Global Skeptics in Cyberspace

Recently, I've been researching an area in County Limerick, Ireland, for a genealogy project, and I came across a bog burst, one of the deadliest bog disasters in Ireland. If you try to look up the Castlegarde bog disaster in Ireland that killed 21 people, you will find conflicting information. This was one of the initial articles I found:

In February it was announced by researchers that non-verified cell lines and misidentified nucleotide sequences were cited in hundreds of papers. This got picked up by the media in May:

The Divine Light Mission (DLM) is something of an oldie as far as cults go, but it attracted its fair share of controversy in the 1970s and 1980s with notable followers such as respected kiwi composer Jenny McLeod and Billy TK Senior. For me this article has been on the backburner almost as long as the Colin Amery articles, as the DLM often received cursory mention in other cults I have researched. I recall first coming across the group in a folio of personal letters at the National Library. I was looking for mentions of Scientology, but instead came upon the type of family update letter that one receives from distant relatives and friends at Christmas; One year in the 1970s, an especially unfortunate family had adult children variously working with Scientology and living in a DLM ashram.

In 1215 the Catholic Church's Fourth Council of the Lateran, which had been announced two years prior and so was very well attended, introduced many new rules. Many of these were focused on fighting corruption within the clergy, by limiting when and how clergy could charge fees for their work (e.g. no fees for reversing someone's excommunication, consecrating a bishop, or offering “superfluous services”), and banning certain practices like getting drunk and nepotism (specifically, priests handing their job down to their sons).

Given that I had dusted off my copy of Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a 500m tall Jesus, I remembered that I don't think I've yet shared a project I did last year where I generated a set of QR Codes all pointing to the NZ Skeptics website. Using Stable Diffusion, Controlnet and some other software, I was able to produce some fun skeptically-themed images that all function as working QR codes - or at least, I managed to get my phone to successfully read each of them at least once. Your Mileage May Vary when trying to scan these yourself, but for what it's worth here they are.