At the end of Wednesday’s meeting of the UMD Society of Inquiry, the local student skeptic group, I conducted a psychological experiment on those attendees who didn’t need to rush off for other appointments. It was a variation on the game of Twenty Questions. But instead of a person or thing, I’d think of a… Continue reading The Science Game
This news item caught my eye because it’s a “news of the weird” type of story: NEW YORK — A New York City man who plunged 40 stories from the rooftop of an apartment building has survived after crashing onto a parked car. But then there was this bit: The car’s owner, Guy McCormack, of… Continue reading Casual Superstition
There’s a phrase that’s been annoying me lately. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, or something that’s been floating around for years but only recently came to my attention, but it’s been bugging me. “We should respect everyone’s ideas.” This is exactly wrong. There are plenty of ideas out there that don’t deserve… Continue reading Respecting Everyone’s Beliefs
One expression I’ve heard a lot lately (most recently at TAM 8) is “herding cats”. As in, organizing skeptics/atheists is like herding cats. The implication in most cases was that this makes us nearly impossible to organize into groups. I think this conclusion is unwarranted. The reason it’s easy to herd sheep (or cattle, or… Continue reading Sheep and Cats
In an earlier post, I talked about Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a dick” talk at TAM 8. This time, I want to look at the other side of that. To the question “does this mean we have to be boring lecturers all the time?”, I hope to answer “No”. After all, we talk and write… Continue reading Some More on Not Being a Dick
I feel chastised. Undoubtedly the most controversial, most thought-provoking talk at TAM 8 was Phil Plait‘s “Don’t be a dick” talk, in which he decried what he sees as the rise of incivility in the skeptical blogosphere. He wrote it down ahead of time so as not to ad lib and accidentally say something he… Continue reading The “Don’t Be A Dick” Heard Round the World
Martin Gardner, the Mathemagician, passed away on May 22. Go read Phil Plait’s post about him, because Phil says everything I would have.
Cracked has entitled “5 Cheap Magic Tricks Behind Every Psychic”. The introductory paragraph reads: I got into magic at the age of five. I stopped thinking psychics were real at the age of five-and-a-half. Mainly because most of them were doing tricks I had just read in the colorful magic book I had bought for… Continue reading Cracked on Psychics
Spoiler: not really. I was just in the kitchen fixing dinner for the cats, when I heard a woman cough. Just a single throat-clearing cough. It definitely sounded like a woman. And this was odd, since there aren’t supposed to be any women in the house. Any company would be unexpected, seeing as how I’m… Continue reading I Just Had a Supernatural Experience
