Critical Thinking

Andrew Wakefield handed award for …. ‘lifetime achievement in quackery’ … it is well deserved.

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The Guardian reports that … Andrew Wakefield, the doctor struck off the medical register for his discredited research that claimed to find a link between autism and theMMR vaccine, can add another honour to his list this Christmas: the inaugural Golden Duck award for lifetime achievement in quackery, set up by the science writer Simon Singh. It is … Read more

Witchcraft and magic cures

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Being critical of daft ideas matters … it really does. Every now and then somebody who is stupid enough to believe gets into a position of power where they then proceed to do real harm on an almost industrial scale. I have an example for you, Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh truly believes that witchcraft is real, as reported … Read more

A bit of fun …Messing about with Gravity

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There exists a very strange place on planet earth, so weird that gravity as we know it does not appear to work as we expect.

Here is a clip by well-known skeptic, Brian Dunning, illustrating this weird anomaly. It is located within Death Valley deep inside one of the hidden canyons (Mosaic Canyon) and caught my attention because I was in that exact spot a couple of months ago myself and was quite amazed by it. Anyway, here is Brian explaining …

OK, so what is going on here, is this credible or is there something else happening? Does gravity really behave like this?

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Fallacy Zoo: The March of the Straw men

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The deployment of straw men is often used to craft the illusion of a strong argument. The metaphor is one in which your opponent will surreptitiously substitute your actual argument for a weak passive dummy and then rapidly demolish it. It conjurers up images of assault troops marching out to do battle against a field … Read more