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Syracuse, Apple, and Autism Pseudoscience
Many people are familiar with facilitated communication (FC), the thoroughly debunked but remarkably resilient treatment used with autistic children.1 A “facilitator” holds the hand or arm of the...
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Deepak Chopra’s ‘Physics’
Crackpot scientists are very fond of abusing and trivializing science—especially physics—and particularly fundamental physics. It is therefore critical to fight crackpot science where it hurts the...
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Online Harassment: Citation Needed
Articles about online harassment have made a resurgence in the last couple of weeks, with social media users sharing data gathered two years ago about online harassment. This research—which analyzed...
View ArticleFrom Pop-Sci to Puppets - Quest For Wonder
Can puppetry encourage a love of science? With a long running podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, and a popular app, The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome, it seems a curious side-step to create...
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Mistaken Memories of Vampires: Pseudohistories of the Chupacabra
Most people assume that the chupacabra, like its cryptozoological brethren Bigfoot and Nessie, dates back many decades or centuries. However, as discussed in my book Tracking the Chupacabra: The...
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“Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” a review by...
Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2015) follows a trend in the literature on conspiracism that has increasingly moved away from seeing conspiracy as being a...
View ArticleNotable Articles about the Creation of CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer
Susan Gerbic, founder of the Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia Project, contacted CSI recently to have us upload some pictures and such for an update to the Wikipedia article about Skeptical Inquirer....
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The CAMphora: Health in a Jar
Amazon.com sells a lot of other stuff besides books. One of its most intriguing offerings is the...
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Clear Thinking About Cancer
This Book Won’t Cure Your Cancer. By Gideon Burrows. NGO media, 2015. ISBN 978-0955369599. 212 pp. Paperback. $15.79. Gideon Burrows has inoperable brain cancer that is slow growing but is...
View ArticleShifting the Conversation about Climate Change
Late last year at the United Nations climate change summit in Paris, world leaders reached a historic accord committing their countries to lowering greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades...
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In Search of Mary Magdalene
Was Mary Magdalene the lover of Christ and did she have a son by him? This idea—made popular by The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s wildly successful novel and its film adaptation—has stimulated debates,...
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Searching for the Yowie, the Down Under Bigfoot
Like the fabled Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalaya Mountains, and the Sasquatch/Bigfoot of North America, Australia’s Yowie (or Yahoo, among many other names) is a supposed hairy man-beast...
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Biological Race and the Problem of Human Diversity
Is biological race a mere myth or a troublesome fact better left unexplored? Some might suggest that, properly conceived, race is neither fable nor farce but rather a potential windfall for both...
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Skepticism at the Center: Event Report of NECSS 2016
Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a skeptics conference. Deep in the heart of Chelsea, attendees of the eighth annual Northeast Conference on...
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Isabela
This is a story about the wonder of science and the power of connection. In 2014, a seven-year-old girl living in São Paulo, Brazil was assigned to write about the planet Saturn. Her father, Nix, is a...
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Fate: Inventing Reasons for the Things that Happen
In April, Houston, Texas, was struck by a massive flood that claimed seven lives. On his blog “The End of the American Dream,” Michael Snyder noted that this was the “8th historic flood in this...
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A Celebrity’s Experience in Scientology
Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. By Leah Remini. Ballantine Books, New York, 2015. ISBN 978-1-101-88696-0. 234 pp. Hardcover, $27. The actress Leah Remini, known for playing...
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A Numerate Life
Whether because of my natural temperament, my training as a mathematician, or a late midlife reckoning and reconsideration, I look on the whole biographical endeavor, my own included, as a dubious...
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Attack of the 12-Foot Rats: Why Bad Math Runs Rampant
When I first saw the meme, my Facebook friends were already debunking it. The graphic states that $1.3 billion divided by 300 million is $4.33 million. If you have a calculator at hand (there’s one...
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Adventures in SkeptiCamp
I’m a people person. I know that is a cliché, but it is true. I’m a major fan of technology as well; social media is amazing. I’ve never been more connected to people before, and my friends are all...
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