Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Vaccination not only works, but it works well. Smallpox is gone, and Polio, Tetanus, and Measles, have all been greatly restricted. Nobody would seriously advocate a return to the 18th century, a time when as many as 400,000 europeans died each and every year of smallpox alone, and yet the arise of an anti-vaccine movement … Read more
The term Yeti is a familiar one to most people. It describes the ape-like creature that supposedly dwells in the snow peaked Himalayas. For most this is simply a popular cultural myth, but some true believers do exist. Just to be clear … Quantity of actual scientific evidence that the Yeti is or was real … Read more
The full senate vote to appoint Kathleen Hartnett White to the position of head the Council on Environmental Quality is soon coming up. The committee vote yesterday (Nov 29th) has endorsed her, so it is just the full vote in the senate that remains. She is of course the ideal Trump environmental appointee – from her … Read more
The title is not a metaphor, this is a posting that is quite literally about Coffee. Be aware that it is a substance that I consume lots of on a regular basis, so I may indeed be a tad biased. The news is that a meta-analysis of many Coffee studies has declared it to be … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more
There has been some previous research that suggested that people who hold strong religious beliefs are more intuitive and less analytical, and when they think more analytically their religious beliefs decrease. This opens up an interesting question – are they born that way, or do they simply inherit this modality? It is a rather fundamental Nurture … Read more
