If you spend any time on social media you'll have no doubt seen fairly enigmatic posts with a grid of yellow and green squares in various combinations. This is Wordle - a daily word guessing game that has taken the world by storm (or at least, that seems to be what I've been seeing!)
As I write this there's news breaking about a new variant of concern of the COVID virus, now named as Omicron.
Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
We've mentioned Sue Grey in the past. She's the Nelson-based lawyer and co-leader of the NZ Outdoors party, and full on conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer.
A member emailed us this week to share an unaddressed letter she received in her mailbox. Thankfully the anonymous author of the document has put in the hard work of joining all the unconnected dots of some of the conspiracies I've mentioned above, and more, and has figured out that the overall aim of the New Zealand government is transhumanism - apparently we're going to be converted to Human 2.0 via the COVID vaccine. As a technology enthusiast I'm having a hard time seeing the downside to being upgraded, although I have to admit to being worried that, given Bill Gates' involvement, my new nanobots may be running a Windows based OS. Hopefully I'll be able to flash them to a more stable BSD or Linux OS, just as soon as I figure out where my serial port is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/29/more-than-100-nobel-laureates-take-on-greenpeace-over-gmo-stance/ - http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/agriculture/problem/Greenpeace-and-Golden-Rice/ - http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/
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.
An article in the Listener makes much ado about very little.
Judith Goodyear became the youngest ever presenter at the 2006 New Zealand Skeptics conference with this exploration of the chain letters of the average teen.
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.
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.
A company which made staff walk barefoot over burning coals in a training exercise has escaped prosecution. Seven sales trainees suffered burns during the "motivational" session run by insurance giant Eagle Star. Two of the workers needed specialist treatment at a burns unit.
The Bible (or, more precisely, the Torah) is a heavenly word-find puzzle, according to Israeli mathematicians.
Back in March, when the police seemed to be making no progress in hunting down South Auckland's serial rapist, a community newspaper ran a story effectively chiding the police in general and Detective Inspector John Manning in particular for taking no notice of the advice being given him by one of Auckland's leading clairvoyants, Ms Margaret Birkin, who has her own programme on Radio Pacific.
This book explains an approach to interpreting the French "prophet" Nostradamus's predictions. It is the culmination of 16 years research by an English woman, V.J. Hewitt. She has invented a system of decoding his quatrains using anagrams -- and not just the sort that you get in cryptic crosswords, but huge, French ones. She takes a Nostradamus quatrain, mixes up all the letters, removes the letters of the subject she is interested in (and it could be anything from soccer hooliganism to an air traffic controllers' strike), adds the date, and then rearranges the remaining letters to produce the prophecy that Nostradamus had clearly intended. What's more she does it in French.
" 'Alternative' medicine is usually defended by a 'skeptical' argument, that we should keep our minds open." Petr Skrabanek in his article "Demarcation of the absurd"1 looked for guidelines on quite how open we should leave our minds and for how long. As he put it "Anything is possible. 'You have to keep your mind open'—until your brains drop out." He argues that we should be prepared to express unbelief because we can always change our minds, but by being gullible or keeping the mind too wide open we "lose reason from the very beginning."
Many thanks to all members who have sent me material recently. Most of it is too voluminous to be used and some of it will be well known to us all. It was nice to have sent on Irene F. Hughes' Golden Numbers form letter and to know that "It is always a strange feeling—opening letters from people whose desire is so clearly intense. At this very moment, your desire is priority #1. It is now '11:33' and your case has just been completed. As always, it gives me a warm feeling to see that once again the numbers reveal their hidden meanings so willingly to someone who asks from the heart." Incidentally my Golden Lucky Number is 11 and so my lucky times are 11 a.m. or 2 p.m.
Didi you know that the 'principle' of water-divining was used to find people buried under snow? I did not, until I read about it in Nature (letter from Rolf Manne, of Pergen, Norway, in the issue of 4 December, 1986). This practice has been foisted on the Mountain Rescue Organisation of the Norwegian Red Cross, and is also taught in the Norwegian Army.
After we have marvelled at the endurance shown in "The Wooden Horse, and thrilled to the weekly plottings of "Colditz," can we be expected to be interested in yet another prisoner-of-war story? Especially if it all happened nearly seventy years ago? For readers with a skeptical interest in matters clairvoyant, the answer in the case of "The Road to En-