Saturday was a surreal day. First thing in the morning, I was wired up by a fly-on-the-wall documentary team before greeting the press and swallowing an entire bottle of (homeopathic) arsenic. At lunch, still alive but barely awake, I was giving phone interviews to the Press Association and a Russian magazine, then I spent a frantic evening on the phone to a producer at BBC News 24 arranging to get a either Simon Singh or Evan Harris MP to the studio. This blogging nonsense really has changed my life.

Tomorrow, I plan to travel to the centre of London where I will take a huge overdose – in public – consuming an entire bottle of pills.

I will not be alone. I'll be joined by several hundred others in London and around the world who will also be overdosing. No harm will come to us because the pills will be homeopathic, and therefore contain no active ingredient – just sugar.

Continue reading at The Guardian!

AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic "overdose". Sceptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.

Read on at New Scientist!

This blog entry has nothing to do with science whatsoever, so if you don't want to read somebody ranting incoherently about something that has nothing to do with science for seven hundred words or so, then please feel free to leave. Only, this is my blog, and sometimes I feel the need to vent.

So the great brain of Apple, Steve Jobs, has unveiled his greatest innovation yet - the iPad. It's a portable device somewhere between a phone and a laptop, a netbook with its keyboard removed, named after a 21st century feminine hygiene product.

Some of you may know that I'm the press officer for the 10:23 Campaign. It's been a truly crazy week, but moments like this have been incredibly rewarding. 10:23 was featured on The Wright Stuff this morning, and Dave Gorman gave an excellent, clear, and razor-sharp explanation of why we're doing this.

The Science and Technology Select Committee have published two new documents submitted by the MHRA as part of their homeopathy 'evidence check'; a public consultation from 2005 which the MHRA used to argue that there was "widespread support for the introduction of national rules for the authorisation of homeopathic medicinal products"; and a document describing how labels for the homeopathic remedy 'Arnica 30C' was tested.

That the Royal Institution is experiencing financial difficulties will come as a surprise to anyone who has made the mistake of offering to buy a round in their bar, but Susan Greenfield’s departure comes with the 211 year-old charity more than three million pounds in the red after an expensive renovation of its premises.

Continue reading at The Guardian!

Rumours have been circulating for at least a month, but last night Susan Greenfield was sacked by the Royal Institution from her position as Director and, in apparent retaliation, announced that she would sue her former employers for discrimination.

This is a response to a controversial piece in Science Based Medicine by Amy Tuteur, M.D. on circumcision: "The case for neonatal circumcision," which cites a recent journal paper of the same title [1]. Beyond calling for the American medical establishment to put pressure on parents to circumcise their infant children, the article implicitly compares those who don't circumcise or who are opposed to circumcising infants to anti-vaccination activists.

The following is a reasonably up-to-date list of skeptical bloggers based in Africa, as compiled by Ionian Enchantment. If you blog about Africa, don't forget to check out the Carnival of the Africans, a carnival for skeptical blogging about the continent.

The list:

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis