Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The journal Public Understandings of Science, has posted a truly weird “scientific” paper that is basically an assertion that they found some scientists who don’t like Richard Dawkins. To be precise out of a total of 20,000 they managed to find 38 who did not, and it is the personal opinions of those 38 that is … Read more
We often read stories about the ice in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland melting, but how can we know if this is really true, can we ever be sure? One rather robust and quite irrefutable bit of evidence would be sea level. If indeed there was an on-going trend of a warming Arctic then there should also be an … Read more
There are some things we do know. For example we know that if all the ice in the Antarctic melted then sea level will rise by about 200 feet (60 meters). So how far above sea level is your house? Actually no, you don’t need to personally worry about waking up tomorrow and finding a super-high … Read more
OK, let’s take this step by step What exactly is dark energy? Think of it as a placeholder. Something has been observed, and since there was nothing we knew about that could explain that observation, the term “Dark energy” emerged as an explanation. The observation made in the 1990s was that the expansion of the … Read more
When faced with claims that Homeopathy works, then you might perhaps reply by citing a scientific study that demonstrates that it does not. If whoever you are conversing with is a practising homeopath, then this is not unfamiliar territory, and they in turn will have a similar scientific study that will soon be plucked out and waved … Read more
The TL;DR; (Too Long; Didn’t Read) answer for the question in the subject line is that Wikipedia is. When you have vast swathes of the human population interacting on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter then it tends to naturally devolve into bubbles. For example those that support Hillary will be sufficiently motivated … Read more