Science & Society

Earlier today, President-Elect Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and, at least according to RFK, Jr., wants the prominent Democratic anti-vaccine activist to head a commission on vaccine safety. You've heard all this before. Like President-Elect Trump, during the 2008 campaign Senator Obama also said alarmingly anti-vaccine things, and like President-Elect Trump,  President-Elect Obama met with RFK, Jr. despite his fame as a science denier. In 2008, I am proud to say Science 2.0 helped change President Obama's mind, but I took to the Wall Street Journal to make the case…

Alternative Title:“Inevitable ‘Society of Walls’ versus the True Legacy of Donald Trump: Dear Donald, please reform Academia!” Confusion and misinformation are so intense in our time that even my readers, though at the right end of the IQ Bell curve, ask: How could deeply and widely knowledgeable scientists support Donald Trump in spite of his mentioning autism when criticizing vaccination procedures and doubting the “global warming consensus”? Many scientists usually do not vote. They see no use in voting, because the choice is usually between deceiving anti-science religious nuts who favor…

In Scotland, traditional New Year greeting is Lang may yer lum reek meaning “long may your chimney smoke”.  So may you never be short of fuel for your fire. So, if I understand this article rightly, this might be a bit difficult for Alaskans in 2017. EPA To Alaskans In Sub-Zero Temps: Stop Burning Wood To Keep Warm All through fear of particulates.  Which goes to show that, whatever differences may have been developing between the Britain and America since even before the War of Independence, the Official Mind still functions in the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. Now for…

If you are sick and need to be readmitted to the hospital after already spending time there, your chances of being allowed back in have dropped since the weight of federal law has imposed penalties on readmissions under the Affordable Care Act, in an effort to contain costs that have ballooned out of control with almost 11 million new people on Medicaid rather than in private exchanges. The authors of the analysis are cheering this as policy efforts that  motivate health care providers to improve performance but they didn't actually analyze successful medical treatment, they simply used…

Nibiru easily ranks as the pseudoscience doomsday scenario I get most questions about. Many people, including teenagers, are terrified that we are all about to be killed by a planet called Nibiru which they think is going to hit Earth or do a close flyby in the very near future, for instance many of them have come to believe that it is going to hit us some time before Christmas, or shortly afterwards. Most astronomers have probably never heard of it. If you were to explain this to them they would just LOL until they realize you don't mean it as a joke and are deadly serious. For my readers…

We've had fake news world ending prophecies for centuries. But now we have exaggerated scientific scenarios to add to the list, so that we can get scared by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway warming and so on. These are mixed with pseudoscience, and hoaxes, to the extent that it's often hard to figure out what is fake doomsday news, what is exaggerated, and what is the sober truth. It's easy to get a feeling of a doomsday helplessness. Yet we are far from helpless. These fake scenarios distract us from many real issues that we can do something about. Some vulnerable people, including…

We've had prophecies of the world ending for centuries. But now we face countless fake and exaggerated end of world stories based on science and pseudoscience, which are spread, together with out and out hoaxes through fake news sites and youtube. These stories distract us from the real issues that we face and can actually do something about. Also they cause most people to switch off and ignore the issues rather than get more engaged, while a few people become terrified by these stories, and even suicidal, especially young teenagers. You'd be amazed how many people find these stories scary.…

The City Colleges of Chicago treats adjunct faculty like full timers when it comes to workloads but pays us worse than a full time fast food worker in Chicago IL.  I am the treasurer of this local of the IEA-NEA which covers seven campuses spread across the city of Chicago. Educationally City Colleges of Chicago can be compared to City University of New York (where this guy teaches Astronomy and Physics you know him .. Michio Kaku teaches at a community college.)  The WTTW , the PBS TV station in Chicago, story shown in the video below is a bit misleading and I want to expand…

John Glenn one of the first seven NASA Astronauts and a former Senator of many terms has died at the age of 95.  His life was rich and full and at this point his loss is not a tragedy.  All that is left to say is God Speed John Glenn.  May you now explore a plane of existence we will all see someday and do so surrounded by souls like yourself with love and grace. To place him in perspective for millennials. When John Glenn went into space we were still somewhat unsure if a person could survive in zero gravity at all.  When he went into space it was on top of a converted…

If there was one theme that qualified the new politically correct definition of morality in higher education it was the idea that the new Affirmative Action professoriate wanted to do away with everything about civilization that white men had created. If a white man had made it or done it, then they wanted to get rid of it. They actually became extremely vocal about the premise of doing away with the white man’s civilization and replacing it. Shakespeare, high theory, the foundations of social science – all of it could be thrown out if it was the product of DEWMS (dead European white men) and…