Today is the Swedish Skeptics Society's 30th birthday! It was started in 1982 on inspiration from the American organisation CSICOP (est. 1976). I've been a member since 1996 and now I'm the society's sixth chairman.
So, what does a skeptical society do? We're a science-friendly resistance movement. We fight quack medicine, newspaper horoscopes, spiritualist mediums, climate change denialism, anti-vaccine propaganda, technophobic scare mongering etc. We make the New Age a Past Age. This we accomplish by publishing a quarterly journal, organising lecture series and pubmeets, handing out prizes and anti-prizes, maintaining a lively on-line forum and generally making our agenda visible in old and new media. Join our chapters in Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg and the Trestad area! And come to our big Euro Congress in Stockholm 23-25 August next year!
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Lokalavdelning i Stockholm? Glada nyheter!
Whether the society's Stockholm activities are organised as a separate chapter or not isn't very important for practical purposes. And nothing in the society's current by-laws prevents the members from electing a national executive board whose members all live in Ögleboda.
Then - watch out! ;)
I certainly won't complain if the chairperson after me is a woman from Gothenburg.
A bit OT -sometimes quacks Auto-quit.
The Norwegian "väderspåman"/weather predictor Sarri (not related to Swedish Sami weather spåman Enok Sarri) recently declared he quit, because climate change made the weather too erratic to predict. I might add that winter weather in Lapland is relatively stable, so with a bit of luck you can make a good guess but apparently changes have made even that too erratic.
Sarri might like to try out the British Met Office/BBC boilerplate "forecast".
Since predicting the weather on the Isles is a mug's game, the best tactic is just to repeat, in a slow posh drawl, 365 days a year
"Cloudy, with some sun likely in the south, rain expected later, temperatures at seasonal norms. Winds southwest to northwest, increasing to gale force on exposed coasts "
Works a treat. Easiest job in the world.
Dustbubble,
Yes!!! And he would make the predictions based on the content of badger stomaches, the shape of the clouds and the behaviour of flocks of chavs passing through!
I anticipate a splendid career in the tabloids.
Slightly OT: One ally of skepticism is satire and ridicule. For instance, Swedish cartoonist Martin Kellerman (aka "Rocky") likes to deflate stupidity, jingoism and lazy thinking. He recently decided to update the (rather silly) seven cardinal sins of Catholicism with more modern concepts.
Blue: "Wasting your life on Facebook". Green: "Buying a lot of unnecessary crap". Violet: "Being a complete dickhead!" -In the new version of "Se7en" the cop is tricked into committing the seventh mortal sin: "killing the dickhead!".
Is there any overlap between CSICOP and the emerging fact-checking sites in the USA?
Can't say! Never heard of those.