I carry cash. I always have. As a member of the last generation to grow up before the widespread existence of cell phones, I learned to always have at least a little cash on hand, if not only in case of an emergency.

Overall, people carry very little cash. A May 2014 survey by Bankrate showed that more than two-thirds of adults carry less than $50 in cash at any given time. Nine percent of respondents reported carrying no cash at all.

Of course, there are benefits to using alternatives to cash. When cash is stolen, it’s gone. Using cash may be more time consuming in certain situations. Cash doesn’t earn cool perks like airline miles or a meager percentage rebate.

People are still using it, otherwise we wouldn’t keep printing it in newer, more colorful designs. In 2012, more than $358 billion (face value) of currency was printed, roughly 90% of which replaced damaged, out-of-circulation money.

So what are the benefits of using cash? Read more

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, it is highly probable that one of your friends has posted a story from a parody website thinking it was genuine. At they very least, you have probably seen some viral image or video purporting something that is absolutely incorrect. How do you sort the fact from fiction? It’s quite easy, if you’re intelligent and level-headed enough to take a few seconds before spreading nonsense. While the internet has made spreading BS very easy, it has also made researching potentially-BS items very easy. If you read something that is just too good to be true or has even the slightest hint of conspiracy to it, just google the keywords to see what comes up. If you’re fairly certain something is false, just google the keywords with the word “hoax” to find discussions of its inaccuracy. For example, I came across this gem on Facebook: Ramen noodles are coated with cancer-causing wax? It would take a very stupid person to believe that something like that would go unnoticed by the FDA or unreported through any of the many reputable worldwide media outlets. Someone who shares this is so dumb that they think the governments of the world, the media, and the manufacturers of the aforementioned death noodles are involved in some massive conspiracy. That’s the only thing I can come up with, because if you take two seconds to google “ramen noodles cancer,” you’ll see that some of the top results are sites devoted to calling out nonsense. Read more

It’s so easy for people to “research” a new health technique or practice or dietary approach and find plenty of websites supporting it, but are these practices backed by science or do they just look and sound scientific?

Spoiler Alert: It’s almost always the latter.

A few symptoms of pseudoscientific hype from RationalWiki:

• A simple idea that purports to be the one answer to many problems (often including diseases)
• A “scientific-sounding” reason for how it works, but little to no actual science behind it; for example, quote mines of studies that if bent enough could be described in such a way to support it, outright misapplication of studies, or words that sound scientific but make no sense in the context they are used in
• Prefers to use abundant testimonials over actual scientific research [emphasis added]

I’m not trying to imply that there are zero positive benefits to some of these practices. I just want to reinforce that many of these perceived benefits may very well be the result of the Placebo Effect, a real phenomenon in which people who are given a dud treatment experience measurable results. Medical studies and pharmaceutical trials administer placebo treatments to measure the difference between what the medicine can do and what the mind and body may do if they think they are receiving a legitimate treatment.

Not every health technique, treatment, or method undergoes the strict scrutiny of a regulatory body. For some things, it simply isn’t commercially viable; for others, there exists enough empirical data to preclude testing entirely. This process exists for a reason though: anecdotes don’t cut it. One thing many articles on pseudoscientific processes share is a reliance on and overabundance of anecdotal evidence. Read more