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
Whatever the science may say, there's no lack of people who are chasing the holy grail of a longer life, often known as Extreme or Radical Life Extension, and who are keen to tell you that they've figured out the secret. Unsurprisingly, they often also have something to sell you. I decided to look into some of the more vocal and well-known of these advocates for extending our lives, to see whether their ideas stack up.
28 April 2025
Not all things connected to religion are bad - it's good to help the poor, feed the homeless, and strive for non-violence. But what if there's something that another religion has, but yours doesn't? Often when this happens to Christians, they'll simply label it as occult or demonic:
6 January 2025
What are the chances that we will make contact with an alien civilisation?
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.
4 March 2024
In December 2020, a patient at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Centre in Alabama accessed or wandered into the hospital's fertility clinic through an unsecured door. Said patient then also accessed the cryogenic nursery, and removed several frozen embryos from containment.
8 January 2024
For an island nation with a population of 5.3 million, I would hazard that we have more than our fair share of pākehā with a hotline to millenia-long dead Asians. And by more I mean a non-zero number, because mediumship is a paranormal practice/belief that has failed to provide any empirical evidence for its efficacy.
25 September 2023
We certainly live in exciting times. There's been recent news about some potentially exciting discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
4 September 2023
In the last two months, two of the non-religious organisations I volunteer for, the Humanists and the NZARH, have both been contacted by a young street preacher called Nic Blackie. Nic is looking for someone to interview on his Christian apologist podcast, called The Garrison. In order to figure out whether it's a good idea to have someone talk with Nic, I've spent several hours listening to most episodes of his podcast. I suffer, so you don't have to!
26 June 2023
Following on from my last article, I decided to see if I could ferret out more “light workers” in New Zealand – the sort of people who worship Trump, and who believe the golden age is “coming real soon now, and we'll be able to laugh at the sceptics”. For the sake of clarity I'll refer to these people henceforth as Light Warriors – you'll see why in a moment.
3 April 2023
I've had a wee break off writing the newsletter for the past couple of weeks, as Brownyn and Mark have contributed lots of content, but it's my turn again this week - thankfully with some great contributions from the aforementioned Bronwyn - with a continuation of her look at the life of Christian Evangelist Ray Comfort, and also previous contributor Alistair Blenney, who takes a look at NESARA.
27 February 2023
Last Friday I attended a service for Robert Woolf. Long time members of NZ Skeptics would recognise Robert's name as a committee member, and conference attendee. He also attended Skeptics in the Pub in Auckland back when it was first running.
30 January 2023
This past week has been quite sad for me. We had to say goodbye to our dog Darwin. I hope you'll indulge me in some reflections on the experience.
30 January 2023
For years, my hobby has been to walk the streets and collect up religious propaganda – most commonly, multicoloured 'Free Tickets to Heaven'.
19 December 2022
Until relatively recently Christian protestants had no problems with abortion. The only reference to it in the Christian Bible indicates that an abortion should be attempted if a woman becomes pregnant as a result of adultery (Numbers 5:27) There isn't much wriggle-room in this verse, so latterly fundagelical Christians would rather pretend it doesn't exist, because a bunch of money-grubbing racists decided abortion made an excellent stalking horse.
1 May 2020
Alpha was hunting. He was rushing through his jungle at break neck speed, close behind the giant grazer. He realised there was a massive series of meals in the beast. As he dashed, he worked on his poem to celebrate the hunt. Already it was several hundred stanzas long, with descriptions of many other hunts, and it was polishing up to be a masterpiece. When he passed it on, to others of his kind, it would make him famous.
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?”
8 October 2017
A couple of years ago I went along to a talk in Wellington about a new device called the QTB (Quantum TrailBlazer), now rebranded as a QSB - Quantum Scalar Box. Back then the device was made from a piece of sewage pipe spray painted black, with several blue LEDs around the top. We were told to believe that the device was emitting "scalar waves" (a pseudo-scientific idea) on the Solfeggio frequencies. I sat there for half an hour while the device went through a range of these frequencies, supposedly healing areas of my life.
1 August 2017
An exploration of joy and meaning in a world without God
18 September 2016
Chris Johnson created a coffee table book a few years ago, quoting atheists talking about their life without god. The book was titled A Better Life, and the strap line explains exactly what the book is about - "100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy & Meaning in a World Without God".
3 July 2016
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/health/judge-to-sentence-parents-whose-little-boy-died-of-bacterial-meningitis-384237241.html
26 June 2016
Tony Robbins is a very popular motivational speaker, and charges US$1,000 or more for a high energy day of talks. Events have names such as "Date with Destiny", "Life and Wealth Mastery" and "Unleash the Power Within". Tony's website has testimonials from famous celebrities, such as Hugh Jackman, Bill Clinton and Serena Williams. Video of Tony Robbins events look a lot like evangelical christian sunday services - lots of music, jumping around and highly emotional sermons.
4 October 2015
seasonal hydrated salts detected when above -23c, would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine
16 August 2015
1 August 2014
Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.
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 February 2011
We've lost another light against the darkness, with the death of Denis Dutton. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, gave us the image of the guttering candle, but I think Denis would be the first to cite another comment from that work: "It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."
1 February 2008
In NZ Skeptic 85 Alison Campbell discusses teaching evolution in the school curriculum with particular reference to the influence of local creationist pressures opposing this as a sole 'theory'. If New Zealand Skeptics are to be true to their cause they must also take a hard look at their own basic assumptions. My concern from an informed amateur perspective is that in teaching evolution it is important to be intellectually honest to students. The fact of the development of life forms over billions of years and their gradual divergence from earlier morphological templates is beyond question to any rational inquirer even if it cannot demonstrated in the traditional hypothesis/experimental test paradigm. Furthermore, Darwin's concept of natural selection is most obviously applicable to those life forms we are most familiar with and on which he based his inductive studies. At this level of macro development for instance, some morphological changes are clearly adaptive for predation or escape, and auditory or visual cues evolve to serve the attraction of mates or camouflage. However there is still substantial debate whether this paradigm can cover all stages in the evolution of life on Earth. It is when we get to the question of the origins of life or the complex operations within a single cell that questions arise. Such intricate developments are crucial to the central concept of Neo-Darwinism.
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 August 2005
All life has a common ancestor. Or to put it another way, every creature alive today, including ourselves, has an unbroken chain of ancestors going back almost four billion years. At certain points along the path from then to now, lineages have split, and split again, to give rise to the millions of species alive today.
1 May 2003
A British man considers himself unlucky because the week he won the lottery, another person did too. So he had to share the £8 million ($NZ23 million) winnings instead of taking home all the money himself.
1 May 2003
These are nervous times. By an astounding coincidence, as I wrote that line and paused to think of what to put next, I had a call from a friend to tell me there was a Sars case at the Waikato Hospital and to ask whether, in my other role as a subeditor at the Waikato Times, I would want to pass that on.
1 February 2003
In Darwin's Shadow: The life and science of Alfred Russel Wallace, by Michael Shermer. Oxford University Press.
1 August 2000
The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, by Simon Conway Morris. Oxford University Press.
1 May 2000
It's a great privilege to have known Eileen, her warmth, her wit and her sharp mind undimmed by her failing health. In the last few years, when she might forget the word for something, she knew what she wanted to say about it.
1 May 2000
That was never six months just then -- it felt much longer. Banised to the depths of New Zealand, in Tuatapere (almost as far south west as you can get in the South Island), life took on a gentler pace. Momentous things did happen -- the stoat population declined by 300 around where we were, and the yellowheads had a successful breeding season.
1 February 2000
In which John Riddell continues his pub night discussions.
1 November 1998
EVERYTHING was roses and buttercups until that fateful day. An omen, it was, for sure. In July, on Friday, only 17 days before the 13th, we had born on our humble dairy farm a calfie. She had four legs, nice black and white patches, a cute butt and two heads, four eyes, four ears and two tongues.
1 August 1996
**RIVER OUT OF EDEN: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF LIFE by Richard Dawkins.
1 May 1996
When I received through the mail a coloured brochure from Time/Life advertising a series of videos and cassettes titled "Growing Younger", I was surprised to see that I could learn from Time/Life via their series how to develop an "ageless body". In addition I could learn to "help reverse ageing" and that the series could "open the door to a life free from the effects of aging" (sic).
1 May 1994
Richard Milton has written this book as a "hang on a minute" reservation about Darwinism and its apparent unquestioned acceptance by mainstream science from geology through to biology (and in one chapter political science) in the manner of the small boy who questioned the reality of the Emperor's new clothes -- "Look Mummy, all those university professors, all those Nobel Prize winners, have got no actual proof to cover their hypotheses with".
1 August 1992
Isaac Asimov, one of the great explainers of the age, died on 6 April, aged 72.
1 February 1991
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1985.