Skepticism
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Speaking of satire that's hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie:
Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now.
Armageddon is not what it used to be
I think there is going to be more outbreaks of telepathy
This is my favorite quote:
Whether or not time ends in 2012, we should be assuming it will so that we take care of business. Secondly and most important, don't cancel your appointments for 2013.
The movie seems to be taking this…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2007
Dear Reader, watch me toot my own horn (yes, I have a very supple spine).
Technorati doth heed prayer. Or at least it heeds "support tickets". So now this blog is visible again on the top-10 archaeology blogs (currently #3 with 187 linkers) and skepticism blogs (currently #9). Netwide.
pharyngula | March 19, 2007The Lynn Margulis blog tour has moved on to Memoirs of a Skepchick—if you weren't satisfied with her answers here, you can try again.
pharyngula | March 18, 2007Avoid Las Vegas between May 17th and 20th. There's a conference going on there that will be like a black hole of stupid, with both Sylvia Browne and Deepak Chopra and a host of low-wattage luminaries of woo in attendance, and there may be a kind of intelligence implosion going on. Your brain may get sucked into the dark pit of delusional dimness if you're too close.
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2007My kids see a fair share of lukewarm religiosity with their grandma and teachers. At home, they're taught that there are basically two types of characters:
Real people who merit empathy and solidarity, such as themselves,
Fictional ones that you can make up stories about, such as Spiderman, the Little Mermaid and Jehovah, Lord of Hosts.Being Swedish, I've never come across a religious parenting manual. But I gather they are really common in the U.S., and that some are exceptionally nasty (as discussed by Jim Benton). Enter Dale McGowan, editor of the anthology Parenting Beyond Belief: On…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2007Regular Dear Reader Christina lives in a small town in western Canada, where there are "lots of nice rock art and arrowheads and Indians (though they don't want to get excavated for political reasons) ". Here's a cool snippet from a letter she sent me."Speaking about books and the local library, I've discovered that if you want to read about Old Norse religion, then you'll have to look in the science fiction section. I guess I should have known, or what? Most likely, the reason is that I live in a town that used to be a really tiny place, but that's grown into a major city in the past five…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007Carne vale is what you say to your usual meaty diet when the fasting of Lent sets in. Science fans do it at Tangled Bank 75, other skeptics at Skeptics' Circle 56.
I wonder if they say chili con carne vale in Mexico.
tsmith | March 13, 2007I was out yesterday, and as such missed Lynn Margulis' blog tour stop at Pharyngula. For those who may not be familiar with Margulis, she's a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was the one who pushed the (now accepted) idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria in cells came about due to symbiosis. In the post announcing her impending arrival, there were lots of questions about her stance on HIV/AIDS. This is mostly due to a review she co-authored on Amazon of Harvey Bialy's biography of HIV denier Peter Duesberg. The review ends: "As both Bialy and Duesberg…
pharyngula | March 13, 2007I got a request to spread the word around Minnesota—the anti-vaxers are gearing up again to push a silly bill in the Minnesota congress. I've put the letter below. If any of these people are your representatives, contact them and tell them they are being very, very silly.
There's supposed to be a hearing next week on a bill that would limit the use of vaccines containing thimerosal, because of the belief that they may cause autism. This is the third year that this bill has been presented, and it keeps failing, but they keep bringing it back up, even though it's clearer now than ever that…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007A burgeoning community of atheist bloggers has come into being since Mojoey published his Atheist Blogroll. The many blogs publishing that list has done a lot for Aardvarchaeology's Technorati ranking. I haven't got a blogroll, mainly because it saves me from having to add courtesy links all the time. But I try to spread the link love in other ways, such as doing feature entries on good underappreciated blogs. And so I decided to post the entire atheist blogroll under the fold. Random chance and purposeless existence bless ya, guys!
pharyngula | March 5, 2007"The Secret" is the latest New Agey scam; there's an excellent article on this con on Salon:
Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2007
Here's another underappreciated, undermarketed and eminently readable blog within the ambit of Aardvarchaeology: Chris O'Brien's Northstate Science. For more archaeology and skepticism, read Chris! He's been at it for a year now, he's only seeing 60 hits a day, and by his own admission,"I have done almost no advertising about the blog, either locally or via other websites - anyone who has discovered Northstate Science has done so either via word of mouth or through searches and links to my posts (hell, most of my relatives, including my mother, don't know I actually have a blog!)"
C'mon…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007The 55th Skeptics' Circle is on-line at The Second Sight. Lots of skeptical writing to "rebalance, realign, detoxify and maintain your skeptical worldview". Also, it will convince you of numerology's validity.
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007My friend Jesper Jerkert has edited a volume of skeptical essays, most culled from Folkvett, the Swedish skeptic quarterly we both help co-edit. This handsome book is just out from the Stockholm publishing house Leopard, whose head hombre Dan Israel is an officer of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the Swedish Skeptic Society, just like Jesper and myself. Don't say we're not doing our bit for the Skeptical Conspiracy for World Domination!
The book's 21 contributions cover themes such as humanistic psychology, Freudianism, parapsychology, stage magic, alternative medicine, computer screen rash,…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Should the future Constitution of the European Union make reference to Christian values? The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel among others thinks so. Or should it be founded on secular liberal principles? I among others think so.
To that end, I have just signed the Brussels Declaration on-line.
We, the people of Europe, hereby affirm our common values. They are based not on a single culture or tradition but are founded in all of the cultures that make up modern Europe.We affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of every individual, and the right of everyone to the greatest possible freedom…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2007The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are:
Archaeologists look at old things to find out what it was like to live a long time ago.
Contract archaeology is research.
This research has its own agenda and needn't pay any attention to what university scholars are doing unless their work is clearly relevant to contract archaeology.
Contract archaeologists should be proud of…
tsmith | February 21, 2007...I'm sure they'll be happy to see that Gambia's president is curing AIDS:
From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia's president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient -- a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.
He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.
"Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof," President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2007The 54th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival is up at Action Skeptics. Akusai has put some serious work into it this time, weaving a hard-boiled tale of Jack Bixby, Skeptical Investigator around the submissions. Is that a gun in your pocket, Akusai, or should I be skeptical?