18 August 2025
In episode 9 of the Telepathy Tapes' extra episodes, titled the Talk Tracks, host Ky Dickens has Adam Curry on to talk about the “science”, in an episode titled “The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality”. According to Ky, dam is apparently an inventor and “deep thinker”, although in the episode he describes himself as an “armchair scientist” and “consciousness researcher” - although all I could find of his research online was a single paper on Google Scholar, where he is listed as the third author on a paper about retrocausation. Two websites I found that have profiles on him both listed many research papers, but none of the papers had his name attached to them, despite the fact that they were listed in one case on a website he owns, which sells an app he created (Entangled), and in the other case were listed on his profile page under a picture of him. So I'm left thinking that maybe he's not so much of a researcher after all. Although even if he had been an author on those papers, looking at the quality of them and the places they've been published (and many haven't been published anywhere) makes me think that it still wouldn't be that much of a flex.
9 June 2025
It's been interesting to see the world's richest man going toe to toe with the world's most powerful man. Nope, actually, interesting isn't the right word. I'm not sure what you call it when you can't tear your eyes away from two influential grown men acting like spoiled children. Maybe disappointing? Like when you tell your child you're disappointed in them. Anyway, Trump's still not pressed the big red nuclear button, and we're already nearly an eighth of the way through his presidency, so maybe we'll survive this yet.
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).
20 February 2023
P-hacking is a data analysis technique that can be used to present patterns as statistically significant when there is really no underlying effect. It is a misuse of statistics and a misrepresentation, plain and simple, and disappointingly it's usually perpetrated by scientists.
13 May 2018
17 December 2017
In September, a 70 year old man apparently burst into flames in London. It's a sad event, and a horrible way to die. The press have started calling it a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion - the idea that people sometimes just randomly burn.
1 February 2016
Retraction Watch is a great website. As the name implies, it focuses on a key aspect of quality control in science: the retraction of scientific papers that have already passed peer-review and were published when serious concerns about those papers come to light.
1 August 2004
We have recently received a message from OZ. Not transtasman Big Brother, but the cousins in France. OZ stands for Observatoire Zététique, a group of skeptical investigators (Zetetic is much the same as skeptic, as every Victorian schoolboy knew. The Greeks had not just one word for it, but two).
1 May 2002
University days are a great time to explore new directions. But sometimes you may end up a long way from where you thought you were going.
1 May 1992
There is something in the German psyche which has a peculiar fascination for the medieval...
1 February 1992
Myocardial infarction (heart attack, coronary thrombosis) is commonly caused by a blood clot blocking one of the three coronary arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle. It is the commonest cause of death (4,000 p.a.) in New Zealand and other Western countries. Specialists have long wondered whether early administration of a fibrinolytic (blood clot dissolving drug) would reduce mortality.
1 February 1991
The results of a study of women attending the Bristol Cancer Help Centre have concentrated a few minds. The findings published in The Lancet last week may be baffling, but they are undoubtedly disturbing: women with breast cancer who attended the centre in addition to having conventional treatment fared very much worse than a control group of women who received conventional treatment alone.
1 August 1990
I was first conscious that I had met Procrustes about 20 years ago, though I did not at that time know his name. At the beginning of a course of instruction on how to examine medical patients the clinical tutor had us don headphones plugged into an amplifier while his stethoscope wandered over the chest of a lady who each year donated her time to the greater glory of Medicine. She had a diseased mitral heart valve and we were invited to identify the "low pitched rumbling diastolic murmur" and "There! Listen carefully!
1 August 1988
Copyright © 1986, Journal of Irreproducible Results