Is the Shroud of Turin really Jesus?

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

Does abstinence-only sex education work?

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

Claim: “Poor people are genetically inferior”

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

This week’s Insanity: Invitation to a Chickenpox party

One manifestation of the rising tide of the non-scientific anti-vaccine movement has been the arrival of the pox party. The idea is that when somebody has a kid who has chickenpox they hold a party and invite all their friends around so that their kids can catch it and thus get it all over and done with early. … Read more

What Did jesus really look like?

OK, let’s start with the quick short TL:DR; version … anybody who claims that they actually know what Jesus looked like is promoting complete and utter BS. The claim The context here is that I’ve seen a few claims floating about within the media regarding a supposedly “scientific” analysis that has yielded the above picture. … Read more

Why are some inclined to embrace Bullshit as truth?

We live in a world that is awash with rather a lot of pseudoscientific claims that are pure grade one gold plated Bullshit, and so it is worth thinking about why some are very susceptible to such influences and others demonstrate a robust immunity to it all. A fascinating paper that yields some insights has been published within the journal Judgment … Read more