Issues

210 - Wind Speed or IQ?

17 March 2025

An interesting point came up when preparing this week's newsletter. In Patrick's article about a couple of recent climate change papers, he's used AI (he doesn't specify which one) to summarise one of the papers for him. As soon as I saw this I had a knee-jerk reaction that writing an article for us in this way is probably not the way we want to go. I've been proud that we've managed to put together a lot of fascinating, entertaining content over the last few years, and the idea that we might offload some of that effort to an AI worries me.

Are These Better Work Stories?

3 March 2025

It's less than a week before my skeptical road trip to try to find the Kaimanawa wall, on the way up to Auckland to visit the new Mormon temple. We're looking forward to meeting up with people for brunch on Sunday, and we're also looking to see if there's anything weird and wonderful we can do on the Sunday afternoon or evening. Maybe a visit to see Brian Tamaki spout his vitriolic hatred would be fun?

A day late, but still skeptical

18 February 2025

Unfortunately Mailchimp failed me last night, and refused to let me login to their website to send out the newsletter. But we're back up and running now, bringing you skeptical news from New Zealand and beyond.

Anyone been to the Kaimanawa Wall?

3 February 2025

In just over a month's time, Bronwyn and I will be driving up to Auckland to visit New Zealand's second Mormon temple. We're also going to try to visit the Kaimanawa wall on the way, so if anyone's been there and has any advice about driving the gravel road to the nearby camp site, I would love to hear from you. While in Auckland we'll try to organise a Skeptics' get together - maybe brunch somewhere on Sunday the 9th. So, if you're in Auckland, we'd love for you to join us for a chilled out chat.

New Year, New Nonsense

21 January 2025

It's been a productive break for our newsletter contributors, and therefore we have another record-breaking newsletter this week, with a great set of articles for you to read. Firstly one of our members, Patrick, has put his hand up and offered to write us a series of articles on climate change - as he says, it's a serious issue that we can't afford to be complacent about, let alone try to deny its very existence - as some people do (sadly even some in our skeptical community).

Aliens Special

6 January 2025

Happy New Year! We had so many articles come in for our Alien special that I had to split them up into two separate newsletter issues, and even then this issue is probably our longest newsletter yet. We'll be back to our normal programming in a couple of weeks, hopefully looking at the Honey browser extension scam, the phenomena of vocal fry and indie voice/cursive singing in modern music, the potential resurgence of an unusual group I covered last year, a review of the recent movie Heretic, and more.

Alien Special

23 December 2024

Maybe it's the day drinking, uni students on summer break, or NZ tourism has gone intergalactic, but it seems that December is prime UFO time for New Zealand. So, for the next couple of issues of the newsletter, we're going to focus on otherworldly things, starting with three December UFO events:

Cats and other Cryptids

9 December 2024

Okay, so maybe cats aren't cryptids, but we own two of them and sometimes I wish they were mythical beings rather than very real little monsters who regularly tear holes in my furniture.

Rationality and Skepticism, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

25 November 2024

Last weekend we held our annual conference in Auckland - this time co-organised with the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH). We started off the weekend on Friday evening at Rationalist House, the NZARH's building on Symonds street. The first event was a Skeptical quiz, hosted by me, as usual featuring some pretty tough questions:

Going Green around the Gills

11 November 2024

Is Going Green like Breaking Bad, where you take a wrong turn in your life and start making dubious life choices? Because the owners of the Go Green Expo, held at different locations around the country each year, seem to have made a really bad life choice when they decided to let alt-med nonsense into their Expo right from its inception.

Thoroughly DeCulted

29 October 2024

Last weekend I travelled down to Christchurch for the DeCult conference, and it was fascinating to hear so many personal stories about the many ways in which cults coerce and mistreat people, as well as some of the ideas people have about how we may be able to minimise the damage that cults are able to do. There were lots of brave people who, having gone through hell while members of these groups, still had the energy to stand up to them and fight once they realised the wrongs that had been done. I was able to say hello to quite a few survivors of different cults who I've met over my years as a skeptic in New Zealand, and also some of our NZ Skeptics members who had made the trip to the conference. And our chair, Bronwyn, gave a great talk about ISTA and Highden that I was able to hear. Although I was volunteering to help at the conference, and had been rostered to work in a different room while Bronwyn was speaking, I managed to organise someone to cover me and my daughter so that we could sit in and hear her telling everyone about just some of the weirdness around Highden and Bruce Lyon.

No Rest for the Wicked

14 October 2024

It's going to be a busy end to this year, with two conferences coming up and a few other goings on that we're looking forward to here in Wellington. As well as the Decult and NZ Skeptics/NZARH Conferences, Bronwyn and I have a couple of smaller events on the horizon. Firstly, we're booked to go on a ghost hunt at the end of this month, and then we're also hoping to finally get to hear a talk on UFOs from Share International. We've tried twice so far, and had events cancelled on us, so hopefully the third time's a charm. Expect to hear more from us on these events in this newsletter, and maybe also an alien special issue coming soon.

Be the Early Bird

30 September 2024

Today is the last day to get early bird tickets for our annual NZ Skeptics Conference, this year in partnership with the NZARH, in Auckland from the 15th to the 17th of November. If you're keen to come and listen to some fascinating talks about skepticism, covering a diverse array of topics (and with something of a focus on religion, given this year's partnering with the Rationalists), make sure you get your tickets today to save a little money. The regular authors of this newsletter will be there, as we'll be recording a live episode of our Yeah… Nah! Podcast at the event. If you're able to make it, be sure to come over and say hi to us as it's always good to chat with people and make new connections at these events.

The Dawning of the Age of Equuleus

16 September 2024

A couple of weeks ago I talked with a journalist about psychics, as she was looking into a story that Kelvin Cruickshank appeared to have muscled his way into. As well as giving her some information about how psychics work, and a little about Kelvin, I had also suggested to her that she should visit a psychic to get an idea of how they operate. A day later she let me know that she was planning to visit a psychic fair that weekend, and I suggested that I could meet her there to brief her on what to expect. So, on Saturday morning two weekends ago, Bronwyn and I headed to Upper Hutt and met with Virginia.

Goodbye, Craig!

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.

Calling all Māori Atheists

19 August 2024

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was going to attend a talk given by Sara Rahmani to the NZ Humanists in Wellington. At the talk she summarised her findings from a set of interviews she's conducted with Māori who have been happy to talk with her about their spiritual journeys with her. Although most of these journeys have been from belief to non-belief, taking a variety of different paths to get there, she has also interviewed a few people who still hold religious or spiritual beliefs.

The only good Cult is a DeCult

5 August 2024

Anke Richter, who we've talked to on our podcast in the past, has promised to write an article for our newsletter soon. In the meantime she'd like us to let you all know that, if you're in Christchurch, there are a couple of interesting events coming up.

Global Skeptics in Cyberspace

22 July 2024

From 7pm on Friday night we opened the first ever 24 hour Global Skeptics in the Pub, an online event in the run-up to the SkeptiCal conference, hosted online by skeptics in Northern California. The event coincided with our usual four-weekly Skeptics in Cyberspace meeting, so it lined up nicely.

Les Oeufs Pochés

8 July 2024

We're currently looking at streamlining this newsletter, and one promising option we're looking at is to move its creation to Wordpress, our current website CMS (Content Management System). The only obvious difference this would make to you would be that our newsletter emails would no longer contain the full text of our articles - instead there would be an excerpt, along with a link to the full article online. I'd love to hear from anyone for whom that would be an issue, where it might make it harder for you to access our newsletter (just email me at newsletter@skeptics.nz). Ideally I may be able to figure out a way to include the full text of our articles still, but so far a workable solution has eluded me.

Dubious claims and “facts”

24 June 2024

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Save Marsden Point Refinery efforts, spearheaded by conspiracy theorists who are trying to convince Channel Infrastructure, by hook or by crook, to stop the decommissioning of the refinery and restore it, while also converting it to be able to process our own crude oil. The main driver behind this effort, Karl Barkley, suffered a mishap recently when his van (which is covered in billboards for The Cause) was towed away from a loading zone by Hamilton Towing Services.

Spiritual Shenanigans

10 June 2024

I would like to start this issue of the newsletter with an apology. In the last newsletter in my brief editorial I mistakenly attributed the proposed Bathroom Bill to David Seymour's political party, ACT, but of course it's been proposed by another coalition partner, Winston Peter's New Zealand First party. Thank you to the readers who were quick to point out my mistake!

The Short and Long of It

27 May 2024

I'm going to keep my intro short this week, because our articles are pretty long and I don't want to bore you all before you even get to the first one - which is an article from someone we've not heard from before, Darren Bird. Darren's written about ACT's new proposed bill attempting to legislate the use of bathrooms - and if you think it sounds suspicious, you'd be right. After Darren we have a piece from Craig, who has looked at someone who's fascinated me for a little while now, Don Murray; I've spent some time clicking through his website over the last few months, and still can't get to grips with him and what he thinks his special powers are. Thankfully Craig's done a nice job of summarising some of his nonsense.

Aurora Skepticalis

13 May 2024

This weekend those of us who weren't screwed over by cloudy evenings were treated to a rare view of the Aurora Australis. As skeptics, though, you won't be surprised to hear that there's no lack of scaremongering when it comes to the aurora. Take, for instance, this iPhone app that promises that you can “Protect your Life” from solar storms:

Ghosts in the Machine

29 April 2024

As we've just had two weeks of school holidays, I've just spent a week in Australia. Sadly during that time a new set of Mormon missionaries were unable to visit me at home to try to convert me. But, don't despair, they've already messaged me again and we've arranged to meet on Saturday. At this point I'm not sure if they seriously think they have a chance to win me over, or if I'm just a sport for them - but I enjoy the conversations, so I'll continue to let them visit me at home and take a couple of hours of my time.

Don't worry, this newsletter isn't going off air

15 April 2024

I was planning to attend a Safe ICT event in Wellington last weekend, where I was going to be warned about the dangers of WiFi mutating my mitochondria. I've written about Safe ICT before, after I spent a while talking to them at the Go Green expo in Wellington. They're an advocacy group who appear to have irrational fears about technology, and prefer to side with individual fringe scientists who write flawed scientific papers, rather than choosing the side that has the weight of scientific evidence behind it. A large part of what they seem to push for is turning off any wireless protocols where possible, and buying expensive ethernet to USB adapters that allow you to run a wired connection from your home router to your mobile phone. Wait until they find out about everything else around them that happens to generate electromagnetic fields! Anyway, a prior event ran for longer than expected, and I missed the event, but next time they run something local I'll be sure to attend.