24 June 2010 by Erik Davis
Recently, I filed a post about food allergies in the schoolyard, which was driven by catching myself in several common logical fallacies. You see, before writing the article, I had a general sense that school policies designed to protect allergic kids from peanut exposure were getting out of hand. After all, back when I was [...]
Posted in Cognition, Critical Thinking, History, Logic and Fallacies, Probability and Statistics, Science, Skepticism12 Comments
16 February 2010 by Steve Thoms
The intellectual head games that a person can play when weaving a conspiracy theory relies heavy on the person’s imagination. In order for the conspiracy to be as superficially consistent as possible, one has to make it bigger and more complicated, necessitating levels of complexity that increase by orders of magnitude with each new level. [...]
Posted in Conspiracy Theories, Critical Thinking, History1 Comment
19 January 2010 by Jonathan Abrams
Warning: This review may contain what some may consider ‘spoilers’. Although, few of the details in the review would be surprising to anyone even remotely familiar with the life of Charles Darwin. But rest assured that the movie is worth your time and money, so go see it and come back if you’re worried about [...]
Posted in Culture, Evolution, History, Reviews0 Comments
09 January 2010 by Ethan Clow
Along time ago a young monk in Jerusalem walked up to two knights and asked nervously “you knights always hang out in the tavern over there and never let anyone else in, what goes on in there?” The knights didn’t answer right away but then one of them said “It’s a secret…” Prompting the other [...]
Posted in Conspiracy Theories, Culture, History2 Comments
09 December 2009 by Kim Hebert
Science is the skilled study of facts – predictable, falsifiable observations in nature. I always thought that was non-racial. But somewhere along the way the terms “Western” and “Eastern” cropped up, distinguished from each other yet allegedly two sides of the same coin. Alternatives. We see this in medicine now with the popularization of Complementary [...]
Posted in History, Science0 Comments
18 November 2009 by Kim Hebert
Remember the year 2000? You know, that apocalypse from 9 years ago with the pyramid calendars and the Y2K bug. Remember June of last year (and every June before that since at least 2006)? Remember September? Or last week? Or August 29, 1997…just kidding. Well, in January 2013 we’ll probably get to ask “remember last [...]
Posted in Culture, History, Pseudoscience0 Comments
11 November 2009 by Kim Hebert
Background Today is Remembrance Day. In Canada and some other countries, people who choose to observe this day wear jaunty little poppies (or a poppy sticker) for the 2 weeks prior to 11 November — originally designed and produced to support wounded veterans. For context and for those who may not know, Remembrance Day was [...]
Posted in Culture, History0 Comments
07 November 2009 by Steve Thoms
If you read this blog with any sort of regularity, you most likely read other skeptic-blogs, and so are probably aware that today is Carl Sagan Day. There’s not much that I can say about the greatest teacher of the 20th century that hasn’t been beautifully said already. Odds are, most of us feel the [...]
Posted in History, Science0 Comments
19 October 2009 by Steve Thoms
I’ve recently taken to using archaic, or otherwise outdated words and phrases in casual conversation. It’s not because I think it makes me look smart (I wear a bow-tie with its own little pocket protector for that), but because I think it’s hilarious when I talk to my students with a little “You lost your [...]
Posted in Culture, History0 Comments
13 October 2009 by Michael Kruse
On the evening of Oct 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard was approached by two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, at the Fireside Bar in Laramie, Wyoming. These men enticed Matthew into McKinney’s pick-up truck, drove him to the outskirts of town, tied Matthew to a fence, pistol-whipped him and left him to die, which he [...]
Posted in Culture, History0 Comments
