17 March 2025
This week I will comment on two articles. The first is an article from Science Advances by Richardson et al. 9 from 13 September 2023. This is a research article with the title “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. This article is a collaboration between multiple climate scientists, including those from the renowned Potsdam Institute (Rockstrom et al).
3 February 2025
It's not a good day when a closer analysis of the path of a near-earth approaching asteroid doesn't rule out impact, but instead shows that it might actually hit earth in 2032.
23 May 2022
Accelerated Christian Education (known as A-C-E or ACE) is in the news, and for all the wrong reasons. ACE is a homeschooling curriculum from the US (Texas) which is accredited in New Zealand, and covers children from age 5 through to college level. Here's Duane Howard, Vice President of ACE, talking about what he thinks education should be for (check out some particularly icky stuff he says around 32 minutes in):
21 December 2020
Retraction Watch have written a nice summary of the year in retractions for The Scientist magazine. Unsurprisingly many of the scientific articles that have been retracted this year are on the topic of COVID-19, but there was one that caught my eye from the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences titled:
1 February 2020
Enrico Fermi was a genius, and his mind worked lightning fast. When his co-workers were audibly speculating on how many alien civilisations might live in our galaxy, he simply looked up and asked: “Where are they?”
1 August 2018
Unorthodox claims about the origin of the Māori go way back. Co-founder of the Polynesian Society and erratic polymath Edward Tregear claimed in 1885 they were “Aryan”, based on such unlikely things as the similarity between waiū (milk: from wai, water and ū, the breast) and whey (Old English hwǣg). What follows is even less persuasive.
27 May 2018
New Zealand's first flat earth conference has just been hosted, last Saturday in Auckland. Around 30 "flat mates" crowded into the Backyard Bar's function room to listen to conversations about how the earth is flat, including live streaming of speakers from overseas.
15 April 2018
A recent poll in the US showed an alarming amount of disbelief about whether our world is round. The survey of 8,000 Americans showed that whereas the vast majority of over 55s are happy accepting that we live on a round planet, like all the other planets we see, only two thirds of eighteen to twenty four year olds are sure. The others either don't know either way, are not totally sure or believe in a flat earth.
11 February 2018
Elon Musk's company SpaceX successfully launched their first Falcon Heavy rocket this week, after a recent successful launch in New Zealand by RocketLab. It's been a good time for private space companies.
1 October 2017
David Meade, who I spoke about last month as predicting the end of the world around the 20th of September, has given us all a reprieve. Obviously the world didn't end, but he now says that October the 21st is the real end of the world.
4 June 2017
Robert Bigelow is convinced that aliens are not only real, but they have visited earth and are living on our planet. He believes that his grandparents were visited by an alien craft, and says that he has spent millions gathering evidence that aliens are among us. People have pointed out that his company Bigelow Aerospace's logo looks a lot like the head of a "gray" - the most popular depiction of an alien, with big almond shaped eyes and a teardrop face.
21 May 2017
Someone in the US recently flew on a plane with a spirit level to prove that the earth is flat. Instead he demonstrated a misunderstanding of physics.
26 March 2017
Shaquille O'Neal gave his support to the flat earth conspiracy movement on a podcast recently. However, although many websites were quick to jump on this, it turns out that Shaq was just joking:
29 January 2017
Robert Hunt spoke on behalf of Creation Ministries International this morning at Upper Hutt Baptist Church.
13 November 2016
Obviously people around the world are painfully aware of the many crazy beliefs held by president-elect Donald Trump. However, what's less well known is the range of nonsense that Mike Pence, America's future Vice President, believes.
7 February 2016
I went to see Creation Ministries International speaker Jonathan Sarfati give a couple of talks in Wellington last week. Jonathan was brought up in New Zealand, and was once the national chess champion.
16 August 2015
16 August 2015
He is a nuclear physicist, whose PhD focussed on nuclear decay. He worked in electronics for the military for nearly 40 years, and argues that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
1 August 2015
In recognition of the Apocalyptic theme of the upcoming Skeptics Conference, Vicki Hyde looks back in the vault to 2012 to see what doomsday predictions we managed to survive.
1 May 2013
Alison Campbell has been spending time on Facebook recently.
1 November 2012
If the beliefs of a sizeable number of people turn out to be correct, this will be the final issue of the NZ Skeptic. According to a survey of 16,262 people in 21 countries conducted by market research company Ipsos for Reuters News, two percent of respondents strongly agree, and eight percent somewhat agree, with the proposition that 21 December 2012, the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar, marks the end of the world. Perhaps surprisingly agreement is highest in China (20 percent), while the Germans and Indonesians (four percent) are relatively dubious. One could perhaps question the representativeness of the sample (comprised of people who have agreed to take part in online surveys), but there must be a lot of people out there who are really worried about this.
1 August 2010
When creationists try to harmonise their worldview with certain inescapable facts of geology, the result is chaos.
1 February 2007
In the 21st century, there are still people who believe the Earth is flat.
1 November 2006
Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin, by Robert M Hazen. Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, USA. Reviewed by Bernard Howard.
1 February 2006
The last of Hamilton's highly successful Café Scientifique series for 2005 examined the issue of dating the Earth and the universe. The date was chosen to be as close as possible to Bishop Ussher's preferred date of October 22 when, he calculated, the creation of the universe began in the year 4004 BC.
1 May 2004
The US$3.3 billion Cassini mission is about to rendezvous with Saturn, but if some had had their way the robot probe would never have left the ground.
1 February 2004
Bob Brockie considers the enduring influence of the founder of Anthroposophy
1 February 2004
The universe we live in is vast, in both space and time, so vast as to be beyond human comprehension. Mathematicians have devised a way in which the large numbers involved can be manipulated, the "exponent"1, but it can mislead us into thinking we comprehend more than we really do. It can blind us to the true difference between two numbers whose exponents differ by only one unit. Thus, if my bank balance grows from $102 to $103, I am richer by $900, but if it grows from $106 to $107, I have gained $9 million.
1 February 2003
For almost half a century, it's seemed like human destiny to go into Space. When we were kids, everyone wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. The loss of the Columbia space shuttle hasn't extinguished that dream, but it firmly reminds us that leaving the Earth behind is a very difficult thing to do. If things were just a little bit different - if our species were as big as elephants, or aquatic, or if the Earth's gravity were much stronger, it may have been impossible. As it is, raising a human being into low Earth orbit, to say nothing of going further, is a hugely expensive proposition. And once up there, the lack of gravity leads to muscle wasting and other physiological problems. Food and air also need to be brought up from the planet below.
1 November 1998
Oh My God, it's the End of the World! Again!
1 August 1998
IT'S a damned rotten trick, I know, but I rang up my mum and asked her a simple question, does the Earth go round the Sun, or is it the other way around? She wasn't sure, but felt the most obvious, correct answer was that the Sun orbits the Earth.
1 February 1990
Zecharia Sitchin's 12th Planet, called "Nibiru" by the Sumerians and "Marduk" by the Babylonians, if it exists has five times the mass of Earth, travels an elliptic orbit around the Sun every 700 to 1000 years, and was known to the Sumerians 6000 years ago. Our little Moon produces tides of 10 meters (32.8 feet) or so. Nibiru would produce a "Super-tide" on Earth, pulling the waters of our oceans up to where Noah's Ark was found on Mt. Ararat at the end of the "40 days and 40 nights" of rain. Of course, rain could not have produced such a flood as the Great Deluge, but Nibiru could have.
1 August 1989
This is the definitive book on the scientific arguments for creationism, it is exhaustive and thorough. It is a massive book, 550 double column pages, 600 references cited, a 13 page index, 54 chapters with about 10 illustrations per chapter. As far as I can see, it covers all the main points at issue; the nature of Science, pseudoscience, entropy Omphalos, radioactive dating and creationist arguments for a young cosmos and young earth. However it is especially strong on geological arguments as befits the author, formerly Professor of Geomorphology at Columbia. Nearly half the book deals with this aspect, covering the Biblical view of the Flood and creationist ideas on plate tectonics, the rapid deposition of sedimentary rocks, evaporites and petroleum and ore deposits. It then deals with the scientific account of these matters and finally gives a thorough account of our evolutionary history. It is especially good on human evolution.
1 February 1989
Head, Department of Geology, University of Newcastle.
1 May 1988
Jesus Christ lives on Venus. Earth has narrowly escaped invasion by the Fish Men. Two machines pull in healing energy from deep space and spread it around Earth each night.