Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
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
You are hopefully familiar with the #MeToo twitter tag. Just over a month ago it went viral as a very public grassroot shout to denounce sexual assault and harassment. It was triggered by the very public accusations against Harvey Weinstein. Literally million of people used it to come forward and so the scale of abuse and harassment … Read more
Previously the selection of my personal top three items of religious weirdness have perhaps been dominated by US religious weirdness each week. So what happens if I apply a US filter this week, will I be left bereft and find nothing to choose because the US has a monopoly on religious weirdness? In a word … 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
There are moments when many eyes turn and focus on something dramatic. The recent example familiar to most will have been the utterly tragic shooting in Las Vegas that resulted in so much trauma (58 people dead and 546 were injured). Most will correctly attribute this to be the senseless act of one lone wolf … Read more
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has a reputation as somebody who “rewrote opinion journalism”. While the core focus behind his writing has been his strong emphases on human rights abuses and social injustices, what makes his writing interesting has been his ability to throw an insightful spotlight upon things that are often hidden and not talked about. … Read more