Homeopathic "doctors"

Here is a short video from a colleague of mine, Iain Martel. It seems that many homeopaths are illegally using the title "doctor" or "Dr.", even though these designations are protected by the government.

How NOT to be gay

I watched this documentary called "Cure for Love" about how an evangelical Christian program tries to convert homosexuals, and help them to follow a righteous lifestyle. I'm relieved to hear that it fails more often than it succeeds. I feel sorry for the married guy and his wife; they both know they're gay, but force themselves to live in a heterosexual relationship so that they can be whole in the eyes of God. Bleh.

SkeptiCamp Toronto

On Oct. 23, 2010, I attended SkeptiCamp in Toronto, hosted by CFI Ontario. It was a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and hear some enriching talks.

I gave a talk (not to suggest that MY talk was enriching). Well, you can judge for yourself. The projector bulb blew, so I didn't have my slides for my talk. So, I've taken the liberty of recording it and putting it on YouTube.

It's entitled "Being Right is Not Enough", and it's about why we can't trust our experiences, emotions, or the popularity of a belief in our pursuit of truth.

Wait, is this chiropractor joking?

Is this chiropractor for real?

Doncha just love the careful measurement technique ("Pull baby's legs, but not too hard.") The sad thing is that the chiropractor probably doesn't even know he's deluding himself.

Anal-retentive photo archiver

Hello, my name is Jeff Orchard, and I have a problem. I find it very hard to delete photos.

As you can surmise from my previous post about digital cameras, we take lots of pictures. We got our first digital camera in Dec. 2002, and have gone through several since. And we've accumulated over 23,000 photos. And I can't throw any of them away. OK, I guess I can part with the odd blurry shot, or "oops I didn't realize the camera was on" picture of the sky or ground. Other than that, I keep'em all.

Part of my reasoning: you never know when you might want that picture of the yard before the deck was built, or that photo of the left-side of the van to see if that dent was there last April.

We capture about 2GB of photo data every month or so. That means our photo/video archive is a stack of DVDs that looks like this...

Maybe that's even healthy. The insanity becomes obvious when I tell you that I keep duplicates, one copy at home (hence the text "home copy" written on the DVDs), and one "remote copy" that I keep in my office at work.

Oh, I can hear the sirens. They're coming to take me away!