I love promoting skepticism, especially among all you young whippersnappers out there (as long as you GET OFF MY LAWN!). Teen Skepchick is a good one, for example.
Podblack Cat sent another suggestion along: Young Australian Skeptics. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what that’s all about. I like seeing what younger folks think about skepticism, and how they think about it. When I was a teenager I believed in all sorts of nonsense, and it took me a long time to grow out of it. These kids are already a decade ahead of me. Where will they be in another decade?
November 29th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Phil, the Teen Skepchicks link is meesed up.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am
erm, “messed” up… lol.
November 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am
It looks fine to me.
November 29th, 2008 at 9:55 am
The Teen Skepchick looks like a link to a non-existent BA article, and returns a 404 error as the article text.
The Young Aussies link currently times out, which is probably not Phil’s fault.
Dennis
November 29th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I’m getting a 404 error on that link as well.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Phil broke the intertubes again.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Try this: http://skepchick.org/teen/
November 29th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Phil Plait: “It looks fine to me.”
Phil, it’s not fine. I checked the source code and the “http://” prefix is missing from the URL.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:34 am
http://skepchick.org/teen/
just cut the following and you get the link above
blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/29/young-australian-skeptics-site/
BA! you have a self-reference to this very article!
J/P=?
November 29th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Phil, I’m trying to help here, but my advice has been held up “awaiting “moderation”.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Phil, you forgot the “http” on your skepchick link, so it’s using the blog as its base address (which results in the 404 error).
November 29th, 2008 at 11:24 am
What is a whippersnapper anyways?
November 29th, 2008 at 11:35 am
The Teen Skepchick link doesn’t work for me either. Funny, and Mercury isn’t even in retrograde!
November 29th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Oxford English Dictionary
whippersnapper n. informal A young and inexperienced person who is presumptuous or overconfident.
Urban Dictionary
whippersnapper 1. A term generally used by old persons, to insult the younger generation. 2. A disrespectful and rude child. Used by older people to refer to someone much younger.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Yay! I am a whippersnapper too! ^_^ ….
November 29th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Ah! I only checked the Aussie site, not Teen Skepchick. It’s fixed, thanks!
November 29th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Don’t you already have a blog for “skepticism?” Can we do astronomy now?
November 29th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Sadly, I admit me too. It actually took me until my mid 20’s to shake it. I’m glad these folks have grasped reality much sooner.
November 29th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
HArry HArrison, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlien, Issac Asimoc: Do these names ring a bell? These are the SciFi writers I started reading when I was 11 years old, hard SciFi, with the accent on Sci,,,
,,,good preparation for a skeptical point of view. By age 13, I dropped the Lutheran religion, seeing ALL religion as a crutch, a means to avoid thinking really difficult thoughts. Maybe the best way to stimulate a skeptical POV is, as my 7th grade teacher did, ignore the section of the school science book that dealt with dinosaurs because, she stated,”As we all know, earth was only created 6000 years ago, so dinosaurs couldn’t exist,,,”. That really pissed me off,,,
SciFi is and should be acknowledged as, Subversive Fiction. It has the unique ability to both stimulate dreams and deep skepticism at the same time,,,
I’m sure glad I found that old book about post world war III telepathic mutants, just lying in the middle of the street, 54 years ago,,,
GAry 7
November 29th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Clarke’s Fourth Law: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”
November 30th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Odd - the comment I made has gone - so has the ‘thank you’ that Skelliot did!
Anyway, what I originally wrote was something along the lines of:
Yes, the Young Australian Skeptics site features a forum board, an articles page (where people can upload articles for inclusion on the main page) and will very soon feature a podcast. The creators of the site hail from the city of Melbourne (where a lot of the younger contributors to the Australian skeptic blog-carnival ‘Skeptics of Carlos’ come from, including the blogger/vodcaster Naontiotami of Homologous Legs blog and the creator of YAS, Skelliot).
I hope people check out the site fully and hop in to contribute - since there’s a few of us there who are involved as either students or educators that take part in critical thinking programs nationwide.
Thanks very much for the plug!
November 30th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Ah ha.
The original comment I made features on another site - ‘Abstract Edge’?
http://abstractedge.com/discoverblog/badastronomy/
Is this anything to do with Discover Blog or is it something else? A mirror site, perhaps?
November 30th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Gary Ansorge - couldn’t agree more.
As a co-writer for the model course for Philosophy and Ethics in this state, I found I included a great deal of suggested texts from the Science Fiction genre when devising a template for teachers.
You can find the course that I contribute to in my country under Sample unit package, Unit 2A – Reason and Persons. It includes an introduction to philosophical skepticism and uses ‘Borges and I’ by Luis Jorge Borges, ‘Babycakes’ by Neil Gaiman, ‘The Island’, GATTACA, Bladerunner, Total Recall and even texts such as Martin Gardner, ‘Science vs. Beauty?’. It’s not a prescriptive list but certainly a ‘recommended’ in terms of teaching it to teenagers.
http://tinyurl.com/philosophyethics
November 30th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Great.
November 30th, 2008 at 5:31 am
Okay maybe one word doesn’t quite do it after all :
Great to see more Skpetical Australian sites & people and that’s very much great for the future of Australians. Full stop.
November 30th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Agree on the power of science fiction to open minds. Oddly enough, my road to skepticism began in 9th grade at Catholic school; my morning religion class was taught by a wonderful priest who encouraged open-minded thinking and skepticism… although I’m sure he’d be rolling in his grave to find out that at least one of his pupils grew up to become an atheist…
November 30th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[…] just found out about the Young Australian Skeptics website through Bad Astronomy and I thought I might give it a plug here as […]
December 1st, 2008 at 12:04 am
Yeah awesome! Thanks for the mention Phil! Remember you can sign up to YAS and submit your own articles for everyone to see.
In regards to our podcast we have recorded the pilot episode to get an idea of what we will do. The first official episode will be recorded this coming sunday. So stay tuned!
December 1st, 2008 at 12:07 am
*cough* Add us to your blog roll
*cough*
December 29th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
[…] Young Australian Skeptics site […]