Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
There is an old joke that goes as follows. A few guys in a bar are boasting about the progress that their various nations are making in space … A Russian guy boasts, “Next year we will put a man on the Moon“. An American boasts, “That’s no big deal, we have done that. Next year we will … Read more
When it coms to all things Trump, I keep grasping for the “Nobody would do something that stupid” thought, and yet time after time he does something that completely resets such expectations. The announcement that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement is a classic example of just that, and so his unofficial title of … Read more
The UK’s Independent reports the rather dire news that the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble due to climate change. Back in April I was writing about how vast back-to-back mass coral bleaching events had hit the Great Barrier Reef, and so what is motivating this posting is the fallout from that as various experts ponder over … Read more
I’m building up to a point here about the “appeal to an authority” fallacy. What comes next is there to be used to illustrate this, so stick with me for a bit. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is the Nobel prize winning Biologist who won the Nobel prize in 2009 jointly with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, “for studies … Read more
Gwyneth Paltrow has a bit of a reputation for promoting weird things via Goop, her lifestyle website. It has however proven to be so successful that she has quit being an actress to focus on it full time now. So what exactly does she offer via Goop? Here are a couple of examples directly from … Read more
As a response to the previous listing from last week a friend who is a Christian pointed out in a comment … “you are right to be sceptical, but not all us are taken in by this stuff.”. I believe that is indeed correct. While most humans are probably religious they are also not complete lunatics that have … Read more