Saturday 12 May 2012

The Round-up w/e 13/05/2012


It’s not square and it’s not down. Yes, it’s the corniest ever opening to the Birmingham Skeptics’ Round-up yet and that took some doing believe me.

Remember Paul the Psychic Octopus who had the uncanny ability to randomly pick one thing out of a choice of two things? Well he’s not the only cephalopod to help with predictions, except this one’s a bit more science based.

I’m doing a charity walk tomorrow and I’ve been blown away by the support from my skeptic friends in raising money. It seems they might also be the people to go to for more fleshy donations too.

I loved this next one. I’ve seen live tweeting from a court room, a television show, all good but an operating theatre during brain surgery! Fantastic

A sad moment here, the Righteous Indignation Podcast is no more. Those that brought it to us are busy people and have other projects and priorities to occupy them. If you’ve never heard this great skeptical podcast or you would like to relisten, you can find all of the episodes by following the link on the page

Just in case you thought that the Catholics were the only religious group with a tendency to cover for child abuse, some worrying reports from the world of the ultra-orthodox Jews.

I’ve read lots of bizarre articles about alternative medicine, but I really don’t know what to say about human flesh pills

I’ve watched this video of footage from the Cassini and  Voyager missions several times now and it’s been goosebumps every time. Watch it, please, it’s incredible.

The Eye of Horus was a symbol of protection, power and health for the Ancient Egyptians and is now a tattoo on the back of Robbie Williams’ neck.  This may or may not qualify as proof against efficacy, but powerful or not it is actually a cool little maths problem.

I think they may have missed some sound effects out in Jurassic Park, according to this article those sauropods were pumping out some serious gas.

I love this, your computer is more likely to pick up an infection from a religious site than a porn site.

If you like your sin to be a bit more original, there’s an interesting article here about it with an account of debate between Dawkins and Cardinal George Pell.

We had the inimitable Robin Ince at Birmingham Skeptics this week and he was awesome. It’s no secret that one of his heroes is Richard Fenyman and it happens that he would have been 94 last Friday. Happy Birthday Mr Fenyman!

Next we have an extremely thorough post by Zeno and Sven Rudloff on the Swiss government’s support of homeopathy.

We’ve got lots of goodies coming up at Birmingham Skeptics. There’s our May Social, the very exciting prospect of Colin Wright and our first ever Skeptics  in the Pub Quiz. So much to look forward too and hopefully some of you will be able to make it along.

After watching last week’s video of the kung fu robots (and far too many science fiction films) I thought we’d better have a lesson on how to Survive A Robot Uprising. See you all soon.



This round-up was compiled by Patrick Redmond (@paddyrex) with the help of the indomitable Roy Beddowes.

1 comment:

notjarvis said...

On the Human Flesh pills thing, it seems to come from an AP news wire story that sort of fled over the web, and was a reheat of a scandalous Korean documentary from last Autumn.


This chap gave a pretty interesting overview, and seems to think they may be talking about "Placenta" pills rather than babies.


Worth watching the question on Skeptics Stackexchange see if anyone adds info.