The Smug Baldy Speaks

I use one of my favorite quotes as the tag line for this blog, and there’s a marginally funny story behind it. My wife and I were visiting my in-laws, and we brought our 20-pound cat with us. During the visit, we were going to visit some other relatives, so we left the cat with [...]

The Guardian reported the interesting story of self-proclaimed psychic, Patricia Putt, and her attempt to take home 1 million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). While many “psychics” have tried to take home the top prize, which would be a scientific stamp of approval to their claims of esp or other super powers, [...]

I drone on and on sometimes about how important critical thinking skills are, so I thought that I’d try something new this time around. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes people make in their thinking, and you decide if I’m holding a mirror up to you. 1. When you fail at something, do [...]

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, believes that we’re entering a new age of scientific understanding that renders the “old” scientific method obsolete. The reason? We now live in an age where petabytes of data are available, and we can now use powerful computer and mathematical models to find heretofore unanticipated correlations. This [...]

One of Sylvia Brown’s biggest on-screen blunders, mistakenly telling Shawn Hornbeck’s parents – on camera – that he had been murdered, has now caused a bit of a stir in syndication across the pond. The Ofcom regulatory agency found that ITV’s rebroadcast of the Montel Williams episode in which Sylvia Browne needlessly devastates Hornbeck’s parents [...]

In my ongoing series about how local non-scientists are attempting to make scientific appeals to include intelligent design in public science classrooms in Alabama, I bring you this tidbit that appeared in yesterday’s Mobile Press Register. In letter titled, “Science not beyond error” a minister from a local Church of Christ argued: Herein lies the [...]

In a recent opinion piece in our local paper, the author announced support for something he oxymoronically called “non-religious” intelligent design (or ID), and went further to claim that this version of ID was more scientific than its predecessor since it made no claim as to the identity of the mysterious universal designer. The author, [...]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine critical thinking and I’d like to get your input as well. For starters, I’ll just take on the term “Critical Thinking” itself. In later posts, I’ll cover how critical thinking is related to science and effective argumentation.

In today’s eSkeptic there are not one, but two responses to Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In the first response, Ben Stein’s Blunder, Michael Shermer recounts his own strange interview for the film, as well as several fabrications, including the one at the film’s opening in which Stein lectures at Pepperdine [...]

Nobody should be required to take a neutral stance on stupidity. Indeed – here at SmugBaldy, we’re vehemently anti-stupid, so this is the sort of thing that really irks me. I had previously written a short piece about how creationists were trying to worm their way into the hall of power in Texas, and expand [...]