Random Thoughts

It can't have been easy for former environmental activist Mark Lynas to change sides. His friends were on the anti-science side, he was a dutiful reader of The Guardian, where activists and environmental trade groups reign supreme, and he was adored there. But he had an ethical dilemma. How could he talk about the science consensus on climate change, despite generous potential funding by corporations to say otherwise (no, really, anti-science people think that happens), while continuing to deny the science consensus in agriculture. Exxon's revenue was 20X that of Monsanto and yet even with…

Summer is coming, and with it some more intense than usual travel for me. I actually started last month, when my path touched Rome, Athens, La Londe Les Maures (a small town on the south French riviera), and Athens again. Since being away from home means also having a chance to meet people you would otherwise not get in touch with, I have decided to make public my travel plan this year, in the hope of crossing the path of friends or acquaintances.  Right now and for the past few days I have been in Athens, where the PhD student Pablo, who is working with me at some new machine learning…

On Saturday, June 2nd, 2018, I gave the commencement speech for the North Penn-Liberty class of 2018, 35 years after I graduated. While much has changed, the basic challenges young people will face have not. A number of attendees asked me for a copy and I didn't have a clean one, mine was half-typed, half hand notes, so it is presented below. At least as it was written. I went off book in a few spots, including at the end. So even at my age I have new things to learn: Like always listen to the experienced speechwriters. ### Home Thank you, Kaitlyn, for the terrific welcome, North Penn-Liberty…

The Christopher Wild, Ph.D., regime as director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is coming to an end and the epidemiology community that would like to be regarded as more than statisticians data dredging to find new things to claim give us cancer are relieved. With recent rulings on bacon, coffee, and a weedkiller, all of which have come down in defiance of every legitimate science body, there were numerous calls for Wild to resign or be fired from the once-respected body - from everywhere except our own National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, where NIEHS…

You cannot make this up; as a movie this would be too cliché, unbelievable. Antifa and Jews are laughing hysterically. The Heimbach story was already a pretty good laugh. That revolutionary right wingers at the forefront of the movement are literally overweight neck-bearded trailer park trash knocking up each others’ step moms in their squeaking mobile homes – again, a movie plot depicting this reality would be rejected as too cliché. But the Heimbach story is nothing compared to what came to light these days. These proud Whites, and involving a whole bunch of different such right wing groups…

Stephen W Hawking actually wrote me a letter in response to one I sent him (actually I think it was an email) while in hindsight it was very likely to have been written by a functionary for him or the like it was still nice.  At about the same time I sent a message to someone at Fermilab and got a response which they posted to their website and kept there ever since.  Which I consider to be a distinct honor as it was either the first or one of the first such questions (and alone the lines of something people must think of from time to time if they know a little physics.) Prof…

Yesterday over 50 million Italian citizens were called to voted to elect the new government, after a rather tense period of political campaign. And today the results are out, yielding a quite confusing picture, at least for what concerns the chances of forming a coalition with a majority in both chambers. The first datum I find interesting about the outcome is that despite the voting procedure was constrained to last a single day (it usually lasted 1.5), a total of three quarters of citizens cast a vote, a number that is not substantially lower than previous ones, and remains overall higher…

I was born and have lived in Venice for over 51 years now (omitting to mention some 2 years of interruption when I worked for Harvard University, 18 years ago), but this has come to an end on December 31st, when I concluded a rather complex move to Padova, 35 kilometers west. Venice is a wonderful city and quite a special place, if you ask me. A city with a millenary history, crammed with magnificent palaces and churches. A place where one could write a book about every stone. Walking through the maze of narrow streets or making one's way through a tight network of canals is an…

A comment under "Relevance Of Race And G Factor Over Social Darwinism In China And General" showed me again that also many smart Science2.0 readers, even those who read me for years, cannot understand that there is more than either progressive science deniers or Jew gassing Nazis, but Science2.0 castrated the comment system for some reason, by pure coincidence during the great 2016/17 shuttering of free speech to rescue freedom. Good – your comments are useless anyway and it motivates to write articles when I again missed the ridiculously short time one can put comments in this place of…

These are remarks to the article "Game Theory on Race Mixed Society turning Lawless" Remark GoBu: Everyone feels as if good according to their own bunch of statements, and for non-self-contradicting bunches, being good would be a priori, because you add to your bunch only what you judge to be good. However, we are forced to have ‘Smelly Flowers in my Good Bunch’: Statements that are in our bunch because we “sold our soul”, by going along with a social system’s deception, thus proving loyalty to that system as the entrance ticket – this is why the social dance so often insists on lies even for…