Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Abuse is the theme this week. Over and over, stories of religious abuse emerge. People in positions of trust continue to abuse such positions and often the religious response is to cover it all up and pretend it has not happened. During the past seven days the following tragic stories have emerged. Item 1 – Pastor … Read more
A legal case that has been trundling its way through the US system has finally reached the US supreme court and had a hearing last Tuesday (5th Dec). The essence of this concerns a couple named Mr Mullins and Mr Craig, pictured above, who went into the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, near Denver back in 2012 owned … Read more
Vaccination not only works, but it works well. Smallpox is gone, and Polio, Tetanus, and Measles, have all been greatly restricted. Nobody would seriously advocate a return to the 18th century, a time when as many as 400,000 europeans died each and every year of smallpox alone, and yet the arise of an anti-vaccine movement … Read more
The news is that the UK’s publicly funded National Health Service has blacklisted Homeopathy and also Herbal remedies. Now, you might be tempted to think that they have finally decided to pay attention to the evidence that clearly demonstrates that it simply does not work at all … right? Nope, that is not the driving force … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more
You are hopefully familiar with the #MeToo twitter tag. Just over a month ago it went viral as a very public grassroot shout to denounce sexual assault and harassment. It was triggered by the very public accusations against Harvey Weinstein. Literally million of people used it to come forward and so the scale of abuse and harassment … Read more