Articles tagged with "years"

I was particularly interested in some feedback from Dr Mike Joy, for whom I have the greatest respect as a scientist who is prepared to talk truth to politicians. He took me to task for being overly enthusiastic about the green energy revolution. He mentioned that the revolution is not occurring, and that with renewables we are currently only adding energy to the amount we already consume. In this he is quite correct.

Our first article in this week's newsletter is from Patrick, who has summarised a recent Nature article about potential underestimation of sea-level rise over the next 60 years. Patrick's article ends with a quote from Edison that, when I read it, seemed too good to be true. So, like any good skeptic, I jumped onto Google to see if there was any truth to the quote. It turns out that it's likely to be true, at least in broad strokes.

Apart from the war in Iran, which of course has dominated everything over the week, there has been some interesting news on the climate - albeit rather disturbing for New Zealand and the Pacific.

This is a review of “The alarmist: fifty years measuring climate change”, by Dave Lowe, Victoria University press 2021.

I would like to make some general observations, and then review a recently published book which synthesises most of what Ben Reid (MEMIA) called a “polycrisis” in his book I previously reviewed.

We had our AGM last night, which was well-attended and ran smoothly. We now have two new committee members, Dave la Rooy and Tony Lord (and as a skeptic I have to assume it's just coincidence that our two new committee members are a Lord and a King). It's great to have them on board, and as a committee we look forward to working with them both over the coming years. Bronwyn will continue on as our capable Chair, and it was pointed out that our new constitution has a five year limit for the Chair role - as a way to ensure we have fresh blood at the helm. This means that we only have three years left to squeeze all we can out of Bronwyn's amazing abilities, although I'm presuming from her passion for skepticism that she'll stay on the committee long after her term as Chair is over. Tim Wright has been reconfirmed as our Treasurer for the next year, and I'm staying on as Secretary - mostly because nobody else seems to want to take on either of these roles! If you're interested in what happened at the AGM, you can read Bronwyn's report on our last 12 months below. I'll also try to remember to add the minutes of our AGM to a future newsletter, once I've written them up properly.

I am writing in the hope that my current confusion might be cleared up by the membership of the NZ Skeptics. This concerns climate change, and more specifically the need to reduce carbon emissions – the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I was in the middle of compiling a “Fortnight in Skeptical History” article when I realised that over two years, back when the newsletter was released weekly, I had already covered both weeks in the period from October 13th to October 26th. While I had to scrap that idea, I saw my entry for Zholia Alemi and was curious about the progress of her legal case in the UK. I covered Alemi in my October 2023 article about fake doctors or doctors who worked fraudulently in New Zealand. As I wrote back then:

As a calendar geek, I was surprised to hear calendar conversion raised as a reason the rapture didn't happen as predicted.

I've just spent an enjoyable week on holiday in Taupō celebrating my 50th birthday. It's amazing to think that this massive lake is actually the caldera of a supervolcano that, for the last 30,000 years or so, has erupted on average around once every thousand years, and that it last erupted about 1,800 years ago. Staying in a property overlooking the lake certainly made me think a little about my own mortality, and my family's wellbeing. Given that, according to Wikipedia, the last eruption “devastated much of the North Island”, I guess it's more than just the local residents who will be affected when the volcano next erupts.

How long can humans really live without changing their actual form, for example by doing something drastic like a brain transplant, cloning, or uploading themselves to the cloud?

Last weekend three of us intrepid skeptics attended a creationist talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”, given by Mike Collins at the Abundant Life church in Wellington. Mike is an aircraft maintenance engineer who, since leaving his real job, has shacked up with Creation Ministries International (CMI), the evangelical Christian group who run the creation.com website and is one of their regular speakers at churches all around New Zealand.

In Wellington, we're hoping to take a trip to the Abundant Life church early next month. The church's pastor, Hamish Thomson, recently took over the running of the quarterly Prayers at Parliament meetings that myself and other skeptics have attended in the past, but this isn't why we'll be visiting. On May the 4th, in the evening, the church will be hosting guest speaker Mike Collins (no, not the astronaut who didn't land on the moon, this one's a speaker for Creation Ministries International (CMI)) giving a talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”. With a title like that, I think we'll be in for a real treat - a fairly major bending of the truth to fit a conservative religious narrative.

What are the chances that we will make contact with an alien civilisation?

Originally published in the November 2008 issue of our journal, The New Zealand Skeptic

About a week ago (November 16th-17th 2024, for those reading way in the future) we held our annual NZ Skeptics conference, and for the first time the conference was a joint effort with the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH).

I've been in contact with a lawyer on and off over the last couple of years regarding one of our old members - old both in terms of when they joined the society, and in terms of their age. Jim Ring was a frequent contributor to our Journal, the NZ Skeptic, writing both articles on a wide range of topics and many Letters to the Editor. Sadly Jim passed away last year, and the conversations with the lawyer, who was a friend of Jim's in his later life, were about a collection of books of skeptical interest that he had collected over his lifetime and wanted to donate to the NZ Skeptics.

I saw a Facebook post from a friend that caught my interest. A weird thing happened to him on the morning of the 17th of April; he explained it as something from a horror movie. He had a doorbell where he had never put batteries in the ringer unit, but despite the lack of batteries at 6:30 am it started to ring, and continued to ring as he picked it up and shook it to double check it didn't have batteries. Indeed, it didn't.

For those who were paying attention when reading the newsletter from two weeks ago, when I published a plea for help from an ex-member of the NZ Skeptics regarding a photo his mother had taken in Auckland, you may have noticed something odd. Despite claiming to be a skeptic, there was a strange sentence in the middle of the email we received. It read:

Plissken Boon is attempting to warn the world of the catastrophe that is about to overtake the Covid vaccinated and unvaccinated. I can't find anything about him and he doesn't have a bio. He appears to live in NZ. A reasonably complete version of his jeremiad is on substack A Very, Very Clever Way ... To Kill You! (substack.com) dated 14th January 2023. His writing is awful...he uses ellipses frequently and unnecessarily, his screed is very long and disorganised, full of repetition and much belittling of those who cannot see the truth of his research.

In my newsletter article last week, one of the dates referred to the 2018 trial of Zholia Alemi, a former Auckland University medical student who was able to practise psychiatry across the NHS and evade discovery for two decades before being undone by her own greed. I was reminded about two other, peculiar cases of fraudster doctors in NZ and thought that it would make a good article and segment in the most recent episode of the Yeah...Nah podcast.

Speaking of misinformation, myself and some other skeptics in Wellington went to watch Ms. Information last night, as part of the NZ International Film Festival. As Craig said last week, Ms. Information is a documentary about Siouxsie Wiles, created by Gwen Isaac and her crew who followed Siouxsie on and off for around two years, starting at the beginning of the pandemic. The documentary focused less on the content of the misinformation that Siouxsie and others tackled during the early days of the pandemic, and more on the abuse that was hurled at her - up to and including quite a few death threats. Not only has Siouxsie been a long-time skeptic, speaking at several of our conferences and helping to run the Auckland Skeptics in the Pub group for many years, but her husband Steven, also featured in the documentary, was a committee member of the Skeptics for several years.

Having been a member for many years, I think it is about time that I made a confession, which I am told is good for the soul even if it is not very good for my continued membership. I am a committed church member, even though the word “committed” makes me think of mental institutions and prisons. I think of the scriptural stories as parabolic and written to guide one's behaviour, definitely not intended as a scientific text. Therefore when a story is physically impossible or extremely unlikely, I simply shrug my shoulders and think that it is a fable and the important part is the message it is portraying. I would never think of using the Bible as a physics or astronomy textbook any more than I would use the physical science texts as a moral guide. Interestingly, I note that many people who have no religious affiliation take great comfort in thinking that when they die they will meet up with old friends who have “gone before”. I think it would be churlish of me to tell them of my doubts in that regard. Also, I have enough humility to recognise that we are still very far from knowing everything about the physical world.

Happy Halloween! Today, as this newsletter goes out, it's officially the day of Halloween, or All Hallow's Eve, though, as I write this, in my neighbourhood, children are expected at my door this evening (Sunday).

NASA recently held a press teleconference where they announced that they will be investigating UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This is a new term being used instead of UFOs, given that UFO suffers from both not being very descriptive (Unidentified things people see in the sky might not be Flying, and they might not be Objects - planets, clouds and aurora are often mistakenly thought to be mysterious objects, but none of them are flying; and the Northern and Southern aurora aren't objects, just cool light shows caused by solar particles), and having a lot of baggage attached to it - when people read UFO, they instantly think aliens. Here's NASA announcing their project:

Several years ago at a Skeptics in the Pub meeting, maybe back in 2014 or 2015, we got onto the topic of the popularity of baby names. At the time, someone predicted that there were likely to be sudden increases in usage for names that had become well known through popular media, especially names that are either rarely used or fictional. Their examples to illustrate the idea were Luke and Leia, from Star Wars, with the prediction that these names would spike at some point after 1977, the release year of the first Star Wars movie.

We've covered the Peter Ellis case before, and indeed, it was a particular focus of NZ Skeptics activity in the 1990s.

Accelerated Christian Education (known as A-C-E or ACE) is in the news, and for all the wrong reasons. ACE is a homeschooling curriculum from the US (Texas) which is accredited in New Zealand, and covers children from age 5 through to college level. Here's Duane Howard, Vice President of ACE, talking about what he thinks education should be for (check out some particularly icky stuff he says around 32 minutes in):

Most of us will know Ken Ring both for his claim that he can predict the weather by looking at the moon, and his supposed ability to predict earthquakes. Here's Ken talking about how you can supposedly also use rainbows to predict the weather:

I heard something interesting from my teenage daughter the other day, a story about some of her friends who have suddenly picked up a tic - a type of involuntary physical movement. I'd heard about this before, a couple of years ago, so I went looking online for any articles to confirm what I'd remembered from before; the idea that this is a mass psychogenic illness.

What do the Brontosaurus, Harry Houdini, and a phrenology bust have in common?

Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, more commonly known as Baba Vanga, was a Bulgarian psychic. Although she died back in 1996, she was kind enough to leave behind some predictions that may or may not actually be about potential future events. Honestly, the Wikipedia Page for Baba Vanga leaves me suspicious about how much of what is attributed to her she actually said, and how much is just being made up by others (and it's also one of the worst Wikipedia pages I've ever seen grammatically - presumably it's mainly been written by people for whom English is not a fluent language).

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully launched!

The Australian Skeptics have spent the last few years working hard on an amazing project, led by Richard Saunders, to find and analyse as many psychic predictions as they could find.

Our recent Skepticon saw Richard Saunders, from the Australian Skeptics, present the results of The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project.

Rex Warwood sadly died late last week. He was a long time reporter, and later editor, for the Franklin County News, and was apparently well liked. However in recent years he appears to have succumbed to conspiratorial thinking, and he became a vocal critic of vaccination against COVID, saying things online such as:

Last week Mark published an item from Stuart Landsborough, from Wanaka's Puzzling World about his recent epiphany about how we can deal with climate change. I found Stuart's item contained some great points, and it resonated with me. I'm worried about whether we'll be able to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The government is really pushing the COVID vaccine at the moment, including with this weekend's Super Saturday - where around 130,000 vaccines were administered in a single day.

In 2008, the This Week In Tech podcasting network had been going for three years and a number of related topic podcasts started up on the network including one called Futures in Biotech. Modelled on the idea of having a weekly podcast on a specialist subject, a new podcast split away by Professor Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University called This Week In Virology (TWIV). It was inspired by this Week In Tech and given virus is also used in technology, the new podcast developed the tagline “the podcast about viruses – the kind that make you sick”. The first episode was on West Nile Virus and as someone who had no previous interest in viruses, the show fascinated me and fourteen years later I'm still a regular listener as I both enjoy science as well as having gotten to know the team well over the years.

This past week has seen the release of the IPCC's 6th assessment report on climate change. The report is issued every seven years. It's become increasingly obvious with successive reports, that the world is in danger of severe consequences of climate change, and it's increasingly certain (to the point of virtual certainty) that humans are the cause of it.

Allison Mack was once famous for her role in the TV show Smallville, a spin-off show about Superman. However, a few years ago she joined a group called NXIVM who promised to help her on the path to enlightenment and happiness. The group pulled in more famous people, including other TV celebrities, the director of What the Bleep Do We Know, and the Bronfman sisters, heirs to the Seagram fortune.

Over the past few weeks there have been various extreme weather events that are now being attributed to climate change, whereas once scientists were more cagey on the issue - saying that it's never possible to blame any one event on climate change. But the evidence is stacking up, and we see temperature records being broken - 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record.

Last weekend I visited the Home Show in Christchurch. All the usual suspects were there, Bioptron, Shuzi and the Magnetic and Titanium healer. This was surprising as I had scanned the exhibitor list in the morning and they did not appear. So I suspect they are on some hidden/covert/backdoor list.

Last week Mark wrote an interesting item in the newsletter around Scientologists using deceptive means to lure people in to their “courses”. We got some feedback from a reader in the US - we love getting feedback! - so I thought I'd share it. Ray from Philadelphia writes:

Apparently, back in 2016 dozens of American Embassy diplomats in Cuba felt sick, and this has been dubbed Havana Syndrome. I'd never heard of this, but it came to my attention through an article written by local skeptic Robert Bartholemew.

I wish I was making this news story up - partially because it's getting a little bit tiresome writing about US politics. However, the recently elected Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who likes to ride on the QAnon conspiracy carriage of the Trump Train, has been put through the wringer in the last week. Journalists have been poring over her social media history and documenting her words, shares and likes - some of which are so weird and wonderful it doesn't take much to debunk them.

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.

This past week has seen the news of development of successful vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The vaccines have a claimed efficacy of nearly 95%. This is good news, and a triumph for science and medical technology that they've been able to be developed so quickly. There are other companies that have vaccines in the pipeline so it's likely that there will be several more vaccines available in the coming months and years.

Enrico Fermi was a genius, and his mind worked lightning fast. When his co-workers were audibly speculating on how many alien civilisations might live in our galaxy, he simply looked up and asked: “Where are they?”

On Wednesday a group of us skeptics visited the Ark Man, Rod Walsh, who has been over in New Zealand from Australia on tour. Rod's schtick is that god told him in the '90s to build a scale model of Noah's Ark from Genesis. Apparently the day after he was told this by god, he turned on the radio and two people were having a conversation about the ark - which proved to him that god's voice had been real. Rod has now built 6 scale replicas of Noah's Ark over the last 20 years, and has been touring the world with his scale models since the '90s.

Yesterday I went to an "Allergy Free and Healthy Living Show" in Porirua. Sadly there were very few stands at the expo that were about allergies - there was Allergy NZ and Coeliac New Zealand. Most of the stands were selling fake cures for big bucks.

An Indonesian teenager has apparently "baffled" doctors by laying eggs. He's laid about 20 eggs over the last 2 years, and x-ray images show an egg inside him before he lays it. The x-ray image makes it unlikely that sleight of hand is involved - he's probably not pretending to produce an egg from internally, but actually just making it appear in his hand at the right time.

One of the issues with fundraising sites like IndieGogo and Kickstarter is that there's a lack of adequate oversight to ensure that the products being offered are actually plausible. Sometimes things end up on my radar that look too good to be true, and at other times they're just plain ridiculous.

A couple of years ago I went along to a talk in Wellington about a new device called the QTB (Quantum TrailBlazer), now rebranded as a QSB - Quantum Scalar Box. Back then the device was made from a piece of sewage pipe spray painted black, with several blue LEDs around the top. We were told to believe that the device was emitting "scalar waves" (a pseudo-scientific idea) on the Solfeggio frequencies. I sat there for half an hour while the device went through a range of these frequencies, supposedly healing areas of my life.

This is an argument I've never heard before against an idea I occasionally hear - that belief in science is just like religion, because it requires faith. In fact, I last heard this argument only a couple of weeks ago.

Robert Hunt spoke on behalf of Creation Ministries International this morning at Upper Hutt Baptist Church.

I went to see Creation Ministries International speaker Jonathan Sarfati give a couple of talks in Wellington last week. Jonathan was brought up in New Zealand, and was once the national chess champion.

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.

There was a Republican candidate debate on Wednesday, and I thought it would be good to look at the wrong-headed thinking of some of the candidates regarding vaccines.

He is a nuclear physicist, whose PhD focussed on nuclear decay. He worked in electronics for the military for nearly 40 years, and argues that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

In recognition of the Apocalyptic theme of the upcoming Skeptics Conference, Vicki Hyde looks back in the vault to 2012 to see what doomsday predictions we managed to survive.

Warwick Don will be sorely missed by New Zealand's skeptical community. He was the last of the active founding members of the New Zealand Skeptics, and took pride in recent years to be the only one to have attended all our conferences. He served as Chair from the founding to 1992, and continued to show an interest in things scientific and skeptical well after having handed the torch on.

Recently released United States Air Force files have confirmed that a suspected UFO photographed in the skies above Auckland more than 60 years ago was actually just a cloud.

It's about 25 years since I joined the NZ Skeptics, and eight years since I took on the editorship of this magazine. It's been fun, but it's time I handed the NZ Skeptic on to other hands, so this will be my last issue as editor. Thank-you to all who have contributed over the years; together we've covered a lot of ground. I thought I'd indulge myself a little here by looking back over past issues and some of the material in them.

Matthew Willey finds it difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday season.

Alison Campbell reviews_ Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, _by Pope Brock. Three Rivers Press, New York.

If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch, says a recent article in the_ Economist. _Barry Brill looks at recent climate sensitivity estimates and considers the possibility of a downgrade.

The dramatic rescue of three women kept prisoner for 10 years in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, came too late for the mother of one of them (NZ Herald, 9 May).

Stuart Landsborough conducts a small experiment which may land him in big trouble.

If the beliefs of a sizeable number of people turn out to be correct, this will be the final issue of the NZ Skeptic. According to a survey of 16,262 people in 21 countries conducted by market research company Ipsos for Reuters News, two percent of respondents strongly agree, and eight percent somewhat agree, with the proposition that 21 December 2012, the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar, marks the end of the world. Perhaps surprisingly agreement is highest in China (20 percent), while the Germans and Indonesians (four percent) are relatively dubious. One could perhaps question the representativeness of the sample (comprised of people who have agreed to take part in online surveys), but there must be a lot of people out there who are really worried about this.

How should a skeptic relate to those who have other belief systems?

Michael Edmonds' article in the latest issue (NZ Skeptic 101) was very interesting, especially laying out the groundwork for non-chemists. If I still had science classes, I would have them all read it and may pass it on to some friends to use.

We've lost another light against the darkness, with the death of Denis Dutton. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, gave us the image of the guttering candle, but I think Denis would be the first to cite another comment from that work: "It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

Rayna Ramsey produced a photographic record of this years NZ Skeptics conference.

After 17 years as chair-entity of the NZ Skeptics, Vicki Hyde has stepped down. Annette Taylor talks to her about life, the universe and taniwhas.

At last year's NZ Skeptics conference Bob Brockie reflected on his career as a newspaper columnist and explained why he has no future with the Mormon Church.

Twelve years after it induced panic among parents world-wide, a paper linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism has been withdrawn (NZ Herald, 4 February).

THE 2009 annual NZ Skeptics Conference in Wellington was its usual mix of good times and thought-provoking material, though with some unique touches. The Kingsgate Hotel was a rather more luxurious venue than we're used to; the few problems that arose were mostly due to the high number of late enrolments, making this one of the largest gatherings in recent years.

A visit to Lake Rotoroa in Nelson Lakes National Park is rewarded with a remarkable sighting.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movie Expelled (Editorial, NZ Skeptic 86) has scored a spectacular public relations own-goal at a screening in Minneapolis (New York Times, 21 March). University of Minnesota developmental biologist PZ Myers, best known for his blog Pharyngula, was one of many who took up the offer to register on-line for the pre-release public screening.

A strange transformation has overtaken the murky world of the creationists. This article is based on a presentation to the 2007 NZ Skeptics Conference.

In NZ Skeptic 82, John Welch wrote that there was something about general practice which attracts an interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Is it acceptable for medical graduates with a science degree to be allowed to carry on in this manner? Should we amend the medical registration so they can't? Is legislation needed to alter the culture-of doctors and society generally? This article is based on a presentation to the 2007 NZ Skeptics Conference.

The disappearance of UFOs and little green men has been reported on once more, this time by the Dominion Post (3 April - see NZ Skeptic 77).

One of New Zealand's most senior journalists, and a long-standing member of the NZ Skeptics, has announced his retirement (Dominion Post, 2 December, Sunday Star Times, 3 December). Frank Haden has been best known in recent years for his columns in the Sunday Star Times, but his 50 year career in journalism has included time as editor of the Sunday Times and assistant editor of the Dominion.

Debunked! by G Charpak & H Broch, translator BK Holland. Johns Hopkins University Press, Reviewed by Bernard Howard.

Demands for equal time cut both ways.

Genealogy as normally practised gives us a very misleading view of our genetic heritage. This article was originally presented at the 2005 Skeptics Conference in Rotorua.

The Mormon church: anti-science and pro-repression. Still.

Could it be that visitations from flying saucers, which have been so frequent over the last 60 years, are now on the wane? Or is something more sinister going on? British UFO-watching clubs, it seems, may have to close because of a lack of sightings, and dwindling interest (The Guardian, 11 August).

When it comes to environmental issues, it's not always easy for a skeptic to decide where to stand

Bill Taylor explains some of the thinking behind the Time-Line installation, "Genesis Aotearoa", at Victoria University (See also Page 13)

I am always astonished that famous mystical persons, such as the Virgin Mary (who was transubstantiated into an Australian fencepost in February) reveal themselves to us mere mortals. I once had an experience like that.

Ancient Phoenicians in New Zealand? A recent book makes the claim, but the evidence doesn't bear scrutiny.

We Dawkins fans have been waiting since "Unweaving the Rainbow" in 1998 for this. Unlike its predecessors, it is not written around a single theme, but is a collection of Dawkins's comments and reviews of the past 25 years, on a variety of topics, reflecting his wide-ranging interests and passions. His editor, Latha Menon, has arranged 32 of these into six groups and a final letter to his ten-year-old daughter on "Belief". In addition to a general Preface, Dawkins has written a short introduction to each group.

Two recent items in the overseas press show that NZ is lagging behind in recognising that the child sex abuse panic has been greatly overblown. In a case which closely paralleled the Christchurch Creche, Dawn Read and Christopher Lillie, Newcastle, were cleared in court of molesting children in a nursery eight years ago, says the Guardian (July 31). Despite this they were fired from their jobs and hounded into hiding by the media and the community. They have just won a libel case against the review team who assessed evidence from the children, the Newcastle City Council and the local Evening Chronicle.

When I spoke at the conference two and a half years ago, argument was rife as to when the next millennium would begin. Now, there is no doubt we are well launched into the third thousand-year period since something important was supposed to have happened.

Singaporean ghostbusters are turning to hi-tech equipment as they search for paranormal phenomena, reports the Evening Post (September 9).

Skepticism is very much concerned with assessing the quality of evidence in support of a particular claim. But evidence means different things to different people. In the first of a two-part series, Jim Ring examines the legal profession's view of the matter.

My brain hurts. I haven't used it in some years, so there's no surprise really. After managing to avoid external employment for a goodly time, a job has finally got its teeth into me and won't let go. Which is not to say I've been totally lazy at home these past years, there's been free-lunch work to do and projects such as the NZ Skeptic to help pass time. But all of these could be done in the privacy of one's own home, dressed in striped jarmies if the mood took and it often did.

I wished I'd tried this one when I was at Gisborne Girl's High. An Oklahoma student has been suspended from school for casting a spell against a teacher, reports the Dominion (Monday October 30). The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on behalf of the student and also charged the school with repeatedly violating her rights by seizing notebooks she used to write horror stories and barring her from drawing or wearing signs of the pagan religion Wicca. No mention was made of how the teacher was faring…

Wherein intrepid ace reporter Vicki Hyde spills the beans on what Skeptics get up to at their annual meetings…

Presenting the evidence just isn't enough

Remember the '90s? It was the decade when:

Three sketpics go head to head with a creationist lecturer.

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!

ROBERT Temple's book The Sirius Mystery suggests that astronauts from Sirius visited Earth in ancient times, 5000 years or more ago. These beings were amphibious humanoids, with the lower body fish-tailed. The evidence for this amazing assertion hangs largely on legend and folklore plus one piece of very puzzling astronomical evidence.

Perhaps it's a coincidence, but many experts in non-proven schemes fall on their own swords. For example, Hoxsey died of cancer, and recently a Lower Hutt clairvoyant went bankrupt (due to unforeseen circumstances). Dr Rajko Medenica, the Yugoslavian specialist whose unorthodox treatments created devoted patients and determined enemies, died at the early age of 58 (Bay Of Plenty Times December 3 1997). He practised in South Carolina and drew patients from around the world, including Muhammad Ali, the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran and the late Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. He served 17 months in a Swiss prison two years ago for fraud, many saying that his unusual methods were not based on science, but that he preyed on those that had lost hope. He obviously didn't do the three guys mentioned much good either.

Ten or twenty years ago, prominent overseas creationists once toured in a blaze of publicity. They spoke in public schools and received plenty of air time on National Radio and prime time TV. Some of us were out there fighting, and we felt we won most of the major battles.

THE GREYS may have crash landed on Earth in 1947, but the real invasion happened about two years ago when Bill Barker's SCHWA merchandise first hit the streets. Since then it seems that there is Grey merchandise for every possible cultural slipstream; for the young and hip there's trendy skateboarding gear, Fimo rave-pendants and drug paraphernalia ("Take me to your dealer"); while for the committed believer there are various clay, bronze and pewter renditions of the aliens, with or without crashed saucer-craft, in numerous commemorative editions.

Another "I've seen the light" American quack whizzed through New Zealand recently, spreading his own magical brew of antioxidants, lacto-vegetarian diets, bioFlavonoid herbs, and, wait for it, Maharishi Ayurveda compounds. Hari Sharma, Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, says that physicians are becoming pathogens, they are creating diseases. Like most saviours of the human race before him, he mixes scientific half truths and anecdotal stories to rubbish hundreds of years of painstakingly researched evidence-based medicine (GP Weekly, October 1997)

WE WERE_ skeptical. We demanded you respond to our clarion call for pithy pieces -- but only a few of you pithed on us. For this we are grateful and we have sent suitable telepathic gifts to all of you, for which you should be grateful. _But seriously, a couple of readers have queried our policy on the format of submissions which they've interpreted as meaning we don't accept handwritten copy. Wrong. Our eyesight is sometimes challenged by the individualistic handwriting styles we sometimes see, so we prefer typed or disc-supplied copy because we can then guarantee accuracy. But above all, we encourage you enthusiastically to send interesting forum pieces in whatever format you have available. The only criteria we use in selecting pieces for the forum is their value and interest to readers. The writer of the best piece published in the next issue will receive the definitive volume on proven homeopathic remedies.

AROUND 40 years ago, at Hull Fair in England, I saw a man dip his fingers in molten lead. He also poured it into his palm and ran it through his fingers. He seemed to suffer no harm although it was real lead; I found a solidified splash and checked. In my vacations I used to work for one of the showmen at the fair, so I found my boss. "That fellow with the molten lead, why doesn't he burn his hands?"

About the time this issue makes it to the letterbox, those Americans not glued to chat-shows or the latest update on alien abductions will be treated to a documentary on recreations of ancient monuments, in which New Zealand's infamous Fridgehenge features.

The other night, after a particularly fine feed of nachos, my friend pulled out her numerology book and proceeded to do my chart. I'd done some things wrong in a past life, and there were a number of lessons I hadn't picked up on -- but generally I was happy to learn my soul was a fairly evolved one.

NEW ZEALAND MYSTERIES, by Robyn Gosset; Bush Press, 1996; 208 pages; $29.95

At the AGM, and in a subsequent letter from a member, the question was raised "what are we saving money for?". Certainly the Skeptics bank account is a reasonably healthy one, after ten years of frugal saving on the part of Treasurers past and present.

When Brian Edwards interviewed Uri Geller some years ago, Dr David Marks of Otago University used the printed transcript to demonstrate that Brian had been the victim of highly skilled "cold reading", rather than the witness to remarkable extra-sensory powers as he appeared to believe at the time.

Skeptics can take an active stance in their daily lives, according to this abridged version of the Chair-entity's after-dinner speech from the Conference.

I'm pleased to report that after 10 years of waiting with bated breath, the New Zealand Skeptics now has its very own leaflet-cum-application form for handing out to the uninitiated. We've bemoaned the lack of these for some time -- particularly those of us doing public presentations where we've often been asked for further information, contact details and the like. It should make it considerably easier for prospective Skeptics to find out about us and join the ranks. Bernard Howard, our ever-faithful Secretary, tells me that he has been getting in application forms from the new material, and we anticipate seeing lots more.

Post-mortem on the autopsy or autopsy on the post-mortem?

At the last conference I was elected editor of the New Zealand Skeptic. Some of you will have read my pieces in Metro magazine or in NBR over the years, or heard my "Soapboxes" on World Service Radio. If you have wondered about my recent absence from the media, it is because I have been preparing to launch my own magazine.

Neither Nutrasweet nor sugar-rich diets produce any change in children's behaviour. (New England Journal of Medicine 330:301-307, 1994)

The following message from James Randi was posted to the Usenet newsgroup sci.skeptic on February 4th by Jim Kutz.

Richard Milton has written this book as a "hang on a minute" reservation about Darwinism and its apparent unquestioned acceptance by mainstream science from geology through to biology (and in one chapter political science) in the manner of the small boy who questioned the reality of the Emperor's new clothes -- "Look Mummy, all those university professors, all those Nobel Prize winners, have got no actual proof to cover their hypotheses with".

John Cole, editor of Creation/Evolution, recently wrote of his tendency toward hair-pulling, in the National Centre for Science Education Reports, Vol 12 No 2 (Summer 1992).

The failure of clairvoyants to locate the missing Wellington man, Michael Kelly, or to know the manner of his death, will not startle many skeptics. No major missing persons case in the history of New Zealand has been solved with paranormal help, despite the fact that police have been deluged with clairvoyant tips over the years -- from Mona Blades to Kirsa Jensen, Teresa Cormack, Luisa Damodron, Heidi Paakkonen or Michael Kelly.

The Minister of Civil Defence, Mr Lee, believes that the Bible, written almost 2000 years ago, predicted the increasing prevalence of earthquakes today.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1985.

The following article appeared in The New Zealand Herald of 6 September 1989. It was the most comprehensive coverage of the 1989 Conference to appear in the national press.

Head, Department of Geology, University of Newcastle.

"Scientific" creationists are fond of easy examples that seem to contradict evolution: so much the better if they seem to make scientists look silly.

The Evening Post, 31 August 1987

Controversy is nothing new to Uri Geller. Nor are setbacks.

I return this born-again spoon to you as a symbol of the power of the press. I assure you I have no knowledge of what sleight of hand unbent it. I only left it in the newsroom for a few moments, too.

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