Brain, n. That with which we think we think. I first heard that joke when I was, I believe, ten years old. I first read Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when I was about ten years...
[There's more! See the original entry here]

The Refusers: Proving Orac's corollary to Poe's Law

The anti-vaccine movement has degenerated to the point where it is impossible to distinguish real from parody. It's just like Poe's law with fundamentalists, only this time with antivaccinationists.

I sometimes wonder if a basic variety of reality-checking is inherent in being able to say that ( Read more... )

Not every day you open the paper and see news about how key concepts in human history may be upended.

Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History - Newsweek.com

... it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple ... drove the builders to seek ( Read more... )

First off. Ebert, as usual, nails it.

The gathering storm - Roger Ebert's Journal
We need to pull in our belts, pay more taxes, demand more value for our taxes, and say no to an ideology that requires converting our health money into corporate profits. We should to raise the lowest wages, and lower the highest ones. We have to return to the saying ( Read more... )

Most of the time I don't mind when people believe weird things. What I do mind is when people believe weird things that are counter-scientific  - that is, when they fly right in the face of things for which we have plenty of evidence.

The former is things like belief in one or more (or no) gods. The latter is things like the Jenny McCarthy brand of ( Read more... )

Bad Astronomy is great any day of the week, but of particular note is a current post wherein Phil Plait pillories Deepak Chopra for an article in which Chopra slaps at "skepticism".
[There's more! See the original entry here]

Some of you might know Levitt & Dunbar's Freakonomics, a book in something of the Tipping Poing / Black Swan vein. The book's premise, since expanded into a regular New York Times feature, is that the economics of things are often counterintuitive and unintended consequences are a way of life.

Now they have a follow-up, entitled SuperFreakonomics ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

The ever-excellent Orac takes his Cleats of Logic to the face of the "Obama=Hitler" crowd. He also does a nice bit of shoe-leather research in actually digging up the text of the debated legislation and examining it in detail, which is something I haven't seen done by many people on either side of the debate.

He gets most of his mojo from ( Read more... )

Magazine Preview - Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com
A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the ( Read more... )