Articles tagged with "history"

We've had a request from longtime member Jan Feike de Bock, who has emailed us with a fascinating offer of a large collection of UFO books.

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.

This week we're covering a few different topics. I look at some potential good news in relation to SIDS and look back at claims made about it in the past. We've got some bizarre claims of paranormal ability related to wind control (don't think I've ever come across that one before), and I look at the recent crash in cryptocurrency markets.

Today's newsletter includes a fun evening myself and some other skeptics spent meditating, a rant about my junk email, and the daft convoy that's on its way to Marsden Point. I take a deep dive into Arise church, looking at their preaching of horrible prosperity gospel nonsense, and the horrific way they treat their interns. Also Bronwyn Rideout has written about a UK charity promoting the discredited CEASE therapy for “treating” autistic people, and finally I ask you all for help with finding skeptical dates in New Zealand history.

The Bosnian Pyramids: The Biggest Hoax in History? Directed by Jurgen Deleye. VOF de Grenswetenschap. Watch online (www.thebiggesthoaxinhistory.com): €5.95. DVD: €19.95 (excl. shipping). Reviewed by David Riddell.

John Welch seems to think that knee-jerk name-calling and immediate dismissal equates to scientific consideration. His constant ridiculing of many conditions with psychological components amounts to narrow-minded materialism. For those of us who have worked with severe cases of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) it seems bizarre to deny that the symptoms reflect a real underlying pathology of brain and emotional functioning. And of course, shell shock has been described since early in human recorded history. Denying its reality as a condition and disputing any need for treatment simply relegates those affected to ongoing suffering, but will not cause the condition to evaporate.

All life has a common ancestor. Or to put it another way, every creature alive today, including ourselves, has an unbroken chain of ancestors going back almost four billion years. At certain points along the path from then to now, lineages have split, and split again, to give rise to the millions of species alive today.

A Waikato University lecturer has been named on a website for Latter-Day Saints as anti-mormon.

The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, by Simon Conway Morris. Oxford University Press.

I didn't wish to begin a debate about the issues surrounding religion in the 16th and 17th-century, nor would I ever wish to stop anyone from taking in interest in history. All I wanted to do was to point out that history is an academic discipline the same as any other, and it is dangerous to make pronouncements of such a dogmatic nature in the subject in which one has not been trained.

"US Universities, cringing under a wave of Political Correctness and an extreme form of "multi-culturalism" are abandoning programmes which present the history of Western Civilisation as anything other than the history of the rape and plunder of minorities and other victims by a conspiracy of middle-class white males." ("The Challenge to Reason", Skeptic 34.)

By Michael Howard. Century Hutchison, 1989. 196 pp. $45.95.