A few facts.

1. Contrary to much popular legend, in the Middle Ages the popular belief was that the world was round. Not only did they think it was round, but they had fairly accurate estimates of the size of the Earth, for which reason in the historical record of the debates about whether to fund Columbus, the main issue was that he was depending on a gross underestimate of the size of the Earth, and didn't have the resources to get to China. The legend about people thinking the Earth was flat arose in the 1800's.
   
2. The theory that tides came about from the motions of the Earth are due to Galileo, not Kepler, and Galileo did not think they were crazy. See [link|http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/tides.html|this link] for more.
   
3. Galileo's theory was wrong in large part. The correct explanation for the tides was found by Newton. It is true that the motion of the Earth has something to do with it, but the effect is due to imbalances between the force of gravity, and the force needed to keep objects moving in a circle. On the whole the two balance out, but on the side closest to the Moon, gravity is stronger, and on the side away from the Moon centripetal acceleration is. This leads to forces away from the center of the Earth at both ends, causing high tides, and then a corresponding low tide in between.
   
4. WTF does Marconi have to do with this? He is famous for radio, not tides. Besides which by his day the orbital mechanics responsible were long-known, well-proven, and there were direct measurements of how strong G (the tendancy for two bodies to attract each other) was.
   

Call me a biased scientific bigot if you will, but I have generally found that people who get this much basic science wrong from the start, usually get the rest wrong as well. And wading through the mistakes is usually painful enough for me to chuck it into the circular bin, unread...

Cheers,
Ben

And here I have been handing them out for free all along! If I only had known... :-)

At one point I did a lot of reading about mind and matter. Things like ESP. The conclusion that I came to is that the research that supports paranormal powers is uncommonly poorly done. However I also believe that attitudes and physical state are not unconnected. The placebo effect is real. Furthermore people are often equipped with better powers of observation than they can access rationally, and so there is value in having ways to access this "intuition".

Now about the placebo effect. A single-blind study is where the people the patient interacts with know what is happening, but don't talk to the patient. A double-blind study is one where the people the patient interacts with are themselves blind. No serious medical research today is done with a single-blind study. Why? Because of a classic set of experiements showing that the beliefs of doctors in a single-blind study affected whether people lived or died.

So if you believe in prayer, and you are surrounded by people who believe in prayer, whether or not prayer has a real direct effect, believing that it does, and knowing that it is being tried on your behalf has a real chance of helping. In fact if you merely have someone you trust who believes in prayer, and they know prayer is being done on your behalf, based on research in the placebo effect that is a single blind study and their belief (even though unshared by you) that something is being done may well help.

It may be just a placebo effect, but I hate throwing away something effective because of a prejudice about the label...

And on a related note, I believe that, say, Tarot is bunk. But I firmly believe that a person with a good intuition who believes in Tarot, and whose rational mind gets out of the way when (s)he does Tarot, is likelly to give valuable Tarot readings.

Again, just because I believe the purported tool is broken is no need to throw away potentially useful results.

Cheers,
Ben