This week, we’ve got Easter and April Fools’ Day back-to-back. [Insert plethora of obvious jokes here.] As usual, events are all over the map, from the spring opener of egg hunting season to celebrations of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the Pastafarian pirates among us. But I admit that this posts subtitle is a false dichotomy. You have many more choices than just pirates or zombies... »
I’m on the radio! Skeptically Speaking asked me to talk a little bit about insect conservation, in order to round out an interview with the author of Rat Island. (I haven’t read the book yet, but it looks pretty fascinating.) I mostly discussed the 2012 report “Spineless”, published by IUCN (The International Union for Conservation of Nature). You might recognize IUCN as au... »
All over the globe, many of your favorite scientists, skeptics, and atheists are appearing live: in Texas, you can meet Surly Amy at the American Atheists Convention in Austin; Stephen Hawking in Houston; Hemant Mehta and Seth Andrews in Canyon and Houston; Australian atheist singer-songwriter Shelley Segal in Houston and San Antonio. Hemant will also be giving a talk in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Car... »
This post is cross-posted and translated from skepchick.no. Ok, so we’ve been talking about the Higgs particle for a year or so now, but there is still this annoying thing that pops up again and again. Namely the nick name the “God Particle”. It is one thing that religious people talk about the particle as if it was actually divine or something, but when scientists perpetuate myt... »
It is a truth universally acknowledged via various classifications of fallacy (ad hominem, guilt by association, and so on) that one cannot discount an argument or premise solely due to its origin. On the other hand, to argue that a concept is meritorious because a hypothetical version of it that has never existed in reality would be a lovely thing (especially if the concept has, thus far, in prac... »
As promised, here’s part two of your March Global Quickies. And guess what? I still have a bunch of awesome links for a third part, so watch out for those soon. ISRAEL (from 9bar) 22 year old Noa Kentman was shouted at and called impure by two ultra-orthodox men after she refused to move to the back of the bus she was traveling in with her sister. The men ended up sitting on the front steps of the... »
For today’s special Pi Day version of Bad Chart Thursday, I present to you the distribution of digits in the first 1,000 decimal places of pi, presented as a pie chart: Remarkably, when I Googled for this, I was only able to find the frequency of digits in pi represented in bar charts, which is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, considering the pun opportunities. So, fixed. As an accompanim... »
If you are in a country that writes dates in the month/day format, then Happy Pi Day! (All others who write out day/month have to wait until 22/7, which is Pi Approximation Day–still just as good!) I was going to spend all weekend baking up an awesome pie-themed menu (breakfast quiche, empanadas for lunch, and either tomato pie or shepherd’s pie for dinner, with a custard pie for desse... »
