Critical Thinking

UFO Alien abduction – proof?

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There is a report of Alien abduction from about a month ago that I have just come across.

It concerns a chap who wandered into his garden in the middle of the night, and found that he had lost an hour. Apparently he really had lost an hour and had solid proof, his watch was one hour out of sync with the rest of the world, in fact he was quite astonished to discover that he had  leap forward into the future. So he contacted the Ministry of Defence to report a UFO abduction.

The details read as follows:

It was an ”unseasonably mild” night in late October when the man from Barnes, south-west London, could not sleep so took to his garden with the drink. ”After a few moments I heard a distant roar of engines getting louder and louder,” he told the Ministry of Defence.

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#SuperInjunction

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Now that the concept of super injunctions is falling apart in the UK, I can  reveal that I am not having an affair with Jeremy Clarkson. Also, it has now been disclosed that Clark Kent is Superman.

(OK, tongue placed firmly in cheek, but stick with me here, I have a skeptical point coming up later on)

Folks not in the UK might be wondering what this is about, so as a quick aside I better explain. In the UK if the press catch you doing something you should not have been doing (think shenanigans one night with a supermodel), you can take out a legal injunction to prevent publication. However, what can then happen is that the press can be a bit sneaky and report that there is an injunction in place that prevents them reporting something and so they name names without actually saying what happened. To prevent this, there is the concept of what is now known as a super-injunction to prevent them reporting on the very existence of  the injunction. To do that costs about £50K.

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Relativity a myth? – Conservapedia claims it is.

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I’m sure that I need not tell you about “Conservapedia”, the degree of craziness is well-known, but just in case you don’t (yet) know, its the home website for all the right-wing theist kooks. Everything you might expect is there, for example …

  • Anti gay bashing
  • Obama bashing
  • Misleading anti-abortion rhetoric
  • Creationist stance and opposed to evolution
  • Claims that dinosaurs and humans co-existed
  • Claims that Fox News is fair and balanced
  • Etc …

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Saying sorry for something somebody else did

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An apology has been offered for the Spanish Inquisition.

Can you actually apologise for the actions of others? It is debatable, but to a degree perhaps yes, for example some corporate representative says or does something inappropriate, then later when discovered, a career is terminated, and another representative for the same organisation steps in to grovel, apologise, and explain that such behaviour is not part of their culture. Ah, but what happens when somebody starts to apologies for actions that took place centuries ago?

The latest example of this is reported in today’s telegraph, “Jews receive apology over Spanish Inquisition execution“. It reads …

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Measles

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In the UK, the Thames Valley Health Protection Unit has issued a letter to the parents of every single child via the local Education Authorities because there has been an increasing number of cases of measles during 2011, especially among children. A similar rise has been observed in other countries in Europe, especially France, but also including Spain, Romania, Bulgaria and Germany. What has been happening is that folks have been away on vacation, and as a result their unimmunised children have been picking up measles, and then bringing it back.

In the US it is a similar story, they are on course to have its worst outbreak of measles in more than a decade. Travellers are catching the highly contagious illness while on vacation, then bringing it back to the U.S.

What is going on here?

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Trust Me, I’m a Scientist

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Great article in the latest Scientific American by Daniel T. Willingham. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. His article discusses why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say, so is of direct interest to skeptics.

A friend of mine has long held that a vaccination his son received as an infant triggered his child’s autism. He clings to this belief despite a string of scientific studies that show no link between autism and vaccines. When the original paper on such a link was recently discredited as a fraud, my friend’s reaction was that it will now be more difficult to persuade people of the dangers of vaccination. He is not alone: nearly half of all Americans believe in the vaccine-autism link or are unsure about it.

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