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Humor Skepticism/critical thinking

Drat! These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!

So, what do you do when those pesky scientific facts won’t line up with your beliefs, be they beliefs that evolution doesn’t explain the diversity of life, that mercury causes autism, that global warming isn’t happening, or whatever your faith-based scientific belief might be? Click on the image, and White House Situational Science Advisor tells […]

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Skepticism/critical thinking

The 29th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle

An excruciatingly large 29th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle has been posted at the Huge Entity. As usual, the skeptical blogosphere has come through, and Danieru has managed to corral the best skeptical blogging out there in, of all things, Mu-Haiku form, as he says: In prose nor dialectic, equality you’ll find, but semantic perspiration, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

I was right: The teacher admits that Airborne doesn’t work

A while back, I wrote about Airborne, the “herbal” concoction designed by a schoolteacher that is touted as preventing colds and the flu if taken preemptively or lessening their severity if taken early on in the course of a cold. I concluded that there was no evidence that it did what Victoria Knight-McDowell, a schoolteacher […]

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Paranormal Pareidolia Skepticism/critical thinking

A little pareidolia, anyone?

Ya gotta love it. Whether it be the Virgin Mary under a freeway overpass on W. Fullerton Avenue in Chicago or on a window in Perth Amboy, NJ, or the face of Jesus on a shell, on the wall of a shower, on a sand dune, a potato chip, or (my personal favorite) a pierogi, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Opinions without expertise

While I’m busy plugging blogs I like, I thought I’d mention that A Photon in the Darkness is another one of my favorite skeptical blogs. Lately, in all the turmoil over my move to ScienceBlogs, I failed to mention two good pieces that Prometheus has posted in the last few days: Why anecdotes aren’t data […]