Another Year, Another Conference

Mark Honeychurch - 27 November 2023

Apologies for the slightly late delivery of this issue of our newsletter - I’m currently tapping away on my keyboard on the ferry at Picton, waiting to start the final leg of our journey back home to Wellington from the conference.

Our conference was a great success, with a well-chosen group of amazing speakers, and it was good to once again be surrounded by many like-minded people for an entire weekend, having the kinds of conversations you can only really have when you have a shared set of assumptions about the world.

At our AGM on Sunday, Craig Shearer stepped down as Chair of the society, and Bronwyn Rideout was enthusiastically voted in as our new Chair - the King is dead, long live the Queen! As far as the committee is concerned, we lost Lisa, as she has other priorities she will be focusing on over the next year, but we’ve gained Margaret Coe, Louise Richardson and Hamish Dickinson - who was one one the key organisers of our conference this year. We look forward to working with them all over the next year.

As well as stepping down from his role as Chair, Craig has also decided to step down from editing our newsletter. As this now only leaves me as editor for now, we will be reducing our output to bi-weekly. If anyone is interested in helping out with editing the newsletter, please get in touch by emailing newsletter@skeptics.nz.

In this week’s newsletter, we start off with a copy of the announcement of our awards, including a rather unusual Bent Spoon.

Committee member Katrina has written an article about not only the aftermath of the LK-99 superconducting debacle from earlier this year, but also a more recent superconducting scandal as well - and this one looks to be a little more serious, involving the respected journal Nature.

Another committee member, Dan Ryan, has been sufficiently annoyed by some recent posts that have been promoted to him on Facebook that he’s written us an article about how, at the root of it, there’s an AI scam, and maybe even more skullduggery as well.

(We’re hoping that you’ll be hearing more from our committee members over the next, year as we’ve asked them to contribute two or three articles each over the course of the year, to help out with the newsletter workload)

Finally, for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the conference, I’ve included the questions (but not answers!) from the quiz I ran on Friday evening.

Calling all South Canterbury Skeptics

Russell from Timaru, who was at the conference this year, has asked if there are any South Canterbury skeptics who would be interested in a get-together over a coffee or similar. If anyone is in the area and is keen to meet like-minded people, please email us (at newsletter@skeptics.nz) and we’ll put you in contact with Russell.