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Skeptic Summary #185

Goring Gore, believers beware, Biblical astronomy, fatherhood, Kansas, Newton, hoaxes and more!

Al tells it like it is - Or does he?

Beware the Believers - An enigma wrapped in a flash animation.

The Bible and Modern Astronomy, Part 2 - The double life of a real astrophysics PhD.

I’m going to be a dad! - We need to wait a bit for the cheap cigars.

Editor’s Choice: Kansas vs Darwin - A nice documentary, and still relevant.

Newton’s Third Law - Do not read this article.

The Museum of Hoaxes - Does it matter that April 1st has come and gone? Not to these people. This is one of the greatest collections of hoaxes I have ever seen. (Not that I normally look for hoaxes, but as a skeptic, the news of them often seems to find me.) This is a pretty vast site and includes among other things The Hoaxipedia, filled with, well, what you would expect from an encyclopedia of hoaxes. It’s a work-in-progress since the hoaxes keep rolling in…

Getting back to April Fools jokes, they do have a top one-hundred list of these. For example, there is this one:

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

Enjoy!

(Hey filthy, this site was made for you!!!)

Sunday: Our chat host was busy recovering.

Wednesday (the 2nd): The night started up with Netwon’s Third Law, an article recently published on the SFN. After this, most of chat was tech talk: The present and future of media storage, flash drives, and ancient programming languages. After many had left, the subject switched over to religion, mostly coming off the Why religious people are so arrogant thread.

Wednesday (the 9th): Not many showed up, but quality over quantity I guess. It started off with a visit to the dentist gone wrong, but morphed into how often we skeptics change our minds on important issues. Then religion and the existence of non-theistic definition of a god. This naturally lead into philosophy, and ended out the night.

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Arbitrary decisions on additives

Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism’s Manufactroversy

Deathless drug strategy buries good news

Evolving the Wow! Factor

First Lungless Frog Found

Fish oil pills, exam results and a belated retreat

The Skeptic’s Dictionary Newsletter

Skepticality #074 - No Intelligence Allowed! - Interviews: Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. Michael Shermer

Three Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang

What’s New by Bob Park

Why Ken Miller isn’t in Expelled

Got some skeptic news items? Send them to us, and we’ll think about adding them.

Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, by Austin Dacey.



“In a dazzling display of erudition, this book presents a cogent argument for secular liberalism. Dacey, a philosopher who teaches at Polytechnic University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, claims that values and ethics — defining what is right and wrong, good and bad — are not the sole domain of theologians. To contribute to our understanding of enlightened secularism, he cites like-minded thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Dewey, Adam Smith, John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Plato, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, among others. Dacey’s presentation is especially timely in view of the emphasis by some current presidential candidates on their religious identity. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic, argued for church-state separation, has the issue of secularism versus religion been so prominent in a national election. Dacey’s analysis helps to put this question into the larger perspective of liberty and conscience. Dacey advocates for democracy over authoritarianism, not hesitating to challenge theocratic Islam, for example, as a new totalitarianism. He calls on secular liberals to stand up for reason and science, the separation of religion and state, freedom of belief, personal autonomy, equality, toleration, and self-criticism. This is a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for progressive secularism.”

— Publishers Weekly

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3. PZ expelled from Expelled — Dawkins slips in! (1,299 views)
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There were 10,724 daily visitors this week.

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1. Hell, your final destination? (17,278 views)
2. What are your favorite words? (11,460 views)
3. We’d invite Hitler to speak, says Columbia dean (2,197 views)
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8. Why religious people are so arrogant (1,307 views)
9. New features? (1,159 views)
10. The secrets of men: unbalanced homophobia (1,136 views)
11. Possum on the half shell (1,079 views)
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14. Psychic update: not so psychic (811 views)
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16. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed! (727 views)
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19. Religion versus vaccines — sound familiar? (580 views)
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1. Evolving a Venom or Two (5,412 views)
2. Fundamentalists Hate Noah’s Ark (5,192 views)
3. Skeptic Summary #152 (529 views)
4. Miracle Thaw — The Bogus Miracle (437 views)
5. Questioning the Validity of False Memory Syndrome (317 views)
6. Cold Reading (276 views)
7. The Bible’s Bad Fruits (225 views)
8. Miracle Thaw Tray (203 views)
9. Kent Hovind is a Big Phony! (152 views)
10. Scientific Truth (152 views)
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There were 47,942 daily visitors in March.