Posts under ‘Current Events’

City Paper reports that several local university newspapers, including The Pitt News, were targeted by Human Life Alliance’s annual advertising insert campaign. The full color advertising insert offers students 12 pages of misinformation about contraception, erroneously links abortion to breast cancer, and propagates the popular myth of “post abortion syndrome”. For more information on this [...]

As we head into the final days before the election, the parties flog their messages, trying to attract undecided voters (if there are any). People align themselves with the candidates who reflect their beliefs — or at least seem to offer the best hope that we will all not end up all living in Hoovervilles [...]

Last night Pittsburgh CBS affiliate, KDKA gave approximately three minutes of news time to Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik to guilt Catholics into voting for “pro-life” John McCain while repeatedly insisting that he couldn’t tell anyone who to vote for.
“The Pope has said you know we’re so concerned about financial bankruptcy but maybe the question that [...]

What could be more perfect October reading than a book about all of the ways that the universe could destroy life as we know it?
Out this week is the much anticipated second book by Dr. Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) Death from the Skies: These Are the Ways the World Will End. I’ve added it [...]

The Church of England is going to apologize to Charles Darwin.
It wants to distance itself from fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the Biblical account of the creation of the world in seven days.
Wow, the Church of England must be the only rational church in the world.
Dr Brown argues that there is nothing incompatible between the scientific theories [...]

Stephen Hawking has bet $100the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) won’t find “God’s Particle.”
I hope he’s wrong, but either way I’m sure this experiment is going to result in a really kick-ass episode of The Universe.
Just in case all the scientists are wrong and universe does explode, I’m going to eat some trans-fats tomorrow (maybe Arby’s).
Incase you [...]

Hey yins:
Don’t miss this month’s Pittsburgh Secular Freethinkers Meetup.
Here is the description from Andrew the organizer:
For September, we will discuss Gnosticism, a belief system in which knowledge or “gnosis” leads to salvation. This isn’t scientific knowledge or rational knowledge, nor is it philosophy. It is an awareness and understanding of reality that goes against much [...]

A number of years ago, there was a colorful figure in baseball named Yogi Berra, and what Yogi was most famous for were his malapropisms or maybe his “Yogi-isms”. One of his better known was the statement “It’s just like déjà vu all over again”. This statement came quite readily to mind as I reflected [...]

Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast tackles cell phone radiation. (You can read the transcript at the link, in addition to download/subscribe to the podcast.)
The Pittsburgh Sports League, and the friends and teammates of Randy Pausch, invite you to participate in the Randy Pausch Memorial Flag Football Tournament Sunday, October 12 at the South Park Fairgrounds. You [...]

After a break for the summer, Café Scientifique Pittsburgh is now back with a new meetup schedule for September.  Café Scientifique hosts gatherings (not quite sure if they are monthly yet) where regular folks like ourselves can get a chance to talk to an expert in a scientific field in plain, everyday English.  They start [...]