1
vote
Does this medical study prove that wearing gold is harmful?
The commandment in Islam is that men should not wear gold, I.e. jewelry (https://sunnah.com/bukhari:5864) It is actually not forbidden to swallow gold for medical purposes, which was also occasionally ...
- 127
33
votes
The Arizona Election Recount 2021: Would Chinese paper prove there was an election fraud?
No.
This is a logical fallacy of the form: some men are tall, you are tall, therefore you are the man who stole $20 out of my wallet because because I think I'm supposed to have $20 more.
There's a ...
- 19.7k
2
votes
Did Abner Schoenwetter spend 6.5 years in jail because he used plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes when importing lobsters from Honduras?
Yes, but only as one of the charges and the fact that the lobster tails were undersized was considered the bigger issue(however, he could technically have been jailed just for the bags).
Prosecutors ...
- 978
6
votes
Do Afghans keep track of their birthdays?
Afghans are Muslims, and Islam requires you to know your exact age for the religious ceremonies and duties. girls for example at 9 and boys at the age of 15 (lunar calendar) will have certain duties.
...
- 169
7
votes
Did farmers adopt cars faster than inhabitants of cities?
You seem to doubt that cars would be more popular among farmers "in remote areas" because you don't think there would be many people in those areas.
The fact is that at the time that cars ...
- 5,913
-1
votes
Do around 2 billion people eat insects regularly?
Lets consider some of the OP's claims.
insect consumption is commonplace in the tropics, while in temperate
zones it is often absent
This just seems to be factually incorrect. Regardless of what you ...
- 1,084
4
votes
Did British journalists keep silent about Russian defections to Germany in WW2?
Is true. The Vlasov army, for example, had thousands of people, all (including the General Vlasov) former Soviet soldiers and officers.
The existence of Russian army soldiers and officers who ...
user58549
1
vote
Has China eliminated local transmission of COVID-19 within its borders?
I am living in one of the major cities in China right now. And I think I'd better stay here for some time. People are still very alerted to the COVID-19 virus. And the television broadcast news about ...
- 127
7
votes
Are fifth freedom flights more often discounted than regular flights?
This statement may have been true before the rise of low-cost carriers, and indeed, in the 2000s I occasionally caught cheap fifth-freedom fares like SIN-HKG on United or KUL-CGK on KLM that were ...
- 1,464
10
votes
Is the British Medical Journal largely funded by vaccine manufactuers?
I am a brit whose family are doctors and am training to be one myself.
The BMJ is run out of advertisements and out of subscriptions like any magazine. It is part of the British Medical Association ...
- 384
-1
votes
Can heat cure COVID-19, the common flu and the common cold?
I'm not a doctor but it seems unlikely this treatment would work for 2 reasons:
The proposed heat is very high in comparison to normal body temperature and temperature used in other heat-treatments
...
- 315
11
votes
Are These Legitimate Tossed-Away Votes For President Trump Found At An Oklahoma Wedding?
There is no credible evidence to support this.
The only evidence here is a few guys talking on a video. We can't verify anything they say, not even that they were actually at a wedding in Oklahoma, ...
- 57.6k
21
votes
Do vote counts for Joe Biden in the 2020 election violate Benford's Law?
According to Wikipedia:
Benford's law, also called the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits ...
- 2,865
15
votes
Do vote counts for Joe Biden in the 2020 election violate Benford's Law?
The reason that Benford's law often holds for real-life data is that real-life data is often fairly broadly distributed on a log scale.
[Benford's Law] tends to be most accurate when values are ...
- 3,412
22
votes
Are these anomalies in the Biden-Trump vote data indicative of voter fraud?
The key assumption,
the ballots are randomly mixed together during transport, spanning areas occupied by multiple voting demographics, we can expect the ratio of mail-in #Biden ballots to mail-in #...
- 731
20
votes
Did France kill millions of Muslims?
There has been a recent political agenda by Turkey's government to expose French violence in Algeria as Genocide, in response to France's recognition of the Armenian genocide. Consequently, English ...
- 1,430
41
votes
Did the precedence of operations in arithmetic change since 1917?
[I edited this answer in response to the helpful comments in the chats. Thanks to everyone for their feedback!]
0. Introduction
TLDR: No, none of the order of evaluation conventions changed since the ...
- 2,147
2
votes
Is this photo of a road detouring around a tree authentic?
Here's a place where the artist has used a copy-paste option in the image editor:
- 1,430
208
votes
Is this photo of a road detouring around a tree authentic?
Fake / Illustration.
(I know this answer does not cite sources, but it's so obvious that requiring to find the "original artist" to expose it as a fake would be an undue complication.)
...
6
votes
Is code read more often than it's written?
The full quote itself (from your source) provides reasons for this being true (emphasis mine):
Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10
to 1. We are constantly reading ...
- 534
6
votes
3
answers
909
views
Has Sweden beaten SARS-CoV-2 with herd immunity? [closed]
An article in The Australian newspaper titled "Coronavirus: Sweden ‘has beaten coronavirus with herd immunity’" makes the claim as per the title.
Evidence is mounting that Sweden has beaten ...
- 6,795
56
votes
Accepted
Do people carry around up to 20 lbs (9 kg) of poop?
No.
According to the chapter "Carbohydrate Metabolism in the Colon" in Human Colonic Bacteria (1995) :
The large intestine contains about 220 g wet weight of contents (range circa 60–900 g),...
- 107k
36
votes
Do people carry around up to 20 lbs (9 kg) of poop?
Those Ads were popular on TV years ago. They all claim some permanent build-up of "extra poop" which only a cleanse can remove. I found a lovely 2018 quote from a skeptic medical office of ...
- 1,403
1
vote
Can homeopathic remedies contain a significant amount of active ingredients?
D1 stands for 1:10 dilution so (even if those numbers are before dilution) it still contains large amount of active ingredient.
The phrase "large amount" is a value judgement that needs to ...
- 134
5
votes
Does synthetic vitamin C contribute to the formation of genotoxins that can lead to cancer?
I have managed to gain access to the full text of the referenced article. I can't pretend to understand it fully (not being a biochemist), but the authors do not state whether the vitamin C they used ...
- 16.6k
0
votes
0
answers
1k
views
Do dramatic cases of body shaking and trembling in religious settings have supernatural causes? [closed]
There are many examples of people experiencing dramatic body shaking and trembling in religious settings, such as the ones below:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
Example 7
...
user56618
6
votes
Does going vegan roughly save 600 gallons of water a day?
Short answer: No.
It's possible to save as much, but probably not average. It depends on what the vegan eats. However, it'd be fair to say an average vegan diet saves about 300-500 gallons of water ...
- 167
35
votes
1
answer
11k
views
Did Pakistan lose each and every war it fought with India from 1947 to 1999?
The speaker in this video says that:
The Pakistani army has lost every war it's fought with India from the original war in 1947 until the latest war in 1999 ...
This is a recurring narrative that ...
- 1,542
17
votes
1
answer
936
views
What is the reason that the moon appears larger on the horizon?
According to the Wikipedia article Moon illusion, it has apparently been "proven" that the moon's larger appearance at the horizon is, indeed, an illusion, and not a magnification of some kind.
I ...
- 2,304
109
votes
2
answers
20k
views
Do facemasks cause CO2 poisoning?
I came across this video on BitChute purporting to test the CO2 levels of what appears to be a KN95 (a Non-NIOSH Approved Respirator) whilst the mask is in use.
The video shows a device displaying CO2 ...
- 1,172
0
votes
Did "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" originally refer not to sex but to housework?
My take on this is that it's a misunderstanding based on the Protestant numeration of the 10 Commandments. The original commandments given to Moses, which number 17 or more distinct commands, were not ...
- 101
3
votes
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
edit: I need to clarify: This is not a complete answer to the question. But it contains relevant information for reaching a conclusion.
JPMorgan has a new study (paywall) showing the strongest ...
- 1,533
-2
votes
Is poker more a game of skill than chance?
More than most card games, poker is a game of psychology and reading other people.
There is an element of chance to each individual hand, but the game isn't just one hand, it's a whole series. The ...
- 195
41
votes
Has the US COVID-19 lockdown resulted in more years of life lost than COVID-19 itself?
Maybe, but this article doesn't show that. It is deeply flawed. It is a reiteration of the "sacrifice the elderly" argument with more statistics.
The article uses the incorrect points of ...
- 19.7k
134
votes
Has the US COVID-19 lockdown resulted in more years of life lost than COVID-19 itself?
Article claim: Specious on its own terms
Contra the excellently researched answer from Paul Draper, the claim in the article is untrue at the time it was written.
The article's central claim is that ...
- 1,137
57
votes
Did Trump order tear gas to be used on protesters to clear a pathway to a church for a photoshot?
This article from New York Magazine summarizes the answer to your question(s) quite nicely. Note: all the bolding within quotes is my own.
Did Trump order the protestors cleared? Yes.
A Justice ...
- 538
2
votes
Was a copy of Bobadilla's lost report on Christopher Columbus found in a Spanish archive in 2006?
The document was found in 2005 by archivist Isabel Aguirre in the General Archive of Simancas. So far, nobody has disputed its authenticity and a renown expert on Columbus, Consuelo Varela, published ...
- 392
1
vote
Has India invaded any country in the last 10,000 years?
There are several ways to formalize this question:
Type I: Did any political entity, with its capital within the territory covered by modern-day India, invade any territory outside modern-day India?
...
user55798
-2
votes
Was Koenigsberg area given to the USSR for 50-year administration rather than permanently?
The final peace treaty (It was not called a Peace treaty) between Germany and the Soviet Union along with France, United Statrs and United States, was signed again in 1990, drafted in the late 1980s, ...
1
vote
Can psychedelic drugs cure depression?
First off, most mental illnesses aren't "Cured" they are "treated." I suffer from combat related PTSD myself, and in the past struggled with depression. There have been experiments with using drugs ...
- 217
0
votes
Does homosexuality in males steeply decline with age?
That book is pretty much garbage. There’s an interesting RationalWiki article about My Genes Made Me Do It, however it’s rather incomplete. Regardless, I believe the author used Laumanns 1994 self ...
- 19
2
votes
Do 4K displays use more power, because it is hard for the backlight to shine through those super tiny pixels?
Yes, this is correct, at least some of the time. Here is an image of an LCD display taken with a microscope:
The black/white parts at the top of each pixel are the hardware for controlling each of ...
- 3,111
2
votes
Did Matt Drudge sell the Drudge Report?
The ownership of Drudge Report does not appear to be public information. There is no real documentation that I can find one way or other. The widespread speculation about the sale is supported by ...
- 7,480
-1
votes
Are Australia's 5G radiation safety standards at least one hundred times laxer than of 6 other listed countries?
The Australian standard is complicated. But what stands out is a factor 1000 between “peak” and “time average”. There are also numbers for “mW per cm squared”, which you can obviously not just ...
- 687
-4
votes
Was there "excess mortality" in Italy due to COVID-19 in March 2020?
Well, if you take a town like Nembro (in the province - not the city - of Bergamo) that has a population of 11,518 and then use a ratio per 100,000, of course one single death will show up as way out ...
- 11
6
votes
Is wearing facemasks the reason South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong have more control of Covid-19
Widespread mask wearing is something those countries have in common but it is not the only difference between their efforts and those of other countries.
I think the point of the chart is not to ...
- 2,024
-1
votes
Why did the value for "average surface temperature of Earth" change from 15°C to 14°C in some scientific literature concerning climate change?
The problem is that the "average surface temperature of Earth" do not exist, it is not a physical measurement, in other words there is not a hole somewhere in the surface of Earth in which you can ...
- 115
1
vote
Does the risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 decrease by washing hands?
COVID-19 is, in this respect, no different than any of a million other pathogens - and hand-washing isn't a new thing.
The Global Handwashing Partnership has been working for years on promoting hand ...
- 2,949
14
votes
Is the loss of (15-21) million mobile users in China in part or partly linked to cover up of COVID-19 numbers?
Wrong assumptions can lead to wrong conclusions.
that probably these closed numbers belonged to the people who died
That assumes that each closed number belonged to one person (or maybe two ...
- 2,765
1
vote
Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
Dr Wodarg’s videos and articles show strong evidence of confirmation bias and fundamental attribution error. For example, in his widely shared original video, he distorts the facts, makes correct but ...
- 49