Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The title is not a metaphor, this is a posting that is quite literally about Coffee. Be aware that it is a substance that I consume lots of on a regular basis, so I may indeed be a tad biased. The news is that a meta-analysis of many Coffee studies has declared it to be … Read more
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more
You are hopefully familiar with the #MeToo twitter tag. Just over a month ago it went viral as a very public grassroot shout to denounce sexual assault and harassment. It was triggered by the very public accusations against Harvey Weinstein. Literally million of people used it to come forward and so the scale of abuse and harassment … Read more
Previously the selection of my personal top three items of religious weirdness have perhaps been dominated by US religious weirdness each week. So what happens if I apply a US filter this week, will I be left bereft and find nothing to choose because the US has a monopoly on religious weirdness? In a word … Read more
There has been some previous research that suggested that people who hold strong religious beliefs are more intuitive and less analytical, and when they think more analytically their religious beliefs decrease. This opens up an interesting question – are they born that way, or do they simply inherit this modality? It is a rather fundamental Nurture … Read more
The years 1998 to 2012 have been previously regarded by some as a time in which the increase in Global Warming paused. Various terms that have been tossed about to refer to this include “global warming hiatus”, “global warming pause”, or “global warming slowdown”. So here is roughly how things have played out … By … Read more