4 August 2025
After 12 years of running a fortnightly Skeptical Activism group in Wellington, it's finally come to an end. We will look into the feasibility of running an online activism meeting at some point, but for now the in-person event, with a free beer for your first complaint, is no more. To give everyone a flavour of the kind of work we did at our activism meetings, we thought we could let you know what we got up to on our final night.
3 March 2025
Search Engine Optimisation (known as SEO) is an IT discipline in which a website owner attempts to optimise their site in a way that makes it appear high up in google's search results, ideally on the first page. The factors that Google considers when ranking pages, through an algorithm called PageRank (and more recently other technologies), are something of an open secret these days.
27 November 2023
Recently Facebook has been showing me AI generated fake images in posts from pages that appear to be designed to trick people into thinking the images they post are real. Since I keep interacting with these posts out of skeptical curiosity, I've found that there are now plenty of scammy AI posts in my FB feed. It's clear to me that they are AI-generated, but the worrying part is that many people are being fooled by them.
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.
15 November 2021
About a year ago Daniel Ryan and I wrote to Givealittle, an organisation in NZ that runs an online platform which allows people to fundraise for needy causes. We expressed our concerns about misuse of the platform:
29 April 2018
There's been some interesting local research on people with health conditions doing their own research. The Southern Cross Health Society has looked into whether people look up their symptoms on google before visiting their GP. They talked to GPs about their patients, and found out that an increasing number of them are coming into their practices with knowledge taken from the internet of what is wrong with them.
27 November 2016
We have some great speakers for this year's Skeptics Conference, including Susan Gerbic who runs the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. Her team put a lot of work into adding a skeptical angle to Wikipedia pages and fleshing out pages of interest to skeptics, such as those of famous scientists.
1 May 2013
Alison Campbell has been spending time on Facebook recently.
1 May 2006
A website poking fun at veterinary homeopathy has become the unlikely symbol of a global backlash by conventional vets against their homeopathic colleagues, according to New Scientist magazine. The "British Veterinary Voodoo Society" (BVVS) is a parody, but its creators say they are making a serious point: that the claimed effectiveness of homeopathic veterinary medicine has no more solid scientific evidence behind it than voodoo. They object to a decision by the UK's Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) to publish an official list of homeopathic vets, which they say undermines the credibility of conventional veterinary medicine.
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 May 1989
Many thanks to all members who have sent me material recently. Most of it is too voluminous to be used and some of it will be well known to us all. It was nice to have sent on Irene F. Hughes' Golden Numbers form letter and to know that "It is always a strange feeling—opening letters from people whose desire is so clearly intense. At this very moment, your desire is priority #1. It is now '11:33' and your case has just been completed. As always, it gives me a warm feeling to see that once again the numbers reveal their hidden meanings so willingly to someone who asks from the heart." Incidentally my Golden Lucky Number is 11 and so my lucky times are 11 a.m. or 2 p.m.