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Customer: Hello, what do you sell here?
Me: That depends who you are exactly
Customer: Me? Oh I'm just a middle aged woman with the usual mild anxieties.
Me: Oh well then I sell pills and natural herbal remedies that can redress the imbalances behind numerous health problems.
Customer: So medicine then.
Me: If you like, yeah in a manner of speaking. How about you call it the alternative to medicine.
Customer: Alternative Medicine! Brilliant! I've just realised ...

I've always been a big fan of Peter Hurkos (1911 - 1988), obviously not because he was a "psychic detective" (indeed he was the very first ever psychic detective) but because he was so spectacularly crap at being a psychic. I started a thread about him on the UK-S forum but it didn't get much interest so I'm hoping a blog entry here will spread the word and that some of you will enjoy reading about him.

Randi's encyclopaedia entry on him is here: http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/Hurkos,%20Peter.html ...

A couple of years ago I helped out (actually I narrated) on a video project. The remit was to come up with some completely daft pseudoscience that no one had heard of before and then make it into a spoof. The first problem we encountered was that inventing a novel pseudoscience was really not that easy. The trouble was that virtually every idea we came up with had already been thought of. To take just one example, we tried to think of a really bizarre “cure-all”. There are plenty of cure-all ...

Those of you who have been an active skeptic for more than the last few years will have noticed that skepticism has become sexy. Suddenly everyone wants to be a skeptic. Skeptics in the Pub has gone from one meeting in London with 20 to 40 fat beardy men, to meetings all over the country, with more than 300 people turning up at the London SitP meetings including (gasp) young men and even women!

I'm not sure exactly why this has happened. It is easy to credit Dawkins, Singh, Goldacre ...

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Whenever the topic of extraterrestrial life comes up, there’s usually an almost unanimous agreement that life probably does exist elsewhere in the universe. The odd thing, however, is that there’s absolutely no evidence at all that it does!

Why do people believe in alien life despite the lack of any evidence?

Well, people are aware of the vastness of space, the limits of current technology, and the unlikelihood of life existing so conveniently close to us that we ...