May 2011 Blog Posts

The In Vino Veritas Podcast is here

Some of you will be exclaiming "FINALLY". Others will be saying "huh?". Still further will be frothing at the mouth and demanding your money back. Well SCREW YOU MONEY BACK DEMANDERS, YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. *ahem* Where was I? Oh yes. My new podcast is here. Dave The Happy Singer and I have been beavering away here at Zombie Proof Studios, over many bottles of wine, several packets of seasoned seaweed, one stuffed dinosaur and a massive pile of audio equipment. We've been driven insane by turns and were it not for the wine we'd have entirely lost it. It's possible we...

I went to a wedding....

  I promised chords. Therefore, here Chords. Roughly: Intro: C G x3 F G C Am On the bleakest day autumn could muster F G In a church to to...

Stupid brains. It's all your fault.

So I got to thinking... (LIke I do) And I think I've figured out the problem. And the problem is this: Brains. Brains are the problem. You see, we're all stuck inside them, and we can't get out. They really are the problem. Or, technically, the problems. For one thing, they're about a kilo and a half of meat basted in a rich chemical soup, whose exact physical composition can either maintain "normal" operation or wreak endocrine havoc with the person stuck inside. Something as simple as dehydration can cause the 3 pounds of so of matter inside your head to completely lose its shit. Can you for a...

A round of applause for Scribd

I want the world to be a nicer place. Most of us do. Of course, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and sometimes, I have to make some people desperately unhappy in my drive toward a happier world. LIke antivaxers and their supporters. They get rather annoyed with me and, of course, with all the other part-time internet superheroes that oppose their nonsense. They act as though we're making their lives unpleasant. Yep, we are. Frankly, if I can help in some small way to prevent more deaths, more illnesses, more economic impact and more general misery from vaccine-preventable diseases, then a...

Fun with smurfs

Ken King, the antivax maniac in my previous post, is back. The man is a glutton for punishment, especially in view of his adherence to Colloidal Silver, an inneffective quack nostrum whose most notable effect is to turn people blue.   He's really a very angry little man. And he's utterly unwilling to be swayed by rational argument, believing as he does that vaccines are not only 100% ineffective but also staggeringly toxic. So the only alternative is to have fun while provoking him into making a fool of himself. Not difficult.

And at that point, the antivaxer just vanished...

Skepticamp in theory and practice

This is my quite short stopgap talk from Skepticamp Sydney 2011, on the why, where, when and how of Skepticamp, thanks to Biyani Mills who taped it in the absence of our second camera. The Q & A was interesting but has been left out in the interests of brevity and understandability, suffice to say this session really cemented the Melbourne event for later in the year

Told you we'd do it....

So, after some months of preparation, hundreds of emails and phone calls, several hectic days nights of organisation and a about seven hours of sustained awesome, Skepticamp Sydney is over. I said we'd do it, didn't I? Yes, Australia's first skepticamp* was a success. In fact, a triumph. It took place from 11:00am on 30th April, at UTS in Sydney, and attracted somewhere in the region of 100 keen skeptical attendees, some of whom were attending their first skeptical event, and some of whom were speaking in front of a crowd on a chosen topic for the first time. In fact, the level of attendee engagement...

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