Conspiracy theories in pseudoarchaeology
Science magazine has a recent online article by journalist Lizzie Wade looking at the growing influence of ancient aliens and other pseudoarchaeological nons...
Science magazine has a recent online article by journalist Lizzie Wade looking at the growing influence of ancient aliens and other pseudoarchaeological nons...
Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I ...
Dan Ariely is an economist at Duke University who has been teaching a massive open online course on behavioral economics to 140,000 students, titled “A Begin...
Phil Plait discusses (“TEDx Talks: Some Ideas Are Not Worth Spreading”) a public letter from the TED organizers to their derivative TEDx community: “A letter...
Larry Moran describes a lecture by Michael Behe, an advocate of intelligent design arguments: “Michael Behe in Toronto, Part 1”. Moran didn’t care for the le...
While looking for something else on youtube I stumbled on a video by a New Age wacko named [name redacted]. Part of his schtick is the claim that human DNA i...
One of the people responsible for the Blair Witch Project is now making a movie about Sasquatch:
John Rennie wrote last week on the occasion of Houdini’s birthday about the great magician’s efforts to disabuse the spiritualist beliefs of Sir Arthur Conan...
I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...
I enjoy “Destination Truth” and “Ghost Hunters”. Of course, they’re totally fake.
Ben Goldacre’s “Bad science” column in The Guardian features an example of coincidence and the overactive imagination run loose on a map of prehistoric Briti...
What we’re up against:
Oh, good grief!
I’ve been sent two videos this week by several readers. I post them here together – I’ve never embedded video before, and after some experimentation I didn’t...
I think that this NY Times story by Noam Cohen, titled “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide,” is just fascinating. It’s an old story (from e...
From Randi, J. 1988. “The detection of fraud and fakery.” Cell Mol Life Sci 44:287-288:
Newsweek is running a long story with the details behind the latest Bigfoot hoax:
I hope the “undisclosed sum” included the freezer:
Depressing?
Reading through the introduction to Archaeology and Language, by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (1998), I thought this quote was great:
I’ve just finished Mary Roach’s entertaining book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
From an article announcing a Sasquatch hunt in Michigan's Upper Peninsula:
I got about halfway through this Wired article by Mark Baard about the "resurgence" of cryptozoology, when I found this:
OK, I never thought I would start a list like this, but I have been irritated enough, already! So here it is:
There is very nice article at Kuro5hin with that title. The article covers Paley's Argument from Design, Behe's work, the Avida computer simulations, and Po...
*This is now an old post—from 2005—see UPDATES below**