“New Study Debunks Prior Belief” is a pretty common format for science news headlines, especially in any area of science that deals with how human beings behave, what they believe, and what values are important to them (psychology, in other… Read More ›
Well done Ali Razeghi, who’s only just gone and invented a time machine. And what a time machine it is. Despite the near wall-to-wall use of Back to the Future imagery in news coverage, this is not a time travelling… Read More ›
It’s all bad news this week, I’m afraid. Literally. Not only does it look bad and sound bad, but it also has bad effects on you. It’s all-round baaaaaaaaad. First of all — and you’re not going to be hugely surprised… Read More ›
So, I’ve concluded that we might as well give up on trying to spread the word about the correlation-causation fallacy. People just don’t seem to be getting it. I do appreciate that there are complexities (after all, causality causes, and… Read More ›
Well, kind of. Here is a video of the keynote lecture I gave as part of the #celt12 ‘Written Word’ conference held last June in Galway, Ireland. Why not set aside 29 minutes or so of your life and watch something… Read More ›
We’ve previously discussed the whole “oh-my-god-vaccines-are-terrible” carry-on that seems to have gripped the popular Luddite imagination since, well, since vaccines were basically invented. Well, they’ve been at it again. This time the controversy has related to the tragically young death… Read More ›
What is it with some media outlets and their tendency to gloss over the difference between ‘weather‘ and ‘climate‘? Let me give you the basics. Here’s the Wikipedia* explanation of the term ‘weather‘: …the state of the atmosphere, to the… Read More ›
Everybody knows that it is perfectly acceptable to say anything you like about religion. Anything. Go on, try it. Nobody will care one way or the other. After all, for as long as the history of human civilization has been recorded,… Read More ›
It’s coming up to that time of year again (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least). The daylight creeps longer into the evening hours, leaves on tree and shrub begin to glow in clouds of verdant splendour, migrating birds return to… Read More ›
People who know me personally will know that I don’t take cancer lightly (for various reasons I won’t go into here). So I am always a bit reluctant to criticize people who make the fight against cancer their life’s mission. After… Read More ›
I am generally nonplussed by birthdays. And I realise that blog posts about blog posts can sometimes be boring. However, as I’m an obsessive hoarder and a data geek, in this case I am going to make an exception. You… Read More ›
Either overusing the internet destroys your brain, or it doesn’t. If it does then I apologize (I’m assuming that as you’re reading this humble blog instead of, say, Art Project, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or Celebrity Bitch Fest [Scarlett Johansson… Read More ›
We already know that men are pigs, but now we also know that men are the kind of pigs who corrupt the morality of dogs. And how do we know this? Well, scientists have discovered it, and the media are… Read More ›
So, apparently, being married is good for you. Married, I tells ya, as in party to a matrimonial contractual arrangement with a legally eligible spouse. Why might this be? Well, one advantage to being married is that your tax and inheritance… Read More ›
There is no doubt that in our increasingly image-conscious and superficially focused times, age discrimination presents a creeping civil rights problem. The tendency to judge the professional and social worth of a person on the basis of his or her… Read More ›
In case you haven’t heard, tobacco smoking is very bad for your health. In fact, it is extremely dangerous. It is associated with an astoundingly morbid gallery of adverse consequences, including a quadrupling of cardiovascular disease risk, a quadrupling of… Read More ›
So it looks as though we are all going to die. Again. This time it’s our mobile phones that are going to kill us. And who says so? Well, exactly. As in, the WHO says so. In a news story… Read More ›
