It turns out throwing someone in a lake and seeing if they sink is a scientific test after all

Johann Hari (full article available for free at his site) has written a column on the new pseudo-science including noting that forthcoming film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” makes a variety of claims including one that you can walk on water if you believe that you can.

This should be easy enough to test. Take whichever person who said this five miles out to sea. Throw him out of the boat and leave him to walk back. If he can he’s right. If he can’t then clearly even he doesn’t really believe this nonsense. It sounds like this is a film that life is too short to see.

Of more interest for science is the ever reliable Bad Science.

I’ve also been browsing The Apothecary’s Drawer, Black Triangle and the Naked Scientists Online. The last being a huge disappointment to adolescents, unless they have a thing for Neanderthals.

I definitely need a snappier name for this site than ‘Alun’ too. The problem is I don’t do names well. I did work on something that was going to be called the Archaeoastronomy Resource Search Engine (hence the URL I registered) but someone pointed out there might be a problem with that name. Cras Faciam is a possibility, which I think is Latin for I’ll do it tomorrow. However leaving it as Alun does make it easier for people who I point to the site to know they’ve spelled ‘archaeoastronomy’ correctly.

They don’t spell Alun correctly but that’s a different problem. —–