Skepticblog

As some of you may know, earlier this year I made three pilot episodes of a new web video series called inFact. The idea was to take the content from Skeptoid and repackage it for delivery to a much broader audience. If you’re wondering what the heck brand of paint I was sniffing to imagine I might have time in my schedule to make a weekly video series, you are on the right track. Of course I don’t have time, and don’t expect to find it any time soon. Video takes an order of magnitude more time and money to produce than an audio-only podcast like Skeptoid.

Therefore, the only way to produce inFact is to take time away from my regular professional career as a consulting computer scientist. This is the kind of career change that I’m looking to make anyway, to become of a full-time science journalist and skeptical outreach professional. But being the family breadwinner, I can only make such a change when there is sufficient money in the game. Continue reading…

Some of the female Cosmonauts. The fat bonehead in the white shirt is Sergei Korolev, who led the charge to discredit the women and end their program.

So I figured out what I’m going to talk about in Berlin next week. At The Amaz!ng Meeting 7 this year in Las Vegas, I was lucky enough to give a 20-minute talk on the last day, and the topic was the Missing Cosmonauts. It’s been one of the most popular episodes of my Skeptoid podcast, and it concerns the urban legend that a number of Soviet Cosmonauts died in space, on flights that never made it into the history books, and who were subsequently erased from history. These tales are based almost entirely upon interpretations of some recordings made by two young Italian brothers who tuned their radio receivers in to pick up Soviet and American radio traffic during Cold War era spaceflights. Continue reading…

I’m excited to announce that Skeptoid has made it to the final round of the annual Podcast Awards for 2010! The real voting starts now.

As you may know, Skeptoid has been my labor of love for over three years. Unlike most other nominated podcasts, I do it almost entirely on my own: I have no co-hosts, producers, company, or sponsors behind me, like most. So I make my pitch that (if you like Skeptoid) it deserves your vote through all my hard work, even if there are other shows also nominated that you also like. Continue reading…

The Manga Guide to Calculus

People always used to make fun of me for learning calculus, on my own, for fun. For some reason my formal educational track always managed to swerve around calculus and I missed out, leaving me forever jealous of my friends who knew what integrals were.

And so it was with some nostalgia that I recently opened a package from No Starch Press and found The Manga Guide to Calculus inside. Now you don’t have to be a complete dork to study calculus on your own; you can do it simply for the fun of enjoying manga (Japanese comic art). Continue reading…

I stand before you today to confess perhaps my greatest clusterfuck of the year: the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment, which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me.

I have an upcoming Skeptoid podcast episode for which I want to include some informal survey data (it’s the September 29 episode, #173, and I’ll update this page when it’s available. The topic and the results will all be revealed on that day). I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter for its potential to virally spread information. So I thought it would be a clever idea to combine my survey with Twitter, which (I thought) would be a lot of fun for everyone and would accomplish two goals: Continue reading…

A Google Alert recently brought my attention to the fact that I had, somehow and without my knowledge, suddenly joined the ranks of conspiracy theorists who believe that FEMA is building concentration camps throughout the United States to inter and kill law-abiding citizens. I wondered if perhaps I’d been mixing my Bloody Marys a bit strong. But then I noticed what site the article was on: PrisonPlanet.com, run by Alex Jones. Alex didn’t personally write the article – he was out running around with his strait jacket flapping half open, cackling like a banshee, pursued on foot by guys in white suits – it was written by Chuck Baldwin.

If you don’t know him, Chuck Baldwin is one of the more legitimate faces of the “Government is out to kill us all” conspiracy theorist crowd. Chuck was the 2008 Presidential candidate for the hardcore conservative Guns-n-Bibles Constitution Party. Chuck wrote: Continue reading…

Not.

Although, if you follow the alt-med news, you may have seen an article from six months ago or so trumpeting “FDA Reluctantly Admits Mercury Fillings Have Neurotoxic Effects on Children“. Wow! So, the FDA has finally admitted that the mercury in amalgam fillings is having devastating results on our children’s health. It’s on the Internet, so it must be true.

This headline grabbed my attention, in part because I had done a Skeptoid episode debunking the silly “smoking teeth” video on YouTube, made by some anti-amalgam people. In it, they dipped an extracted tooth in water and then filmed the water vapor rising off of the tooth using a fluorescent screen; only they said it was mercury vapor, and that it represented the constant flow of mercury into your body from amalgam fillings. (Mercury vapor is far heavier than air, it wouldn’t rise, it would sink.) It was a textbook case of alarmism. Continue reading…

Recently I hit a milestone on my audio podcast Skeptoid: the 150th episode. I wanted to do something really fun, and decided a lavish broadway musical was the way to go. Normally my listeners expect 10 minutes of me talking in a dry and boring manner, so I figured this would be a fun way to surprise everyone.

The concept was a musical version of a secret meeting of the Illuminati, ruing the fact that the population has discovered alternative and faith-based everything, and thus profits are down. Continue reading…

Congratulations to Roy Natian who won two free tickets to the Skeptoid 150th Episode Party on April 18th at the University of California, Irvine. Entrants submitted a YouTube video telling why critical thinking is important, and Roy’s name was randomly drawn from all entrants. Here is his video: Continue reading…

The March 10 episode of my Skeptoid podcast dealt with a number of strange skulls from around the world. One that’s perhaps best known among the strange skull aficionado crowd – if there is such a crowd – is the “Starchild”. It’s the partial skull of a hydrocephalic child who died in Mexico about 900 years ago. At least, that’s what it is according to nearly every knowledgeable person who has seen it. But according to Lloyd Pye, it’s an alien hybrid. Continue reading…