Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
While being interviewed back in 1989 Carl Sagan was asked “Are you a Socialist?” You can almost hear Ted Turner treating the word “socialist” as an almost derogatory term, and so this was perhaps tossed at him as if he was being asked if he was a child molester. The answer Carl gives reflects his character and … Read more
I often trip up over some rather strange claims being promoted by people who are in reality both decent, reasonable, and intelligent. This week’s example comes from a piece written by Jerry Fogltance, a retired Air Force chaplain and lieutenant colonel. Within his column he writes … Atheists take pride in claiming that what they believe … Read more
Since we are deep into the working week, I’ll lighten up a bit today and have a bit of fun. Humans generally tend to not simply take what we find asis, but also often can’t resist the urge to tweak and improve things, and apparently the Nigerian 419 guys are not immune to that urge. To … Read more
The very short TL;DR; summary is perhaps “yikes”. So I sat down to enjoy the latest episode of Real Time with Bill maher, and was totally floored when he wheeled on Charlie Sheen’s HIV Quack, “Dr.” Samir Chachoua, and then proceeds to interview him. What then emerged were some totally unfounded claims, and so here … Read more
I was blogging about this a couple of days ago, and reported the rather bizarre story of how Richard Dawkins, who had been invited to a science and skeptics conference to be their keynote speaker on what is the wholly appropriate 40th anniversary of the publication of his highly influential book, The Selfish Gene, and was … Read more
We are awash with pseudoscientific claims that look scientific, dress scientifically, sound sciency, but in reality are not. We need never look too far nor too hard to find an example, and so clearly such public popularity should perhaps cause us to pause and wonder why it is like this, why do so many cling on … Read more