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Agavalicious

Submitted by Admin BASIS, Food
Bottles of organic agave nectarOh, Apartment Therapy, your credulousness is the gift that keeps on giving (specifically, giving me things to write about in blog posts). This time, someone discovered an article that says, oh my god, agave nectar is not a magical health food: it is actually sugar! And just as bad for you as some other types of sugar, like, for example, sugar. Or even, maybe, high fructose corn syrup, which we all know is basically heroin because it will addict you and then kill you. This basically shot the puppy of some of the commenters, who had been so sure that agave syrup -- I refuse to call something nectar unless it is actually flower juice -- was super healthy.
UGH! Seriously? I may be pouring mine down the drain. I just bought a HUGE bottle when it was on sale at whole foods.
I'm shocked. I had no idea that agave was not healthy for you. Like spookiefish, I feel somewhat betrayed. I stopped buying it because it was so expensive. Now I have another key reason to not buy it again i

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Bigfoot talk blog roundup

Submitted by Admin BAS, BASIS, Cryptozoology
Couldn't make it to Tuesday's Ask a Scientist lecture on Bigfoot? Well, eventually you'll be able to watch it on fora.tv, but until then, here's a bit of blog coverage to tide you over: The Snitch (SF Weekly): Ask a Scientist: Sorry, Bigfoot Probably Doesn't Exist. But If He Did, He Would Be Taller Than a Bear Metousiosis: Science Cafe: Eugenie Scott — Bigfoot and Other Wild Men of the Forest There was also a negative post from someone who didn't actually attend, and it makes for a glorious game of Conservative Bingo: -San Francisco bashing -insulting a woman's appearance -confusing separation of church and state with anti-religiousness -assuming morality requires religion -invoking

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Andrew Fraknoi talk on November 19th

Submitted by Admin Announcements
--- Wednesday November 19, at 4 pm: "Your Fiction Science Defense Kit: Dealing with Astrology, UFO's, and Other Astronomical Pseudo-sciences" A non-technical talk by Andrew Fraknoi, Foothill College Harney Science Center, Room 127 University of San Francisco Physics and Astronomy Department Colloquium; free and open to educators and students. For a campus map, see: http://www.usfca.edu/online/gen_info/map_c.html (Please allow yourself time to park and find the room. Street parking around campus is not always easy to find.) An enormous amount of media attention has been given to some pretty amazing claims on the fringes of astronomy. These include the idea that your life path and romantic destiny are determined by the position of objects in the sky at the moment of your birth; that extraterrestrial space-craft have regularly landed on our planet (and kidnapped innocent citizens without being noticed); and that an ancient race left us a message on the planet Mars in the shape of a human face. In this illustrated talk, astronomer and popular lecturer Andrew Fraknoi will discuss the most famous "fiction science" claims related to astronomy, and provide the background and analysis needed to appreciate them properly. He will share some rece

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UFOs spotted in Bay Area

Submitted by Admin Aliens & UFOs
From the Bay Area's number one news source... craigslist:
Hey guys. Today was amazing. I can't really write too much about it for I have been talking about it all day, and into the night with folks. Some shit is going down. I don't know whether this is preliminary surveilance or I don;t know, The Galactic Federation of Light scoping the scene pre-October 14th, but a good friend of mine and I were at the park today and saw several unidentified flying objects. They looked exactly like the white lights in the day sky over Guadalajara from 2004. They formed a perfect isosceles triangle over Dolores Park, and many appeared afterwards. Later on, I guess about two hours ago, they came back. The same friend I was with earlier in the day called to tell me they were out in the sky again, I ran up to my roof and saw them as well. This time at night. She saw what had to have been a thousand in a fleet over near Potrero Hill. And I saw around 10 near the mission from my roof. They move together, and fast, but they will pause and cease to travel if you stare at them for a long enough time. There was a huge streak unlike that of a shooting star or burning up space debris(I know what that looks like), and they all disappeared. This is no joke, no lie, no delusion. I have seen it along with my friend. On

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Welcome to the new BAS website

Submitted by Admin

The Bay Area Skeptics are proud to announce our new website, built on Drupal, the content management system used by such luminaries as The Onion. On this main page, you'll find our new BAS blog, featuring posts by our Board of Directors. We're also going to increase the online archive of BASIS, our newsletter; look forward to that in the next few months!

Have any comments or suggestions? Let us know!


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For positive qi, put the ghost in the southwest corner

Submitted by Admin Paranormal
An Apartment Therapy San Francisco reader asks:
I am considering buying my first home. It is a renovated 1924 Edwardian style San Francisco flat, very charming with original details. After doing some research on the building, I discovered that there was a murder in the building in 1966. A young single woman was found stabbed to death in the apartment, the killer was never found. The thing that made my hair really stand on end is she came from the same small town as me and went to the same high school. My question to your readers: Do I buy this place?? I feel like I'm being a bit superstitious, but the coincidences are just too bizarre. I like the flat, it has a good feel, but I would hate to move in and feel scared and uncomfortable. It will be the biggest investment of my life. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Now, I don't want to be too hard on the questioner, because it seems like she knows she's being irrational and really, it would suck to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate only to discover that you couldn't get over your irrational creepy feeling. And a number of commenters seem to feel the same way she does:
I'm superstitious, so whenever I move into a new place I

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Oscar, the Hospice Cat ??? Or Kitty Kevorkian?

Submitted by Admin Psychics
By: 
John R. Cole, BAS Board, CSI fellow
Originally published in BASIS
July-September

July 2007 news included the case of a cat named Oscar who allegedly predicted which patients in a hospice would soon die. As SF Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll noted (30 Jul 2007), this seems a bit of a stretch.

"... Oscar's 'uncanny knack of knowing when people are going to die' [looks fishy]. Apparently he walks aloofly around the halls of the Providence, R.I., nursing home where he lives, and then settles down with a person who, only a few hours later, dies. Oscar somehow intuits the imminence of death and provides succor in these last hours - or so the story goes.

"From the evidence, an equally viable theory is that Oscar kills people, but no one has mentioned that possibility.

"The staffers at the nursin


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