4 August 2025
We received an email the other day from none other than (in)famous ex-Christchurch street preacher and evangelist Ray Comfort. Ray had found Bronwyn's article about him and emailed us, very briefly, to let her know that he liked the article:
7 July 2025
I had a fun time this weekend with friends coming over to my house to celebrate Christmas. No, this email hasn't been delayed six months, or arrived from the future - it's July, not December. Like me, most of the friends that came over on the weekend are from the Northern hemisphere, and there's something that just feels right about having a second Christmas celebration every year when the weather's cold and miserable, just like it was in the “good old days”. We eat brussels sprouts and roast potatoes, drink mulled wine, and open presents - all while the TV plays YouTube videos with cheesy Christmas songs as the audio track and logs burning on an open fire as the video track. For one of our few Southern hemisphere guests, Aaron, not only is this mid-year “Midwinter Christmas” an alien idea, but he also never celebrated the usual December 25th Christmas when he was growing up. This is because he was brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, and they famously avoid celebrating events like Christmas, Easter and birthdays. I met Aaron through the NZ Humanists a while after he'd “faded” from the organisation, and it's been great to be there to see him find his feet and move on with his life since then.
7 July 2025
The article from Aaron Davies about blind testing diet colas is a really interesting one for me. As a little background info for you, Aaron is an ex Jehovah's Witness and was a NZ Skeptics committee member a few years ago. In the article I'm the “Mark” mentioned in the testing. So, if you've read the article already, you'll know that when challenged with picking out my favoured beverage, Diet Coke, from a line-up of identical looking drinks in identical looking cups, I successfully identified the Diet Coke.
23 June 2025
After Bronwyn's article in the last newsletter about cryonics, Katrina and I have decided to get in on the action and write our own articles on related topics to accompany the second part of Bronwyn's series. It's been interesting to learn more about longevity and preservation - both the real science, and the pseudoscience. And thankfully there were a couple of fascinating documentaries I was able to watch to help me flesh out my article, so it wasn't all just reading for me.
23 June 2025
While trawling alt-med websites for nonsense recently, I noticed a particularly egregious claim made by Ben Warren's BePure company for their multivitamin product, BePure One. The advertisement claimed that it was essential, and that people need to take it every day. Now it strikes me as surprising that any product would need to be taken by everyone, no matter their situation - especially as alternative medicines are not only unproven, but they're often also pretty expensive. BePure One, for example, is $69 for a month's supply - not nice, especially as most people who eat a balanced diet don't actually need a multivitamin, as they're getting everything they need from their food.
9 June 2025
It's been interesting to see the world's richest man going toe to toe with the world's most powerful man. Nope, actually, interesting isn't the right word. I'm not sure what you call it when you can't tear your eyes away from two influential grown men acting like spoiled children. Maybe disappointing? Like when you tell your child you're disappointed in them. Anyway, Trump's still not pressed the big red nuclear button, and we're already nearly an eighth of the way through his presidency, so maybe we'll survive this yet.
26 May 2025
In my efforts to wrestle with the push to include AI content in our newsletter, I've been chatting recently with our newest regular contributor, Patrick Medlicott, about why I prefer content that is written by humans. One new reason that popped into my head is that I know, from editing people's stories every fortnight, that each of our writers leaves their own distinct fingerprints on each and every article they write. Bronwyn, Katrina and Patrick each have their own tell-tale signs that they have written an article - certain repeated typos, punctuation choices, use (or lack of use) of commas, sentence length, repeatedly used words and phrases, etc. Each of these things has become very familiar to me, and through my editing I try to clean up each article without losing too much of these fingerprints.
12 May 2025
There are so many things going on in the climate space at the moment that it is difficult to keep up with them all. My sources of recent information are Dr Catherine Dyer, Bernard Hickey, and Peter Bale from the Kākā - a weekly podcast on political economy, climate change, and international affairs (from Dr Robert Patman University of Otago), together with invited guests each week from other areas of interest including economists and politicians. I believe this is a worthy site of usually peer-reviewed information concerning these topics. I would like to make a plug for the Kākā, which unfortunately is a pay site (but most reliable news these days is). For under $20 a month, one receives a daily briefing and a set of links to other sites (also often unfortunately behind paywalls). Many people might say it is mildly left of centre, and it is certainly not particularly complimentary of our present government. It is available through a platform called Substack, interestingly enough run by a young expatriate New Zealander.
31 March 2025
The NZ skeptics mailbox recently received a request from a company selling breathalysers in NZ. They wanted us to help them game the system when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, so that they could increase their sales. Given that I wrote about SEO just a few weeks ago, I figured the email exchange might be of interest to our readers. I think the emails tell the story quite well by themselves, so here they are in chronological order:
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.
3 March 2025
I'm unreserved in my assessment that this has been one of the biggest weekends in ISTA/Highden history, just not for the reasons ISTA would have anticipated. Anya Kamenetz, writing for New York Magazine's The Cut, has written a damning piece on ISTA, with the subtitle of: “_Can a neo-Tantric sex group dedicated to exploring dark desires root out abuse?_”
14 October 2024
It has been a while since I wrote about pseudoscience and scams around curing Autism, but that doesn't mean I haven't been collecting a whopper or two to share.
16 September 2024
It has been reported that former supermodel Elle Macpherson refused to follow the medical advice of 32 doctors to have chemotherapy following a breast cancer diagnosis, instead opting for holistic alternative therapies.
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.
18 March 2024
Apologies for this week's newsletter being a little late - I was planning to finish it off last night, but I was hit by some weird medical issue where I had a horrible headache and ended up sleeping from 5pm to get rid of it.
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.
18 September 2023
For the last few months, we've been asking if anyone has a copy of our missing NZ Skeptics Journal issues, and with the help of long-time member John Welch we were able to fill most of our gaps, with the exception of issue 5. Since then we've been wondering if maybe issue 5 didn't exist, that maybe the elusive number 5 was skipped as a joke to wind up future archivists - an urban legend, the mysterious issue that nobody could find.
4 September 2023
For this week's newsletter, I bumped into a news story about Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist who seems to be making a career out of making unfounded claims of having discovered aliens. On the back of the recent David Grusch shenanigans in the US, it's not surprising that the public are hungry for alien stories, and Avi has a great one for them to feast on - it's just sad that it's likely going to end up being found to be nothing more than sloppy science and wild conjecture.
28 August 2023
One of our members emailed us last week asking about a climate change denier's blog article.
6 June 2023
This weekend I think I may have finally managed to reach the end goal of my time in the Eastern Lightning (Church of Almighty God) group in New Zealand. Having been asking for months now if I could get my hands on one of the many books that the church prints, I finally have a copy.
1 May 2023
Well, hello there! Craig isn't looking and Mark is busy writing, so I thought I would slip in here and write the editorial for this week.
6 March 2023
It's a bumper issue today, but I make no apologies for bringing you a ridiculously long email! If you're using a web based client like GMail, you may need to click the “View entire message” link or similar to read the whole newsletter this week, or click the “Read this in your browser” button at the top of the email to open the newsletter as a web page in your browser.
20 February 2023
This week's newsletter starts off (relatively) lightly, with an article from Katrina about p-hacking. Katrina's been writing some great articles for us recently, and it was a pleasure to have her on our podcast a couple of weeks ago. We're hoping to have her join us again to talk about her new article this week, and if you're both a listener and a reader you can get a sneak preview of what she'll be talking about.
24 January 2023
An article in Stuff yesterday, reprinted from the Telegraph, showcased the efforts of a scientist to bring statistics to bear on the problem of cryptids. Floe Foxen has supposedly written a couple of papers, yet to be peer reviewed, that look at the “probability” of Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings being something more mundane than a hominid and plesiosaur respectively.
24 January 2023
I guess the biggest news this week is that our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is resigning, and that she will be replaced by Minister Chris Hipkins. However, I'm not sure there's much of skeptical interest that I can say about this news. I think Ardern did a good job steering us through tough times, and obviously I'm dismayed about the vitriol she's had hurled at her from the conspiracy cheap seats. I don't know too much about Hipkins, but again he seems competent, and he's been working to remove Religious Instruction from schools - which I see as a positive step for an increasingly irreligious and secular country like ours.
12 December 2022
In this week's newsletter I look at a video I watched recently on Facebook, promising a life hack for getting more bang for your buck when it comes to disposable batteries. Although, from what I can tell, the only bang you're likely to get with this hack is exploding batteries.
5 December 2022
In her “purest form”, a traditional wife (or the more hashtaggable Tradwife) is a woman who takes a traditional gender role in their marriage and household, and forgoes a career to focus on their family and raising children. One could be forgiven for wondering what makes tradwives different from housewives, for which the answer is the emphasis placed by tradwives on submission to their husband, as well as a heavy dose of 1950s aesthetics or rural landscapes, along with a variety of homey and benign hashtags like #homemaker or #cooking, and the occasional scripture if Jesus is on your speed dial.
14 November 2022
As I am in the early- to middle-part of my COVID infection, I've decided that my contribution this week is essentially a redirection to a New York Times Opinion piece by Dr. Elisabeth Bik. Dr. Bik is a microbiologist at Stanford University and the Dutch National Institute for Health with a better-than-average ability to detect patterns. While the NYT article makes it seem that she is the sort who reads scientific papers for fun, her special talent has not made her popular with some of her peers. Her particular skill is identifying image manipulation, whereby photos of blots, agar plates, bacteria from one experiment are flipped, stretched, or cropped to give the appearance of a proven hypothesis or novel finding. Admittedly, Bik doesn't just rely on her eyes for this task. Like other sleuths she utilises software to do some of the work for her, specifically the freely available 29a.ch, but argues that human eyes are still needed to weed out the false positives.
3 October 2022
One of our readers from the other side of the world, a Kiwi living in Ireland has told us about a Destiny Church in the UK.
12 September 2022
For anyone who wants to groan about how bad our local press can be, there's an article from the Telegraph, reprinted by the Herald and titled "Scientists discover humans produce invisible aura of air-cleansing molecules", that talks about the idea of the existence of an “aura” around our bodies. The article uses a recent study that looks into a small amount of “free radicals” that are generated by our skin to argue that, technically, these chemicals could be considered to be an aura.
29 August 2022
It's been an action-packed week this week, with lots of interesting things happening in conspiracy circles, both here and overseas. And a lot of it seems to be in the right direction, with prominent anti-vaxxers and conspiracy mongers like Robert Kennedy Jr and Chantelle Baker having their social media accounts removed, the parliament protest something of a fizzle, the operators of Counterspin being arrested, and Billy TK and Vinny Eastwood having their day in court.
8 August 2022
It's nice to occasionally be able to talk about nonsense outside of New Zealand. In this case, the Sydney Morning Herald recently printed - and then retracted - an article about a supposed new form of water called hexagonal water, made up of H3O2 molecules.
8 August 2022
There's usually no lack of content for our newsletter, and this week is no exception - which is great, as I'm on the newsletter for a second week in a row while Craig's unavailable. The Alex Jones court case has made the news this week, and it's good to see the mainstream media focusing on this particular charlatan. When I started reading up on the court proceedings, every article I read seemed to have some new tidbit of information, and it can be a little depressing hearing just how awful Alex Jones is, and how much money he can make in a day. As I say in my article on him below, he's one man I'd love to see in jail, but sadly I'm not sure that'll ever happen.
18 July 2022
Has anyone noticed that NZ stoner supplies mainstay, Cosmic Corner, has been taking a more witchy route as of late? Increasing its stores of tarot cards, smudge sticks, and crystals? The answer for why may lie in how magic and witchcraft have rapidly dominated TikTok, currently one of the world's most popular social media platforms.
4 July 2022
Warning: The subject matter of this article may be distressing to some due to discussions about children, death, and handling of dead bodies.
17 January 2022
Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, more commonly known as Baba Vanga, was a Bulgarian psychic. Although she died back in 1996, she was kind enough to leave behind some predictions that may or may not actually be about potential future events. Honestly, the Wikipedia Page for Baba Vanga leaves me suspicious about how much of what is attributed to her she actually said, and how much is just being made up by others (and it's also one of the worst Wikipedia pages I've ever seen grammatically - presumably it's mainly been written by people for whom English is not a fluent language).
10 January 2022
This week it's been reported that University of Auckland scientists Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles and Professor Sean Hendy have taken a case to the Employment Relations Authority. They're claiming that their employer - the university - hasn't done enough to protect them from attack by people upset with their science communication and public comment on COVID-related issues. They describe their attackers as “a small but venomous sector of the public”.
3 January 2022
I can blame my skepticism on George Adamski.
6 December 2021
I was sent a funny article the other day about the benefits of aluminium foil on a website called Tips and Tricks. The website appears to be a prolific source of clickbait - articles with catchy titles that are designed to suck you in and get you to click the link to read more. This is because the company wants to take you away from social media sites and onto their website, to show you adverts and make money from them.
20 October 2021
Mike Adams is well known to skeptics. For many years he's run the Natural News website, which started out as a source of medical misinformation paired with a shop selling expensive, useless supplements. Some of his sillier posts included using a microscope to take zoomed-in photos of McDonald's chicken nuggets as a way to make them look unappealing.
27 September 2021
This week I came across an article about a COVID anti-viral pill. There's some hope that an antiviral (similar to the well-known Tamiflu) could work that would be used to treat people with COVID. The action of the pill would work to reduce the viral load.
16 August 2021
Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
21 June 2021
Finally this week, in the bizarre category, I read an article by Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis infamy - the arch-creationist and science-denying anti-evolution propagandist.
24 May 2021
Yet another anti-hero of the COVID story is Dr Simon Thornley, of the COVID Plan B group who we've mentioned many times in the past.
5 May 2021
A recent article from Radio NZ did a great job of pointing out just how useless online polls are, and raising concerns about how often New Zealand media outlets, including Newshub, the AM Show and the Herald, rely on them as source material for news articles.
21 April 2021
An article was published by Stuff the other day about cosmetic acupuncture - a discredited idea that sticking needles in your face can be an alternative to paying for a face lift. Half way through reading the article it started to feel really familiar, like I'd already read it but on the topic of a different unproven therapy. Sure enough, a quick search for the reporter's previous work turned up a recent article in stuff about reiki - a "therapy" where someone heals you by holding their hands near you.
5 April 2021
Stuff published an article recently about the dangers of LED light bulbs, arguing that the blue light from LED bulbs disturbs our circadian rhythm and disrupts our sleep, with wide ranging knock-on effects to our health. My skeptical radar beeped at reading this, as I've looked into this issue in the past and found much speculation and very little actual science.
29 March 2021
Apparently, back in 2016 dozens of American Embassy diplomats in Cuba felt sick, and this has been dubbed Havana Syndrome. I'd never heard of this, but it came to my attention through an article written by local skeptic Robert Bartholemew.
22 March 2021
I read a very good article today in The Atlantic explaining some of the subtleties around the COVID vaccine. In particular we shouldn't be surprised when vaccinated people get infected.
15 March 2021
Rebecca Booth, from Fairlie in the South Island, recently found a seven leaf clover. The Stuff article about this find mentioned that this is not the first clover-related find Rebecca has had. Apparently earlier this year, in January, she found both four and five leaf clovers.
1 March 2021
Mark Honeychurch recently covered a Newshub story by Sarah Templeton in our newsletter (Reiki is Here To Save Us All) about a visit to a Reiki person by the reporter. (Practitioner, in my humble opinion, is probably the wrong word).
15 February 2021
Creationism is what drew me into skepticism. Back in the 90s when I was lecturing in software development, I had a work colleague who was a young earth creationist. Seemingly rational in other areas of his life, and very intelligent, he was nevertheless hooked on “creation science”. It showed to me how even smart people can be taken in when they have an emotional stake in the topic.
9 February 2021
Late last year we were contacted by Sina Nasiri, who had written a heart-felt article about his journey to atheism while growing up in Iran. His article explored the risky business of finding people to trust and confide in, in a society where being an atheist is no trivial thing – where apostacy from Islam is punishable by death.
1 February 2021
Or at least that's what NewsHub would have us believe, with an article published on Tuesday about the benefits of Reiki, an energy healing technique that involves the practitioner manipulating your “energy field” by waving their hands around your body.
11 January 2021
I'm sure many skeptics have enjoyed JP Sears' parody videos of the wellness industry, such as How to Become Gluten Intolerant and How to be Ultra Spiritual. It was a surprise to me, just before Christmas, to read that despite poking fun, JP Sears has for a long time been a seller of nonsense. An article from the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Canada details JP Sears' history of selling unregulated therapy sessions and useless supplements, and sadly also his recent descent into COVID-19 science denial.
28 December 2020
Dr. Siouxsie Wiles wrote on twitter recently about a NZ Herald article which wondered if New Zealand's response to the pandemic was an overreaction. While pointing out that she hadn't read the article (it was pay-walled) she said “But if the answer isn't a resounding NO WE DIDNT then the piece is insulting, ridiculous, disappointing, & dangerous”.
30 November 2020
There's an interesting article published by Dr Deane Galbraithe this week about Billy Te Kakiha's evangelical influence, and how this may explain his adoption of so many conspiracy theories in his talks. For those who don't remember, Billy TK started a political party earlier this year, the Public Party, with a platform based on conspiracies and other unscientific nonsense. Deane has been talking in our Facebook group about his article, and, although it's not mentioned in the article itself, on Facebook he's talked about someone who has messaged him to let him know that Billy TK has a history with the Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement.
9 November 2020
The above title is my paraphrasing of a recent paper published in an Elsevier-owned scientific journal, Science of The Total Environment. The paper's actual title is:
9 November 2020
If the US election hasn't caused you enough stress, you could read a recent “take down” of James Randi titled The man who destroyed skepticism, published soon after his death on the popular Boing Boing blog, that is sure to make your blood boil. I for one was very surprised and disappointed to see the Boing Boing website, which normally has a reputation for good quality reporting, hosting this hit piece written by Mitch Horowitz. Mitch is a believer in the spiritual realm, and his own website describes him as “a historian of alternative spirituality and one of today's most literate voices of esoterica, mysticism, and the occult”. The article includes such gems as:
1 February 2020
For the New Zealand organisation which has shown the most egregious gullibility or lack of critical thinking in public coverage of, or commentary on, a science-related issue
1 February 2020
Skeptic summary: The kiwis who are taking a stand against vaccination misinformation. We salute you.
13 May 2018
13 May 2018
Healing crystals have become very popular recently, with people buying many different crystals to either wear or place in their homes and help with physical and mental health issues, monetary problems and any other problem you could imagine. There are even water bottles with crystals in that are supposed to somehow "energise" the water you drink.
1 May 2018
On 23rd February 2018 Buzzfeed.com broke the news that the prominent atheist and skeptic Lawrence Krauss had been accused of sexual assault. Later we learned that this news had a New Zealand connection as Professor Krauss was not going to be attending the show in Christchurch with Richard Dawkins. Looking at Skeptics in the pub message boards I can see attendance may be affected by people's feelings toward the remaining speaker's attitudes to women.
11 March 2018
A Reiki meeting has been deemed newsworthy by the Taranaki Daily News.
25 February 2018
The UK Mirror recently carried a weird story claiming that there are numbers so big that they would create a black hole in your brain if you could memorise them. The title of the article is:
25 February 2018
Liza Schneider has written an article for the BoP Times, printed online in the Herald, which promotes nonsense therapies for animals.
1 February 2018
It is hard to avoid hearing about Bitcoin and other so-called cryptocurrencies these days. Almost every issue of every newspaper has an article about some aspect of Bitcoin. As a researcher in cryptography I have been interested in Bitcoin since around 2013 (though I confess to have never "mined" a block or invested in Bitcoin). The purpose of this article is not to explain the technology of Bitcoin or to give a detailed overview of it. And I am definitely not giving investment advice! Instead I want to highlight a few aspects of the Bitcoin story that I think are of particular interest to skeptics.
1 February 2018
For the article “Don't waste money on superfoods and supplements” published in Stuff, 29th Sept 2017.
3 September 2017
Newshub published an article about an 80 year old picture showing a native american man holding something rectangular with flat edges. Although it conceivably looks like an iPhone 5, as the article concedes it's much more likely to be a mirror or blade.
3 September 2017
Last week an article was published on Stuff talking about how a young New Zealand woman who has had cancer (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) since she was 14 is going to spend $20,000 on an alternative treatment for her cancer - Ozone Therapy. The clinic says about this therapy:
6 August 2017
There was a nice story about the 30th anniversary of the Lotto this week from Stuff. The article talked about how the fact some numbers come up more often than others is likely chance (Lotto take this seriously, and apparently regularly wash and weigh the balls to ensure there's no bias). The difference in frequency between the most drawn ball, number 1 (16.91%) and the least drawn ball number 34 (13.97%) is not huge, and I suspect the number frequency draws a bell curve.
18 June 2017
An article in the Herald this week talked about several innovations that were showcased at the Hamilton Fieldays event. Unfortunately, one of the products, DermaShield, appears to be very much pseudo-scientific.
11 June 2017
Radio NZ published an article this week that seemed to accept, without evidence, claims that traditional Maori medicine can help with medical conditions including cancer.
4 June 2017
Although there is a history in skepticism of people being "skeptical" of climate change, modern skepticism understands that there is a broad consensus amongst scientists that climate change is both real and caused by humans.
21 May 2017
A claim has been made by Noel Hilliam that European settlers beat Maori to settling NZ, and that reconstruction of skulls from a woman and man have shown that they originated in Wales and the Mediterranean, respectively. The woman had blue eyes and blonde hair, and the
18 September 2016
Stuff have reprinted another article from Juice Daily, which claims that garlic, pineapple, a salt water gargle and chicken soup can help with allergies. Of course, this is all unproven tosh and certainly not good medical advice. Thomas Lumley at Stats Chat does a good job of deconstructing the article, going through all the links in the article and checking out the evidence for the claims. Unsurprisingly, the given evidence is very thin:
21 August 2016
Superfoods are foods that are touted as having high levels of one or more nutrients, with claims made that these nutrients can heal the body. These superfoods, such as kale, goji berries and chia seeds, are often sold at very high prices.
10 July 2016
Yet another infomercial style article has been published on the NZ Herald, this time talking about the benefits of bee venom. Abeeco are a major seller of bee products in New Zealand, and they have several successful ASA complaints against them. Abeeco talks in the article about their products, but all they are able to produce in support of them is anecdotes - no proper data. The article even has an 0800 number at the bottom, and although it just says to call the number for "more information", nowhere does it state that the number is Abeeco's sales line!
3 July 2016
A recent article on Ken Ring's Predict Weather website, presumably written by Ken, has told people not to trust anything they read in the media. In a particularly conspiratorial tone, the article says that you should not trust politicians and you should consider not taking a cancer treatment that the medical profession recommends to you.
26 June 2016
Stuff published an advertorial article last week claiming that colloidal silver - small particles of silver in a cream or spray - could treat a variety of medical conditions. The article was written by a sales representative from Skybright Natural Health, a company which sells colloidal silver products. She said:
27 September 2015
Stuff published an article last week about Tamaha McDonald, from Blenheim, who is currently living in Mexico. Tamaha's wife, Jennifer, suffers from a lung condition which means that she needs a double lung transplant. They are currently raising money to help with this.
1 May 2014
At TAM 2013 the last talk was by Peter Boghossian and it was on Authenticity. One of the take-away messages I got from that talk was that you should stand by your words and if someone is offended by them let them know that you're sorry that they were offended. But stand by what you said, if you really trust in it.
1 May 2014
The game is … on. I've recently rewatched the new Sherlock and my partner always reacts to that misquote.
1 August 2012
There may indeed be a place for creationism in the science classroom, but not the way the creationists want. This article is based on a presentation to the 2011 NZ Skeptics Conference.
1 May 2012
I've just been reading my Summer 2012 edition of New Zealand Skeptic, but I think there is a piece missing from my version.
1 November 2011
Alison Campbell investigates alarming reports on what is living in our dishwashers.
1 August 2010
While in the gym,_ Alison Campbell _considers some health issues.
1 August 2007
An article in the Listener makes much ado about very little.
1 May 2007
After a bloodless coup, the NZ Skeptic has a new editor. This doesn't mean much in practical terms; for many years I've been working closely with previous ed Annette Taylor. She will now take on the roles that I used to-subediting, proofing, making cups of tea, cooking dinner and the like. It won't be long before we can enlist the daughter into the production of this fine publication.
1 November 2006
Jim Ring finds some material to pass the time on a recent flight.
1 November 2006
A Listener article on Brazilian medium and 'miracle-worker' Joao de Deus has taken the annual Bent Spoon Award from the New Zealand Skeptics.
1 February 2006
Checking facts should be part and parcel of academic life, but too often it isn't done.
1 November 2004
Journalists in New Zealand generally show a lack of scepticism when dealing with issues of science and pseudoscience - except for mainstream medicine. This article is based on a presentation to the New Zealand Skeptics Conference, 11 September, 2004
1 August 2004
The Enlightenment -- a period of intellectual progress in Europe and North America during the eighteenth century -- saw superstition, dogma and ignorance lose ground to reason, science and freedom of inquiry. Enlightenment thinkers questioned received ideas and used rational methods to explore new possibilities in many fields. Despite persecution by government and church, the enormous increase in the publication of newspapers and books spread ideas widely. The result was an outpouring of knowledge and understanding about the way the world works. Western civilisation's high standard of living and openness today stem from the Enlightenment.
1 May 2004
It was a dark and stormy night. But (almost) without flinching we set off to hear Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Kevin Grazier speaking about the Cassini mission to Saturn.
1 February 2003
In this issue Ian Wishart responds to Warwick Don's critique of his article on Intelligent Design.
1 August 2002
A critique of "Walking with Beasts", by Ian Wishart, Investigate Magazine, June 2002
1 February 2000
Skepsis's last article on Menopause Madness [Skeptic 53] reminded me of my recent prescribing of progesterone cream for a well informed patient at her request. The good GP I am (I have faith, sometimes in evidence-based medicine!), I looked up the evidence on such creams and also perused the articles given to me by my patient. There was one Randomised Control trial, review article by a gynaecologist plus a lot of very biomedical in vitro research which was of little use to me. Not much in the Cochrane database and a little on MEDLINE. One clinical trial of reasonable quality showed some results in terms of symptom improvement. Safety issues hadn't really been researched but then again wild yam cream must be natural and therefore OK huh?
1 August 1998
An article by Gordon Hewitt in NZ Skeptic 47 states, "In June 1995...an article appeared in this publication saying counselling was no use. This judgement was based on a single study conducted in 1939." This is not true, but as the author of the article I am obviously biased. May I urge all skeptics to read it for themselves?
1 May 1997
The other night, after a particularly fine feed of nachos, my friend pulled out her numerology book and proceeded to do my chart. I'd done some things wrong in a past life, and there were a number of lessons I hadn't picked up on -- but generally I was happy to learn my soul was a fairly evolved one.
1 August 1996
A physicist with hidden motives writes something unexpected for a "cultural studies" journal.
1 November 1993
The New Internationalist Review, a magazine not normally known for gullibility beyond the political, decided not all that long ago to examine the paranormal. Our intrepid reporter Peter Lange decided to have a look.
1 August 1993
Several copies of each issue of our newsletter are sent to the international skeptical movement's headquarters in Buffalo, New York. Many of these are distributed to our sister organisations around the world, and it is gratifying when items by our members are noticed in other publications.
1 November 1991
A breathless story about a Tibetan who supposedly cures brain tumours prompted the Skeptics to give their annual Bent Spoon award to the New Zealand Listener.
1 May 1991
In issue 16, I reported on an AIDS treatment scam run by a British doctor, James Sharp, and an Iraqi vet. This had been exposed as such by an investigative journalist.
1 February 1991
"Repetitive strain injury": an iatrogenic epidemic of simulated injury.
1 November 1990
Anabolic steroids were in the news during the Commonwealth Games and Dr Michael Kennedy has been studying their use by athletes for the past ten years. His conclusion is that "anabolic steroids have no effect on aerobic sports, such as running and swimming, but may lead to a small improvement in the performance of trained weightlifters." He quotes a 1972 study that showed when athletes were given placebo and told they were steroids, they got stronger and trained harder.
1 August 1990
I have just got around to reading the article "Science vs Religion" in Skeptic No. 11, and am still wondering why it was written for such a journal (or was it?).
1 May 1989
The Press Council has not accepted that a jam-eating poltergeist was a logical explanation for a series of events reported in a Truth story.