Late March & April 2007

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007: There’s a Skeptics Meeting at 6 pm in Psychology room 3187. The Guest Speaker is Alan York and his presentation is "Be a Skeptic. Not a Cynic." Brian Harris will introduce him. Somebody suggested that we email in different ideas about what we want him to talk about.

We still have maybe 15-20 copies of an edition of "Skeptical Inquirer" with about 15-20 copies of an edition of "Free Inquiry." Feel free to pick up both issues.

Saturday, April 7th, 2007: I’m not a PUGWASH officer, but I’m a member, and there’s a PUGWASH conference on April 6th and 7th at Purdue. On April 7th, there will be Bill Nye, and during the next hour there will be something about the search for life on other worlds.

I’m interested in SETI and also the search for organic atoms on other stars. For example, astronomers can check stars that contain in their electromagnetic spectrum burnt atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, or calcium.

I don’t know if you’re interested in this, but I am. The conference is free for students who have paid their PUGWASH dues, but its $25 for non-members. With $20 dues, you get a t-shirt, a folder, and participation in that year’s activities. You can pay dues in their office in Stewart Center. I’m not making anybody go, but I just thought that it would be interesting.

There's more info and a flier at http://www.purdue.edu/pugwash.

If you don’t know your coupon/discount code or membership number, check to be sure that you’ve paid your dues and email Jonathan Braun at j p b r a u n (at) p u r d u e . e d u . If you’ve already paid, then all that you need to do is send Jonathan an email with your name, major, t-shirt size, and email address.

PUGWASH was founded by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell in Pugwash, Canada for Socially Responsible use of Technology.

Speaking of the April 7th meeting about Life on Other Worlds...

The 5K: I was in a class called CGT 141 with a contest and assignment called the "5K." The object of the contest was to make the best web site that you can with a cascading style sheet and that all of the files combined had to be 5 kilobytes (5,120 bytes) or less. One of my entries was about the Arecibo Message Decoded, SETI, and the movie Contact.

Klingons in The White House! Just watch C-SPAN's crazy clip here and if you're interested the purdueonline.com message board about it is here.

A weird former Canadian Defense Minister thinks that UFO technology can halt global warming.
Whatever: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070228/wl_canada_afp/canadaenvironmentkyoto_070228180440 & http://archives.purdueonline.com/showthread.php?t=7681.
...and apparently a Canadian comedian’s reaction includes that she doesn’t believe in these UFOS or in man-made global warming.
A page with some bloggers’ reactions includes the text of:

"To put this in its proper perspective, it seems quite unlikely that America’s media will cover a recent National Geographic article concerning the possibility the sun is much more responsible for climate change than man as reported by NewsBusters Thursday."

Finally, another person besides me who mentions that solar cycles are partly responsible for changes in Earth’s temperature. To my understanding, the Sun has cycles of 75 to 77 years and minicycles of 11 years.

Just Thursday (March 22, 2007) morning, there was news that France is the first country to open its UFO files. How odd:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070322/ts_afp/sciencespaceufo_070322143210
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/42970.html
OVNI is also the Spanish language name for what we call a UFO.

From February, this bizarre bulletin board is entitled, "Russian fisherman catch squeaking alien and eat it." I know it’s unusual, but not extra-terrestrial. Just look at the web page and internet video; it’s the only other thing that I’m going to say about it before you read it. ;o)

From a page in the January 2007 issue of Discover, its "20 Things You Didn’t Know About Aliens." Some of it is weird. However, some UFO researchers are saying that if UFOs do exist, then about 85% of reported UFO sighting are fraudulent, optical illusions, hallucinations, or atmospheric phenomena.

According to the homepage of thisistrue.com:

"Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens."

I had a laugh from that one.

The May/June 2006 issue of Skeptical Inquirer has four views about SETI and astrobiology.

Back To Info about Skeptics Meetings

April 14th & 15th, 2007: I want to set up a Skeptic’s Fair booth at the Purdue Bug Bowl/Spring Engineering Fair for at least one of the days. Let’s debunk Ouiji/Ouija boards the way that Penn & Teller would. We’ll have some Tarot cards and other things. Who wants to help?

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007: If we don’t elect officers on April 3rd, then we’ll elect officers on April 17th. I plan to show videos if nobody has any other plans for the meeting. Would you rather watch Penn & Teller’s BS, or something that I’ve prepared on video?

August 2007 Even though I’m graduating in May, I want to set up a booth at Boiler Gold Rush. Who wants to help?

Thursday October ??th, 2007: This is the 700-year anniversary of Friday, the 13th if it actually happened the way that I was told. I know that there are some problems in the movie, "The Da Vinci Code", but they talked about people getting burned at the stake in 1307 AD. Possibly, this meeting might be about Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons" and some of the stories behind it. "Angels & Demons" will eventually be made into a movie.

How many people besides me would want a meeting about "Angels and Demons" because it’s the month of the 700th anniversary of Friday, the 13th? I want your feedback about if this would be a good idea for a meeting. I would want us to independently read "Angels & Demons Special Illustrated Edition" from a library for a few hours or so over the summer before the meeting.

With permission, this web page was designed somewhat based on the layout of infidels.org, but we haven't worked for them. This page was last updated on March 26th, 2007 at 12:45 pm.

To contact the Skeptics webmaster: s t a t h m k (at) y a h o o . c o m . Put something such as, "Purdue Skeptics" in the subject line so that it won't be flagged as spam.