It never fails to amaze me, how amusingly credulous idiots can be. Mix that with pseudoscience, and you’ve got both the scam and the victim.
With paranoid parents banning everything from comics to children’s books to toy guns, it’s kind of shocking to look back and see what their own parents must have played with in their youth.
Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front. At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of …
Continue reading ‘“The cyber-weapons paradox: ‘They’re not that dangerous’”’ »
Apparently the historical size of horses is inversely proportional to the temperature — in other words, when temperatures were hotter, the ancestors of modern horses were smaller, and vice versa. It makes sense, since smaller bodies are easier to cool. Unfortunately it’s also well-known that reptiles have just the opposite response, getting larger as temperatures …
Continue reading ‘“Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE”’ »
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement …
Continue reading ‘“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”’ »
Some people have a lot more money than sense.
Remember the SOPA drama last week? It has given MPAA not-quite-lobbyist Chris Dodd a bad case of foot-in-mouth: he publicly threatened politicians who’d taken MPAA money for not doing what the MPAA wanted. On national television, no less. Un-freakin’-believable. And just this side of actually criminal. Dodd is a former senator — he should know …
In honor of the year’s first Friday the thirteenth: it’s not bad luck when you bring it on yourself. 😉
The synopsis: Religion and brute force failed to quash the idea of Darwinian evolution. Creationists and their Bible verses just irritated nonbelievers. Now Intelligent Design (ID) tries to topple Darwin again, not by offering a viable alternative, but by trying to co-opt the same concepts that have raised science to its current strength. Unfortunately for …
Continue reading ‘“The Other Intelligent Design Theories”’ »
As reported here. Why? Simple enough: fear shuts off the brain. It’s easier to control people who are afraid, something that dictators, politicians, and televangelists know very well.
Just in case you were wondering. 😉 I don’t know the context of that quote, but I’m very concerned about the science deniers in the US. It seems that, despite mandatory science classes in high school, most people still don’t understand science. Conservatives seem to think that science is like religion: convince enough people of …
Continue reading ‘“Moon *Not* Made of Cheese, Physicist Explains”’ »