Every year I give some thought to the question of how best to mark Holocaust Memorial Day… …and every year I come back to same thing, this video of Jacob Bronowski at Auschwitz, from the landmark BBC series ‘The Ascent of Man’. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs[/youtube] No more need be said. […]

One of the more interesting and widely cited, empirically verified, facts to emerge from the field of psychology in the last few decades is the fact that people have a marked propensity to overestimate their own abilities relative to other people. To put another way, if you ask […]

As one idiotic idea fades temporarily (?) into the background with the withdrawal of Nadine Dorries’ misconceived abstinence education bill from last Friday’s House of Commons order paper, another resurfaces in the form of proposals to alter the current framework for pre-abortion counselling which are, in part, a […]

Although the Internet is, today, positively swimming with consumer review websites, the online consumer review model has its flaws. One can never be entirely certain about the personal motives or degree of experience that product reviewers bring to the table nor how robust a review sites’ systems when […]

CORRECTIONS When dealing with statistics its important to check not only your figures but also your assumptions. For example, if a government agency, such as the CPS, publishes a report with the title ‘Violence Against Women’ then the natural assumption is that all the data in the report […]

No, that’s not a front page headline from an upcoming edition of the Daily Express. Rather its an actual newly published essay in an oncology journal, ‘The Breast Journal’, which is published by Wiley-Blackwell with the following promotional blurb: The Breast Journal is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary source […]

It would appear from today’s Twitter traffic that Rhys Morgan has now hit the big time with the acquisition of his own personal fruitloop, who comes complete with their own batshit insane Youtube channel, ‘SKEPTICSexposed’ (seven videos and counting, so far). That said, most of the smart money […]

If you’ve been following developments in the ongoing case of the skeptical blogosphere vs Dr Stanslaw Burzynski then you’ll probably be aware that, yesterday, yet another branch of mainstream media joined the growing list of professional journalistic enterprises that have recently been drawn into, perhaps unwittingly, promoting his […]

There’s a side to the ongoing Burzynski story that, for me, hasn’t really been covered in any great depth as yet and so, at the risk of offending a few people along the way, I’m going to dive straight into it and talk about the role of Burzynski’s […]

I dealt with the absurd proposition that the findings of the RCPsych/NCCMH review of abortion and mental health demonstrates that 98% of abortions carried out in the UK are, in fact, illegal within the provision of the Abortion Act 1967 in my last monster post on the subject […]