Articles tagged with "lot"

I appreciated the look at plastic detox ideas and highlighting other silly things, but felt like part of the main point of concern around micro plastics was missed.

Our ongoing plagiarism project is going well - thanks to the people who reached out and offered to help with running the text we have through TurnItIn. We're now receiving reports from two different academics who are putting the documents through two different plagiarism detectors. Our evidence, and the website we're building to showcase it, is coming together well. It's been a lot of work so far, but there's a lot still to do, so we'll keep working until we've built the most thorough case we're able to put together - we really want to make sure we do this well, as it involves serious accusations.

I read Fake Believe by Dylan Reeve earlier this year, and intended to review it at the time for the newsletter. But typically for me, life got in the way and I never got around to actually putting my thoughts on the page. And as the book has been out for almost a year now, I felt I had missed the boat. However, as Dylan will be a contestant on The Traitors NZ (starting Monday August 7 on Three) perhaps now is a good time to strike while the iron is somewhat reheated.

One of our regular readers (Hi Ray... and Paul) has requested we put a date on our newsletters, so you'll be receiving this on 31st July, 2023.

It's been an action-packed week this week, with lots of interesting things happening in conspiracy circles, both here and overseas. And a lot of it seems to be in the right direction, with prominent anti-vaxxers and conspiracy mongers like Robert Kennedy Jr and Chantelle Baker having their social media accounts removed, the parliament protest something of a fizzle, the operators of Counterspin being arrested, and Billy TK and Vinny Eastwood having their day in court.

For those of you who listen to our fortnightly NZ Skeptics podcast, Yeah… Nah! (which is based on this newsletter), you'll be aware that I tested positive for COVID recently. It's been a week now since my first day of symptoms, and I'm feeling a lot better than I did a week ago. Craig was kind enough to cover for me on the radio talking with Graeme Hill last week, but thankfully I was feeling good enough to get back in the saddle yesterday afternoon. For those of you who listen to the radio, I highly recommend listening to Graeme's “Hill's Weekend” show on Sunday afternoons - Graeme always manages to line up a set of fascinating people to talk to, and I'm always grateful to be able to talk with him about skepticism and some of the nonsense we find out there in the world.

We're currently putting together a calendar of historical skeptical events relevant to New Zealand - and we're aiming to have at least one event for every day of the year. It's been a lot of fun so far, and we've found a lot of fascinating stories about New Zealand that I'd never heard before, like:

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

As mentioned in the Mary Hobbs response above, there's now a group of doctors in NZ standing up for vaccinations, mostly it would seem in response to the handful of those who are against them.

Recently I've been playing with some deep learning software - OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3, and EleutherAI's GPT-J-6G. These are NLP algorithms. No, not that discredited garbage Neuro-Linguistic Programming - in this case NLP stands for Natural Language Processing.

Sensing Murder psychic Kelvin Cruickshank is currently touring the country. He's been down in the South Island recently, visiting Christchurch and a lot of smaller towns, and selling tickets at $65 a pop. Next month he'll be touring the North Island.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

Last week was a busy one. On Monday I visited parliament for a church service called The Power of One, along with another couple of skeptics. The event was organised by a group called Jesus for NZ (who formed back in 2017 when Jesus was taken out of the parliamentary prayer), hosted by Alfred Ngaro and facilitated by Simon Bridges. There was a lot of talk about Jesus re-taking the nation until everyone in this country is a believer, and restoring NZ to its “former glory”. Personally I'm much happier with NZ being a rational, secular democracy than a theocracy, but it turns out that not everyone wants a fair society and equality for all.

Conspiracies are in the news a lot lately. In recent newsletters we've talked about them a lot, and there's more to cover this week, both from an international and NZ-based perspective.

In a recent article Cracked dot com has pointed out flaws in several popular conspiracy theories.

I rather like our local supermarket. Lovely staff, generally excellent products, and close to home as well.

There was a nice story about the 30th anniversary of the Lotto this week from Stuff. The article talked about how the fact some numbers come up more often than others is likely chance (Lotto take this seriously, and apparently regularly wash and weigh the balls to ensure there's no bias). The difference in frequency between the most drawn ball, number 1 (16.91%) and the least drawn ball number 34 (13.97%) is not huge, and I suspect the number frequency draws a bell curve.

Dave Hansford from Nelson has written a book - called "Protecting Paradise: 1080 and the Fight to Save New Zealand's Wildlife" - about New Zealand's use of the poison 1080. The name appears to be a play on the Graf Boys' documentary Poisoning Paradise, which tried to paint a picture that 1080 is not as safe as the government says it is.

I was messaged this week by someone who works near the new Scientology centre in Auckland. They told me that there are lots of Scientologists out on the streets at the moment, including outside the nearby hospital, trying to bring people into the church. The way they do this is quite disingenuous, normally starting with offering a free personality test - the Oxford Capacity Analysis test (nothing to do with Oxford University)

Australian Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" has opened its newest attraction, the Ark Encounter, on Thursday.

Tony Robbins is a very popular motivational speaker, and charges US$1,000 or more for a high energy day of talks. Events have names such as "Date with Destiny", "Life and Wealth Mastery" and "Unleash the Power Within". Tony's website has testimonials from famous celebrities, such as Hugh Jackman, Bill Clinton and Serena Williams. Video of Tony Robbins events look a lot like evangelical christian sunday services - lots of music, jumping around and highly emotional sermons.

Rush Limbaugh, US radio talk show host, has used a conversation about Harambe the gorilla to argue that evolution does not work.

On Thursday I went to Cafe Scientifique, a regular meeting in Wellington where talks are given about a scientific topic.

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.

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

Adam van Langenberg gives practical suggestions on how to run a high school skeptical society, based on his own successful experience.

Garfield was right-there's nothing like a piping hot lasagne on a winter's night. Especially when eaten with good wine and fine people.

A Christchurch mother who fed her five-year-old son raw beans was surprised when he fell ill. Because they had not been sprayed, she reasoned they should be a natural, healthy snack. But natural, as Jay Mann makes clear in this highly entertaining guide to the contents of your dinner plate, doesn't necessarily mean safe. Beans for example contain lectins, which have no bad taste to warn unwary consumers, but destroy the lining of your small intestine. Alfalfa contains canavanine, which disrupts DNA and RNA metabolism, though you would need to eat a lot of alfalfa to be poisoned by it. Lots of common foods are laden with poisons, all perfectly natural of course, but best consumed in small doses only.

Had an email the other day from someone we hadn't heard from in a while. Among other things, he took the opportunity to ask why we heard so little from the Skeptics in the media, and made unfavourable comparisons with the Consumer's Institute. Given the breadth of that organisation's support base and consequent level of funding, that hardly seemed fair.

Nearly everyone knows that in Old Testament times Sodom and Gomorrah were pretty naughty places to be and that the Lord, after negotiations with Abraham, was moved to spare any good people that could be found in them. In the event, it seems that only Lot, his wife and his two unmarried daughters fitted the bill. It is true that his two sons-in-law-to-be were invited to leave with Lot and his family, but they scoffed at the idea that two angels were going to destroy the city of Sodom with little obvious help.

Sometimes a programme really makes one think about how television defines what is important for us to know about.