Bastard Sheep

The cult of mac have released another product today, and as expected the news sites are filled with information about it as though it’s the only thing that has happened in the past month. It’s amazing how Apple seem to be the only tech company who can drum up the attention normally reserved for celebrities and drama queens.  Even massacres and natural disasters struggle at times.

Along with all the media attention, the public has also gone in to a frenzy. Once again tied between the fanboys who think it’s the greatest thing since the last Apple release/the previous Apple release/the previous Apple release/rinse, repeat/sliced bread, and the Apple haters who like to counter the rabid Apple fans with equally rabid opposition.

What neither side seems to understand is that Apple products, like just about all products (IT and non-IT) have their place. They all have their purpose.  When the MacBook Air came out we had the same thing, many people saying it was too limited, others saying it suited them perfectly.  I’m in the camp of it being too limited for me, but just because it doesn’t suit me doesn’t mean I should be running around all but trolling those to whom it does suit. (more…)

If you’re on Twitter at all (and if you’re reading this, chances you are) it would be hard to not know that the Shorty Awards are currently taking place.  These are awards for twitter users across pretty much any category possible.  There’s some good news and some bad news, though.

Currently in the #health category we have more quacks and snakeoil salespeople than anything else.  Fortunately we’ve managed to get @DrRachie in to first spot, but it’s a tight race between legitimate votes for her and bot votes for the second place quack @HealthRanger who runs the misinformation, antivax and anti-science-based-medicine site naturalnews.com.  So jump on over now and vote for @DrRachie asap to help keep her in the clear (and legitimate) lead!

Keep in mind that only one vote (the most recent) per category counts, and you must put a reason in for your vote to make it.

Secondly, I’m putting out a personal request for self pimpage. I am not ashamed. I am also not wearing pants. Vote for me in the #nopants category, now. Please!  At this point in time I only need 24 votes to get the number one spot.

It all started off, as the best things in life do, as a little joke.  This is not how it is going to end however. We will succeed.  We must.  For the good of mankind, and also as a little warmup and pimpage for TAM Australia (Coming late November 2010).

I have started a petition to get Naontiotami interviewed on the SGU podcast. Please go there and sign it. Your mother will thank you.

Just a quick post to say merry christmas to everyone, and I hope you all have a wonderful day with family and friends.  I know how I’ll be spending it, pretty much exactly as described in the following song.

Don’t forget you only have until the 26th to purchase this from itunes and have 50% of the payment go towards Autism research, so grab it now before it’s too late!

(post title taken from here).  Kent Hovind has found a way to get back in to the public’s attention again, and as always it isn’t for a good reason.  If he isn’t making a laughing stock of himself, it seems he’s making a laughing stock of himse … wait.  Ok, so maybe there’s only one thing he’s good at.

If you don’t know who he is, he is most famous for being a bible literalist and young earth creationist.  He’s a self proclaimed doctor through an unaccredited “university” (read: diploma mill) as well as a self proclaimed science teacher (though his employment history does not reflect this).

His doctorial dissertation has been kept exceedingly secret.  This is odd as the standard practise for universities globally is to make such dissertations publicly available.  Both he and his “university” has consistently refused to allow it to be made public despite numerous requests  for reprints or scholarly inquiry.  That is until now.

The fine folk over at WikiLeaks.Org have managed to get their hands on it.  The popularity of wikileaks though means this file is extremely slow to download.  Despite coming in at a mere 2.1MB it still took me close to an hour to download it, so I have decided to mirror it here and here. (more…)

Right now, public schools across Australia generally have religious education classes.  Thanks to the high involvement and lack of seperation between church and state in this country, generally if someone does not wish their kid to be indoctrinated in these classes, the childs only option is to sit out and do, well, nothing.

The Humanist Society of Victoria have been pushing for a number of years to have an alternative so that kids who sit out of these classes have something productive to do other than sit in a small room with no books and nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs.  This has always been rejected by the religious right and their influences though as it may give these kids an upper hand, allowing them an opportunity to get educated in something the other kids cannot.  They fail every time to see the irony here, they are essentially saying their own course on religion is useless and does not contribute to ones education.

What the Humanist Society of Victoria have been pushing for the strongest, is an ethics class as an alternative.  More irony to the religious right, they are essentially saying the kids who attend religion class won’t learn about ethics.  A quick look at the bible seems to confirm this.

After that very long introduction though, I am finally getting to my point.  It would appear the NSW government has beaten Victoria to the punch.  Out of almost nowhere, the NSW Premier Nathan Reese has announced today that schools across the state of NSW will be getting ethics classes as an alternative to religion. (more…)

(This was also posted at YoungAusSkeptics.com)

The news sites are going crazy right now about a Belgian man called Rom Houben who has spent the last 23 years in a coma. His facilitators are now claiming he was not in a coma at all, but rather that he was just trapped concious inside is body unable to get out and communicate with the outside world.

The skeptic sites are going crazy as well about this story, but not for the same reason. Watch the video below and see if you can pick the reason why.

(more…)

(This was also posted at YoungAusSkeptics.com)

One of the great things about the way language evolves is that words change their meaning all the time. The main reason this happens is due to the way in which we generally learn words. How many of you upon hearing a new word actually go to the effort to pick up a dictionary or go to an online one and look up the words meaning? I am sure a few of you do, but the majority of people (myself included) don’t.

Instead we look at the context the word was used in, the sentence it is in and those surrounding, and from there we use our intuition and past experience to decide our own definition of the word. If we get it wrong, we continue to get it wrong until such a time as we are corrected. We may easily decide to start using that word, incorrectly of course, in our conversations with others. They then pick up on this incorrect meaning and maybe even apply their own meaning to it which is different again. As the word spreads and is picked up, the meaning changes. Dictionaries have in the past and continue today to change the official meaning of a word based upon common usage. (more…)

The topic on the link of atheism and skepticism comes up all the time in skeptic circles.  The general questions tend to hover around the topics of whether skeptics should be atheists, should skeptics cover atheistic topics and fights, can theists be skeptics, is theism a subject we should make taboo or not, and recently whether atheism is in fact skepticism as well.

For starters, atheism isn’t necessarily the skeptical stance when it comes to theism.  You see, there’s generally two paths that lead to atheism.  One being the Acharya S and Zeitgeist path which is full of conspiracy theories. It claims that christianity stole most if not all of its aspects from other religions etc.  The evidence put forward is full of examples where prior religions had similar traditions, symbols and mythology therefore christianity stole it.

Pagans for example celebrated winter solstice at or around the end of December, christians have christmas then, therefore christians stole that from pagans and/or used it to crush paganism.  The problem here is that it confuses correlation for causation.  Just because two things are similar does not mean one caused the other.  This is a logical fallacy often argued against by sceptics in all manner of topics.  This form of atheism is in no way shape or form sceptical. (more…)

A few days ago in Australia, independent senator Nick Xenophon gave a little speech about the cult of scientology accusing them of being a criminal organisation.  Podblack does some nice coverage of it if you would like to read more.

This has put the media in to a spin and the cult of scientology in to damage control overdrive.  As yet we have not seen their usual tactic of digging or manufacturing dirt on the person to discredit and ruin them personally, however there have been a number of interviews.

The Channel 7 morning program Sunrise had a representative on from the cult of scientology this morning, and she had some interesting things to say.  The most surprising of these, is that if people are unsatisfied or leave the cult, they offer full refunds.  Audio here. (Right-click, save as)

That is right everyone.  After the hundreds of horror stories of people losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cult, going broke, being ostracised and having their lives destroyed, it appears the cult now offers refunds, in full!

This spokesperson has just opened the cult of scientology up to a barrage of compensation claims, and I certainly hope they come thick, fast, and most importantly publicly.  I would love to see just how many (if any) of these requests they honour.  I am expecting the number to be somewhere in the realm of between zero and none.   The methods they use to weasel out of these request for compensation will be highly amusing to say the very least.