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The Island of Doubt

An irregular exploration of the struggle between the power of rational discourse and the scientific method on one hand, and the forces of superstition and dogma on the other.

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me-fergus.jpg James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.

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for 9 July 2007

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Other Doubtful Blogs

Inspiration

The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle
in the Dark, by Carl Sagan
(A review)

The Doubter's Companion:
by John Ralston Saul (Excerpts)

Skeptic Magazine: www.skeptic.com

Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: www.csicop.org

A poem by Yehuda Amichai:
The Place
Where We Are Right


The Meaning of the
Island of Doubt


Author's site: cyamid.net


Add to Technorati Favorites! Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
--- H. L. Mencken

By doubting we come to inquiry; and through inquiry we perceive truth.
--- Peter Abelard

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
-- Richard Dawkins

As for evolution, it happened. Deal with it.
-- Michael Shermer.

More blogs about island of doubt.

pseudo-science:

Dissin' Yoga: You can almost hear the gnashing of teeth

The real problem sets in when yoga is offered as part of a larger program of alternative care.

Can celebrities save the world?

So Leonardo DiCaprio is picking up where Al Gore left off in the battle to keep Earth habitable. Is this a good thing?...

Cell phone fever: it's all in your head ... so to speak

A new study that shows people who say radio waves from cell phone towers are making them sick are exhibiting a purely pyschosomatic reaction won't be the last nail required to seal this particular coffin of pseudo-science. But as a...

The incredible calculating canine!

"Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times."

Cowards at University College London

"One of the most eminent scientists in the UK" has been taking on the merchants of woo...

The Loch Ness monster is back ... not

When CNN announces it has "what Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the finest footage ever taken" it's hard not to bite. Never mind that what used to be the most famous photographic evidence turned out to be fake....

How to embarrass your country

I am so embarrassed to be a Canadian. A member of Canada's Parliament has given voice to an effort to add Bigfoot to the country's Species at Risk Act. Read it and weep:...

Scared of the ether

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it was more that little appropriate that I might be reminded of that particular truism by a friend of mine who just happens to be a librarian. The lesson involves a variation...

Witchful thinking: water on the brain

This past weekend in the New Age capital of the New South (Asheville, N.C.), members of the Appalachian chapter of the American Society of Dowsers were scheduled to hold a quarterly meeting. I know this because the alternative weekly in...

The end of an era at Princeton

After 28 years, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research institute is finally giving up the ghost, bringing an end to arguably the most respectable -- or the least embarrassing -- parapsychological research effort. Is this cause for celebration? I'm not sure,...

Fake psychic get's girls

"Fake Psychic Get's Girls." That's the subject line of my favorite piece of spam. Every now and then one slips by the email junk filters and I get a chuckle, and not just because of the punctuation error, either....

Playing to type in Japan

What with absurdly high levels of belief in astrology, sky fairies, homeopathy, and whatnot, it sometimes seems like the United States of America has the market cornered in superstitious nonsense. Far from it. The Chinese, for example, have their penchant...

PSYCH Colombia: Voodoo-doll exorcisms

Anyone tried to watch the new USA Network series Psych? The one in which a sharp-eyed guy pretends to be psychic in order to get paid investigation gigs with the local police department? Well, don't bother. For one thing, the...

British flakes

Today's time-waster while I wait for the first coat of sky blue to dry in what used to be the study is reader-baiting. The targets are citizens of the U.K. The subject is the paranormal. I ask you, what's with...

Forget Hitler, the fault lies in our stars

Astrology is not usually at the top of my worry list. Sure, there are far too many gullible readers of daily horoscopes, and it did bother me a bit to learn Ronald Reagan was consulting an astrologer while sitting in...

Psychics on the ascendancy

Here's a depressing way to start your week, courtesy of The New Statesman: .."psychic schools have never been so busy, and it's not the Doris Stokes brigade who want to learn, but the young, the prosperous and the educated. Stephen...

When parents let their children die

I used to be dead-set against the idea of letting Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists deny their children conventional treatment for life-threatening illnesses. It still makes me angry to know that there are mothers and fathers out there who love...

The sense of being stared at ...not

Time was when I wouldn't have cared much if my alma mater had invited a New Age quack to give a lecture on the university's dime. That was then. This is now. Under the very clever headline of "Pitching Woo-woo,"...

Alternative medicine debate

This week's Science includes an interesting "forum" on the value of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), that wing of the U.S. National Institutes of Health charged with checking out whether or not herbal remedies and other...

The 0.1 % solution

No. I'm not talking about Dick Cheney's metric for how probable a threat must be before taking it seriously (that would be 1 %). Instead we have this bizarre statement in Newsday from a researcher of the paranorma identified only...

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