The week in six bits: 1. What would it feel like to touch a human brain? We’re always told it’s jelly-like and yet, when I held it in my undergrad gross anatomy class, it felt like a cold cooked chicken (it was even wrapped in tin foil, I recall). Well, […]
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 is therefore correlated with, correlation, but correlation does not cause […]
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 […]
Here is an interesting article from Discover Magazine, about some recent research into the association between intelligence and social attitudes. The study was conducted by some psychologists from Canada, and published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. It represents a newly burgeoning tradition of investigating whether social conservatives (such as […]
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, it has been characterized by nothing other than back-to-back episodes […]
It seems like only yesterday I was writing about the idea that scoffing mounds of chocolicious contraband might actually be — bear with me — bad for your physical health. That’s right. Call me Doctor Bigbrains and give me my Nobel Prize. I’ll even say it again: gorging on chocolate […]
