Weekly Round-up w/e 20th May 2011

A weekly round-up of things we liked that we think you'd like also.

Welcome to this weeks weekly round up of interesting articles from around the web.  We have career advice, questions about reality, amazing photography and a hilarious joke around the name of the Chinese President.

So You Think You're a Skeptic?

Pyrrho of Elis (360-262)

By Francis O'Regan

Back in January 2011 we had a very lively meeting when Steve Fuller came to talk to us and covered the topic "If You're Pro-Science, What are you Pro?" He is best known for his defence of the creationist stance and it was an interesting night and lead to lots of discussion. I thought our guest made some good points, but his opening move caused a whole lot of muttering under our breaths and whispered accusations that our guest was setting up straw men in an attempt to make it easier to defend his point of view.

His opening remarks did temporally confuse the audience, you see he made the heretical claim that we weren’t real Sceptics and if I was living in ancient Ionia he would have been right, but it got me thinking which is always the point of a Skeptics meeting. He said, and I paraphrase from my biased memory, that a Sceptic was Sceptical about everything and therefore could make no definite decisions about the nature of anything. A true Sceptic by definition can have no opinion on anything.

Ancient Sceptics a Potted and Incomplete History

The history of Ancient Scepticism is an interesting one and includes amongst other things a man scared of dogs, a one eyed dancer, a happy pig and some very worried theistic philosophers and, like everything of any worth in Western Civilisation, it was invented by

Weekly Roundup w/e 13th May 2011

Operation Human Shield

A weekly round-up of things we liked that we think you'd like also.

We’re back, did you miss us?  I’ve been away sunning myself in tropical Skegness in Billy Butlin’s exclusive resort.  As a result I haven’t been scouring the web for interesting things to show you.  Well, it was back to the grind this week but it wasn’t all bad.  Former tabloid hack and lovable cockney rogue Rich Peppiatt came to Birmingham Skeptics this week to lift the lid on the Tabloid press, really interesting talk, catch him if you can.  Anyway, we have some lovely, and not so lovely, things for you here: