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Reported on http://novysan.com/magic and confirmed here: http://www.media.mit.edu/about/academics/class-schedule
'When Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” he might as easily have been describing technology. In fact, “magic” is still the word we use to encompass the wonders of a new technology before it becomes ubiquitous. '
Course Description
"With a focus on the creation of functional prototypes and practicing real magical crafts, this class combines theatrical illusion, game design, sleight of hand, machine learning, camouflage, and neuroscience to explore how ideas from ancient magic and modern stage illusion can inform cutting edge technology. Students will learn techniques to improve the presentation, display, and interface of their projects as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural traditions that shape user expectations of technology. Topics will include: Stage Illusion as Information Display, The Neuroscience of Misdirection, Magical Warfare: Camouflage and Deception, Magic Items and the Internet of Things, Computational Demonology, Ritual Magick as User Experience Design. Guest lecturers and representatives of Member companies will contribute to select project critiques. Requires regular reading, discussion, practicing magic tricks, design exercises, a midterm project and final project."
Uncle Al would have been so proud.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06 2015, @05:11PM
Herbology is not a fraud. It's one of the areas where pharmaceutical companies go to look for new stuff to patent. It's not the main area because it's tricky- not all of it works, or not all of it works if you don't know the details (which, when, where, how to prepare etc):
http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/medicines-in-nature/ [nationalgeographic.com]
Gomes told me how, a year earlier, he had visited a healer in rural West Bengal whose plant successfully countered cobra and viper poison. The healer's recipe had come from his grandfather to his father to him.
Gomes took the healer's plant to his laboratory to test on rats. He prepared a dosage of snake venom that he could predict would kill 50 percent of the animals. He administered it by injection, and 50 percent of the rats died. Next, he gave the same dosage to another group of rats, then fed them an extract of the roots. None of the rats died.
Gomes returned for more of the plants, but the healer had grown suspicious and refused to provide any more.
So Gomes had a botanist examine what remained of the first batch of plants. Together they went to rural West Bengal, collected the same plant, and again tried the experiment. The new plants did nothing to neutralize the venom. Just as Rasoanaivo had found in his work with anticancer medicines, the chemical composition of plants is complicated. Even with all their modern technology scientists do not know which plants to pick or when to pick them or whether traditional healers might have added other herbal or nonherbal ingredients to the cure.
Gomes's story was another illustration of why pharmaceutical companies spend an insignificant amount of their research money on natural products and why they focus most of their resources on genetic research and synthetic drug design: Understand the pathological process that causes disease, and design a molecule that fixes it.
Regarding faith healing, the placebo effect is real. It doesn't work for everything, but it can be effective and useful in some cases. It can even work when people know it, so perhaps we can skip the lying and fraud bit: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/placebos-work-even-when-you-know-10-12-23/ [scientificamerican.com]
I'm wondering whether some of those placebos are really inert though. Given the amount of people addicted to sugar and the effect is has, it seems to me a sugar pill isn't inert enough to use as a placebo. But many studies seem to use sugar pills.
See also: http://archive.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all [wired.com]
Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.