education

Should the UK’s NHS fund homeopathy? #BBCTBQ

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Today’s BBC Big Questions has three – ‘Are the rich paying their fair share?’, ‘Should the NHS fund homeopathy?’ and ‘Are women taking over religion?’ Oh this is easy … “No”, “No”, and “Nobody cares (except a few religious folks)”, ah but getting there will be fun, because as I start to write this prior … Read more

The long reach of reason – Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

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Now this is interesting, it’s a TED talk, but in a format I’ve never seen before – they have animated it, and also it is a duo, not a single individual. The TED site describes it as follows … In a time when irrationality seems to rule both politics and culture, has reasoned thinking finally … Read more

A Sikh Principal, Too English for a Largely Muslim School

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Balwant Bains (pictured), was the head of  Saltley School and Specialist Science College in Birmingham, but because of utterly unreasonable pressure applied by the Muslim-dominated school board he quit. Yes, it is “that” school, the one that made all those headlines. What is new is that he has now given an interview about what happened and so you can read it … Read more

Criticising Atheism from a position of complete and utter ignorance

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If there was a topic you knew next to nothing about and perhaps felt negatively about, would you be confident enough to write a newspaper article based solely upon your own specific ignorance of the topic and end up making yourself the target of much well deserved mockery? I think many, if not most, regardless of … Read more

How to Manipulate people into doing anything you want them to do

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The Endowment Effect, also known as divestiture aversion,  is a rather subtle psychological mechanism that is often leveraged to get people to happily act and behave in a specific manner. Now you might be wondering what this means, so lets focus down on that with a specific example workers work harder to maintain ownership of a provisional awarded … Read more

Separation of Church and State is not an attack, it is a defence for belief.

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The call for the complete separation of church and state is often portrayed by some religious beliefs as an attack – how dare those non-believers force prayer out of schools, how dare those non-believers force the removal of the 10 commandments from outside the courthouse, etc… and so what we find there is a complete failure to … Read more