Skeptico will be hosting the Skeptics’ Circle next Thursday June 9th, and I need your articles.
If you haven’t read a Skeptics’ Circle before, check out the previous ones to get a feel for what we’re looking for. Briefly, you need to have blogged about a skeptical subject, and you need to send me the permalink for that post, ideally with an interesting summary of your post that might persuade someone to click on the link and read it. It’s a great way to attract more traffic to your blog, and to get your words of wisdom out to a wider audience.
You may be aware that Nate (the founder), tightened up the guidelines for submissions, as explained here and here. Briefly, we are looking for apolitical posts (not a political post, haha), under one of the following broad headings, as explained by Nate:
Appropriate Subjects
Here are the ideal topics for a Skeptics’ Circle submission:
Urban legends. Heard a story about a friend-of-a-friend repeated from other friends and want to find out whether or not it’s true? See a hoax you want to warn people about? Have a strange looking picture forwarded to your e-mail? Don’t leave it all to Snopes, do a little digging and see for yourself whether or not it’s true.
The paranormal. Want to prove how silly astrologists, psychics, ghosts, UFOs, or Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) are? You better believe we’ve got a place for you. All I ask is we keep it more scientific-based than snarky, although there’s nothing wrong with some sarcasm to keep it funny.
Quackery. Of all the subjects included in the Circle, this may be the most likely to save someone's life. There is a lot of potentially harmful questionable medical advice out there being pushed faster than researchers can debunk it.
Pseudoscience. You don’t need to be a professor to know something flat-out doesn’t make sense. If you hear a theory that makes everything you learned from your high school laboratory experiments sound wrong, odds are it’s wrong. Intelligent design fits into this category, because it’s less of a political issue than it is an attempt to superimpose beliefs over facts and the political connotations are side-issues at best.
Historical revision. If someone’s promoting a crooked timeline to try to deny or ignore a major event in history or forcing an incorrect view of the past, prove them wrong. Ideological reinterpretations have done too much harm to the world already.
Critical thinking. Posts dealing with the meta-analytical process behind sorting out the reason from the misinformation fit in this catch-all category.
Please click on the email link at the bottom of the column on the left, and send me the details of your post. Please put "Skeptics' Circle" in the subject line of your email. I will accept submissions up to midnight Pacific Time on Wednesday June 8, although I would be grateful if you didn’t all leave it that late: send them as soon as you have posted. There is no limit to the number of submissions you can make.
So what are you waiting for? Get writing! I'm looking forward to receiving them.