If you are like me, you use your smartphone a lot. I use mine for engineering work, snapshots and photo editing, tweeting, reading pdfs while on the road, listening to podcasts....oh and its a phone too.
I am pretty enamored with the state of these devices, growing up in the 70's and 80's, the common iPhone, blackberry or Android phone really seem like a device from the future. As you probably know, there are well over 100 thousand apps for the iphone (and most of them are junk, really).
Well it's time to get some real skeptical software on these machines! One message I took away from the last NECSS conference, was from Rebecca Watson. A great time to help spread the skeptical viewpoint of various subjects is to go to presentations by creationists, antivaxxers, and so forth, and ask sharp questions. You aren't trying to convince the presenter, that person is probably already lost (you'd know this if you ever watched Jenny McCarthy flail around defending her ridiculous ideas about vaccinations). However the audience is generally a little more prone to being jarred if someone pointedly makes remarks that are logical or data driven refutations of items that were presented. If you are anything like me, you feel better having actual data in your hand, well here it is.
In this vein, I created a game for your iPhone. Skeptic's Bingo. Its not a brilliant game. Its pretty obvious. But I have at least made something that you can use to pass the time during one of these lecture. However more importantly, it presents information about common tripe that is usually put forward in various areas like creationism, anti-vaxers (well thats coming next), and other areas (which I will add as time goes on).
The website for the game is here.
Mark the things that you have heard so you can come back to them later. Use the information provided to formulate a good question that puts the presenter on the spot. get out there and get good information into the heads of the people listening there with you.
At least I hope you will download the game, pay the measly dollar for access to the functionality that flips over the tiles for the information (this money will go toward the improvement of this game and the skeptical community).
And please, rate the program before angry creationists "pharyngulate" my reviews. Have you seen how many bibles there are in the app store?
Coming soon as updates to this app:
Vaccine Bingo
Refined Layout
List view of claims (as opposed to bingo board)
Psychic Bingo
CAM Bingo
Basically if people show interest in this app, I'll get right on these items. Right now, I only have the evolution one.
