Science & Society

We all pay our electric and gas bills in winter with more urgency than in summer because cold can kill you.  Without both electricity and gas modern furnaces will not function.  So we pay and think that the cold will be at bay for a month.  Then my family gets this letter which I was only made aware of by my parents yesterday.   ComEd the local electric utility and a corporate subsidiary of Exelon  is going to shut off the power for about 240 minutes between the hours of 8AM and 4PM.  When asked if they will give any warning on the day of this shut off, say…

This is awful. A science writer and video producer who decided Christmas Eve is just the right time to publish a video claiming FALSELY that a small nuclear exchange of 100 nuclear weapons would destroy all world agriculture for decades. This is based on an old paper from 1983 which was treated with skepticism at the time and now is known to be incorrect, combined with more recent research from 2014 that is disputed because of it preloads the model with high levels of soot in the stratosphere, levels which most modern studies do not support. He claims that 2 months after the exchange, the…

Evidence shows that banning scientific words does not stop them from being used.   Today in many reports the Trump administration banned the use by the CDC of the words or phrases, transgender, evidence based, science based, fetus, vulnerable, entitlement, and diversity.  Some individual in the trump administration made this call I'd really like to know who (Sounds like a Jeff Sessions kind of thing.  VP Pence would be too politically smart to try something so foolish.)  Most of these words are things which are simply descriptive. Science based, and evidence…

ABC News recently suspended Brian Ross (four weeks without pay) for fabricating an unsubstantiated story that matched his ideological beliefs about Republicans and President Donald Trump and which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet. This was not the first time he had turned his wishful thinking into action, he also blamed the Aurora, Colorado shooting on the Tea Party. It was, however, the first time ABC instituted some accountability for his work. When will science media do the same? I am not talking about criticizing Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop nonsense or discussing the merits…

Once more many people are getting scared as a result of the recent North Korea test which puts the whole of the US in range.  The headlines say it puts all of US in range. You have to read carefully to discover it was probably a lightweight mock warhead. The way over hyped news stories about North Korea scare vulnerable young children and adults. So I write this to help put it in perspective. Also to explain why there is no way North Korea want to attack the US with a nuclear weapon. Nor does the US have any military options involving an invasion of North Korea, and both sides know that…

Up goer five is a game where you try to explain a hard idea in simple words. I am even writing this part using only the most often used words. Even a idea for how it all works. Even the word "theory" is not in the list of the 1000 most common words, nor are energy, or momentum, but force is. I explained my theory of everything in what might be the briefest scientific publication ever "A Theory of Everything (DOI:au.151097671.11518441)" not counting the single figure and citation to a longer more detailed paper. I did this for the Authorea "Up Goer Five challenge".UPDATE: A Reader helpfully…

Since writing on intelligence and race, many who know me and that I am capable of Aspergerian levels of critical thought, such as the boss of Science2.0, cannot understand how I, the quantum relativist unforgiving of any simplification, can be suddenly so naïve as to, for instance when discussing IQ, neglect different kinds of intelligence and “creativity”. Such dismissals occur in spite of, as it is relevant for this particular example of discussing intelligence, my discussing analytic-verbal versus spatial intelligence and “emotional intelligence”, and also knowing from personal experience…

This is another silly story that is scaring people including very young children and giving them panic attacks. The claim is a fantasy story that a 'black star' (??) at the far side of the sun is going to somehow send powerful earthquakes to Earth on Sunday 19th November from a distance of over150 million miles. There is no truth to this, it's just a made up fantasy like a script for a bad movie. Not even a pseudo science explanation of how it is supposed to do it.  We are getting so many comments, posts and PM's about it in our Doomsday / Nibiru support groups on Facebook, and so far…

Also on China, Jews, ‘game theory paradox’, Antifa, Trump supporters, gun laws… **Trigger Warning** Game theoretically, the left-right political divide is an understood phenomenon. Such polarization arises whenever power is distributed through repeated winner-takes-all elections. Smaller groups lose all influence except by influencing one of the main groups. A one dimensional “political spectrum” evolves through the way apes identify and rationalize. Every single ape identifies with a collection of positions, a ‘Good Bunch’ (Remark GoBu at end) of partially mutually contradicting statements…

To see the problem try a google news search for Planet X - and see if you find anything there about the genuine astronomical search for planets beyond Neptune. It's filled with stories saying that the nonsense planet Nibiru is about to fly past Earth or hit us (what professor Brian Cox once called the imaginary bullshit planet Nibiru). You often have to search quite a way to find genuine news amongst the nonsense. Now try to imagine what that search looks like to a young child aged 13 (say) who does not know that these stories are fake and sensationalist. Many get scared, sick, and even…