31 March 2025
After having written in the last issue about the committee's hesitance to let people submit articles for inclusion in the newsletter that include significant AI content, I wasn't totally surprised to receive an email from Peter Harrison, who we've had on our podcast before talking about AI. What did surprise me, though, was the formal tone of his letter - which at first I took to be a little passive-aggressive. However, this and the Americanized spelling still didn't tip me off as to the real author of the email:
31 March 2025
Further to my previous articles on climate change, this week I will talk about several short topics from recent publications.
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?
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).
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.
8 July 2024
I've been in contact with a lawyer on and off over the last couple of years regarding one of our old members - old both in terms of when they joined the society, and in terms of their age. Jim Ring was a frequent contributor to our Journal, the NZ Skeptic, writing both articles on a wide range of topics and many Letters to the Editor. Sadly Jim passed away last year, and the conversations with the lawyer, who was a friend of Jim's in his later life, were about a collection of books of skeptical interest that he had collected over his lifetime and wanted to donate to the NZ Skeptics.
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.
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.
2 April 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus
8 January 2024
Happy New Year, and welcome to our first newsletter of 2024. I've had a nice couple of weeks off work so far, and weirdly I've spent a few days this week staying at a religious retreat in the middle of nowhere! (For context, it was the best deal I could find on Airbnb, and I only found out the details of what the place was used for after I'd booked to stay there).
11 December 2023
It's weird not having had a newsletter out last week. Hopefully you didn't miss us too much! As our sole editor I'll be keeping to a biweekly schedule for now - although if we get more content coming our way from readers and committee members, who knows, I may be able to return to producing the newsletter on a weekly basis. For now, you can expect to read something from myself, Bronwyn and Craig every fortnight, and then we'll be recording our podcast in the days following the newsletter's release, and chatting about either our articles or something else that tickles our fancy. If you feel moved to write an article for us, just send your article to news@skeptics.nz and we'll let you know if we plan to publish it, which is very likely to be the case as we love reading all your thoughts on skeptical topics, and I'm sure our audience does too. And, once your article's been published, we'll probably want you to join us on the podcast to talk about it as well - but only if you're comfortable with doing that.
7 August 2023
Speaking of misinformation, myself and some other skeptics in Wellington went to watch Ms. Information last night, as part of the NZ International Film Festival. As Craig said last week, Ms. Information is a documentary about Siouxsie Wiles, created by Gwen Isaac and her crew who followed Siouxsie on and off for around two years, starting at the beginning of the pandemic. The documentary focused less on the content of the misinformation that Siouxsie and others tackled during the early days of the pandemic, and more on the abuse that was hurled at her - up to and including quite a few death threats. Not only has Siouxsie been a long-time skeptic, speaking at several of our conferences and helping to run the Auckland Skeptics in the Pub group for many years, but her husband Steven, also featured in the documentary, was a committee member of the Skeptics for several years.
24 July 2023
Last Monday night I attended a local talk given by National Party leader Chris Luxon, along with Tim and Alexander, who have written articles for this week's newsletter. This meeting wasn't the main attraction, it was just a prelude to the big event of the week on Tuesday.
10 July 2023
We have some fun articles coming up in the next few weeks. Firstly, my time in the Church of Almighty God (Eastern Lightning) has come to an end, and not through my choosing. I'll be writing one final article about the group, as well as publishing a piece from Wellington Skeptics in the Pub member Tim Atkin about how the church managed to spread so widely under strict communist rule in China. Dan Ryan talked with me the other day about some spammy Facebook ads he's been getting recently for a hair analysis service, and as we looked into it at our regular Skeptical Activism meeting, we realised that not only could we have a little fun with this (I have a friend who works for Auckland Zoo who's on board for some interesting testing), but also digging deeper we realised some interesting information about the people running the scam. More on that soon, hopefully!
19 June 2023
Craig is away in the US for the next four weeks, so I'm going to try to hold the fort until he gets back. Thankfully I have articles from some of our reliable contributors this week, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to convince one or more of them to take over for an issue or two in the coming weeks.
13 March 2023
This is about my unexpected adventure in skepticism a very long time ago in a galaxy not so far away.
7 February 2023
This week's newsletter will feature no articles from me - and this makes me very happy. Why have I not written anything, you may ask, and why am I happy about it. Well, because I'm blessed - and not just once, but twice. Let me explain…
30 January 2023
I've got a bumper crop of articles this week, from several contributors. Holly Blackler tells us about her efforts to secularise Wellington city. Katrina Borthwick writes about the Herbalist Charter, and regular contributor Bronwyn Rideout continues her series on the Science of Identify Foundation.
9 January 2023
It was a relatively well known practice in WW2 (and possibly before) that if your torch/flashlight battery was getting a little flat, a few quick touches to a vehicle battery would restore a fair bit of charge. This information became more public knowledge in the UK, post WW2 when times were tough, and a number of articles were published on it. I cannot now find any, but the earliest article I have read was a 1953 one in "Wireless World" by R W Hallows with some designs and an analysis of these simple methods.
28 November 2022
This newsletter will be a bit short (well, only two articles, but the second one is quite a long read!). As I write this, we've just finished our annual conference in Wellington, so it's been super busy. We had a good turnout of skeptics from around the country, and a great set of informative and entertaining talks throughout the weekend.
21 November 2022
Our annual conference starts on Friday, and for those of you who plan to come but haven't bought a ticket yet, you'd better be quick. I spent yesterday afternoon with Bronwyn and Daniel, running through a sound check at the venue, testing that the technology works as expected, finalising our catering and trying out our Friday night "entertainment” (we also had enough time to grab a quick beer at the Welsh Dragon bar, our venue for Friday evening's event).
7 November 2022
Skeptic Steven Novella recently published an interesting open letter to cranks. In it he speaks in a very forthright, honest way about people who email him and pronounce that they have figured out something that overturns science, or have single-handedly solved one of science's many unsolved puzzles. Steven explains in the letter about the importance of peer review, and talks of the arrogance of those who think they're smarter than the combined wisdom of the world's experts. He makes a really good point that the proper route to making your claims public, and ensuring they are properly vetted and tested, is a lot of hard work - and it's this hard work that cranks are keen to bypass, often preferring to instead jump straight to making claims without designing experiments, and publishing books rather than writing scholarly articles.
18 July 2022
I have a good friend who often helps me out by sending me articles that might be of interest to Skeptics - and they sometimes come in handy both for this newsletter, and for my regular weekend radio chats with Graeme Hill on Today FM. He's is one of quite a few skeptically minded friends I have who have no interest in the organised skeptical movement in New Zealand - he just lives his life being wary of the nonsense that surrounds us.
7 June 2022
I apologise for my lack of inspiration in the title, but at least we have some interesting articles for you:
7 June 2022
I received an email last week with a stern warning:
25 April 2022
I heard something interesting from my teenage daughter the other day, a story about some of her friends who have suddenly picked up a tic - a type of involuntary physical movement. I'd heard about this before, a couple of years ago, so I went looking online for any articles to confirm what I'd remembered from before; the idea that this is a mass psychogenic illness.
11 April 2022
I recently had a clear out of my email inbox, as I'd reached about 20,000 unread emails. As a part of this onerous task, I unsubscribed from a large number of mailing lists. Many of them were from online stores where I'd never agreed to be emailed in the first place, but a bunch of them were from conspiracy groups where I'd signed up for more information, or filled in a form to get access to a series of nonsense videos (like “_The Truth About Cancer_” and “_GMOs Revealed_”, two truly awful video series). It was obvious that several of these mailing lists I hadn't even signed up for, so I assume there's some crossover and sharing of mailing lists between these groups. There are also some groups that I've decided to still receive emails from, such as Family First and Voices for Freedom, because I think it's important to keep an eye on them.
28 February 2022
Although Bronwyn's put together this week's newsletter, I couldn't help myself and wrote a small piece about the protesters' obsession with Nuremberg.
1 November 2021
Nothing - apart from that they're all featured in this week's newsletter.
30 September 2018
In a frankly scary move, the WHO are legitimising unproven medical therapies by including them in the new edition of its "International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems" - ICD11.
12 November 2017
Dr Libby is a nutritional biochemist, not a medical doctor, who regularly posts alternative medicine articles in Stuff. She sells books, goes on speaking tours, has promoted a Multi Level Marketing scheme - USANA over-priced vitamins - and now sells her own alt-med products
28 August 2016
The Society for Science Based Healthcare has recently submitted complaints about articles in two newspapers.
1 February 2014
Siouxsie Wiles takes a look at a new medical journal - available at all good supermarkets.
1 February 2007
Garfield was right-there's nothing like a piping hot lasagne on a winter's night. Especially when eaten with good wine and fine people.
1 August 2005
The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) is gaining a reputation as a Mickey Mouse government organisation that harms the reputation and integrity of New Zealand's tertiary institutions.
1 August 1999
ONCE again the medical profession has made a mess of its relations with the public, and I'm not talking about Gisborne smear takers.
1 February 1991
At the 1989 NZCSICOP conference Dr Denis Dutton generalised that women's magazines contained horoscopes and men's magazines didn't. A female voice rightly objected that Broadsheet was horoscope-less. There is also a dubious exception to the generalisation about men's magazines (see box). Nevertheless, what Denis said was largely confirmed by a quick survey I made of women's magazines at a Whitcoulls newsstand. New York Woman doesn't carry horoscopes, neither does Moxie (but it does carry an advice column by a so-called psychic). These were the only additional exceptions I could find. However I discovered Australian Elle has not only horoscopes but a numerology page as well.
1 November 1990
The New Zealand Woman's Weekly has been the recipient of a New Zealand Skeptics' Bent Spoon Award. Does Broadsheet, "New Zealand's feminist magazine", make a more intelligent response to matters of interest to Skeptics?
1 August 1987
This issue contains three varied articles on medicine, all by members. They are meant to be provocative and I hope that members will respond. Member Jim Woolnough of Auckland kindly sent me the October issue of "The N.Z. Psychic Gazette". At only 80c an issue it is value packed and I urge all members to buy one copy. This issue is worth the money for the front page poem about one's best friend, the dog (I'm clumsy and sweet and get under your feet, etc). There are articles on numerology, the psychic aura of animals and photographing ghosts. There are also the advertisements for psychic counselling, postal psychometry, Karma destiny, holistic spiritual massage, for pendulums and reflexology balls (no jokes now, please).
1 May 1987
Former Star news editor Josh Easby has collected . an award for journalistic excellence for his "psychic duel" with an Auckland clairvoyant.