I regularly see people on FB making posts about global warming in an effort to prove that warming is actually occurring, in response to GW critics. This always baffles me. Few objecters to AGW are objecting to the claim that warming is occurring, except the complete nutters, like Drudge, etc.  Most of the ones w/ even half a brain, are objecting to ( Read more... )

Much to the delight of many of us, Al Franken "eviscerated" a Focus on the Family representative, Tom Minnery, during the recent hearings on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act.  Minnery's testimony included this line: "children living with their own married biological or adoptive mothers and fathers were generally healthier and happier". Franken ( Read more... )

The NCAA tournament is exciting, I suppose, (although I never watch college basketball because the timeout and fouling bullshit at the end of games completely ruins it for me.) (There could be no league with better "end of game" excitement than the NFL and there could be no worse than basketball, particularly college basketball.)   But it's worth ( Read more... )

I've been closely following reports of threats posed to and by Japan's nuclear power plant since the earthquake. here seems to be much concern that the Japan nuclear power plant situation will turn into another Chernobyl: "US experts fear 'Chernobyl-like' crisis for Japan"  and here's a more "technical" description of the potential problem ( ( Read more... )

There was an article in the NYT yesterday , "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within", (h/t, rck ) about conservatives in psychology.  Apparently social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is arguing that there's an anti-conservative bias in the field of psychology which is demonstrated by their low numbers. (Of 1000 psychologists in a room he'd polled, only 3 ( Read more... )

I had an interesting discussion on FB recently, where most of my interesting discussions occur these days in those frustratingly tiny dialogue boxes, about the vaccine-autism link.  One of my FB friends claimed that "somehow, whether you believe vaccines cause autism positions you on the political right or left" and further that "it has to do with ( Read more... )

At the risk of sounding like a stodgy contrarian, when has that ever stopped me before, let me note that the amount of attention that Paul the Octupus is receiving reinforces my concerns about innumeracy, human stupidity and inability to think critically.

The method, if we're to believe that it has been followed and worked accurately,  has ( Read more... )

In other news, this "climategate" thing has been pissing me off. Partly because the scientists from whom the emails were stolen were being political, stupid and imprudent, but mostly because it's being used, entirely predictably, to quickly jump to the wrong conclusions. I'm trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to avoid getting into discussions ( Read more... )

Many years ago I read Jerry Farber's wonderful article "The Student and Society: An annotated Manifesto", (link to book, The Student as Nigger,  search for the essay within it)  It was written in the 60s, as the title and wording suggest, but assuredly, I didn't read it until the late 1980s. The splendid first paragraph reads as follows:

School is ( Read more... )

Famously, something that often frustrates people in political discussions is the fact that such discussion can have a tendency to end up being much more like supporting one's favourite hockey team than a dispassionate inquiry into the best way for a government to operate, i.e., people care less about what their favoured party does than they care ( Read more... )