12 May 2025
The story of the Commonwealth Covenant Church (CCC) has been hanging out in the chasms of my Google Drive for some time. A while ago I was asked about cults or sects that might be in the Wairarapa besides the 2x2s. This group came up in my search, although much of what I found about their activities was not based in the Wairarapa but rather in the Hutt Valley. The CCC is not the easiest group to research, as their numbers had thinned considerably by the early 2000s, and numbered just six by 2013. They were a long-dead congregation by the time anything would be recorded on the web. Archival records are limited (or restricted), and when the CCC does warrant a mention in a book or academic work, it's limited to one or two lines.
23 May 2022
Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, which I recently bought from a charity shop and have been reading before bed, contains a chapter on cosmology. Explaining the evidence for the Big Bang, it discusses, among other things, how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently discovered the cosmic microwave background. In 1962, adapting an obsolete satellite transmission antenna for radio astronomy, they detected an unexpected noise. They pointed their antenna at various astronomical objects, and at New York City, but the signal came from all directions. They examined their instrument and ruled out possible radiation from the antenna itself. Eventually they reached out to Princeton University, where a team led by Robert Dicke had been making theoretical calculations that explained the signal. For their discovery, Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
1 May 2013
Some Skeptics have been surprised that our organisation has been so restrained in its response to the purported moa sighting near Cragieburn. As we see it, the whole issue is fraught with difficulty.
1 August 2005
Apparently mediums and the paranormal have replaced cop shows as the latest television drama genre of choice -- if you are to believe TV3's marketing, whether news or promo puff pieces, there's fact behind the fiction. Yeah right....
1 May 1993
Some Skeptics have been surprised that our organisation has been so restrained in its response to the purported moa sighting near Cragieburn. As we see it, the whole issue is fraught with difficulty.
1 November 1988
Doris Stokes, the medium superstar, was a fraud, says a British author, Ian Wilson, in his book, "The After Death Experience."
1 February 1988
Evidence of the Shroud. By lan Wilson. Macmillan, 1986. 158 pp. $46.15.