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Saturday, May 26th, 2012

Australian Skeptics

Homeopathy – so diluted there’s no evidence left.

I woke up this morning to my usual radio station to hear a discussion about the pros and cons of homeopathy. There was the President of the AMA being careful to say that homeopathy is “implausible” (he probably wanted to say...
Wed, March 14, 2012, 2:27 pm EST
Psychics predict the future. Do they?

We're just about to go into the psychic prediction season, so it's a good time to look at how well they did in predicting what would happen in 2011. I don't have all the space in the world here so I've chosen three sets of predictions to see how well...
Wed, December 28, 2011, 12:46 pm EST
Theatre of the absurd

Many years ago I did some stage acting, and one of the plays we performed was Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco which was part of what was known as "The Theatre of the Absurd", a sort of literary equivalent to surrealist art, where what was...
Thu, September 29, 2011, 10:34 am EST
A night out with the creationists

Well, that's what we expected when a hardy group from Western Sydney Freethinkers went to the Archangel Michael and Saint Bishoy Coptic Orthodox Church at Mt. Druitt to see a talk about young Earth creationism. The talk was an intersection of two...
Tue, August 23, 2011, 5:42 pm EST
Denial is not scepticism

When are the climate change deniers (not “sceptics”) going to come out and be honest about their opposition to the carbon tax? They oppose it because they are deniers, and for no other reason.I'm not going into the economic arguments of a...
Tue, August 9, 2011, 12:48 pm EST
Are mobile phones frying our brains?

Mobile phone danger seems to be a perennial story in the media. I got my first mobile phone before the world wide web had been invented, but I am sure that there must have been people using their Roneo machines to run off fliers warning of the dangers...
Fri, June 3, 2011, 11:57 am EST
Don’t make any plans for Sunday. Jesus was wrong!

Being an ancient hippie I was rather concerned about Friday, May 13, 2011. Not just because it was Friday the Thirteenth but because there was a planetary alignment predicted by the song Aquarius in the musical Hair.Jupiter was aligned with Mars, but...
Fri, May 20, 2011, 10:12 am EST
Acts of God?

Watching the scenes from Japan over the last few days and listening to religious nutcases blame the earthquake and tsunami on the wrath of God reminded me of something I wrote in early 2005 following the earthquake to the west of Indonesia and the...
Wed, March 23, 2011, 11:37 am EST
Magic Wands

Television shows have a long tradition of promoting "scientific" breakthroughs which owe little to science and a lot to the entrepreneurial spirit of inventors and promoters. These shows are where you go to hear about the latest gadget or...
Thu, February 17, 2011, 11:27 am EST
Checking the facts

I am often referred to "scientific" papers which supposedly prove such matters as the efficacy of homeopathy or the dangers of vaccines.Sometimes these papers don't actually exist, sometimes they are irrelevant, and sometimes they are full of...
Tue, February 1, 2011, 4:03 pm EST
The good news keeps on coming

It's been good news for common sense and bad news for the anti-vaccination brigade over the last few weeks.The first was an analysis by the American Academy of Pediatrics which examined 40 scientific studies looking for some connection between...
Thu, January 20, 2011, 10:04 am EST
Predictions for 2011

Before giving my psychic predictions or 2011, I will review my success at predicting the events of 2010.1. There will be talk of romance in the Royal Family, with at least one engagement being hotly rumoured. Princess Anne will not remarry during 2010....
Fri, January 7, 2011, 10:27 am EST
An atheist at Christmas

Every time that Christmas comes around I hear religious believers expressing sympathy for atheists who are apparently deprived of the pleasure of enjoying the season.In some cases it is even suggested that atheists are annoyed by Christmas because of...
Tue, December 21, 2010, 10:32 am EST
Getting risk wrong

People are notoriously bad at assessing risk. That is, at correctly distinguishing between decisions based on fact and those based on opinion, or to put it another way, decisions based on the head and those on the gut. We tend to overrate some risks and...
Wed, July 21, 2010, 12:02 pm EST
'The creationists are coming'

Think of the children!There has been an outbreak of panic among some local atheists and freethinkers over the following headline in the papers:"Intelligent design to be taught in Queensland schools under national curriculum"It would indeed be...
Wed, June 9, 2010, 2:12 pm EST
Publication in the peer-reviewed literature

Medical quacks and pseudo scientists don't like being told that they would have more credibility if their work was published in peer-reviewed journals. Often they will attack the peer review process itself and try to pretend that because it is not...
Wed, May 19, 2010, 3:08 pm EST
Literature v Literalism

My daily trip through the Blue Mountains, looking at hills and valleys that took hundreds of millions of years to make, sometimes causes me to reflect on how the nonsense of creationism still infects our society. Like those moles in holes at the fun...
Tue, May 4, 2010, 5:47 pm EST
World Homeopathy Awareness Week

To celebrate the birthday of Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, this week is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. Yes, I did say "inventor", not "discoverer", because homeopathy is a total invention from whole cloth, not some...
Wed, April 14, 2010, 10:43 am EST
Targeting the susceptible

The birth of a new baby is a time for celebration and joy, but the good feelings can be tempered by new things to worry about. The health of the child must be of concern, and new parents will be thinking about such things as whether the child might have...
Tue, March 30, 2010, 3:56 pm EST
Polypharmacy

One of the common ways to defend pseudomedicine is to show how less bad it is than real medicine. The usual method of doing this is to exaggerate the number of deaths in hospitals and compare the fabricated number with the number of people who die, for...
Tue, March 16, 2010, 8:37 am EST