In a world where Netflix is streaming a show about underage sexpots, it’s hard to imagine what the Valley’s problem with this stuff could be. But a friend suggests that at roughly the 7-minute mark, the discussion turns to anti-Christian bias in Google search and recommends—whoops!— alternative services. Okay, so LIKE the vid and find a non-Google search service.
Intelligent Design
A philosopher wonders if we will end up outsourcing religion and spirituality to AI
Some religions already use robot priests. It has also occurred to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook could stand in for churches.
Does a cosmopsychist believe in life after death?
Bernardo Kastrup: I certainly believe in consciousness after death. I believe that our core subjectivity, that implicit, innate sense of “I”-ness, remains undifferentiated. That’s the reason you still think you are the same person you were when you were five years old even though everything about you has changed.
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne contemplates the idea that Darwin might be Canceled
But here’s the really interesting part: Coyne points to a medallion struck by Darwin’s wife’s family, the Wedgwood (who were abolitionists). But the medallion fits creationism far better than Darwinism.
Why “statistical significance” is corrupting science
Smith: When I was a young assistant professor at Yale, one of my senior colleagues, Nobel Laureate James Tobin, wryly observed that the bad old days when researchers had to do calculations by hand were actually a blessing. The effort was so great that people thought hard before calculating. They put theory before data. Today, with terabytes of data and lightning-fast computers, it is too easy to calculate first, think later.
Why is there no consensus on evolution?
The main reason there isn’t a consensus is surely that anything like a consensus would create the risk of falsification. The vaguer a theory is, the less falsifiable it is.A theory like Darwinism is grand and leads to all kinds of dramatic arts and culture stuff but remains too vague to be proven wrong or proven much of anything.
Were the Nazis on the Right or on the Left? Does it Matter?
The issue of whether the Nazis were on the left or the right comes up most often in discussions of economics. Some argue the Nazis called themselves socialists, and therefore they should be classified on the left. The problem with that argument is that in spite of the fact that the formal name of the Read More…
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies
The following is President Trump’s statement: Today, our Nation mourns the loss of a titan of the law. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served more than 27 years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—notably just the second woman to be appointed to the Court. She was a loving wife to Read More…
Rob Sheldon on the latest effort to pretend that nothing is wrong in cosmology
Sheldon: This dashes yet another attempt to find something that the standard model could not explain. Surprisingly, this is what depresses particle theorists, who have yet to find anything new in the last 40 years, despite thousands of publications.
The irony! Scientific American is holding forth on an algorithm that might solve “political paralysis”
Why should we now believe that SciAm’s account of Brett Hennig’s “alternative democracy” ideas is presented to us for any reason other than to sell SciAm’s chosen political candidate for US prez? The thing about sudden partisanship is that you can buy it but you can’t sell it. It’s almost like the folk at Scientific American don’t really get that.
Surprisingly, we don’t know much about fire
We are fond of ridiculing our ancestors for belief in phlogiston but a more accurate description of combustion, we are told, involves many uncertainties.
Very well preserved ice age cave bear found in Siberia
Sources say there is a cub too that hasn’t yet been announced. Researchers are confident that they can extract readable DNA. Too bad we don’t have dinosaurs like that. Just think of all the speculation that would be circumvented.
What next? A tree that stings? Yes.
Most interesting: “Our results provide an intriguing example of inter-kingdom convergent evolution of animal and plant venoms with shared modes of delivery, molecular structure, and pharmacology.” Plants and animals are not so different after all.
Science Magazine gets pitched headlong into the political mud wrestle, along with Scientific American
Okay, the editor said it: “there is no apolitical science.” We are not now dealing in the world of accusations but of admissions. He is admitting that opposition to “creationism,” however they define it is political. Fine. We all knew that but we did not have it in writing before. Getting things put in writing is a genuine help.
Rob Sheldon on Scientific American’s foray into politics, backing Joe Biden
I was a devoted SciAm fan growing up. I collected other people’s old copies and had a collection going back to the 60’s. Then SciAm was bought out by some big publishing firm. And my favorite column, the Amateur Scientist by Forrest M. Mims III , was cancelled because Mims was a Christian.