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
The title is not a metaphor, this is a posting that is quite literally about Coffee. Be aware that it is a substance that I consume lots of on a regular basis, so I may indeed be a tad biased. The news is that a meta-analysis of many Coffee studies has declared it to be … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … 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
The years 1998 to 2012 have been previously regarded by some as a time in which the increase in Global Warming paused. Various terms that have been tossed about to refer to this include “global warming hiatus”, “global warming pause”, or “global warming slowdown”. So here is roughly how things have played out … By … 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
