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.
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
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:
A weekly round-up of things we liked that we think you'd like also.
Welcome to the Birmingham Skeptics Weekly Roundup Easter special. There’s nothing special about it, it’s just it happens to be Easter weekend and I need to find something to fill these lines up the top here. It seems to have done the trick, that’s a fair few lines done already. Weather’s nice as well, and it’s St George’s Day. So, it’s the Birmingham Skeptics Weekly Roundup Easter, Nice Weather and St George’s day special. There we go, that’s this bit done, now here’s what you came for, the best of the web:
Oi, scientists, listen up, yeah, Stephen Curry recommends you enter the Guardian science writing competition.
We need devout Muslim scientists to speak out, says Usama Hasan, who has had death threats for saying evolution is compatible with the Koran.
Derrr du-du-du-derrr, Der Der Der, Derrr du-du-du-derrr, Superbus!
Honestly dear, I was in the strip club looking for help with my physics coursework.
A new quackbusting browser plugin called Fish Barrel has been released by Leicester Skeptic’s Simon Perry. Fully automated misleading claim finder and reporter.
Birmingham Skeptics regular Rich Spencer of Rich Spencer photography brought his (expensive looking) camera along to our Nick Pope talk. He got some fantastic photos, see what we look like by having a look at them on Facebook here.
That’s it for this week, on Wednesday (27/4) we have our Birmingham Skeptics social in The Square Peg, Corporation St. There’ll be someone there from 7.00pm so feel free to turn up when you like and meet some interesting people.
A weekly round-up of things we liked that we think you'd like also.
We’re
getting all arty this week. Ever since Matt Lodder visited with his
excellent talk “A sceptical view of western media perceptions of
tattoos”, we’ve been interested in the tension between art and science
and whether any actually exists. This is explored in a couple of
articles you can see below. Also, top UFO expert Nick Pope popped in to
talk to us this week. A lot of new faces came along to see him and
entertained us with their experiences of UFOs, the atmosphere was great
as believers and sceptics all had their say without any ill will. We’ve
made sure a bit of UFO related stuff is in this weeks round up:
It seems at times that our education system encourages a rift between the arts and the sciences. One route will lead you to aesthetic appreciation whereas the other to a more practical destination. A false dichotomy is created between the sensual and the sensible that places the scientists in their laboratory working late into the night uncovering the secrets of the universe whilst the artists drink absinthe and discuss its spiritual nature.
This is of course all a pile of tosh as I would expect most of the readers of this blog to realise. There is a long tradition of combining science and art and it’s only the blinkered view of some that would maintain that the two should never meet. Science wants to
Once more we bring you our weekly compilation of goodies
we’ve trawled from the web. A smorgasbord of digital delights for your
delectation.
We know it’s unlikely that you’ve missed this but we
couldn’t be left out of celebrating the online release of Storm. Congratulations to
Tracy King, D C Turner, Tim Minchin and all the others involved for a wonderful
piece of work.
We’re sure that Storm would be more than a little dismayed
to read the following from our friends at Mersey Side Skeptics who score a success
in their campaign against homeopathy.
If you fancy giving your home that spacey makeover Steve D
has the interior design tip of the week for you over at the Mad Art Lab with
the Paper Planet Lantern.
In case you missed Monbiot’s article in the Guardian here’s the fully
referenced version of Evidence Meltdown as he critiques the position of Helen
Caldicott and the anti-nuclear movement’s presentation of the impacts of
radiation on human health.
In the run up to our visit by Nick Pope on the 13th
April, Birmingham Skeptics stalwart Andy Pickering confesses to a temporary
lapse in rational thought in A Flock of UFOs.
The people down at Fermilab are still bashing those
proton/anti-protons and they might have found something a bit funky. If confirmed
it’d be a fine result in the months before the trusty Tevatron closes down due
to lack of funds. Read more over at POPSCI.
We’ll finish with a couple of commentaries on the use of
scientific research by journalists. Hot off the press is Ben Goldacre taking The
Fourth Estate to task over some not so prime primary research.
Following in the same theme those witty and pithy people
over at xkcd give us a lesson on the misapplication of statistics.
