Be Skeptical!

Ask anybody in my family some defining features about me. It would go a little like this. 

“Marcos likes playing guitar and drums, recording music, doing research on topics not in school...........(A little bit later)...........and he also loves his Iphone!”

Yes, I can admit it. I love my Iphone. I also love the fact that I can get podcasts for free on my phone and listen to them anywhere. A podcast is a type of media consisting of an episodic series of audio or video. While scrolling through the science section in the podcast library I found a podcast called Skeptoid. Skeptoid is a 10-minute weekly podcast hosted by Brian Dunning of skeptoid.com who each week dives into several common topics and debunks them with science and reasoning. While listening to these, I find many things I was told as a kid are simply not true. Let’s take a short test, I will give you a few statements that you have probably heard before. Your job is to tell me whether these are true or false.

1. In Columbus’ time people thought the earth was flat.
2. Area 51 holds top secret Alien technology.
3. Wifi and Phones can give you cancer.
4. It is recommended that you wait a half hour after you eat before you go swimming again,
5. People have seen heaven in near-death experiences. 

Well I hope you determined at least one of those was wrong(hopefully number 2). But here’s a real shocker, all of the above are false. Yup. I could sit here and explain why, but to get an explanation visit www.skeptoid.com and search them yourself. After listening to maybe 50 skeptoid episode, I have realized something very important. The people who are more skeptical are always the ones who find out what is actually the truth. I tried being a skeptic after listening to many skeptoid episodes and here are a few things I found out:

1. Balance bracelets don’t work.

Yup. After talking to someone wearing this bracelet and showing it off I did some research. Apparently, the company behind the balance bracelet issued a statement saying that the bracelet was merely a placebo. 

1. Jamba Juice isn’t healthy.

Yeah, a small Jamba Juice has around 50 grams of sugar. I don’t think thats a good thing to have after a workout.

1. Shell oil is in fact not good for our economy.

After an ad from Shell before a video on Youtube, I became very curious about why they felt the need to tell everyone how great they were with all the jobs they supply. Well, Shell recently came under fire from the EPA after drilling in the Arctic. Not only that, but it seems that people are upset that they were granted the right to drill in the Arctic. With all of the greenhouses gases and global warming, my conclusion is that the ad is in fact wrong. So with all the harm that Shell is doing to the enviroment, they are hurting our economy by rending some jobs in the future useless.

Well these are just my conclusions and suggestions. I have become more skeptical thanks to Brian Dunning and Skeptoid and it seems to be paying off I will maybe post more observations and facts that are not widely known in the future. I will end this post in the words of Brian Dunning, stay skeptical!