Entries by Buckwheat

Obituary for Richard Hammell

On Saturday August 17th in the wee hours of the morning, Richard our Skeptics in the Pub host for the past 10+ years, used his amazing mechanical skills to turn his favorite red G8 car into a rocket and explore the galaxy without us. Atoms to atoms, we don’t expect a report from Richard any […]

Bernie Nordquist

Name: JB (Bernie) Nordquist Birthplace: Born in Thunder Bay, Ontario (On the Port Arthur side when it was still the twin cities) What type of work have you done? I moved at an early age to a small town northeast of Thunder Bay called Beardmore and grew up there. I started work at an early age […]

Alan Dyer’s Video of the April 8th, 2024 Eclipse

Alan Dyer is an astronomy author and astrophotographer based in southern Alberta who has been fortunate enough to make a living by writing and teaching about space at planetariums in Western Canada. He is already booked to travel to Spain to witness his 18th total eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026. Dyer has put together a […]

Some Good News from 2023

From CBC’s The Current 2024-01-03 The news in 2023 was dominated by cruelty, conflict, and climate disasters, but Angus Hervey says it was also the “best year ever” for global health, conservation, and clean energy. Hervey is the editor of Future Crunch, a newsletter highlighting positive news. He says the good news can often outweigh […]

Anti-Trans Harassment Coming to the Valley

9-year-old’s gender questioned in ‘gobsmacking’ track-and-field incident, family says Winston Szeto, Brady Strachan · CBC News · Posted: Jun 13, 2023 11:13 PM PDT | Last Updated: June 14 A man at a Kelowna track meet insisted on seeing documentation ‘proving my daughter was born a girl,’ mom says’. Click here to see the full article. Wayne Broughton, a Central […]

The Secular Seven

From ‘Only Sky’ by Phil Zucherman, March 24, 2023 There have always been non-believers. But for the first time in recorded history, there are now numerous societies with a majority of people who don’t believe in God. According to an analysis of the best internationally-available data by Isabella Kasselstrand, Ryan T. Cragun, and me, published in our […]

Fighting an Infodemic with Cognitive Vaccines

From the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website: An infodemic is too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response. An infodemic can intensify […]

Governing Bodies Can Implode

On August 16, 1999, Alberta’s Learning Minister, Lyle Oberg, dissolved the Calgary Board of Education and appointed temporary trustees.  The board had become so dysfunctional that it imploded.  Some board members held such strong stances, bordering on extreme views, that they could not make it work. One of the members had interned at the Fraser […]

First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope

From the NASA website below The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). The telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data were released during […]

UN Treaty to Control Plastic Pollution

From: CBC’s Quirk and Quarks,  March 12th, 2022 Episode: On March 2, at a meeting of the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi, the world’s nations agreed to negotiate a global agreement to control plastic pollution. We speak to Max Liboiron, a plastics pollution researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland, about how the world created its plastics […]