The slides from my presentation at Ignite Fort Collins #10. Watch this talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2OH4CxFdmg

1. Don’t Believe
the Esoteric Hype!
Jochen Wolters, Skeptic

2. Fortune Telling
$850 for 30 minutes
Image by Flickr/nellyfus

3. “Revitalized” Water
$15 per quart
Source: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/erich.eder/wasser/eder2002.htm

4. “Quadro Tracker”
$400 – $8,000 a piece
Source: http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-is-alpha-6-detector.html

5. Alas, …
d! iled! iled!
Faile Fa Fa

6. Pattern Recognition
useful
Images by Flickr/aeter and Flickr/Kaptain Kobold

7. Pattern Recognition
useful deceiving
Images by Flickr/aeter and Flickr/Kaptain Kobold

8. Concurrency vs. Causality
✔
useful
Image (right) by Flickr/manyhighways

9. Concurrency vs. Causality
✔
useful
✘
deceiving
Images by Flickr/anna gutermuth and Flickr/manyhighways

10. Confirmation Bias
Confirming Contradicting
Evidence Evidence
Image by Flickr/carbonnyc

11. Confirmation Bias
Confirming Contradicting
Evidence Evidence
always deceiving !
Image by Flickr/carbonnyc

12. The Antidote:
Good Science
The Sixteen Postulates of Science
http://bit.ly/GoodScience

13. #4
Scientific experiments
should be repeatable
under similar circumstances.
The Sixteen Postulates of Science
http://bit.ly/GoodScience

14. Why
bother?

15. Fact
v.
fiction

16. Educate
yourself!

17. The Skeptics Society
http://skeptic.org

18. James Randi
Educational
Foundation
http://randi.org

19. Carl Sagan
The
Demon-
Haunted
World

20. Don’t Believe
the Esoteric Hype!
Jochen Wolters, Skeptic
http://polytropia.com
@jochenwolters