Few things get me riled up as much as deliberate ignorance about science. Every time I hear someone promoting homeopathy, talk favorably about energy healing, or spew forth some other pseudo-scientific nonsense, I try (and often fail) to control the urge to set them right.

Ask my girlfriend. If I had to give her a penny for every time she asks me to stop yelling at the TV because of some mind-numbingly ignorant piece of ‘news’ (I’m looking at you, BBC Breakfast), she’d own substantially more than just my heart.

The reason I get so enraged at such displays of wilful ignorance is because it’s so terribly easy to check if any given scientific ‘fact’ is true. All you need is an open mind and a web browser.

But people as a whole are lazy, enjoy being ignorant, and suffer from a phenomenon known as confirmation bias that makes them focus on the few scraps of information confirming their pre-conceived notions, while ignoring the mountains of evidence that contradict their point of view.

We can’t fix this by showering people with real, verified facts coming from genuine, evidence-based science.

We can only fix this by teaching people to think rationally, clearly, and with an awareness of their own biases and limitations.

The book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is a goldmine for sceptics. It effectively demolishes homeopathy, deconstructs nutritionists, and delivers staggering blows to the media’s horrendously flawed reporting of science news.

But it does all this almost carelessly, as an added benefit, in the course of its real goal: educating the reader in spotting the fallacies in medical science as it’s reported in the news, in advertisements, and on TV.

The real goal of the book is to teach people to think for themselves, to not allow themselves to be manipulated, and to base their decisions about medicine on valid scientific evidence.

Bad Science is a very important book. It’s so important that I think everyone should read it. Unfortunately I don’t have the resources to buy six billion copies, so I can’t send this book to everyone. But I can buy this book for the readers of this blog, as few as there are.

I’m going to give away ten copies of Bad Science. The first ten commenters on this post will get a free copy of Bad Science, paid for entirely by me.

All I ask you to do is when you receive the book to read it, and then lend it out to someone who you think will benefit from reading it. Spread the word.