Talking to a jar of rice

[Amygee]

I've gotten so much joy from FJ, and now I think I finally have something fun to share with you all.

thispilgrimage.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-little-experiment.html

Tammy is your typical homeschool mom. She wants to teach her children to have curious, inquiring minds. And of course she wants them to learn science in a creative way. So she devises an experiment:

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. ~ Proverbs 18:21

We are doing an experiment to see how literally true this proverb is.

We put some rice (cooked with a little salt, nothing else added) into two clean jars..

..Put the lids on, and labeled them "DEATH" and "LIFE". Whenever someone in the house is angry, they are to speak to the "DEATH" jar. Only good things will be spoken to the "LIFE" jar. We put them on different sides of the kitchen, so one doesn't overhear the other. ;)

So, we'll see in a couple of weeks what happens."

:shock:

A few weeks later they found that the "life" jar has some colored stuff in it. So apparently nice words make mold grow.

I have been giggling over this all day, and then I remember that her poor kids are being educated by this top-notch mind.

[Black Aliss]

So there's something alive in the jar labeled "Life" and nothing growing in the jar labeled "Death". Maybe the rice didn't understand the point of the experiment and just went by their labels?

[samurai_sarah]

I once forgot to clean out the rice-cooker, before going away for the weekend. When I came back, oddly colourful things had happened to the remaining rice. 'fess up - who talked to my rice-cooker?!?

[VandalSquirrel]

She definitely didn't come up with this on her own. It's based on a Japanese experiment that looked at water crystals.

http://www.highexistence.com/water-experiment/

And her rice idea happens at schools world wide.

I'm not saying I can explain it, nor am I endorsing this woman (I've never read her blog before), but I am saying that she did not devise this experiment, and that it is actually fairly mainstream.

[AVENues]

That's right. Masaru Emoto's studies are pretty interesting. And definitely scientific.

[meda]

So it's rice mold with high self esteem?

[Knight of Ni]

My grandfather insists that talking to his tomato plants makes them produce more fruit.

[GodsKnickers]

So it's rice mold with high self esteem?

This totally hits my funny bone tonight. :lol:

[Joan of Snarc]

Big deal. I once talked to a plant.

[jaynie]

It's like...some weird alternate universe version of scientific. Like, it's an experiment set up to test a hypothesis, and thought is given to the possibility that one condition might affect the other, etc..and yet it's clearly nonsense. It's like doing an experiment to see if the house elves prefer cookies or donuts by leaving a plate of each out and counting the fastest to decompose as a "win". The initial premise is...flawed.

I guess it's good her kids are learning that it's possible to test ideas about the world, though? That's one up on a lot of fundies (depressingly).

[Maggie Mae]

I did a similar "experiment" way back in the 1990s (or late 80s) where I grew four spider plants on the same shelf, except for one hour a day, one got blasted with rock music in my bedroom, one was left on the shelf alone, one was put in the kitchen with some classical music, and one was talked to by my mom and I. The classical music one grew the "best" and the one left alone in silence died. I still don't know what that means, but I know I stole my experiment from a Babysitter's Club book.

[doggie]

well at least they did not have to eat the alive rice. They should as it was full of Jesus and all.

[AnywhereButHere]

Mythbusters did an experiment. Apparently, plants like music. All kinds. They didn't care much about being talked to. Maybe they should try singing to the rice and see what happens. :)

Although, not for nothing, if my rice is growing mold, I'm not thinking that's a good thing. It's kind of gross and more suited to the death jar. Personal opinion. :P

[Black Aliss]

That's right. Masaru Emoto's studies are pretty interesting. And definitely scientific.

Come again? Where are the publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals? Where are the double-blind studies? This woo woo stuff is about as scientific as prayer keeping Uriah from breaking down in the middle of nowhere.

[Isis]

While we were doing IVF, certain family members were fond of telling us that we'd have a better success rate if we prayed or had others pray over our embryos. Some cited a study at Columbia...

The IVF-ET prayer scandalIn 2001 the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published an experimental study by three Columbia University researchers which claimed that prayer for women undergoing in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer (IVF-ET) resulted in a double success rate (50%) of pregnancy compared to that of women who did not receive prayer.[18] Columbia University issued a news release claiming that the study was carefully designed to eliminate bias.[19] The most important skeptic was Bruce Flamm, a clinical professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the University of California at Irvine, who not only found the experimental procedures flawed,[20] but also discovered that some of the authors themselves were frauds.[21] The first-named author Kwang Y. Cha never responded to any inquiries. Daniel Wirth, a.k.a. John Wayne Truelove, is not an M.D. but an M.S. in parapsychology who has since been indicted on felony charges for mail fraud and theft, committed apparently at the time the study was claimed to be conducted, and he pled guilty. On November 22, 2004, Wirth was sentenced to five years in prison followed by three years of supervised release (parole). In December 2001 an investigation of Columbia University by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) revealed that the study’s lead author, Dr. Rogerio Lobo, first learned of the study six to twelve months after the study was completed, and he subsequently denied having anything to do with the study’s design or conduct and claimed to have provided only editorial assistance. The name of Columbia University and Lobo were retracted.[22]

I thought that plant thing was because talking to them means that you are breathing CO2 on them directly?

[Savoring Samsara]

Come again? Where are the publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals? Where are the double-blind studies? This woo woo stuff is about as scientific as prayer keeping Uriah from breaking down in the middle of nowhere.

I read her initial post as sarcasm.

[Savoring Samsara]

While we were doing IVF, certain family members were fond of telling us that we'd have a better success rate if we prayed or had others pray over our embryos. Some cited a study at Columbia...

I thought that plant thing was because talking to them means that you are breathing CO2 on them directly?

Scientifically speaking, it turns out that being prayed for is worse than all that: http://seattletimes.com/html/health/200 ... ray31.html (news site, not breaking link)

Praying for a sick heart patient may feel right to people of faith, but it doesn't appear to improve the patient's health, according to a new study that is the largest ever done on the healing powers of prayer.

Indeed, researchers at the Harvard Medical School and five other U.S. medical centers found, to their bewilderment, that coronary-bypass patients who knew strangers were praying for them fared significantly worse than people who got no prayers. The team speculated that telling patients about the prayers may have caused "performance anxiety," or perhaps a fear that doctors expected the worst.

[PokaDot]

I have a feeling that regardless of what the outcome was, she would have found a way to show that "life" was better.

Life has no mold and death does? Speaking bad words makes mold grow!

Life has mold and death does not? Speaking good words makes mold grow! Bad words makes mold recoil in fear!

Life and death had mold? Well, take your pick from the other ones depending on which one had more mold, and then say one of the kids must have spoken nice to death, or mean to life to cause the experiment to be tainted.

I wonder if someone should mention she forgot a control.

[jaynie]

I wonder if someone should mention she forgot a control.

She could also use a bigger sample size, if we're making suggestions. At least 4 in each condition I think, to make it even worth running a statistical analysis. And she'd have to operationally define "anger" and "good things" to ensure that everyone is speaking the same kind of words with the same emotion to the life and death jars. And she'd have to ensure that each of the jars are spoken to equally by each member of the household. And of course the jars would have to be identical, with the same weight of rice in each, and kept in the same conditions.

What am I even doing? :lol:

[AuntCloud]

Francis Galton has studied the effect of prayer on ships, specifically on the chance for a ship-wreck.

Results? not anything a good Christian would like to endorse.

Here's the original article by Galton:

http://galton.org/essays/1870-1879/galt ... rayer.html

And here are the Cliff notes:

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/smh/revie ... lton01.htm

[Black Aliss]

I read her initial post as sarcasm.

My bad. I meant to reply to the post above AVENue's.

[Bloo]

It's kind of sad that at this point I'm somewhat impressed that they at least cooked the rice. I have a feeling with dried, uncooked rice, a whole lot of nothing would happen either way.

[Buzzard]

It's kind of sad that at this point I'm somewhat impressed that they at least cooked the rice. I have a feeling with dried, uncooked rice, a whole lot of nothing would happen either way.

Its a SIN! They wasted TWO JARS OF RICE! Do you know how many meals of canned chicken in a blender that could have made?!!? ELEVENTY!

[Bloo]

They didn't waste it. They LEARNED from it, apparently as God intended. Hell, God probably would have poisoned the rice if they tried to eat it before teaching with it, because He's hardcore like that.

[Buzzard]

They didn't waste it. They LEARNED from it, apparently as God intended. Hell, God probably would have poisoned the rice if they tried to eat it before teaching with it, because He's hardcore like that.

I wonder if you can still eat the "death" rice since there's no mold.