4 January 2021
Welcome to the first newsletter of the new year. I think we can all agree that 2020 was a fairly exceptional year, and not in a good way. 2021 has rolled around, and the common expectation is that it's going to be much better than 2020! I feel we're falling for some cognitive effect that rolling over the calendar provides us - and that maybe it's not going to turn out that way.
21 October 2016
A Chinese man appears to have invented a novel way to tell the future. He puts his hand down a woman's top, feels her breast, and presumably uses the information he gleans to work out what is in store for the woman. Of course, by using cold reading a fortune teller
1 August 1999
Winter is here, and it's time for all good skeptics to heed the call and flock to Auckland for the annual conference, where illuminating conversation and inspired addresses await. And then the same good skeptics can generate battle strategies to cope with all the fuss about the Millennium and the imminent end of the world. In the meantime, here's a copy of the Skeptic to read while making these important plans.
1 May 1988
In his predictably naughty way, Brian Edwards did a bit of stirring when he was the after-dinner speaker at the annual conference of the New Zealand Skeptics Society during the weekend. Skeptics, he needled, should have at least something to believe in. Members counter-stirred. At their annual meeting the next day, they passed a resolution "endorsing the existence of Santa Claus, but still expressing doubts about the tooth fairy."