... presented by Carl Sagan. Also, this has to be one of the longest sentences ever written in English:
“Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition - this is merely a representative, not a comprehensive list - are astrology; the Bermuda Triangle; “Big Foot” and the Loch Ness monster; ghosts; the “evil eye”; multicolored halolike “auras” said to surround the heads of everyone (with colors personalized); extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and “remote viewing” of distant places; the belief that 13 is an “unlucky” number (because of which many no-nonsense office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the 12th to the 14th floors - why take the chance?); bleeding statues; the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck; divining rods, dowsing, and water witching; “facilitated communication” in autism; the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard pyramids, and other tenets of “pyramidology”; phone calls (none of them collect) from the dead; prophecies of Nostradamus; the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms; the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full; palmistry; numerology; polygraphy; comets, tea leaves, and “monstrous” births as harbingers of future events (plus the divinations fashionable in earlier epochs, accomplished by viewing entrails, smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows, and excrement; listening to gurgling stomachs; and even, for a brief period, examining tables of logarithms); “photography” of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus; a Russian elephant that speaks fluently; “sensitives” who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips; Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the “lost” continent of Atlantis would “rise”) and other “prophets,” sleeping and awake; diet quackery; out-of-body (e.g., near-death) experiences interpreted as real events in the external world; faith-healer fraud; Ouija boards; the emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered by intrepid use of a “lie detector”; water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it; telling character from facial features or bumps on the head; the “hundredth monkey” confusion and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true; human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp; 3-cycle biorhythms; perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy (but all of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close examination by skeptics); the systematically inept predictions of Jeane Dixon (who “predicted” a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the U.S. to put the first human on the Moon) and other professional “psychics”; the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies; dianetics and Scientology; Carlos Castaneda and “sorcery”; claims of finding the remains of Noah’s Ark; the “Amityville Horror” and other hauntings; and accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing through the rain forests of the Congo Republic in our time.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
[h/t: Claudia]
