Mick

Tim Farley's site Skeptical Software Tools has some interesting posts, particularly this one about Building Internet Tools For Skeptics.

http://skeptools.wordpress.com/2008/...-for-skeptics/

It does not seem like there's been much activity there. Being a programmer I find it pretty interesting, and I'd like to experiment with some tools myself.

I think one of the more useful tools would be some way of getting a quick perspective ...

I'd just posted a link to the periodic table of irrational topics, and I realized that I was familiar with about 90% of the topics there. It got me wondering what other lists there are of skeptical topics.

Periodic table of irrational topics (118 Topics)
http://www.crispian.net/PTIR/Nonsense.html

Investigator Topics List from Investigator Magazine (189 topics)
http://ed5015.tripod.com/SkepticsTopicsList69.htm

Skpetic Dictionary (645) ...

A good overview of some of the bunk out there:

http://www.crispian.net/PTIR/Nonsense.html



Unfortunately I can't really condone it, as it use extremely pejorative terms to describe the various groups. While you might be technically right to describe Christians as delusional, it's hardly going to help the discussion, is it?

This poking fun at people (and just plain insulting them) is entertaining for the skeptics, but ...

So for 2011 I'm going to try a new place to put my musings and investigations. The old sites worked pretty well, and I've got over 20,000 comments on them over the years. I thought it was time to add a more general place, where I could talk about the real meat-topic, debunking.

So here's metabunk.org, still nascent and rather empty. We'll see what 2011 shall bring to fill it up.