Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
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
It strikes me as rather odd that at times we often deploy very generic labels to describe others, and by doing so belittle and greatly distort who they actually are. Take for example the religious labels we use … “Christian”, “Muslim”, “Hindu”, etc… or the sub-categories we sometimes break these down into, such as “Catholic”, … Read more
Within a previous posting from a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the supposed reconstruction of the face of Jesus, and that was shared on Facebook. There one commenter suggested … The only real picture of Jesus son of Mary is the one imprinted upon the linen cloth popularly known as the holy shroud kept in … Read more
The TL;DR; answer is no, it does not work. In 2007 the federal government commissioned a study to look into it all, and the results are here in a PDF. The executive summary lays it all out quite well, and basically reveals that the millions they spend promoting an abstinence education policy was completely wasted because … Read more
This has been doing the rounds … There are potentially a couple of rather important points here, but they are all trumped by one key one. We could perhaps start by taking this as a cue for an immediate rant because it is quite frankly an abhorrent idea for an elected official to promote and … Read more