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:
29 November 2021
As I write this there's news breaking about a new variant of concern of the COVID virus, now named as Omicron.
15 March 2021
Following on from last week's stories about the Tamakis saying they won't be getting vaccinated, and Ken Ring saying he predicted our recent earthquake, there have been a couple of interesting developments.
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:
4 October 2015
The Pharmacy Council is trying to change part of its Code of Ethics: Here is the old code:
1 May 2015
Why do individuals who read the same information react differently? To some extent, beliefs affect individuals' reactions. While this is normal, it can be problematic if beliefs interfere with objective reasoning.
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 May 1999
I AM looking for ideas. For the last four years, I have had a challenge to psychics for them to find a promissory note with a value of $50,000. For the first six months, it was located within five kilometres of my tourist activity - Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World in Wanaka. I had two serious psychic challenges, each of whom seriously failed!
1 August 1996
DARK NATURE -- A NATURAL HISTORY OF EVIL, by Lyall Watson; Hodder & Stoughton, 1995; $19.95
1 August 1994
Congratulations on featuring the superb contribution from Peter Münz in Skeptic 31. It seems to concur with a passage from Antony Flew I have just been reading. He says that to know something is "to believe what is in fact true, and to be rationally justified in that belief". Like most people shivering in the postmodernist shadow, my first reaction was to draw back, thinking that all seemed a bit too definite. Surely it's not still allowed to be definite about something?
1 February 1991
Even those who find the new look Skeptical Inquirer a little tedious will have to admit it is more stylish than the old. Reading the certainly-not-tedious The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog edited by Ted Schulz (now available in Wellington at Whitcoulls and Unity Books at $45.00) I was astonished by the similarity between the logo for the Hypno-
1 August 1988
"Critical thinking" is the name given to a way of reasoning, in everyday language, which is a great benefit to everybody who uses it. It is a tool which can be used to improve our understanding of other people's arguments, to improve our own reasoning, to improve decision making, and to aid communication. It is especially useful for skeptics and debunkers. It is also a new idea, since in the past people have never been taught how to reason properly using everyday language, which is how most of us reason most of the time. Most of us could improve our thinking considerably by using critical thinking methods. I would like to see the Skeptics involved in the promotion of this subject.