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Beware the Dystopian Visions of Celebrity Scientists
Stephen Hawking’s future: doomed singularity or invading aliens? Image by J. Nathan Matias, via Wikimedia Commons Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license....
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Flawed Scientific Geniuses on the Big Screen
Benedict Cumberbatch, left, portrays Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (Image: STUDIOCANAL); Eddie Redmayne, right, stars as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (Image: Liam Daniel / Focus...
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The Forgetfulness of Skepticism
Skeptic Joseph Rinn, demonstrating mediumistic trickery for a press syndicate in 1920. (From Daniel Loxton’s collection.) Scientific skepticism has a long history—roughly 40 years in its most modern...
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The Myth of Learning Styles
While certain content may benefit from being presented in a particular way, there is no evidence that learning is enhanced by changing the mode of presentation to match students learning preferences....
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Obituaries of Skepticism in 2014
The end of the year is a time for looking back, and that includes remembering who we have lost. For the last few years I’ve tried to do this for the skeptical community via blog posts and my segment on...
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A Tsunami to Remember
Digital image showing cross section of the Java or Sunda trench, and the wave heights of the tsunami (gray peaks near the shoreline). (Courtesy USGS). Today, December 26, 2014, is a somber anniversary....
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Things Skeptics Knew a Century Ago About How Thinking Goes Wrong
American psychologist and skeptic Joseph Jastrow. Image courtesy US National Library of Medicine, via Wikimedia Commons. When better than the final days of the year to reflect on lessons of the past?...
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In the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Aerial view of the La Conchita landslide after the 2005 event. (Photograph by Mark Reid, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.) Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without...
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Skeptic David Morrison Receives AAS Education Prize
David Morrison. Image courtesy NASA Ames Research Center Many congratulations are due to astronomer and skeptic David Morrison, named as the recipient of the 2015 Education Prize from the American...
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Book Review: The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs
The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs, by Robert T. Bakker, illustrated by Luis V. Rey (New York: Golden Books, 2013); 64 pages; reviewed by Daniel Loxton. This review also appears in the current...
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Scam Science Journals and “The Simpsons”
Baby Maggie Simpson and Mrs. Krabappel doing science. (Original art by former “Simpsons” animator Anna Maltese, used with permission). Several times a week my email inbox contains offers to contribute...
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Should Goddard’s Squadron Drop Dead Fred?
CLICK TO ENLARGE. Scanned copy of Bobbie Capel’s squadron photo allegedly including the ghost of Freddy Jackson. I love looking at “ghost photos.” They’ve fascinated me all my life, but at some point I...
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False Balance and the Shakespeare Authorship “Debate”
About a month ago, my phone suggested that I might want to read a Newsweek article called “The Campaign to Prove Shakespeare Didn’t Exist” by Robert Gore-Langton. I was somewhat disturbed that my phone...
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What the Empirical Evidence REALLY Says about Rock, Paper, Scissors
(Image by Ani Aharonian with Daniel Loxton.) A popular YouTube channel called Numberphile has published a video in which they claim to have a good strategy for winning at Rock, Paper, Scissors, gleaned...
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Pulling a Fast One: Video Critique of a Viral Speed Archery Video
Anna Maltese. (Image courtesy of the author.) In the past two weeks you’ve probably seen a viral archery video circulated on social media which makes a lot of claims about modern and historical...
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Newsrooms Building Online Tools Skeptics Can Use
A modern newsroom in Berlin. By Thomas Schmidt (NetAction) via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve long advocated the construction of customized online tools (websites, apps and more) to advance the cause of...
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A Tale of Two Debaters
View Undeniable listing at Shop Skeptic As we celebrate the 206th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin today (Feb. 12), there is both good news and bad news in the continuing culture war over...
View ArticleConsidering a Complaint About Skeptical Tactics
Few skeptical tactics are as hard-hitting or as ethically fraught as undercover investigation and “sting”-type traps designed to expose the roots of too-good-to-be-true claims—or even to catch...
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Gotcha! Thinking About Skeptical “Stings”
In my last post I outlined a small recent stir caused by sharp comments about skeptics from former Ghost Hunters cast member Amy Bruni. I promised to dig further into the issues of skeptical undercover...
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Poes, Trolls, and Dinosaur Deniers
For the last week or so, a site for a group calling itself “Christians Against Dinosaurs” has gone viral, and at least a dozen of my Facebook friends have forwarded it to me in surprise, curious as to...
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