Thursday, November 18, 2004

Baloney Detection Kit

With all the brouhaha about Faye and her story, i thought it would be a good idea for us to review Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" which should at least give us some inkling if or when we are facing deception. The links below reproduce the links faithfullly and they also link to addtional reading if you wan them.

Operation Clambake

http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

Skeptics.com

Carlsagan.com

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

The Philippine Chess Team

I forgot to mention that the Philippine Team to the Chess Olympiad had again exceeded expectations and was tied with several other countries in 12-19 places with 32 points. The Philippines was seeded 40th.

Congrtulations to the members of the team:

Eugenio Torre
Rogelio Antonio
Mark Paragua
Jayson Gonzales
Emmanuel Senador
Darwin Laylo


Faye the Conquering Hero

A new e-mail is spreading through the Philippines. It is about the heroism of a youg girl named Faye who despite being abandoned by her father, despite not having enough money, despite being ignored by the Philippine government, was able to travel to Indonesia and Australia to win the "Mathematics for the Young Asians" and the "Intercontinental Science Quiz Net" respectively beating competition from the Japanese, the Germans, the Americans etc.

Unfortunately, the e-mail being disseminated lacks any kind of detail that can be used to verify the story. The competitions, the little girl supposedly won, cannot be found on the internet. The story seems to be too good to believe, and when that happens it usually is.

Unless new details that can verify this story surfaces, I think that we should consider this story with a large grain of salt, it is inspiring if true but it can make you want to puke on the people who would try to manipulate the emotions of Filpinos with this kind of stunt when this story is proven to be false.

Update (10-18-2004)

The Philippine Daily Inquirer ran two follow up stories on Faye last Saturday and Sunday (November 13 and 14) which established that the story circulating among Filipinos about Faye is untrue.