They find our lack of faith disturbing

It’s always nice to find that someone else has already done such a thorough job of covering a particular point, that I don’t really need to add anything myself. Certain idiotic blatherings on Fox News, about some atheist bus adverts in the US, were among a number of things I’ve seen lately which annoyed me [...]

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Exciting Skeptics’ Circle news!

And the exciting news is… there’s a new Skeptics’ Circle up. Hey, don’t act like that’s some kind of anti-climax, it’s a good one. And it’s taking a weight off my shoulders by letting me feel like telling you about it has fulfilled my blogging obligations for today, because I haven’t got the energy to [...]

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Beware the spinal trap

The following is a reprint of an article by Simon Singh, which first appeared in the Guardian last year, and has been the focus of all the legal fracas to have followed. Ben Goldacre summarises the circumstances for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to any of this. Everyone in the skeptical blogosphere has been [...]

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Me = DEBUNKED

Ooh goody, someone else hilariously thinks I’m wrong about everything. That’s always nice. The full comment left can be read in response to my homeopathy article, here. I’ll quote just the relevant bits. Well, “relevant” is pushing it, but here goes. Well well well, what have we here? Yet another rant against Homeopathy? Well, for [...]

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Post hoc ergo propter hoc

It’s logical fallacy hour again, here in Skeptictionary corner. These tend to be a little lighter and less research-intensive, and I don’t want to wait another month before being able to post something else, so I’m scaling down a bit from the recent mammoth on homeopathy. [Spoiler from the future: I ended up rambling on [...]

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Who’s a pirate’s favourite comedian?

Bill Maherrrrrr. … I am very ashamed. I couldn’t think of anything to use as a title, so I decided to just say Bill Maher’s name in a stupid voice and throw a laboured pirate reference in for no reason to try and turn it into comedy. Let’s just pretend that never happened. So, apparently [...]

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Why I r not srs atheist

See, my response to things like blasphemy laws and censorship is usually just to swear a lot and do my best to piss the relevant people off. Atheist Ireland, on the other hand, have been putting together this letter to the President, laying out in fantastic detail, point by point, just what an unfair, illiberal, [...]

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Holy shit, Tranquility

The planet we live on is around eight thousand miles across. It’s a pretty big ball of rock, floating in empty space. The ball of burning gas it’s spinning around is nearly a hundred million miles away. That’s further than a supersonic jet could travel in a decade. Cold, black vacuum stretches out in every [...]

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Homeopathy

Yep, it’s the big homeopathy rant. I’ve been feeling curiously medicinal of late, so let’s see how this turns out. All good bullshit needs an exciting origins story In 1796, a German doctor called Samuel Hahnemann first published a description of a thing he’d made up called the “Law of Similars”. He’d taken a popular [...]

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Things of interest

Just a quick round-up today, of a few things which I might talk about in more depth if it wasn’t Friday night and I wasn’t distracted by pizza, Mitchell & Webb, and being extremely lazy: – Orac on divisiveness within the world of woo. I love this, and it’s a great summary of the situation. [...]

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