Carnival of the Africans #12

Welcome to another (somewhat late) edition of Carnival of the Africans the best and only carnival for African scientists, rationalists and skeptics...

We start this month's edition with a few newcomers:

• The Academy of Science of South Africa launched a blog a while back and recently did a cool rundown of new papers in the South African Journal of Science. 
• Geekery has posts on the top 10 craziest geek quotes and Geek God: Mark Shuttleworth.
• Hello Universe, This is Nessie writes about discrimination against atheists on the South African bench. 
• Also new is Blaize (who is coming to UKZN next year, yay!) at Bomoko and other nonsense words with a post on how a contradiction leads to any and all conclusions.  
  
• Tauriq Moosa covers that potato faith dude Angus Buchan, and...
  
• Rounding off the newbies (well, bloggers new to me...) is Lenny on superstitious beliefs about Diwali and the weather...

On the the familiars...

Simon Halliday, bless his soul, actually submitted a post to this edition (so I didn't have to forage on his blog), so I'll give him pride of place. He has a fascinating piece on whether gender affects risk aversion (hear the evolutionary psychologists stir...)

Jacques Rousseau (who used to lecture me at UCT, btw) at Synapses has two posts in this edition: on how faith kills and Blasphemy Day.

The Skeptic Blacksheep (aka Michelle) reports that a psychic, amazingly, claims to have contacted Michael Jackson. Sigh.

Next up is Angela of The Skeptic Detective who blogged about a deeply boring psychic fair in Durban (I was there: yes, it was that boring). She also demolishes another idiotic chain mail doing the rounds, this time about snakes in kiddies' ball pits. (People really need to learn how to spot shopped pictures).

Tim at Reason Check does a great job of taking on Marietta Theunissen, a notorious and frankly dangerous 'psychic' who was interviewed on South Africa's 702 radio station recently. (I commented on Tim's post with a link to the mp3. Listen, if you dare).

Dr. Spurt (whose friend Dave is my supervisor...) continues his series of posts on Mad Ads (also: this) and takes on the weird claim that music not produced by a human brain is worthless.

Finally, my contributions: I attack ignorance about evolutionary psychology, explain that you have an immune system (yes!) and review a bunch of skeptical books.

We don't have a host for next month so email me if you're keen! Especially if you haven't hosted before. It'll be good for you...