Ben Goldacre - Battling Bad Science

It's hard to understate the number of misleading health reports and health advice out there. First there's the problem of alternative-medicine quacks (visit the Enemies of Reason tag to learn more about them); then there are also problems with misleading journalistic reports that confuse some shallow correlation with a causal connection; then we have pharmaceutical companies who publish only results favorable to their products while keeping those...

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Wanna Live Forever? Become a Noun

Woody Allen once quipped that while most people want to achieve immortality through their work, he'd rather achieve it through not dying. I think I'm with him on that one, but while we wait for people like Aubrey De Grey to figure out how to achieve radical life extension, your best next bet might be to do something remarkable so that your name is forever associated with your contribution.So, try to do it right because, as Robert Krulwich and...

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Elizabeth Warren Is Awesome

Part of my growing opposition to libertarianism and political conservatism is due to the fact that they are shallow and myopic philosophies based on the unrealistic illusion of self-sufficiency and individual isolationism, and I don't think that these approaches to political philosophy are worthy of people whose brains are fully functional.And I don't know if the picture above is an indication that Elizabeth Warren has been reading John...

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Back in Black - Threats to America's Children

So, "Dr." Oz, quack-alternative-medicine peddler, started a fear mongering campaign about a week ago scaring parents all over the country with the idea that apple juice is loaded with 'lethal' amounts of arsenic. As it turns out, Oz didn't distinguish between inorganic arsenic, which really is toxic, and organic arsenic, which isn't toxic.Now, you might think "innocent mistake, anyone could have failed to make the distinction," and that would be...

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Slinky Physics

In the past, we've learned a few awesome things about pendulum waves and about the physics and philosophical questions raised by Foucault's pendulum, but there are plenty of other simple objects and experiments that can teach us fascinating and thought-provoking lessons about physics and physical principles, many of which can be done from the comfort of your own home.Today we have a curious question about what would happen to the bottom of a slinky...

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Lecture 8 - Personal Identity

Science is great when it comes to discoveries and studies about the physical world. It requires lots of work and dedication, analytic skills to test various hypotheses, and a wealth of creativity to figure out how to conduct experiments to tell the merits of one explanation from those of another. For all of that, however, and without implying any denigration, it's also somewhat easy because you have the physical world itself to check your...

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West Bank Story - Challahfax vs. Halalifax

I seriously don't understand how Israel has managed to get away with human rights violations of Palestinians for as long as it has, or why everyone (other than the US) turns a blind eye to the shit they pull on a regular basis. I get, and agree, that the Jews have a right to have their own state, but by that very same token, shouldn't they be able to recognize that the same rights should be extended to the people that previously inhabited they land...

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A Few Gay Men - The Gayest Penetration

I just don't get people sometimes. Religious conservatives base their opposition to homosexuality primarily on the Old Testament, where you can easily find injunctions and orders to kill the gays. So, you would think that if gays wanted to serve in the military (and run the risk of possibly getting killed in action protecting the same country that denies them many rights most of us take for granted) conservatives would be happy to let them run that...

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Inside Nature's Giants - Giant Squid

It wasn't uncommon just a few centuries ago for sailors to tell tales of gigantic sea monsters whose tentacles would crush entire ships. Jules Verne's version of this monster as it attacked Captain Nemo's Nautilus is probably a good example of the kind of thing many people used to believe. Now, while it might be possible for giant squids to really be as large as those old accounts, the largest documented case, as far as I know, puts these creatures...

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Religious Fundamentalists Are the Ultimate Nerds

When you think of a nerd, you probably have a very specific image in your mind of someone who wears thick glasses and lacks physical and social grace, but if you were to think about the general qualities that characterize a nerd, you'd find things like borderline-insane obsession with very narrow pursuits, a general inability to relate to folks who don't share their passions, a megalomaniacal sense of self-importance because they happen to hold what...

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David Sloan Wilson - Religion and Other Meaning Systems

Even though I'm not as vociferous about my antagonism toward religious belief as people like Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne or Bill Maher, my feelings on the subject are probably not all that different from theirs. Arguing about supernatural nonsense on ethical terms is easy, and it's only in cases of forced special pleading and unjustifiable double standards that we are willing to let religiosity get away with things that we would not...

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You Are Not So Smart - PRO-CRAS-TI-NATION

One of my favorite blogs out there is You Are Not So Smart. Based on scientific developments in fields like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, it's a fun and accessible exploration of the many ways in which our minds predictably fail us because of the many cognitive biases to which we are naturally prone and the logical fallacies we commit without even realizing it.If you consistently manage to make the same wrong choice, for instance,...

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Remembering 9/11 - Imagine No Religion

Today marks the 10th anniversary of that surreal and catastrophic day that will be forever marked in our collective and individual memories. Needless to say, my heart and thoughts are with everyone affected by that tragedy.But I think this day also presents an opportunity to meditate and reflect on what philosophers refer to sometimes as the ethics of belief, and the question of our moral responsibility for holding the beliefs we hold.Beliefs don't...

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The Republican Debate in 45 Seconds

In case you missed the GOP debate the other night as I did, here are the highlights:I don't think my small brain can handle the intricacy and complexity of these ideas...

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Peter Singer vs John Lennox - Is There a God?

Most public academic debates concerning the existence of God tend to feature religious apologists who propose sophisticated philosophical arguments for the existence of a supernatural or transcendent Being. Here is where we're exposed to things like the ontological argument, the argument from necessity and contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the moral argument, Pascal's wager, the argument from design or its fine-tuning cousin, etc.There...

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Jonathan Drori - The Beautiful Tricks of Flowers

In the game of evolution, the winners are those who successfully manage to survive and reproduce, and one of the best ways to do the latter is sexually. If you simply made perfect copies of yourself, there wouldn't be enough genetic diversity in your offspring to be protected against newly evolving pressures. Sexual reproduction provides some of the shuffling necessary for the evolution of successful adaptations by providing some genetic diversity....

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Crop Circles

One of the most prevalent and insidious informal logical fallacies is the argument from personal incredulity: I personally can't explain x, therefore the explanation must be y (and y usually takes the form of God or aliens or ghosts, or some other arbitrarily chosen being). You should never take your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations as evidence of anything other than your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations...When...

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Richard Dawkins - So Who Was the First Person Really?

Richard Dawkins is coming out with a great new illustrated book about how scientists come to have the knowledge they do, and it'll be released here in the US on my little niece's birthday, so guess what she'll be getting from her favorite uncle? :)The following excerpt from the audio version of the book (read, as usual, by Dawkins himself and Lalla Ward) explores the kind of question that a young inquiring mind might ask her parents: who was the...

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Islam was created by Muhammad, for Muhammad?

Have you ever noticed that one thing most religions and cults have in common, apart from all the supernatural and unfalsifiable claims they make, is that they tend to be so coincidentally convenient for the sake and benefit of their leaders?What are the odds?!? Some dude claims to have knowledge of things the rest of us have no direct access to (and can't therefore refute through evidence), and this knowledge just happens to tell us that we must...

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