Bill Maher promotes a HIV Cure quack

The very short TL;DR; summary is perhaps “yikes”. So I sat down to enjoy the latest episode of Real Time with Bill maher, and was totally floored when he wheeled on Charlie Sheen’s HIV Quack, “Dr.” Samir Chachoua, and then proceeds to interview him. What then emerged were some totally unfounded claims, and so here … Read more

A few final pointers regarding Richard Dawkins & NECSS

This is a topic that I’m more or less done with for now, but before I move on I wanted to add one last posting that contains a couple of links that consist of some quite good writing on it all. I  should add that putting links to them here does not necessarily imply I endorse … Read more

FBI have asked the elderly to stop knocking Oregon militants on their ass

The title says it all, and yes, I confess that I did indeed quite enjoy reading this. The story is about Robert Saunders, a 79 year old retied teacher and devoted birdwatcher, who was out checking on some owls. While doing so he was confronted by an armed Oregon militant who quickly got in his face and … Read more

Can Review Skeptic help you to spot a fake Hotel Review?

I’ve come across a fascinating little site named “Review Skeptic”. There they explain … Review Skeptic is based on research at Cornell University that uses machine learning to identify fake hotel reviews with nearly 90% accuracy. So the idea here is that you can cut and paste any review in and then click “Test It”, and the … Read more

Brain Training – Lumosity guilty of bogus claims

Lumosity, a San Francisco based company, has been promoting “Brain Training” that basically consists of games that are supposed to improve your memory, attention, flexibility, speed of processing, and problem solving abilities.  It might indeed be popular and also quite profitable, but the ever so slight flaw is that they have been claiming stuff that is at best … Read more

Is the Prosperity gospel fraud?

In the age of google those that promote weird or bizarre claims are being challenged as never before because we no longer have to simply accept their word, we can look it up, and this is especially true of the Prosperity gospel. Justifying the Prosperity gospel As I’m sure you are aware, at least I hope … Read more