Back in June I wrote about the way French Theory could be used to undermine evidence. I received a challenge among the comments to provide some evidence for this. Well, at the time, I didn’t have much evidence (as I thought I had made clear), but now a small aliquot has arrived courtesy of Arts [...]
For those of you who don’t know (and shame on you if you don’t), David Hilbert was one of the giants of 19th-20th century mathematics. Despite his very English-looking name, he was German by birth and by upbringing and lived almost his entire life in Königsberg and later Göttingen. Although Hilbert wrote instrumental papers in [...]
This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has a—shall we say—rather frank exchange of views on the methods for assessing casualty rates in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Readers may well wonder how it is that two studies of deaths in Iraq could come up with a ten-fold difference in reported deaths. The short answer [...]
Last Thursday, “Melbourne Museum held its first ever public dissection by Museum scientists of a giant squid” and streamed it live.
The video can be downloaded here.
Demonstrating that there is probably no science story that can’t somehow be given an sf-flavoured headline, a National Geographic story about the colossal squid is titled “Colossal Squid Has Glowing ‘Cloaking Device‘”.
From Nature, via ABC News in Science, details of a placoderm fish fossil from WA’s Gogo site that pushes the “known record of live birth back by about 200 million years“.
Kudos to my friend John Long, my alma mater and current employer UWA, and to David Attenborough, after whom the fish has been named.
Bruce Dorminey reports in COSMOS on a fascinating paper that suggests the early Earth may have had three moons, only for the orbits of the two smaller (~100km or so) moons to become unstable over a billion years or so. The paper by Jack Lissauer and John Chambers is an excellent example of the sort [...]
In the never-ending circus of lies, misattributions, and ethical lapses surrounding the current so-called Culture War, especially as it relates to evolutionary science versus religious fundamentalism, biological anthropologist Pat Shipman has contributed yet another outright lie to the debate.
Seen while browsing through New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions; a link to video of a salamander that coils up and rolls downhill a la the mythical hoop snake or M. C. Escher’s Curl-Up.
Norm Geras, whom I usually rely on to write thoughtful exercises in clear thinking, has let me down by praising a review by Marilynne Robinson. It’s not that I disagree with the point that attracted Geras to the review in the first place. Robinson was reviewing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for Harper’s, and she [...]
