Skepticblog

In the small community of Sedalia Missouri there happens to be a substantial Krishna community. (I won’t get into the various names for specific Krishna religions, but will just refer to them as Krishna for simplicity.) Recently they took offense at the T-shirts worn by the local high school band. The theme was a trip to the moon and their shirts featured imagery from the Apollo moon landings.

The Krishnas took offense at this because, according to their Vedic scriptures, the moon landing was a hoax. Specifically it says that the moon is further away than the sun, and that in order for a human to exist on another world, they have to leave their body and adopt one made for that world. Therefore the astronauts could not have landed on the moon, and the moon landings must have been a hoax. Seriously – they really believe this.

But the issue here is that they complained about the T-shirts because they found it offensive to their religious beliefs. They argued that the school system is supposed to remain neutral with regard to religious beliefs, and that they violated this neutrality by endorsing the “controversial” Apollo moon landings.

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This Sunday before game-time you might want to set your Tivos to record Dateline. This week, supposedly, Matt Lauer interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield and several other affiliates of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, along with Dr. Paul Offit and journalist Brian Deer.

The Thoughtful House agreed to the interviews because they figured they would get fair treatment from the likes of Matt. I’m interested to see what kind of a program NBC has put together on this very sensitive subject.

Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.

Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.

Copyright: Barry & Noemi Diacon

Just when I finally got away from Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s moisture farm, to join Biggs at the Academy, I find Tatooine’s twin suns have followed me all the way to Earth.

This picture, featured as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on the NASA web site (click the image to see the full-size original), has some people who think they know a thing or two about mirages and refraction in a bit of a fit. (continue reading…)

Skeptic card for Phil Plait

The ever-traffic-begging Crispian Jago has created a set of Simspons-style gaming cards based on the most beloved and good-looking of skeptics, and then made an exception in my case.
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Alex "Skeptiko" Tsakiris

On Tuesday night, August 18^thI did a podcast for SKEPTIKO at www.skeptiko.com. I had been warned about dealing with the host, Alex Tsakiris by several people far more familiar with the blog-universe than me including friends at CFI West and Baxter at Warning: Radio, so I was on my guard. It was an eye-opening session. (continue reading…)

So some of you may have noticed my absence on the blogosphere as of late. I could give you a hundred excuses why but the two main ones are: I’ve been very busy working on productions for my “real” job, and I haven’t had much time to research topics to blog about.

The Skeptologists TV series is still a very active part of our work here but sometimes we go through a phase where there’s not much to report on. That’s the case at the moment. We’re reworking a few show details, and preparing some new pitch materials to adjust to the current TV climate. We’re also looking into self-financing the program to get us into production, so those are pretty exciting developments.

But this blog isn’t about that. I just wanted to offer a thank you to all of my colleagues who continue to provide countless hours of fresh and interesting material for SkepticBlog.org. The team hasn’t let me down, and judging by the comments and the very active group of regulars that we have online here, we’ve got a great community of people who all have some very exciting things to discuss. (continue reading…)

I’m a big fan of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellience) and I think their search program constitutes the best chance we have of making contact. In fact, on a recent Saturday I was rained out of my normal 4-hour bike ride, so I read SETI scientist Seth Shostak’s new book, Confessions of An Alien Hunter (published by National Geographic), a brilliant and fun read. Seth has a fantastic sense of humor and in his book he presents some of great one-liners to use when dealing with UFOlogists, alien abductees, and the saucerites. For example:

Regarding the time it would take to traverse the vast distances between the stars, which would be millions of years (it will take Voyager II 300,000 years to reach a nearby star), Shostak notes: “That’s a long time to be squirming in a coach seat.”

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The New Scientist headling reads: “How to turn seawater into jet fuel.” The “water into fuel” meme is one that will just not die – like lead into gold, it is an iconic example of turning something of little or no value into something of great value, which apparently appeals to our ape brains.

This is an old story that crops up from time to time. I recently blogged about a Florida inventor, John Kanzius, who found a way to burn salt water, resulting in many breathless news reports imagining a day in the near future when we would simply fill our gas tanks with seawater. The New Scientist story has a couple of new wrinkles, but first let me review the reason we will not be running our cars on water – the laws of thermodynamics.

As I discussed last week, in any new process that claims to produce energy it is a useful exercise to consider where the energy is ultimately coming from. In the case of water, the claims invariably are that the hydrogen and oxygen is split through some sort of electrolysis process, and then the hydrogen is burned back with oxygen to produce energy. Of course, thermodynamics tells us that this process must produce less energy than it consumes – it costs energy, it does not produce energy.

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In the last few weeks it has become increasingly obvious to me that there are many more folks out there in the world who are “closet skeptics ” than I could ever have imagined. There is a huge pool of rational thinking citizens who are as fed up as myself with phony psychics, fake medical claims, mediums talking to dead people and every other scam we see hyped through mass media. In my latest podcast on Bryan and Baxter’s Warning Radio (www.warningradio.info/Warning/Home.htmland at a meeting I attended last weekend for the Center for Inquiry West and their Independent Investigations Group (IIG), I found that there are many who want to act, but for a variety of reasons, are holding back from actually taking a more militant stand in public. This is understandable. In our litigious society with its politically correct standards and whacko agendas, it’s hard to want to move out of your cubicle for anything and not much seems worth getting someone else upset over. So what can we do about that?

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The Daily Mail is a UK newspaper that has a tendency, oh, every so often, of printing articles that sometimes don’t exactly represent reality.

This is one such article. It links vaccinations for the swine flu to a neurological disorder called Guillaine-Barré Syndrome, or GBS. The article inflates the danger from vaccinations and may scare people into not getting their inoculations.

And you know how I feel about that.
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