Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
With a hat-tip to Orac for the term “quackiest quackfest”, we have the news that Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand held the quackiest quackfest of 2018 – the “GOOP Health” conference in New York. Goop is not about bulk-selling pseudoscientific nonsense, instead it is an attempt to cast an aura of credibility by cranking up the prices … Read more
A couple of days ago the UK’s Independent, and several other media outlets, have promoted this claim … Religious people are, on average, less intelligent than atheists, researchers claim. To be clear, this posting is not simply a dig at the Independent. Other outlets ran with the same story. The International Business Times very explicitly … Read more
A formal study entitled “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign” has been published this month. Just to be totally clear here, the term is a reference to misinformation – news that is presented as true, but is instead partially or wholly false, and so … Read more
A new paper has been published by the Chinese International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences (That’s part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences). Within it they present their analysis of data gathered from all around the earth’s oceans and demonstrate a very clear ongoing ocean warming trend. There is a short clip that visualises the data … … Read more
On the weekend I went to a church. To be specific, it was the Broad Street Chapel pictured above, but it was not quite as you might anticipate it to be. The picture above shows you the outside of the building, and below you can see it within its actual context. It might indeed have … Read more
In some respects some aspects of Christianity looks fine on paper – do good, be loving, etc… While Christianity has no monopoly on such ideas, it never did, and none of the various supernatural claims have any evidence to back them up, the far more disturbing observation is the actual behaviour of those that claim … Read more