This week's newsletter will feature no articles from me - and this makes me very happy. Why have I not written anything, you may ask, and why am I happy about it. Well, because I'm blessed - and not just once, but twice. Let me explain…
The first way that I'm blessed is because this week I have three great articles from other skeptics that have been submitted for inclusion in our newsletter. And this is great. Although I'm happy to write about what's going on in New Zealand and delve into interesting skeptical topics, I also don't want to dominate the conversation here. The more articles I receive from others, the more varied the topics you all get to read about will be (I tend to have certain topic biases, like technology). On top of that, I'm no oracle! As a fallible human, my opinions are just as flawed as anyone else's - and so it's great to be able to make sure my take on things is balanced by the opinions of other skeptics. So, thank you to this week's contributors who have allowed me to be lazy. And if you're sitting there thinking that maybe you could also help out and write something for us, I'd like to say that your contribution would be more than welcome!
The second reason I'm blessed is that I'm currently in the process of joining a new religious group who are taking up a lot of my time. This only started on Friday night, during our Skeptics in Cyberspace meeting - near the end of the meeting I connected to an online audio “fellowship” with a fascinating religious group who are currently very active here in New Zealand, as well as being adept at using social media. Since Friday night I've received many words of wisdom from this group during the hours and hours of online meetings and one-on-one conversations they've blessed me with. I'm learning so many new things that I never knew before - many of which are frankly very surprising, and seem almost unbelievable. I'm not going to go into details, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but rest assured when the time is right I (and possibly others) will endeavour to spread the Good Word with all of you. I apologise for my vagueness!
So, with the rather intense time investment I've been putting into this new group, and my desire to spend at least some of my weekend with my family, it's been great to know that, while I've been tied up elsewhere and have not managed to write up anything for you to read (other than this little rambling intro), others have taken up the slack and saved me from damnation.
Katrina, one of our new committee members, has pondered the question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who watches the watchmen) when it comes to AI - it's an important question, given the current turbulent state of AI research and plethora of publicly available tools. Bronwyn has found herself another Christian group, filled with regressive, evidence-free ideas about how we should all live our lives, which has taken root in New Zealand. And finally Dan Ryan has documented his David vs Goliath battle with Samsung when his shiny new mobile phone broke.
