events

QEDCon 2024 gets underway this weekend, with fringe events starting on Thursday evening. The full schedule is now online - https://qedcon.org/schedule As usual, it won't be possible to see everything, but it's all being videoed and most sessions will be available at a later date. This year...

A friend of mine suggested this event, which was originally scheduled for April but had to be cancelled. I had encountered Peterson during the Covid year, while surfing through Youtube. I found him an interesting and entertaining lecturer/philosopher, and I was particularly struck by how...

The Louisville Area Skeptics, in association with the Spalding University College of Social Sciences and Humanities, will host the James Randi Educational Foundation's workshop "Divination with Pendulums and Dowsing Rods". It will be a comprehensive 3-hour, hands-on program covering the history...

I've heard talk that the big bang may have been acausal. I've also heard that some quantum events appear to have no cause, and I suppose that at the beginning of the universe, it would have been small enough to be on the quantum level. Can anyone give me some examples of causeless events, in...

"As regular Sb readers have probably noticed, we've almost reached 1,000,000 comments on our network! W00t! To celebrate, from September 14-29, our bloggers are setting up parties all over the U.S. and abroad." The link lists the events. There's one in Seattle on Sat the 27th that I'll be...

I was always under the impression that any past event has a probability of 1, since it has already occured. I am having a discussion on another forum about this, but the person I am chatting with continues to claim that probability is a constant, and that you can take a random event (such as a...

Why do some events generate conspiracy theories, but others don't? Why conspiracy theories about JFK, Lincoln, 9/11, etc... but not for Oklahoma City, Unabomber, James Garfield, shuttle disasters?

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591 These are the ten most harmful books as defined by Human Events -- a conservative political magazine. Note, Darwin only rated a Honorable mention...lead positions, predictably to Marx, Hitler and Mao, but Kinsey and Rachel Carson? What's...

I've heard people say that in quantum mechanics, particles appear without reason or that electrons "decide" their spin without cause. Why is this the consensus? Why have physicists decided that there are uncaused quantum events when these phenomenon could just as easily be explained by an...

After TAM3 I was thinking... I met a lot of smart people from small groups that felt largely alone in the world... that is, they didn't know of other skeptical organizations in their area. My question is this: Is there a 'registry' of such groups? A place to announce meetings, events and...

'god' (plural noun) doesn't give a @#&^ about you/us (Fri Jan 14 12:03:16) Message: 'god' doesn't care about individuals, anymore. I am not talking about the metaphysical "God" that people worship so often in today's religious circles. I am not even sure such a thing exists. I am talking...

Well, the end of the year always brings about these top 10 of the year lists. Here's the Top 10 Paranormal Events of 2004. I'm sure many of these have already been discussed. http://paranormal.about.com/od/paranormalgeneralinfo/a/aa113004.htm

This might turn into a rant, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief. One's political position is naturally a culmination of one's whole-life experience; a combination of how you were raise, the norms of the local community you grew up in, and the socail concerns that were dominanat when you...

We've heard the charge before... so and so is "Politicizing" 9-11, or "Politicizing" the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, and so forth... I want to throw out a semantic point--is this always wrong? At its core, "Politics" refers to how a group determines policy. So, in a sense, if someone brings up...

I was chatting with an acquaintance the other day about evolution. He's kind of a fence sitter on the question of speciation. He said that he would be more convinced if there was an observed example of speciation, in the wild, that involved one or a few point/small mutations. Most of the...