Skepticblog

Are you an exhausted antiscientist? Has railing against the mainstream science paradigm got you down? Making up "facts" is tough, and it’s tiring CONSTANTLY TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, using different color fonts, and don’t forget all those exclamation points!!! Not to mention comparing scientists to Hitler and Himmler, and yourself to Galileo and Einstein.

And of course, your mind is soft and not used to real work, so you need to take constant breaks.
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I love me some Captain Disillusion. He does a great job debunking the bunk, and his sense of humor slays me. And in this particular video, well, he’s simply Amazing.

Captain D will be at TAM 7, I hear. Doesn’t that make you want to attend even more?

In the video, you can see my book over his shoulder. Awesome! And I’m dork enough to know he got the music at the end right, too.

Dan Loxton is something of a go-getter. He’s editor of the Junior Skeptic portion of Skeptic Magazine, and was the driving force behind "What Do I Do Next?", a practical guide to active skepticism.
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Simon Singh is a journalist in the UK; he writes for the Guardian. Moreover, he’s a science journalist, and a good one who, like so many of us, prefers reality the way it is.

The British Chiropractic Association, however, prefers reality to bend to their will. They’ve been making some outrageous claims lately about the efficacy of their "treatment", things that are clearly wrong. Simon wrote about this in a column, saying,

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

Unsurprisingly, the BCA took a dim view of this. So of course they produced copious variable-controlled double blind studies with statistically significant testing procedures to back up their claim.

HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaha! No, that would be silly! Of course they didn’t do that. They sued him instead.

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Some UFO stories are sillier than others. Among the very silliest are claims that NASA not only has evidence that the Space Shuttle is buzzed by flying saucers, but that they have video of it and this video is commonly released by NASA.

OK, can we first screw our heads on straight here? If you’re claiming that astronauts routinely take video of alien spacecraft, and that NASA is desperately trying to cover them up, why in the frak would they release the video?

Hello, McFly? I mean, seriously?

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As you may recall, the James Randi Educational Foundation recently tested a woman named Patricia Putt who claimed she could "read" people, that is, write down statements that accurately described these people, without knowing them in advance. She applied for the Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, and the preliminary test was performed in England by JREF friends Professors Christopher French and Richard Wiseman.

Briefly, 10 women were read by Ms. Putt, she wrote down descriptions of them, and then after the readings each of the ten women was allowed to look over the readings and determine which one fit her best.

In advance of the testing, Putt and the JREF agreed that if 5 of the 10 women chose correctly, then this would indicate that something interesting was happening, and she could move on to the final testing. And how did she fare?

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Scott Hurst, a skeptic and JREF friend, has written an entry for Swift asking how much responsibility antivax mouthpieces like Meryl Dorey and Jenny McCarthy have for deaths caused by their rhetoric. It’s a solidly-written piece that is well-researched and brings up what I think is a valid point. While we do have the right to free speech in the U.S., there are ramifications to it. Are they responsible if parents don’t vaccinate their children, and deaths follow? It’s a fair question.

Somewhat less fair, perhaps, is a video that has been made making fun of Jenny McCarthy. While I think it provides an outlet for the visceral need to do something to stop her relentless nonsense about vaccinations and autism, I don’t know if this sort of thing really helps. I don’t know if it will convince any fence-sitters or believers, and can come across as being mean-spirited. I think there’s a difference between being angry and showing it, and being simply mean. What do you think? I’ve heard opinions going both ways on this video.
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A MILLION dollars!

I think one of the coolest things — if not the coolest thing — the James Randi Educational Foundation does is the Million Dollar Challenge: if you can prove you have paranormal abilities (you can dowse, you’re psychic, you can make objects float or catch fire or turn into cheese just with the power of your mind), then we’ll give you a million bucks.

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In America, people who claim vaccines cause autism are a major health threat. Some of these folks are just parents, people concerned about their kids, people desperately looking for a cause for a devastating illness. Others are vocal advocates of nonsense, saying things that are proven beyond reasonable doubt to be untrue.

The end result? Kids, including infants, are getting sick, and some of them are dying. Never, ever forget that, no matter how loudly these people yell, and no matter what garbage they spout (including, inevitably, in the comments that will follow this very post). Babies are dying.
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As an astronomer, my familiarity with the details of biological evolution are about on par with that of an interested layman (though being trained scientifically helps with that understanding, adding insight to the process of the scientific endeavor). I’m familiar with the concepts of descent with modification, genetic mutations, natural pressures for adaptations, and the like. I’m less familiar with other aspects, like allele frequencies, how specifically pressures can change adaptations, and what transitional fossils are in the record, but I can probably hold my own against your run-of-the-mill creationist.

That’s why I loved the book Why Evolution is True by biologist Jerry Coyne. This is a clear, easy-to-understand work that shows you — with no compromising and no backing down — that evolution has occurred, the evidence is overwhelming, and that no other explanation for what we see around us makes sense.

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