RPGs and skepticism (Sunday fun post)

If you really aren’t interested in video games at all, you….probably won’t bother reading this post. But if you’re somewhat interested in them but don’t know much about them, you might not know that this weekend has been BlizzCon, the annual convention held in Anaheim, California by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard’s most […]

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New blog network: FreethoughtBlogs

My friend Ed Brayton who currently blogs at Dispatches From the Culture Wars on Scienceblogs is launching a new blogging network specifically for skeptical/humanist concerns called FreethoughtBlogs on Monday, August 1st. You can see the event announcement on Facebook here, and here is the description given: A new blog network […]

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Pareidolia of the day: Holy sh!t!

Today’s incidence of pareidolia is a doozy. Or a doo-….no, I’m just not going there. The title for this post was enough. For the record, pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images […]

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“….Seriously?” Part: the end

…and cue the inevitable “Can’t we all just get along?” post. Hemant Mehta does a good job of summarizing the whole very high-school situation, though I’m not sure what the point is with the whole “Female 1” and “Female 2” thing. If you’re interested, read. Interest in attending any future […]

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“…Seriously?” part 2

Somebody purporting to be Richard Dawkins apparently made some rather idiotic comments on Pharyngula of the “people have it worse than you, so how dare you complain about your own situation” variety, and Jen McCreight rightly excoriates him (or his impersonator) for it.  For reference on these remarks, see this. Whether that […]

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Religion going extinct? I doubt it.

The BBC reports on a paper recently presented at the American Physical Society meeting here in Dallas which makes claims about a decreasing level of religiosity in some parts of the world.  The paper, entitled “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation,” suggests […]

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An observation

The video of TamTamPamela thanking God for the Japanese earthquake was all over the web yesterday.  I’m kind of disappointed in how willing people were to buy it without question.  Not because it’s a skepticism fail per se (I fall for Poes often– that’s the point of a Poe), but because they […]

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TAM 9 speakers

The Amazing Meeting has announced its list of speakers for this year, its ninth meeting.  There are a lot of them, and quite a few– at least ten, from what I can tell– are people who can speak to the topic of how and why people believe weird things.  Or […]

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Interesting links of the day

Jurors acquit suspect, then give him their jury pay.  They say it’s still not enough to make up for what he went through. Womens’ secret thoughts about porn, juxtaposed against photos of retro man candy (not safe for work, needless to say) Top ten airport restaurants in the United States. Could’ve been […]

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Top 10 Logical Fallacies in Politics

Wonder how he managed to narrow it down to ten….  This is a very good list explanations and examples of fallacies commonly made by politicians.  In the world according to Gretchen, all children would learn about logical fallacies in school at a young age and then go home and apply […]

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