Skeptics' Circle - call for submissions

I will be hosting the next edition of the Skeptic's Circle on April 27th, 2006. Skeptic's Circle is a blog carnival devoted to critical thinking, detection of logical fallacies, debunking pseudoscience, medical quackery, urban myths, claims of paranormal and distortions of history. It collects the best blog posts written over the two-week period leading up to each edition. While purely political posts are shunned, debunking politically, religiously or financially motivated claims is just fine. Delwing into the psychology of the believer or sociology of belief is also fair game. Here is what the carnival guidelines say:

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 factsand 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.

SUBMISSIONS:

To have your writing included in an upcoming edition of the Skeptics' Circle, send an e-mail with the URL for your post along with a brief description to the host....

...which is me: Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com
Send your entries by April 26th, 2006 at 5pm EST for the inclusion in the carnival.