Next stop: Alpha Centauri? | Photo: Skatebiker at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 Last week, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Millner announced the “Breakthrough Starshot” project, an idea to send a postage-stamp-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri on a […]
Not actually an ingredient | Photo: Danny Chapman, CC BY 2.0 *** One of the links in yesterday’s “Best of the Rest” segment (those stories I don’t get to because time is a limited and […]
Photo: Lara, CC BY 2.0 Gail Dines and I have a difference of opinion. She thinks pornography is “a public health crisis,” and I think she’s wrong. *** Gail Dines is a sociology professor and […]
This Alexander Technique does not involve attempting to conquer Asia Minor | Photo: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0 *** So in my travels about the interwebs this week, I stumbled upon something calling itself “The […]
Rice: regular, and golden | Photo: International Rice Research Association, CC BY 2.0 This is an expansion of a miniature facebook rant I went off on this morning, so feel free to read on or […]
In which a non-scientist (me) asks questions about the reporting of a scientific study and reassures himself — through the twin powers of “reading what other scientists think” and “doing math” — that he’s probably […]
A post from over a year ago has been making the rounds again, with the headline “No-one Could See The Color Blue Until Modern Times.” The article from Business Insider contains some interesting observations on […]
In which I write a letter to Bernie Sanders he’ll never read. *** Dear Senator (and presidential hopeful) Bernie Sanders, I think you’re swell. I’m a small-c conservative from Canada, so while you’re still not […]
“Two may keep counsel when the third’s away.” So says the villainous Aaron in Shakespeare’s bloody Titus Andronicus, before offing a nurse to preserve his great secret: that the Empress’s new son is his. The surest […]
As many of you familiar with the Reproducibility Project will know, getting results in psychology doesn’t always mean you’re right. For example, the project found last year that, among the one hundred psychological studies it chose […]