Penn & Teller’s Bullshit

Early this decade, magicians and comedians Penn & Teller concocted a television program on the Showtime cable network called “Bullshit!”
Its first episodes were a very funny and astute debunking of hapless psychics and spoon benders.
A few episodes later, P&T shifted from rightly ridiculing pseudoscience to attacking real, hard peer-reviewed science — as if [...]

Skepticism: Healthy vs. Unhealthy

An analogy.
Man and wife in car, gas gauge on empty, gas station up ahead, last gas for 20 miles.
Healthy skeptic: We better get gas here because we’re on empty and the next gas station is 20 miles up the road.
Unhealthy skeptic: I doubt we’ll run out of gas that quickly. These gas gauges are never [...]

Google doesn’t like liars.

Mark Twain wrote, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on.”
Our friend the Google is now erasing this disparity. And as Internet usage escalates, this disparity may well disappear completely.
Bad news for liars. Good news for everyone else.
A nice example of this is found at the Canadian website, [...]

Global Warming Skeptics

I have now officially filed self-professed “global warming skeptics” with:
a) “global warming denialists” and;
b) “evolution denialists”
I say this because global warming skeptics (GWS) tend to adopt the following positions:
a) I don’t know much about it and don’t intend to educate myself about it so I’ll drape my lack of interest in the faux noble cloth [...]

Taking Back the Kennebec River

Myself (Douglas Watts) and the organization Friends of Merrymeeting Bay have since fall 2005 been engaged in a legal effort before the Maine Board of Environmental Protection to have immediate, safe and effective fish passage installed at the four hydro-electric dams on the Kennebec River between Waterville and Skowhegan.
In spite of 16 months of disputatious [...]

Intelligent Design

The moment ID (Intelligent Design) was born, ie. when Creationists were forced for tactical reasons to externally sever any invocation of a Biblical Christian God, ID became an exercise in circular logic and self-refutation for the following reasons:
a) Any invocation of a “conscious” designer brings you right back to invocation of a God, leaving out [...]