A Little Light Scepticism Before Work

I've been using my seemingly endless car journeys round the M25 to listen to the excellent podcast series from the New England Sceptical Society (NESS) called "The Sceptics Guide to the Universe." They've been mostly very interesting although they cover the whole Intelligent Design farrago far too often for my liking. Not that I think there's any validity to ID but they essentially just keep saying the same thing over and over (it's not science) and in my view don't quite go far enough and tar all religious thinking with the same brush. Again I suspect because it's such a hot button issue in the States. Still, I'll let them off, they are American and ID was a big issue in America in 2005 (when the podcast started) as various school boards tried to change the science curriculum to include ID supposedly for balance (but it's not science!) Thankfully they failed in their attempts but it's worrying that something like this happens at all in a supposedly 'advanced' country. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.



I am slightly concerned that my current bout of grumpiness is induced at least as much by listening to all the ID nonsense in the car as it is by sitting in the traffic. I had hoped to be amused by it all but generally it's just worrying. So I'm going to try and put it all in it's proper context, it's not news after all it's history, the ID people lost. It's not science! Fortunately they've moved onto some more lightweight topics to debunk like spiritualism and alternative medicine. Certainly listening to the excellent Collings and Herrin podcast on the way in today put me in a much better mood.



In any event I'm not sure I've got the stamina to work my way through the entire back catalogue, although I'd like to - I'm currently on 22 out of 250 and each one is around an hour long! By my reckoning I'll need to be at Carpetright for another 77 days to work my way through the current crop, although they'd have produced another 11 in that time, so that would mean... Didn't Achilles and the tortoise do something similar?



Anyway, I won't be here that long, so my consumption of sceptical material should slow down enough for me to safely vent it all out in a controlled manner without the danger of getting too wound up.