The other day, I briefly mentioned this ridiculous “Faith of Britain” site that was full of woo-woo nonsense. Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out they’re also cheap and unoriginal. Alongside a section that says this:
Faith of Britain Day will help us all overcome whatever obstacles and difficulties we may face as a country, an economy and as individuals. With over 80 million people concentrating their mental energies at the same time on the same day, we will unleash an irresistible psychic force that will, quite literally, make our dreams come true.
Faith of Britain recognizes that Britain is a multi-cultural, multi-faith family. All of our faiths and beliefs have one common thread: the belief that positive thinking makes positive things happen.
They have a little photo montage of various diverse people. I’ve gotten several emails today from people who say, “Hey! I recognize those guys!” — it seems they aren’t British, and they aren’t particularly into New Age quantum weeblishness. The picture is lifted straight out of the web page for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida. I wonder if they know that their mental energies are being harnessed to psychically fix the British economy?
Is it more sad that they didn’t even rename the image?
Might I suggest that any atheists whose picture was misused by these cretins contact the U.K. advertising regulatory agency. I don’t have the address ofhand, but any magazine with advertising published in the U.K. has a notice from them concerning how to report behavior like this. I understand they actually investigate & do something about incidents like this.
Doh!!
@#1 Eternal Critic
Hey, they inserted an underscore!
I guess it’s just:
Religion^Faith = The Original Nigerian Scam
#4: Nope. It was already there. Check the properties.
The picture is lifted straight out of the web page for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida.
You don’t suppose that they really wanted a photo of astrologers, but didn’t know the difference?
The underscore is in the filemane on the U Florida website
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/images/People/People_.jpg
http://thefaithofbritain.com/images642/People_.jpg
Go Gators!!!
I bet the web designer just did a google image search for “people” and swiped it.
Lame.
Argh:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?verified=true&storyId=100867217&ft=1&f=1001#commentBlock
I remember when a whole bunch of hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. It didn’t work.
*sigh*
Awright! I’m moving to Britain. I want my dreams to come true, too!
“Faith of Britain” are aware of all Internet traditions.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the use of the word “utilize”. I have yet to find an example where the word “use” may not be substituted for “utilize” to achieve the same meaning.
(Don’t even get me started about “less” and “few”.)
Nah, their collective faith transferred ownership to them.
See what magic will do for people? Hey, if it worked for Demski (when he ripped off Harvard), why shouldn’t it work for equally lame purveyors of woo?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Steve_C @#10
“I bet the web designer just did a google image search for “people” and swiped it.”
If the web designer just did a Google image search for “people” and swiped it, the web designer is not a very intelligent designer.
You’d think they would at least steal a picture of Brits?
Unless…. They thought they wouldn’t get caught.
The population of the United Kingdom is currently just over 60 million, so I don’t know where these idiots get 80 million from.
Maybe they stole the extra 20 million people from Florida too.
Yet.
Wow, woo-heads acting unethically. Colour me surprised. NOT.
Hey, Abbie Hoffman SWORE the Pentagon got a few inches off the ground.
Astronomers? What do we think they did google image search for? “Cosmic quantum people” (“people” since that’s the name of the picture file)?
As a UF student, I am sad my department was passed over for the astronomers. Bug people get no love.
Honest question, as I’m not personally familiar with the people working for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida, but is it not possible that this is simply a stock photograph?
@ #25
I doubt it. That would be weird, and besides, I’m pretty sure the gentleman about midway up the left side, between yellow/blue striped shirt and bright blue T-shirt, is this guy, Dr. Stanley F. Dermott, the department chair.
If so, it’s prophetic, since Dr. Dermott obtained both his undergrad and PhD at the University of London!
Seems like a pretty clear-cut case of copyright infringement to me. I hope the injured party takes action.
that’s my silly collage… and yes, we’re all from the university of florida… and yes, i feel they got it from goolge search…
I think these people took the episode Dr. Who, Last of the Timelords a bit too literal. As uhm, this is what he had Martha orchestrate to save the day.
But at least that was fiction :)
That’s funny. She stopped working as a “Scientist” when she discovered that there was more to the Universe than she realized.
That seems a little backwards to me. That sounds more like a reason to become a scientist. And if the evidence was with regard to something specific, it seems like the kind of thing you’d try to publish.
And calling them “scientists” seems a little vague. Would it be that hard to tell us what kind? On second thought, I imagine many woo-woos don’t really know the difference.
The picture’s also here, with the same name: http://www.liberatemedia.com/blog/social-media/12-social-media-tools-to-find-people-online/
Gotta do a bit of digging to find it, though…the UFL image on the other hand does come up as the 3rd result on the Google search “people”, so I’d say it’s still likely that they did just copy from the university site. Hard to say though where the picture came from in the first place…I highly doubt anything seriously legal’s at stake, anyway.
80 million? The UK doesn’t even have 80 million inhabitants.
Ah, scratch that. Sounds like jorG can account for it.
“And calling them “scientists” seems a little vague. Would it be that hard to tell us what kind?”
You might as well ask why they feel the need to capitalize “Scientist”.
What a strange thing to make the focus of one’s life…
They almost got one thing right.
Positive thinking does make things happen, but not in that way..
A GIS for astronomy people brings it up on the first page, and department people brings it up on the second (they use the image on their ‘Contact page’ so I suppose they might have wanted a departmental collage of some kind).
astro people seems a reasonable search, and if you are only looking for “Medium Images”, you end up with on the fourth page.
#22: Hey, Abbie Hoffman SWORE the Pentagon got a few inches off the ground.
I think it was actually Abbie Hoffman that got a few inches off the ground.
That’s done to show respect to Scientists. As an eCONOMIST, I’m used to a display of disdain.
@28
Funny, I almost tried to correct you on that – you’re in college and you don’t even know how to spell it, but then I realized, you actually meant collage…
/brainfart
Sherry: So you would be happier if less people utilized the wrong words? Or did you mean to infer something else entirely? The English language is just so ambivalent…
*7 Original point!
*37 ‘astro people seems a reasonable search’
Bimbos gave the brief..”We want a piccy there of people from the astro side of life”…meaning astrological…but over the phone the designer only caught ‘Astro’ and assumed the brief was for ‘Astronomy people’…that would make sense…in a twisted way of course!
UK Population: 60,943,912 (July 2008 est. from CIA world factbook)
Where are the extra 20 million people located?
Nah, the bimbos probably don’t know the difference.
Reminds me of when I was a teenager, I went to a library I’d not previously visited, & asked the librarian where the astronomy section was. She sent me to a section dealing with astrology.
xebecs, that’s just cruel. I like it.
Where are the extra 20 million people located?
No problem! For those bimbos, it’d be on the Astral Plane, eh.
I’m getting really tired of ‘positive’ as a euphemism for ‘good’. So now I fight back.
A: Say something positive.
B: You’re ugly.
A: That’s negative.
B: No, the negative would be you’re not ugly. Ugly is the positive, uglier the comparative, and ugliest the superlative.
A: Are you sure about that?
B: Sure I’m sure. I’m positive.
Should we really be surprised when a religion commits plagiarism? Christianity did that for all its stories and wrapped them in some historic events. The only thing original about that religion is blaming people for being conceived.
I suspect it would be more accurate to say that whoever they got to do the website design ripped off that photo. I doubt whether any of these space cadets sullied themselves with anything as down-to-Earth as putting together a website.
At least the person responsible copied the image to their server. I’ve had cases where commercial sites have simply linked to images on sites I’ve been responsible for, thus stealing our bandwidth. But in this case you can, um, enhance their site by replacing the image with something unflattering…
Maybe the pic people really are Brits…
Maybe they just set out one morning down that Avenue of the Thousand Traffic Lights in Orlando (that being a number of ours’ ideal holiday destination) to go and get some milk or something, and just kept on going…
Maybe they are the corporeal remains of those Brits who, while visiting DisneyPlace, leant too far over a rubbish bin or unwittingly walked widdershins around a concession , and so got sucked into that Area 51 that lies beneath the park – and along with the remains of those employees who failed to live up to the image of their character – got sold off as a job lot to the Dept of International Experimental Woo at the university…
“But in this case you can, um, enhance their site by replacing the image with something unflattering…”
reminds me of this:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/this-is-why-you-dont-steal-from-cracked/
hahaha, hilarious in so many ways. I know that this is actually a serious topic, as they have blatantly plagiarised and people are sadly wasting their time and energy praying and all that, but this post made me laugh so hard that I’ve almost forgotten how crappy my day was. Thanks for that.
OT, I know, but I have to vent: I just heard professional idiot Michael Egnor on NPR. Is it even safe to allow him out of his residence?
I especially like how they left in the picture of the poor graduate student with his head down at his desk. He’s probably crying because his equipment just broke. Hoooooray GOD!
My sister once told me that a student of hers turned in a paper with the internet order number still visible on it.
Ahhh, cheaters are the smartest persons on the planet.
true skeptic @#11 and Fred Mounts @#53
Thanks for the tip.
http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2009/02/say-it-aint-so-npr.html
“I remember when a whole bunch of hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. It didn’t work.”
I thought it did move just a little bit.
Xebecs #41,
You are a wicked, wicked person. Naughty Zoot!
@11 and @53–
I’ve always considered NPR a voice of reason, and because they now equate Egnor’s credibility with Novella’s, well…
Also, I posted yesterday that Jim Lehrer speculated on his news coverage that the safe landing of flight 1549 might have been a “miracle”.
At least Pharyngula’s still a safe haven.
I just did a byte-for-byte comparison of each file.
Yes, it’s exactly the same file.
Idiots.
I can’t help wondering if that “people” google search turned up another inspiration for their “designer”. After all, the third page in on the Google image search turns up this image, which is conceptually similar (although NOT THE SAME) to the other image at the top of the Faith of Britain page:
http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/165262_our_people.jpg
@Sherry, #15, I drink less than I should, but I ate a few cookies. :)
“It is a proven scientific fact that thinking about something often causes it to happen.”
this is true! this very morning i woke up, got out of bed, had a coffee and thought “i need a shit”
moments later i was sitting on the bog, trousers round my ankles, dropping the kids off at the pool.
wow! the power of the mind!!!
It sounds like these guys have been watching a little too much of “the Secret”…
OMG (I probably shouldn’t write that here), maybe that’s why I’m so tired, they’ve harnessed my mental energies and didn’t even tell me. Bastards!
Amanda Hart from St Albans and Ben Murphy from Watford are the two psychics in question who believe they can help, of course self promotion doesn’t come into it.
Well it does actually, these two non-entities in the psychic world have stooped lower than I thought possible.
Amanda Hart, one of the ‘creators’ of this stipid site has quite a reputation (bad) as a psychic.
“Amanda Hart you may remember as being one of the failures on Channel 5’s Psychic Challenge program, in fact she was so bad it was laughable.”
http://badpsychics.com/thefraudfiles/modules/news/article.php?storyid=409
Even by UF’s (ahem) flexible standards, that little Vulcan one up from the bottom on the right seems a little young to be majoring in astro.
These people are idiots, of course, but obscure idiots. I couldn’t find any news items about Faith of Britain, for instance.
In the UK that 60 million figure is disputed. Some people think it’s very inaccurate and fails to include all the illegal immigrants, especially all the criminals and the slave labour they’re concealing, which the government incompetently let in to the country or even lost from custody! These people don’t admit to their presence during official censuses. Though I think I’ve heard estimates that the actual population of the UK is more like 70 million than 80 million. 80 seems high even for the extreme conspiracy nutters.
More to the point, if any of the people in the photograph are not religious nutters but sane atheistic scientists instead, they could sue for defamation of character over the clear implication that they are involved with such unscientific religious nonsense.
The Advertising Standards Agency is very specific about what can be used to advertise a product or service.
I’m pretty sure these woo mongers need the permission of every person in the photographs (not just the copyright) if they are going imply they their supporters.
See the CAP code regarding privacy.
Perhaps someone at the university should pass on the URL to them and have them complain to the ASA.
I’m not sure if the ASA has any jurisdiction over web pages but they probably know who can help.
David Harper @ 19,
Hey I live in Florida can I apply for my British Passport now?
STRENGTH THROUGH PURITY
PURITY THROUGH FAITH
PUREED NONSENSE THROUGH CAPITALS
FIREBREATHING NORSE
REMEMBER REMEMBER
THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER (It’s Art Garfunkle’s birthday)
COFFEE THROUGH NOSE
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
It appears they have removed the collage in question.
The collage is also removed from http://www.liberatemedia.com/blog/social-media/12-social-media-tools-to-find-people-online/“.
HORSEFEATHERS
The pre-teen in the bottom right–faculty? staff? grad student?
They may have removed it from their page, but it is not removed from their server:
http://thefaithofbritain.com/images642/People_.jpg
On the word “utilize”. You would have thought on a site called “Faith of Britain”, they would be able to spell. Here in Britain, it is “utilise”, not “utilize”.
Morons or more plagiarism? Yeah okay, that one is easy. Both for sure.
Just to answer the question (for interested folk) the picture in the bottom right was a baby picture of one of the professors. It was an inside joke in the department – he looks exactly like his son and had this picture and one of his son on his website.
I’m glad they’ve taken down the collage. I was one of the people pictured. I found it fairly hilarious but obviously in extremely poor taste.
There IS a very positive side to this: 30 years ago, an astronomy department at a large university could NOT have been used to represent diversity! We’ve come a long way baby. Don’t get me wrong, we still have a long way to go, but it was a hopeful thought.
I particularly liked this statement on the home page:
“It is a proven scientific fact that thinking about something often causes it to happen.”
Gah.
http://www.webcitation.org/5emq9Ah9W
An awful lot of believing going on there…