So I popped out last night to switch on the tumble drier. It's been a bit rainy. It was quite late. I was barefoot. As I wandered, tired, out of my back door round to my laundry area, the flourescent light flickered into life. What I spotted near my feet brought me up short. Within a few inches of my bare toes, locomoting along, was a spider. Maybe three to four centimetres in body length, with a relatively small abdomen, arched shiny carapace and the characteristic slow lope of a mygalomorph. Under the flourescent light, it glimmered black. When approached, it...

David Ould has taken to redacting posts now, in order to protect his own fragile ego WTF? Indeed. Long story short, this thread has been one long morrass of Godwinism, occasionally interspersed with logical failures and rebukes. Finally, it's reached the point where David is now redacting content which exposes his own logical flaws and retaining the final, entirely deliberate insult (not an ad-hominem, since I'm not using it to counter his "arguments") - which is frankly meaningless without the preceding content. So, business as usual then. Theist selectively quotes atheist in order to make the atheist look bad and the theist look...

I mean, how could I fail to become a bible-believin' christian when presented with such infallible logic as this? Wow. Infallible, seriously. So, I posted a response. I'm not convinced that David, a man who pre-moderates comments on his blog, will publish it. So I'm posting it here, for your delectation Your comments on the OT are equally surprising. It is chock full of specific historical statements. You can go to the British Museum and read the cuneiform records from almost 3000 years ago of Assyrian monarchs that you read about in the Bible and so on. Wait, what? Wow. You know, you're right....

Earth 500,000 years ago Night time Around a flickering fire sit Thag, Og and Clug, cavemen. It's a clear night, the starts are out and there's a full moon casting a wan light over the landscape. Around them are the sounds of the savannah on which they eke out their existence. It's a daily struggle for existence. Recently, their companion, Morg, was eaten by a tiger. The cavemen are feeling, for want of a better word, philosophical. Thag: You know, Thag miss Morg Og: We all same, Thag. Thag: Make you wonder what it all about really, doesn't it? Og: What Thag mean? Thag: Well, it like, one minute...

I'll be talking to Victoria Skeptics in June 2011 on Activism in general, or possibly the more specific online skeptical activism talk. Please see Vic Skeptics for more detail. I should be appearing on a future edition of the Pseudoscientists Podcast, recorded at TAM Oz. Not sure when yet I've received an invite to appear on "Meet The Skeptics!" sometime in the near future I spoke to Maynard at TAM Oz. again, I have no idea when that will appear. Sydney Drinking Skeptically happens on 14th December at the Town Hall in Newtown, but seems to clash with Rebecca Watson's appearance at the Manning...

   The above advert came from December 2010's Living Now magazine, which, aside from being an embarrassment to the publishing industry, is a published platform for pseudo-scientific nonsense and outright idiocy in NSW, QLD, VIC and WA. Meryl Dorey's AVN, in this advertisement, is taking an awful risk - this is, in essence, a fundraising appeal - as well as a ball of spit aimed at the authorities - and the OLGR have placed some severe restrictions on the AVN's fundraising activities. That, though, is not the bit that interests me. I'm for Meryl Dorey getting belligerent with the authorities. I want...