Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Sky News is reporting the following, so it just must be true, they would not get something like this incorrect and would of course fact check … right? Scientists predict ‘mini ice age’ could hit UK by 2030 A model of the Sun’s magnetic activity suggests the River Thames may freeze over within two decades, … Read more
Given the date, it is perhaps appropriate and traditional to mull over some seasonal aspect. For this year, I’d like to ask a question regarding the timing of the authorship of the Gospels. These are the alpha sources for much of our cultural inheritance. I’m not going to simply quote some dates at you, nor … Read more
The US Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on the selling of snake oil. If indeed homeopathy only consisted of a herbal tea or two to help alleviate a cold, then they would not have been too concerned, but unfortunately the landscape has changed and so they have been forced to respond to the … Read more
A new paper has been published within the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin entitled … Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection We report three studies—including an analysis of large-scale survey data—in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support … Read more
The term Yeti is a familiar one to most people. It describes the ape-like creature that supposedly dwells in the snow peaked Himalayas. For most this is simply a popular cultural myth, but some true believers do exist. Just to be clear … Quantity of actual scientific evidence that the Yeti is or was real … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more