skepticism

– the rigorous methodology summed up by Carl Sagan as a Baloney Detection Kit

Tiny violin/fiddle less than half an inch long "Chen, of Beijing, China, took seven years to craft the tiny instrument from 30 separate parts with strings thinner than a human hair."

When one’s right to dissent is so terribly, terribly suppressed…

By tigtog on 2011-08-16 • ( 3 )

…that one can only manage to get one’s views published in the opinion pages of a national broadsheet, one knows that the nation is in a parlous state of enforced conformity indeed.

Tips for Elevator Use

By Mindy on 2011-07-20 • ( 12 )

Tips for Elevator use.

A friendly looking anthopomorphised cat of adult size is holding the hand of a small child while they walk together across a pedestrian crossing

I wish to make a deeply heartfelt apology to all motorists

By tigtog on 2011-07-19 • ( 15 )

In the wake of Elevatorgate, I realise that in habitually engaging in threat/risk-assessment vigilance every single time I cross the road, I have actually been doing you all a most grave injustice.

More Elevatorgate: cornering, uncongeniality and warning flags

By tigtog on 2011-07-15 • ( 34 )

Ironically, no one hates high pressure sales tactics more than skeptics. We can’t stand it when a sales associate gets in our face and uses cheap psychological tricks to try to make us buy stuff we don’t want. We take it as an insult to our intelligence. We resent it.

Bye bye Dawkins: a voice from the past

By tigtog on 2011-07-07 • ( 13 )

How very disappointing, but sadly not surprising, that he turned out be such a smug, patronising git about more than just religious beliefs.

Fancy that

By tigtog on 2011-04-07 • ( 2 )

Critics’ review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming

SIWOTI: Sagan’s ECREE maxim is NOT nonsense

By tigtog on 2011-03-10 • ( 16 )

Please pardon the acronyms in the title (expansions forthcoming in the post), I’m attempting to keep my post titles reasonably concise. Which is exactly what the final sentence in the quote below does in relation to the rest of the paragraph preceding it: it restates the whole argument of the paragraph pithily in just five words: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.