by Carl Howard | Sep 15, 2015 | Biases and Fallacies, History
If there’s one thing I love to hate-read more than anti-smartphone moral panics (see some previous examples), it’s anti-tech memes. They distill the moral panic clearly, without much chance to obfuscate. They also get shared a lot. Recently I saw someone share an...
by Carl Howard | Sep 8, 2015 | Biases and Fallacies, Feminism and LGBT, Language, Race
I’m sure you’ve seen the one-line that’s the title of this post: Although the above joke is about vegans, it’s a standard template used against lots of other groups (as we’ll see below). An interesting connection to the vegan version of the joke is the countless times...
by Carl Howard | Sep 1, 2015 | Atheism and Religion, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
I haven’t written about the ‘science vs religion’ thing for ages, but an article caught my attention –– first because I thought it was ridiculous and later because it did force me to think about using scientific metaphors, which is always a positive. It’s The Missing...
by Carl Howard | Aug 25, 2015 | Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Medicine, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness
Here’s a belated liveblog of the panel, which I thought would be focussed on making our definition of wellness more scientific but was actually about the wellness (ie. CAM) industry. There’s also a podcast about the panel on Radio National. DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS ON...
by Carl Howard | Aug 23, 2015 | Ethics, Feminism and LGBT, Sex
The intertubes are alight with articles on the Ashley Madison hacking and two data dumps of the member database. While some of the messaging I’ve seen has been nuanced there’s a good chance it will be dwarfed by hype and clickbait so some thoughts and links about it....
by Carl Howard | Aug 19, 2015 | Evolution and Biology, Science and Skepticism
It’s Sydney Science Festival this week so I’m going to 4 talks and liveblogging them. Tonight’s talk by Simon Ho is Time After Time: Measuring Evolution with Molecular Clocks, discussing the research he’s been involved with. Phylogenetic tree with Darwin, a chimp,...
