Sunday 24 November 2013

Another Skepticule episode is available (with more soon to come...)

Announcing that Skepticule will be at QED in some form next April, episode 58 also deals with martyrdom, Jewish exile, deep internet, rational thought, altmed and the burka.

http://www.skepticule.co.uk/2013/11/skepticule-058-20131104.html

http://www.skepticule.co.uk/2013/11/skepticule-058-20131104.html 

Enjoy, or cringe, as appropriate.

Friday 22 November 2013

Burnee links for Friday

Get up to date with this bumper crop of links...

Don't Believe Your Eyes | Shre Design
Amazing landscapes, all fake creatively imagined.

BBC News - Neil Gaiman: 'No such thing as a bad book for children'
If we want a future of rich culture, we mustn't risk putting kids off reading.

WDDTY – Tesco choose profit over people | Western Sloth
Tut tut, Tesco.

A tribute to Prince Charles, champion of anti-science, on his 65th birthday | Edzard Ernst
Not so much a tribute, more a timeline of unjustified influence.

The Throwable, Panoramic Ball Cam Is Finally Here—and It's Incredible
An astounding merge of existing technologies, making something truly amazing for $500. Too cool for words.

Incredible Interactive Dynamic Shape Display
Amazing potential ... I think!

Confronting the World’s Great Unrecognized Crisis | Psychology Today
More than an interesting evening with friends at the pub.

Atheists Must Not Self-Censor - Council for Secular Humanism
Eddie Tabash's call to arms.

National Secular Society - Secularism seeks to balance everyone’s religious freedoms fairly. Why would anyone oppose that?
An explanation of secularism. In case it's needed. (It is.)

The Rants of Cherry Black » Blog Archive » “Superstition Ain’t The Way”
Trish reports first hand on woo in professional medicine.

http://www.evilburnee.co.uk/search/label/Burnee%20links
Atheist Agenda Wants You to Turn Your Back on Christ
Articles like this are (...I hesitate to say "a godsend"...) welcome, because they highlight not only the object of their concern — in this case Boghossian's book — but also the fact that some cages have been badly rattled. That the article also contains obvious misconceptions and non sequiturs is a bonus.

Policy: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims : Nature News & Comment
Useful list for non-scientists who don't want to be misled.

School children as young as 8 told they would be labelled 'racist' for missing school trip - Telegraph
I know quite a few headteachers. I don't think any of them would have done something this crass and threatening. But I suspect there's more to this than immediately apparent.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Jehovah's Circular Witnesses

I tweeted this image of a leaflet I found on the mat this evening:


It poses a straightforward question, and I have no difficulty in coming up with an answer. The rest of the leaflet apparently seeks to persuade me I'm wrong, so let's see what its core argument is. The outside of the whole leaflet looks like this (click to bignify):


The inside of the leaflet is where the question is given thorough investigation, and a cogent argument presented (click to bignify, and excuse my sarcasm):


The answer to the question, "Can the dead really live again?" is yes, because it says so in the Bible. Naturally this leads to the next question, "Can we really believe what the Bible says?" And surprise, surprise, the answer to that is also yes, because (see the three reasons on the right hand side above) it says so in the Bible.

Just who is this leaflet aimed at?


For all those who have left their brains outside for the evening there's a PDF of this leaflet on the JW website:
http://download.jw.org/files/media_books/c4/T-35_E.pdf