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Archive for the ‘daily mail’ Category

I know that I blog about Daily Mail articles all the time, but to me the Daily Mail represents everything that’s wrong about tabloid science reporting in the UK. Their latest word guff is a great example of how to slush together potentially good science and mawkish quackery.

The article in question is entitled “Could talking to an apple help you become more beautiful?”, which sets the scene quite nicely. What follows is a few words from a neuro-linguistic programmer who thinks that you can improve your appearance with positive thinking.

If you forget the apples, the message of the article is quite sensible: positive thinking and compliments make you more beautiful. Now, there could be many reasons for this. I’m no psychologist, but it seems quite reasonable to me that if you are happy, you’ll smile more, your posture and general demeanor will be better, and other people will perceive you as being better looking.

If the article stopped there, it would be nothing more than a straight-forward comment. But of course, this is the Daily Fail. Welcome to tenuity. They suggest testing this idea of positive complements on an apple, as apples have a similar water content to the human body. Cut an apple in half, love one half and hate the other. The half you hate will look worse than the half you love.

Obviously, there are a multitude of problems with this. It’s not a fair experiment, and it’s open to the bias of the experimenter. But most obvious of all, it makes the idiotic suggestion that the human body and apples are comparable because they have a similar water content. It beggars belief. If I mixed 60 grams of water with 40 grams of sand, would I get something comparable to a human? Well, maybe I’d get something comparable to the Daily Mail.

So, who is behind this tripe? The neuro-linguistic programmer (NLP) in question is Nikki Owen, who just seems to be after publicity. NLP is pretty dodgy technique which I may cover later. She seeks support from Masaru Emoto, who thinks that you can ‘speak’ water into making pretty crystals. He’s had a lot of attention from the Skeptic community, and has even been offered the million dollars by James Randi if he can provide evidence of his watery claims. The last person involves is clinical psychologist Dr Helen Nightingale, who has been grossly misrepresented. I think the lesson here is quite simply ‘DON’T TALK TO THE MAIL OR YOU GET ASSOCIATED WITH QUACKERY!’.