Science & Society

Once upon a time a food company spent years in court defending itself against a government lawsuit about a marketing claim on their package that looked misleading.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Kraft they could not advertise that their cheese "singles" contained 5 ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when, in fact, they really only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.  Sounds trvial, right? Not at a time when the  FTC and FDA defended the public from even subtle marketing deceptions. Fast forward to…

One map blows away the land use and desecration claim of the anti TMT protestors, the self-styled Ku Kiai Mauna (KKM), or “protectors”.   A map which has come to light shows that in 1901 there was astronomy going on at the top of Mauna Kea for at least 120 years.  It also shows that the strategically important Mauna Kea access road predates the formation of DHHL by at least 20 years if not much longer.   Therefore the claim that they own that area of land by federal law, unless paid back by the state, is invalid. One need not read a complicated court case to see any…

If you want to find the gay neighborhood in a new town, look for the tanning salons, according to a new analysis. Neighborhoods with high proportions of gay and bisexual men are twice as likely to have an indoor tanning salon than other neighborhoods. Some will try to argue that the tanning industry is targeting gay and bisexual men ("just like Big Tobacco" is the cliché) but they are already six times more likely than heterosexual men to tan indoors so the stores are going up where the customers are. Due to high usage, gay and bisexual men are about twice as likely to suffer from skin…

Philosophically, it stands to reason that everything that exists has a cause related to its existence. Religion, as you might expect, came up with that axiom. We know the universe exists and that at some point it did not so religion posits that God lit the match that set off the Big Bang. Getting back to the smaller scale, a new religion, Gaia worship and its acolytes promoting the notion that conventional food and modern medicine are bad, also engage in their own first cause rationalizations: nothing happens without a reason.  For example, in 2006, a lot of bees died.…

A recent analysis of 204,796 news articles about 204 mass shootings(1) over a 40-year period found that President Trump is not inventing things when he mentions a link between shootings and video games. He got it from mainstream media. Is corporate media racist?  They found that 6,814 articles that mentioned video games when discussing mass shootings and video games were 8X more likely to be mentioned in media accounts when the shooting occurred at a school and the perpetrator was white male than when the shooter was African American, found the authors.  It could be that when…

Projects and welfare systems established to provide support by normalizing disabled people instead contribute to their further marginalization, finds a new analysis. The paper in Organization Studies investigated a program that allocated computers to disabled people, to help people improve sociability through electronic interactions. In the assessment designed to establish whether or not a person qualified, the assessors often did stick to the questions and answers on the form, and even ignored responses or shaped answers to better suit the program's requirements. They glossed over them in…

Native Hawaiians have legit land use grievances but those have nothing to do with the Thirty Meter Telescope planned and approved twice over ten years to be built atop Mauna Kea.  Astronomers globally need to stand up for this observatory or humanity will lose big. A minority of Native Hawaiians who are opposed to the Thirty Meter Telescope have relied on misinformation, defamation, lies, intimidation, appeals to celebrity, and appeals to emotion to make their point.  It is time that astronomers who want this telescope built show some backbone and stand up against this 21st century…

On August 20, in occasion of the "5th International Workshop on Nucleon Structure at Large Bjorken x", organized at the Orthodox Academy of Crete, I had the pleasure to accompany at the piano my wife, the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, for a concert offered to the participants to the workshop by the organizers.This is not the first time I perform in musical events - in fact, in my youth I graduated in Antique Instruments and I played the baroque flute in a number of concerts in northern Italy. However, playing the piano is a different matter. My technique is rather mediocre so I had to prepare…

Prevailing sexual economics belief posits that women have less sexual bargaining power as they age. But Baumeister and Vohs' 2004 Sexual Economic Theory (it's a proper name, like String Theory, even though it isn't really a theory, also like String Theory) was built on the assumption that sexual (reproductive) access is an intrinsically valued commodity, the supply of which is controlled by younger women. But in the modern era sex is about more than procreation, and survey results show older women are not in a worse position. And if the women are bisexual or pansexual, they even have more…

A critical examination of the three main claims made by anti TMT protestors.  Here are brief rebuttals to their sacredness and sovereignty claims and lastly a scientific reason why building anywhere else on Earth is no substitute. There is no basis in law or ethics for this opposition.  It is instead more a fashionable cause, and a bandwagon to jump on.   “Kapu TMT” is their banner.  Have most of them really thought deeply about what that means?  I’m sure that the Natives know but no way the millions who suddenly care about this know.   It means keep…