Goodbye, Craig!

Mark Honeychurch - 2 September 2024

We’ve had a bit of a changing of the guard over the last couple of weeks - Craig Shearer has decided to step back from his major responsibilities with the NZ Skeptics, as he plans to focus more on some of his other hobbies and endeavours. Craig will no longer be writing regular articles for us or hosting and editing our podcast, although he has said that he’ll write something for us if and when he feels sufficiently impassioned by something annoyingly unskeptical, and he’s planning to remain on the committee.

In Craig’s place, both in the newsletter and on the podcast, we now have Katrina Borthwick and Brad MacClure, two committee members who have helped out occasionally with articles and the podcast in the past. I will continue to be the sole Editor of our newsletter (until someone’s masochistic enough to step up and help out!), and Bronwyn will be taking over as the main host of the podcast (she gets to do the intro and outro, and introduce our guests), with Bronwyn and Brad sharing the audio editing responsibilities. As always, if you’re willing to help out with any of the work that we do, we’d love to hear from you! Just email us at newsletter@skeptics.nz.

In this week’s newsletter, Katrina has written about a recently retracted paper written by a New Zealand author, where the topic of the paper was the pseudoscientific practice of chiropractic and X-ray use, and the retraction appears to be related more to the threat of a lawsuit than the paper being problematic. I’ve continued the X-ray theme by looking into the Throckmorton Sign, a supposed diagnostic tool that uses a novel idea to detect fractures in X-rays. Bronwyn has written a review of Lost Resort, a spiritual healer reality TV show that I’ve had the displeasure of watching recently - tune in to our next podcast episode to hear me ranting about this one with Bronwyn! I’ve recently learned that one of the many man-made mysteries, the Forrest Fenn treasure, has been found, so I’ve written a summary of recent events. And, finally, Brad points out the obvious - that Richard Dawkins is a grumpy old man who doesn’t like the fact that the world keeps changing.