Baby, it’s cold outside, what with polar vortexes and the like. Except maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a conspiracy. Maybe it’s a left-wing conspiracy, designed to blame right-wingers for climate change. Here’s conservative US political disc jockey and padlocked-Wikipedia-biographee Rush Limbaugh: Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have […]
Here’s a picture of two Pseudobiceros bedfordi having sex. Looks quite action-packed doesn’t it? The term used to describe this procedure is fun as well. It’s called “penis fencing“. Yeah, sure it is. I’m betting whatever scientist came up with that one had a pretty good sense of humour, as […]
Critics of science regularly suggest that applying empiricism to life serves to deny human beings their true dignity. Very frequently you hear complaints about sociologists, psychologists, and health scientists “treating people like numbers“. Because that’s what we do. We treat you like numbers. You number, you. Take this guy. I think […]
If there is “more than one way of knowing”, then how can you know that that is true? Presumably, if you know that it is true, then I can simply ‘know’ that it is not true. And I can further simply choose to ‘know’ that I am right in a […]
“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 words). Very often, however, these alleged debunkings are themselves open […]
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 exciting, witty, and informative? Okay, shhh down the back. Get […]
