Keywords: link, aliens, book

Today I want to talk to you about being abducted by aliens for fun and profit!

This is a fun, tongue-in-cheek book about the flying saucer phenomenon by Professor Solomon available as a free download online.  Professor Solomon has figured out the reason that aliens are visiting us and can tell you the best way to enjoy your abduction experience.

And he's set up a live webcam on an alien ship to record his abduction adventure.  If you're lucky, maybe you'll catch a glimpse of him cavorting with an alien:

Keywords: link

I regularly check my hits from Google searches, and through that I found out that I'm in the #2 spot for the search term: "Dr. Algund Eenboom" crazy - in case you don't remember, Eenboom is one of the talking heads from the Ancient Aliens series that I've been analyzing.

I took a look at the #1 result, which came from a website called Poffy The Cucumber's Movie Mania.  The author of the article, Jon Dunmore, happens to actually be a friend of Giorgio Tsoukalos (that guy's a riot!), and does an excellent review of the Ancient Aliens series.  He has really good style, and I love the way he writes:

ANCIENT ALIENS is - like all von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods books - speculative fiction masquerading as hard science. Each of the scores of segments in this 5-part series starts off promising, knowledge dripping like blond ambrosia off naked Valkyrie shoulders, and then - oil slicked into a gutter of disinformation with red herrings, straw man arguments and narrators with scary voices.

I wish I could write like that.

Take a look, it's worth the read!

Keywords: link

I thought I should mention here one of my favourite blogs, Skeptic North.  This is a Canadian blog on science and skepticism.  Back in January they accepted one of my articles as a guest post

As a Canadian, I enjoy having a Canadian source for my skeptical news and analysis.  They have a very good staff of regular contributors, and a weekly segment of skeptical fails and wins from the media.

Check them out!

Keywords: link, book

I want to recommend a really good read about the scientific practice of medicine.  It's called Testing Treatments by Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton, and Iain Chalmers.  It's available as a free download online, so if you're interested, there's no excuse not to get it.

Health and medicine is one of those fields where I feel that people could definitely benefit from better science based thinking.  I've complained in the past about how fuzzy and woo-ish this subject can get, even within the field of medicine itself.

Good books on the science of medicine are, I believe, something we should endeavour to read so that we can wrap our minds around the issues of medicine and gain a firmer understanding of how our bodies actually work.

Keywords: link

I found this blog, Swallowing The Camel,  while doing research on the psychic detective Arthur Price Roberts.  The author of the blog is a fellow Canadian, who describes herself as a "30ish housefrau".

She wasn't able to find out any more about Roberts than I was, but she didn't dwell on it so that probably makes her smarter than me.

Her goal is to examine "hoaxes, scams, controversies, rumours, schemes, bizarre ideas, bogus products, disinformation, misinformation, impractical jokes, literary fraud, and anything else that smells bad."

I found some very interesting articles, and spent some time reading them.  Check out her list of the world's weirdest conspiracy theories.  Good stuff!

Keywords: link

I'd like to plug a blog that I've been reading for a little while, Friend Of Reason by Christian Polson-Brown.  He tends to write about scientific issues that interest him, but he also does a bit of debunking and skeptical advocacy.

I found his blog on another forum, while I was specifically looking for other small time blogs to read.  I love finding good resources which are not yet one of the popular big names.I noticed that Polson-Brown's experience with blogging had some similarities to mine, and joked with him that he was the Australian version of me. 

Surprisingly, he didn't take offense at that.

Anyway, he writes about interesting subjects.  He's a student of Conservation Biology, and often writes on related topics.  Recommended reading if you share these interests.