I'm delighted to announce that all of us here at Mad Art Lab are putting together an old-school acitvity book! Think paper dolls, word searches, connect the dots, and kitchen experiments, but with more skepticism and alcohol. We'll be posting various activities as we develop them; here is an example of something I'm contributing:
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Feeling a little chilly? Homeopathy can help! The principles of homeopathy tell us that minute traces of something refreshing, like lemonade, diluted over and over again in water and shaken a certain way should have you warm and cozy in no time. It’s like magic!*
What you’ll need:
- 16 ounce glass
- Spoon
- 3 ounces fresh lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 10 ounces water
- Eyedropper
- 30 vials, with stoppers, each containing 99 drops of water
- Ice cubes
- Combine the lemon juice, sugar, and water in the glass and stir vigorously with the spoon until the sugar is dissolved. You’ve made lemonade!
- Using the eyedropper, draw up some of your lemonade, and then add a single drop to the first vial. Set the glass of lemonade aside.
- Stopper the first vial and shake to incorporate the drop of lemonade. Then, succus the vial 10 times to activate it (see Figure 1):
a. Hold the vial firmly in your right hand with your thumb over the stopper.
b. Shake it with 10 powerful downward strokes of the arm, letting each stroke terminate in a jerk by striking the closed right hand on the open palm of the left hand.
- Remove the stopper. Using the eye dropper, draw up some of the solution from the first vial, and then add a single drop to the second vial.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 with the remaining vials.
- That’s it! The 30th vial now contains a 30C dilution of lemonade. This means that 1 in 10^−60 drops will be lemonade. In other words, you would need to drink a quantity of this solution 10 billion times greater than the volume of the Earth in order to consume a single molecule of lemonade.
- Uncork the final vial and consume the homeopathic preparation to relieve your chills.
- If drinking 100 drops of well-shaken water didn’t make you feel warmer, go put on a sweater.
- Retrieve your lemonade. Add a few ice cubes and enjoy.
*Seriously. You would need magic for this to actually work.
All artwork by the amazing Brian G!
Awesome! I love that it's done in a satirical way, yet it's just like what homeopaths would have really come up with. How big of a book is being planned?
Thanks!
Re: size of the book, we're not positive yet, though I think we'll have to decide sooner than later as it will affect certain things we want to include…
Wait…. since like cures like…. will this cure you of lemons?
@Kate: Obviously. *rolls eyes*
We actually had someone at SkeptiCal who believed in Homeopathy. She also appeared to be an antivaxxer, go figure.