Articles tagged with "wiki"

Clavicular, better known to his mum and dad as Braden Peters, is a 20 year old internet influencer who promotes an extreme beauty regime known as “looksmaxxing”.

Over the past month, I've watched two YouTube videos where the topic of the ridiculous nature of Guinness World Records (GWR) came up. First, I was a johnny-come-lately to hbomberguy's 2023 video on the history behind the Roblox 'Oof' sound, and the second was the first of two videos by Dan Olson of Folding Ideas about the inefficiency of the second season of Mr. Beast's game show. In the former, suspicion is cast over the legitimacy of Tommy Tallarico's records for video game concerts and video game composing. Meanwhile, Olson, albeit more briefly, questions whether the many records the Beast Games received are an unintentional monument to incompetence in the field of televised game shows. But whereas chasing after Guinness Records is used as a mark against Tallarico and Mr. Beast, I'm interested in the flaws in the awards process itself.

It all started in 1958 when Hillary and the British physiologist and mountaineer Griffith Pugh questioned whether Everest (29,031 ft or 8,848.86 m) could be climbed without supplemental oxygen, possibly achieving this by acclimatising at 20,000 ft for several months. Hillary surmised that the prolonged period required for acclimatisation meant that this trek would be far more costly than his first Everest climb. This was a fair assumption to make, as the expedition with which he made his first summit is said to have cost between £15,000 and £30,000, and took seven weeks to reach the summit, including leaving Kathmandu, and acclimatising over a period of weeks at multiple camps up the mountain. Cost was just one of several barriers to climbing Everest in the 1950s. By the time the Silver Hut Expedition set off, just 7 other people in 3 different expeditions had summited Everest between Hillary's first success and September 1960. Further, these expeditions are the only expeditions that are believed to have even occurred during this time. This time, Hillary estimated that this experiment could cost up to $120,000 USD.

If you are sick of being the skeptical 'voice of reason' in arguments, perhaps as an alternative to engaging in a proper discussion you could try using some logical fallacies, humor, or psychological tricks to confuse, disarm, or simply shut down your opponent.

In the last few months NASA has announced the detection of a third extrasolar object, named ATLAS, on its way through the solar system - following Oumuamua (in 2017) and Borisov (in 2019). We've only been detecting these objects that aren't gravitationally bound to our sun - visitors that fly through our solar system and then continue on their way, never to return - for the past decade or so, and there's good reason for this. Several projects have been created recently that attempt to detect objects that have the potential to collide with earth, such as Pan-STARRS (the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) and ATLAS (the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System). These two projects found Oumuamua and Comet Atlas respectively, whereas the other extrasolar object, Comet Borisov, was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov (an awesome guy who spotted it using one of the many telescopes he has designed and built himself and operates at his personal observatory).

I doubt anyone could have anticipated the degree to which the death of Pope Francis has drawn the attention of the internet. The fervour is likely fueled by the unexpected fan base that sprang up around the 2024 movie Conclave, a film about the quiet intrigues of cardinals as they select the next pope. I'm confident there is a media literacy paper in here about the intersection of prestige films with a meme culture informed by reality television. But until then, I'm enjoying a very niche form of mash-up humour while I can get it.

When I first became interested in skepticism back in the 90s, I started finding communities on the internet (little did I know that we had our own skeptical organisation here in Aotearoa/New Zealand), and one of the prominent people I encountered was Michael Shermer.

In Wellington, the School of Practical Philosophy (SPP) is likely best known to most denizens by sight rather than by name or reputation. Situated midway up a steep hill in the neighbourhood of Te Aro, the SPP premises is quite impressive from the sidewalk; The facade is stately, and the ground floor chattels are well-maintained and tidy. However, there is a pervasive feeling of… well, not exactly a heyday long past, but maybe a heyday that was never fully realised.

As best as I can ascertain, Colin Amery has passed. I mean, I'm certain the British architectural historian named Colin Amery is dead, as he warranted multiple obituaries and “In Memoriam”s in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus

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.

2021: A group called Doctors Stand Up For Vaccination releases an open letter to the New Zealand public stressing the importance of vaccination. The letter is signed by 6535 registered doctors.

1980: Colin Gardener and his neighbour Helena Bradley see a lioness near Gardener's home in Wellington. Which is notable because New Zealand has no indigenous big cats. A police search around the Meadowcrofts property turns up nothing. A few days later, Gardener and another neighbour, Maurice Bradley, catch another glimpse of the creature and determine that it is not a lioness but just an unusually big ex-domestic cat.

The Skeptical Calendar is 90% done and far be it for the Editors of this illustrious newsletter to even suggest its readers go out and be newsworthy, we might have a few days you want to aim for.

After some false starts over the past three years, I finally had the opportunity to attend a Gnostic Mass. As far as Occult/Esoteric groups go, the Gnostic Mass is one of, if not THE, most accessible occult ritual for an outsider to observe and partake in. To understand why attending a Gnostic mass in New Zealand was on my to-do list, it's pertinent to understand what it is and who it was written for.

The perfect group for total introverts.

I've written about Voices for Freedom many times in the past. For review, they're a group of anti-vaxxers and “freedom” lovers and generally anti-government agitators. They started back in 2020 during the first year of the pandemic. They claim to have quite a following, though of course, that's unverified.

I was in 9th grade in Canada when Columbine occurred, and alongside that tragedy came a burst of energy in Christian youth culture that arrived to save us poor sinners and goths. It also meant an uptick in documentaries that examined this modern iteration of the youth counter-counter culture (leaving us to perpetually wonder what the kids of Jesus Camp are doing). I missed out on youth group hijinx, as the lure of Christian rock and rounds of chubby bunny was not that strong, and I was that sort of teenage atheist jerk that even my most devoted Sally Anne friends knew I was a lost cause.

An article in Stuff yesterday, reprinted from the Telegraph, showcased the efforts of a scientist to bring statistics to bear on the problem of cryptids. Floe Foxen has supposedly written a couple of papers, yet to be peer reviewed, that look at the “probability” of Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings being something more mundane than a hominid and plesiosaur respectively.

In his book, Islands of the Dawn: The story of alternative spiritualities in New Zealand, Robert Ellwood explores why New Zealand is attractive to fringe religious groups/alternative spiritualities, and why early settlers and guru seekers of the 1960s-70s loved those groups right back. However, not all groups caused the same level of headaches for the government like the Ananda Marga and Scientology did, or had the same cultural profile as the sannyasins of Rajneesh movement; Ellwood had a sizable list of secret societies that had gone defunct by the 90s.

I know my contributions tend to call back to the prehistoric time of 2002 to 2006, when I was completing my first of three (and in three years, fingers crossed, four) degrees. This time, rather than being a ploy to justify my continuing procrastination on the next instalment of the MLM series, my inspiration came from the recent skeptics in cyberspace meetup. Discussion arose around Mensa and whether they were a viable, alternative audience for persons unsuccessful in promoting their pseudoscience via NZ Skeptics. As with any topic where I have a personal stake and Mark Honeychurch, like a moth to a flame, is drawn to its more absurdist elements, anyone on that Zoom call was treated to an awkward, albeit brief, verbal tussle about who was going to write about what.

We don't often cover sports stories in our newsletter, and I'm certainly not one for writing them, but yesterday we heard the news of the untimely death of Shane Warne, the Australian Cricketer. Warne was only 52 and died of a heart attack.

I've been watching the Facebook page of Voices For Freedom. To me it's staggering the output of their page, with their frequent posts. often several a day. They have over 7,000 people following the page.

Billy TK held an anti-lockdown rally in Auckland on Saturday. The rally was accompanied by a variety of interesting flags, signs and chants:

I told you all three weeks ago that I was going to visit the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosicrucians, and I can report that I survived the meeting intact. My friend Tim and I had a great chat with three of the group's members about their beliefs, and about the history of the organisation. Much of what we heard sounded very familiar, with an organisational structure that reminded me of Scientology (making your way up the “Bridge”) and a belief in visualisation that was akin to Rhonda Byrne's “The Secret”, where if you imagine something enough it will come true for you.

I'm sure most people saw the intriguing news that a tall prism shaped metal structure, now known as the Utah Monolith, had been found by conservationists in the desert in the US, sticking out from the rock floor of a canyon. It's been great to see sleuths figure out where the monolith is located, using flight plans and google maps satellite view (in a slot canyon in Lockhart Basin in San Juan County, Utah), approximately when it was placed, using historical satellite photos (between August 2015 and October 2016) and how it was made, with several people visiting the site (it's hollow and made from riveted stainless steel sheets). However, the mystery of who put it there has still not been solved.

The amazing members of the GSoW (Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia) group have struck again. In recent years the group have done some amazing work creating new Wikipedia articles and rewriting existing ones on topics of importance to skepticism, including quite a few that are related to New Zealand - including pages for skeptic Siouxsie Wiles, psychic Jeanette Wilson and even our organisation, the NZ Skeptics. We've also had Susan Gerbic, head of the project, come to New Zealand twice in the last few years to talk to us at our conferences about both the GSoW project and her work using sting operations to bust psychics.

You probably already heard that Exxon knew about climate change back in the 70s and 80s, and chose to double down on the misinformation, but now, as an EV driver myself I was interested to learn the latest news to come out about climate change denial relating to big Auto, specifically Ford and GM. In the first part of an investigation by E&E News, we find out that the automakers were well aware that car emissions caused climate change 50 years ago. Their own scientists were telling top executives that emissions from the vehicles they were producing would lead to climate change.

In the scheme invested money receives a return of 30% profit after a month. It works as a classic Ponzi scheme, where the incoming money from new members is used to pay members whose investment is withdrawn. These schemes work while they gain in popularity, but stop working as soon as they stop growing. The most famous example of this is the Bernie Madoff fraud, where it's estimated that $65 billion was lost.

A Christian blogger has warned that mandalas in adult colouring in books could be dangerous. She suggests that the magical new age claims made about mandalas are true, that they have the ability to heal if you meditate on them and that a good way to do this is to colour them in. Of course, as these magical claims are not Christian, they must be bad and Christians should stay away from them.

There has been a major end of the world prediction about every 100 years or so from 66AD onwards. Then from 1500AD (16th Century) every 10 years, then by the 1970s pretty much every year.

The NHS are advertising for a spiritual healer.