Articles tagged with "weekend"

Hey New Zealand! SGU is coming your way soon.

It's less than two weeks until our conference in Christchurch, and we're busy sorting out the last few loose ends. We now have tickets available for our Saturday evening soiree, so if you're coming to the conference and want to chill out with other skeptics, the committee of the NZ Skeptics, the SGU and some of our other weekend speakers, make sure you grab your tickets soon! It's only $40 for an evening featuring entertainment, canapes, and cheap booze.

It was Wellington Day yesterday, so this newsletter is a day later than usual. It's been a very warm weekend here in Wellington, but I've spent most of the weekend inside, with the air conditioning on, working on our plagiarism project (no, we're not planning to plagiarise from elsewhere to fill our newsletter!). Between Dan Ryan and myself, we have enough coding skills to be able to write software tools that are making our job of detecting and displaying cases of plagiarism much quicker - so I've been spending the weekend writing software.

I hope you had an enjoyable Labour Weekend for those able to take some time off.

The last time I wrote the newsletter, I announced our NZ Skeptics conference happening in Dunedin on the weekend of 24th - 26th November, at Taito Otago Settlers Museum.

As many readers will know, NZ Skeptics hold an annual conference. We hold these in various locations around the country, and this year we're holding it in Dunedin.

Our annual NZ Skeptics Conference, being held in Wellington on 25th - 27th November is just weeks away now.

In just over a month we're having the gathering of the year - this year's in-person skeptics conference - our first since 2019.

The NZ Skeptics Conference 2022 is being held in Wellington on the weekend of 26th and 27th of November. We'd love to see you there, in person. We've got some great speakers lined up, and it will be great to see everybody again.

This past weekend has been a pretty skeptically-active weekend for me.

Hello, it's Craig here - so, I'm back writing newsletters, after taking a three week break.

This week I've got an eclectic mix of topics. I cover Matariki weekend, the awful Roe v. Wade US supreme court decision and the implications here, and look at my carbon footprint.

I hope you're enjoying a few days off at Easter weekend, maybe enjoying some Hot Cross Buns dripping with butter, and some chocolate eggs.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

This weekend was our joint Australian and New Zealand conference, Skepticon 2021. Thank you so much to those of you who joined us, it was an amazing weekend with fascinating talks and I hope you enjoyed it all as much as I did.

Did you know that NZ Skeptics is running an in-person conference again this year (after not running one last year because of COVID).

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent an enjoyable weekend away with some friends up in Russell, in the Bay of Islands. A couple of points from a skeptical perspective; firstly, one of my friends told me about an interview he heard with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand, which I've since listened to (detailed below), and the second was a conversation I overheard which illustrated to me how “fake news” and misinformation is innocently spread.

A few weeks ago I wrote about big cats reported sighted in Canterbury, and opined that what had been seen was likely a feral cat.

Welcome to this week's NZ Skeptics newsletter. I'm going to be pretty brief as I've have a busy weekend, but there were a few stories that caught my eye this week.

It was show weekend here in Canterbury. Another long weekend to squander in the garden and pottering about the house. I've also been thinking about why on the Xbox game Assassin's Creed Valhalla my son chose to stand up for the seemingly uninformed and offended peasant, rather than the man of medicine (aka warlock) who was bemoaning the general distrust in knowledge. Perhaps it was the jaunty animal skull head-piece the warlock was wearing that made him look more like the bad guy, or perhaps it was just the promise of better loot...

In his predictably naughty way, Brian Edwards did a bit of stirring when he was the after-dinner speaker at the annual conference of the New Zealand Skeptics Society during the weekend. Skeptics, he needled, should have at least something to believe in. Members counter-stirred. At their annual meeting the next day, they passed a resolution "endorsing the existence of Santa Claus, but still expressing doubts about the tooth fairy."