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Libertarian and Science Commentary

Science Dies In Unblogginess

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If you want to win the culture wars, learn more science
The only thing an academic is afraid of is of being proved wrong by someone with greater expertise

How to read scientific and technical books
Why it's important, some tips on what to expect, and how to figure out all those scary formulas

Grilled cheese sandwiches of death
Twelve scientists try to cook a grilled cheese sandwich on a gas stove, panic ensues

In praise of uncertainty
We need to be far more skeptical and less sure of our knowledge

Females discriminated against in images on the Internet, study claims
Not that kind of images

Chlormequat: deadly contaminant in our food chain or unscientific clickbait?
Another day, another conspiracy by Big Cereal to sterilize us and turn us all into bloggers

What happens after death?
The idea that the world is a simulation is just an updated version of creationism

As Twitter changes into X, the Web becomes Twitter
One clever trick to convince readers you're tracking them and don't want them to click

Just one word: plastics. I mean microplastics. No, I mean BPA and PBDEs
The United Nations is going after “microplastics.” But just how dangerous are they?

More information on the neurotropic coronavirus GX_P2V
Here's what we know about that new form of SARS-CoV-2 that attacks the brain

Time and space don't exist, scientists say
Why space is probably quantized and elementary particles may have incredibly complex structure

Requiem for global warming
Cell phones aren't just making people cross-eyed. They're causing global warming, or maybe cooling, or both

'Oppenheimer' tells us how research should be conducted
As colleges sink deeper into ze ocean of corruption, it's more important than ever to divorce science from them

How AI will affect image processing
Hint: more complicated browsers, fatter books, more expensive software, all new computers, and higher electric bills

Adding a furin cleavage site to avian coronavirus causes neuropathology
A DNA lab does the riskiest gain-of-function experiment yet

The mysteries of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane
The idea that human breathing causes global warming is not what it seems

When will people stop pretending that ChatGPT knows what it's saying?
And what about Joe Biden, the original Aviso baby?

How did it come to this?
The crowd that once prided itself on saying only nice things to each other now finds itself supporting those who advocate genocide

NO2 causes the ozone hole, CFCs cause global warming, CO2 misses out
Silly us, it's a mistake anybody could make. All those little molecules look the same to us

Biden's strategy is now clear
America is in such deep trouble that its fate may lie in the hands of Donald Trump's fanatical supporters

Can AI really diagnose Alzheimer's disease?
What does the new reliance on computer databases do to science? Nothing good

Pyotr Pottanovich Shervchofskii and the Glob of Fire
If J.K. Rowling had been a Russian novelist, academics would be praising her novel as the sequel to Anna Karenina

The social role of humor
The question of why humor is funny is often confused with the question of why humans use it. The Patriarchy has nothing to do with it

Plagiarism engines and linguistic gray goo
ChatGPT4 fails the Turing test. Also, scientists discover that water is wet

You've been running your website all wrong, your content is terrible, and you are a terrible person, part 2

Unscientific science books reviewed in Nature magazine
Hasn't Nature figured out yet that we're sick to death of politics?

You've been running your website all wrong, your content is terrible, your price is too high, and you are a terrible person
But so what? Climate alarmism isn't going to kill itself

What on earth were the terrorists thinking?
One weird trick to get your territory destroyed, expose your hidden allies, and ruin your chances for statehood forever

AI predicts a dystopian future for America
Streets covered in ice, the Statue of Liberty in Manhattan, kudzu and sewage plants everywhere, and still no taxis

Speculation is not science
Climatology is not exempt from the need for scientific proof. If you want to convince us that CO2 causes warming, then prove it empirically

Build a stronger fence
A fence may not be the solution to all of our problems, but without one you're an open target

Metaphysics of causal sets
A model for quantum gravity is remarkably similar to neural networks—and may resolve the multiverse question

You're insulting people all wrong
Good insults demonstrate the ability to think creatively and quickly in a tense situation. Our politicians have lost that skill

Don't believe the hype from the media about science
An overlooked 2021 paper purporting to show 99% agreement with the AGW narrative actually shows the opposite

If global warming is really a crisis, then make the research available to the public
Good scholarly practice? What's that?

Global warming causes everything, and everything causes global warming
A bunch of futurists unwittingly predicted that AGW will turn England into a tropical paradise

Tutorial on image densitometry in Imal
How to get scientifically accurate data from Western blots

What features would alien spacecraft NOT have?
Most if not all UFO sightings are actually evidence of humans who misunderstand Earth technology

How to deal with a flat tire
Many of my colleagues seem not to know what to do when they get a flat tire. Here's a quick tutorial

AI is coming for the bureaucrats
Scientists and car mechanics safe; news reporters and bureaucrats hardest hit

Is your washing machine really spying on you?
It's just a matter of time before it turns you in for not cleaning out the lint trap

Nature now suffering from climate grief
Not just ordinary climate grief. Extreme climate grief . . . whatever that is

The high cost of spitting on graves
Academics do it because it's their job. But who wants to end up like Martin Heidegger or Didier Raoult?

Bureaucrats find something harmless to do
The telephone sanitizer crowd meets the precautionary principle on regulating artificial intelligence

Electric cars: what will our future be like?
Fun on a bun until you get roasted or carted off to prison by a self-driving government car

Poison ivy
How to identify it, how it affects the immune system, why only humans are affected, and how it differs from giant hogweed

An unbiased search engine. What a concept!
Brave promises no censorship, no bias, no Bing, and less seizing up of your computer

Science magazine wants us to study systemic racism
So are we allowed to make jokes about it now, or is it still too early?

The crisis crisis
Just present the data accurately and stop trying to tell us what to think, please

Aspartame: a carcinogenic chemical or victim of bad science?
First they came for your salt and sugar. Then they came for your artificial sweeteners

I'm sorry to tell you your car has only three months to live
We need better contrarians. Maybe, oh I don't know, scientists could speak up and tell us the truth?

Understanding consciousness will turn our thinking on its side
Celebrity scientists try to apply scientific reductionism to a philosophical problem

DEI is a threat to science
Bad news: the root cause isn't DEI itself. Good news: DEI ideologues have gone too far

Could an AI produce a creative work of art?
Assuming that it somehow overcomes the challenge of non-existence

Are those inexpensive USB software-defined radios any good?
They're getting cheaper and more powerful than ever. Just our luck now that radio is almost obsolete

What's the real reason behind all this scaremongering about AI?
AI will pose an enormous challenge to the humans. But it's not the one they want you to think

In the future, fairy tales will be bloody and violent
First Winnie the Pooh, now Cinderella. What's the world coming to?

AI will wipe out humanity?
You say that like it's a bad thing

A thirst for revenge
That five billion dollar beer can is just the symptom. Everyone seems to want revenge on everybody else

Nature magazine does something right for a change
The second-wokest science magazine in Christendom accidentally puts a dent in DI&E

ChatGPT is not intelligent
Machine learning doesn't mean the machine is knowledgeable about anything, and it's certainly not God

Artificial intelligence, mental telepathy, and theory of mind
If only they could develop a functional AI by next Tuesday, then I wouldn't have to struggle with that dreadful tax software

Atheists can appreciate Easter too
At the most fundamental level, religious people and atheists believe the same thing. The only difference is that for us, it is always Sucky Friday

Will ChatGPT kill all the humans?
An article in Time magazine said to be written by an "AI expert" claims it will. But did a human actually write it?

Covid causes cognitive impairment
Is covid the cause of our social problems? A new study documents how the Spike protein in Covid impairs brain function

Doing experiments at night
The human brain is constantly trying to solve problems. But its goal is to keep us alive, not to discover the truth

Computer Covid, aka yet another unsolvable Windows problem
Am I imagining things, or are computers all going crazy all of a sudden?

Tutorial for image deconvolution in Imal
Basic principles of image deconvolution: why you need it, how it works, and how to do it

Does vitamin D prevent Alzheimer's disease or not?
Another day, another miraculous cure for Alzheimer's. If only it were so easy

Groupthink in science
ChatGPT is the ultimate groupthink. It might just be the greatest thing for science ever

Don't put your milk on the bottom shelf
A silly example about something that's ridiculously easy to check, but the media still get it wrong

Watch out for fake scientists
From the "it should be obvious" file: just because somebody says he's a scientist doesn't make him one

More sex, less gender, please
Changing the language doesn't change our thoughts. It just makes us lie more

Artificial intelligence and the problem of disinformation
To be intelligent, an artificial intelligence has to be able to think. Are the humans really ready for that?

Here's the fundamental reason the Covid vax was so bad
Different branches of science underestimate each other. It's a longstanding problem in biology

Science does not support banning gas stoves
People are boiling over gas stoves. But the claim is mostly junk science

After beta-amyloid, the deluge
The new theory that Covid-19 causes Alzheimer's disease tells us something important about how science works

Why I stopped doing peer reviews
Go ahead, make my day. Fill up my spam folder with review requests

Is 'disruptive' science really decreasing?
A group of economists and management experts forgot the first rule of economics: you get what you pay for

Artificial intelligence is not really intelligent. That goes double for ChatGPT
Regurgitating text slurped from the Internet isn't what we had in mind

Does Acetaminophen turn you into a sociopath?
Acetaminophen inhibits the brain regions that let us experience pain and empathy. Great if you have a headache. For social cohesion not so much

Does loss of sexual fertility trigger Alzheimer's disease?
Evidence from anti-androgen therapy and hormone replacement therapy says maybe

Why are people losing confidence in their doctors?
Politicized medicine changes the calculation that patients make about their doctor's competence

What would the WOPR in WarGames do today?
Computers no longer come with Tic-Tac-Toe preinstalled. So if you're a WOPR, you've got a problem

They is trying
Group pressure creates a tribal language intended to enforce solidarity. That language drives away potential allies

Elon Musk For President
We should take a cue from the global warmers who want us to sequester carbon dioxide

Picking your nose causes Alzheimer's disease?
The latest theory on the cause of Alzheimer's is viruses going up ya schnoz. So how does Covid fit in?

Who is approving all these crazy virus experiments?
Let's all just calm down about lethal viruses and go back to creating black holes

Ad blocker checkers and other useless things on the Internet
Bring back the old days when we could read about how to make H bombs

Computer modeling is not a predictive tool
If you tune your computer models, they will only tell you what you want to hear

Are humans really evil, or is it an illusion?
How our genetic programming influences our beliefs to alter our behavior

Politics makes you stupid
Scientific journals can either tell the truth or they can do politics

Scientific institutions need to defend science against gender ideology
It might be fun for kids to think there are millions of different sexes, but it just ain't so. Letting them think so is dishonest

How to do bad image forensic analysis
Scientific journals are paying experts to analyze images submitted by researchers. They're not very good

A bit of Kremlinology on Eisai-Biogen's latest Alzheimer clinical trial announcement
The results show conclusively that we need a better way to measure cognitive impairment

That science fad that cost Biogen 18 billion dollars
The era of discovery is coming to an end. Science now mostly consists of following fads

Tutorial on image forensic testing in imal
How to analyze scientific images to detect image manipulation in the free open-source Imal software package

With the cooperation of unscrupulous scientific journals, Internet sleuths are canceling scientists
In the seamy world of Internet sleuths, canceling scientists is a fun new game. They are scarcely different from Twitter activists who cancel their political opponents

Misattribution of scientific fraud
Many widely used image analysis techniques cannot discriminate good images from manipulated ones. They are damaging science

Four myths about science
It's important for the average person and for the media to understand what science can and cannot do

We are born free, but everywhere in the chains of our ideologies [revised]
Ideology is a way of forming a group identity in response to a perceived physical threat

Western blotting must die. All those retracted papers will kill it
Why in the world are people still trying to get reliable results with the most unreliable method ever invented?

Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance
A review paper states what scientists and doctors already knew. It is such a big story that the press even got the name of the journal right

Meta-analysis of junk science is still junk science
A paper on gender violence and global warming reminds us that meta-analysis doesn't make something true

Which comes first, the reefer or the madness?
Science still doesn't have an answer about how marijuana disrupts sensory processing or whether it induces schizophrenia

The broken watch paradigm in science
Eliminating bad cells and bad proteins without understanding why they went bad is only treating the symptoms

Do women exist?
More proof that an ideology based on denying reality will eventually backfire hilariously

Guys like Woody Williams show us why male aggression is essential for our survival
Trying to extract ourselves entirely from the brutality of nature would guarantee our extinction

Antibody against beta-amyloid fails in important clinical trial
Why does everybody keep picking on beta-amyloid?

Freezing people in liquid nitrogen is back
Not such a crazy idea after all, but a potential benefit to science in the future

Scientific journals should stick to science
Let's face it: journals like Nature, PLoS One, and PNAS are just not very good at doing science policy

Nobody is interested in fuel cells. Thank the obsession with CO2
The most boring technology on the planet could still give us electric cars that are actually practical

Should you switch from Windows to Linux?
The trend toward annual licensing will eventually kill off Windows for good. So should you switch now?

Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are potential anti-cancer drugs
Clinical researchers must report adverse events, but if a drug accidentally cures cancer it's dismissed as an anecdote

Trust science? Pshaw
Religious people claim that order is proof of a deity. They have it backwards, but science is no picnic either

Does Putin have Parkinson's disease?
There are many different types of tremor. Distinguishing them is not so easy

Science and Abortion
There's a lot of hysteria over abortion. Much of it arises from a misunderstanding of biology

The tragedy of tractor porn addiction
We have bigger problems than people watching porn

Are public health experts doing science or sociology?
Declaring global warming and racism to be public health crises jeopardizes its respectability as a branch of science

What will brain chips be like, and how would they work?
What happens when the computer chip in your brain suddenly craps out?

Can science discover the gene for wisdom?
What is this thing called wisdom of which you speak, and how can science create more of it?

NASA wants to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence
How many bits per second can we send under optimal conditions, and how might extraterrestrials react?

What new technologies are needed in biology?
I don't know about anyone else, but I've had it up to here with Western blots—and rats

The neuroscience of Harry Potter
This fairy tale is practically a first course in developmental neuropsychiatric disorders

The one article on COVID everyone should read
A professor of pathology explains why SARS-CoV-2 poses a risk to the brain—and why vaccines don't work as expected

How to avoid making bad arguments
Making a bad argument might seem like a good idea, but it can undermine everything you struggle for

Does fake news impair cognitive function?
What is causing the rapid decline in IQ among the humans? The epidemic of fake news may play a role

How to repair a Barnstead Smart2Pure water purifier
Want to help cure diseases? Make scientific equipment less artistic looking and easier to fix

We're going around in circles on Covid (updated)
Everything that was true is now false and vice versa. A new made-in-the-lab theory and SARS-Cov-2 damages your DNA

You can't draw conclusions from non-significant results
The perils of blogging about ivermectin while not understanding pharmacology and basic statistics

Vaccines and the toxicity of the Covid-19 spike protein
No wait! Covid is still interesting! We're still in a pandemic! Come back!

Approving drugs without understanding their mode of action is a recipe for failure
Watch out for that warm and fuzzy feeling when you drop the placebo group

Science should not be a religion
Science is not a religion. It is a way of extracting honest results from dishonest people

The sad life of green M & Ms
Green M&Ms were once coveted as aphrodisiacs. Now their reputation is starting to melt away

Fairy tales as practice in reality testing
Fairy tales are not just cute stories that teach moral lessons. They also help children practice distinguishing reality from fantasy

Unexplained objects in microscope images
People are claiming to find strange contaminants in vaccines. We see these all the time under the microscope

What on Earth is "mass formation psychosis"?
The long dark winter of doom, disease, devastation, and experts is upon us

How to copy files from Android phone to Linux without going mad
It's 2022, but computer software is still giving us error messages that are unhelpful at best

WHO is running out of Greek letters. What is next?
There are only nine Greek letters left, so I have a few helpful suggestions

Low-cost homogenizers
Part 3 on inexpensive ways to make improvised lab equipment: a cheap tissue homogenizer

Masking bad science about masks
Was the DANMASK-19 study really too small? With a big enough population, you could prove that almost anything would protect you

What really causes anorexia?
We have no treatment and no solid understanding of it. We have something better: a rich supply of speculation

Why were the Harry Potter movies so popular?
The Harry Potter books were a 4000 page manual on how to feel empathy. They are the perfect antidote for our twit-based culture

Converting an ordinary inverted scope into a fluorescence microscope
Need a fluorescence microscope for a quick experiment but only have a standard inverted scope? No problem!

Stop picking on the cows
Global warmers want to stop cows from producing methane by eliminating cows. But it is anaerobic bacteria that are to blame

Blame the funding process, not Fauci, for gain-of-function research
Grant funding panels should be allowed to consider the risks in cutting-edge research

Pfizermectin and molnupiravir
Two new drugs are in clinical trials, finally giving us a way of treating COVID-19. But are they safe? Shyeah, right

A Closer Look at the Ivermectin Statistics in Africa
The Internet is getting another buzz on about some small molecule with antiviral activity

Covidomort
Both sides of the vaccine war are following the strategy of Monty Python's Kamikaze Scotsmen

Ivermectin and COVID-19
Ivermectin has strong antiviral activity in vitro. It is neither a miracle drug nor a quack cure

Do people ever say what they believe?
If, as is now claimed, people are saying things they don't really believe, we are justified in ignoring everything they say

Small molecule drugs against COVID-19
A new paper claims that the antiviral activity of all existing anti-COVID drugs is an artifact

Connections between Alzheimer's disease and cancer
As science improves, its predictions asymptotically approach common sense. But it's a long journey

Fauci is in error about NIAID funding of gain-of-function experiments
The National Library of Medicine's own Pubmed finds thirteen papers from Shi Zhengli funded by NIAID, including gain of function experiments

Newly discovered benefits of ionizing radiation
Everything we thought we knew about ionizing radiation is being turned on its head . . . okay, almost everything

We are living in an information desert
The idea that truth is determined by authority undermines our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood

Does vaccine hesitancy increase the probability of a new mutant strain or decrease it?
Bad arguments can be made for both sides

What the Pentagon's UFO Report Doesn't Say is What's Important
Which is . . . practically everything

The legacy of the virus lab leak coverup
The credibility of science took a huge beating over the past year. Advocacy science is the main culprit

How to reduce vibrations in a push lawnmower
Simple modifications to prevent permanent nerve damage caused by vibrations

The hidden debate about the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site
The most important scientific discussion of our time going on within obscure scientific journals

Strange things started happening to me after I got vaccinated
I finally got around to getting a Covid vaccine. Now forks are sticking to my head, drones crash around me, and I can no longer get Wi-Fi

The FDA's approval of aducanumab is a blow to Alzheimer research
Biogen cut corners on their clinical trials, leaving scientists wondering: is it beta-amyloid or not?

Be wary of news media bearing gifts about Covid-19
The news media now claim to believe the coronavirus lab leak theory is plausible. Don't trust them

Cheap laughs on the computer
Computer-generated anagrams may be cheap jokes, but they help us understand why some jokes are amusing and some aren't

On the toxicity of beta-amyloid
Published concentrations of beta-amyloid in patients are all over the map. What does it all mean?

Where do we go from here with Alzheimer's disease?
The US National Institutes of Health is driving basic researchers out of the field just when we need them most

Cognitive Creationism
An article in The Journal of Controversial Results compares the new science deniers to the old Biblical creationists

Sex and gender: the biological facts
Why do some people think biological sex is a continuum? Here are some commonly asked questions about sex and gender

What is it really like to live in the country?
A little bit of friendly advice from those of us trapped like rats in a rural paradise

Alternatives to Amazon and Diet Coke
A list of vendors that are faster and cheaper and who don't try to interfere in matters they ought not to interfere in

Politics meets Koch's postulates
Politics is a social pathology that has killed more people in the past century than many well known diseases. (Part 1 in Conversations with a left-winger)

Is hyper-aggressive clinical screening really a good idea?
Too much reliance on clinical tests undermines the credibility of medical science

Pepe Le Pew, a skunk too far
Canceling cultural icons on your own side proves that you have gone nuts: a review of Little Women

Against ideology
Ideology is incompatible with a search for truth. Most of the world's problems are caused by ideologues

Please turn the electricity back off
For a glorious two weeks we were back to chopping wood and reading books by candlelight

Weird biochemistry on the Internet
Is deuterium toxic? Does glyphosate destroy resistance to Covid? Does it cause Alzheimer's disease?

Fires, crowded theaters, and freedom of speech
Rules are rules. If they're not concerned about being burned to a crisp, that's their problem.

Is it possible to estimate how many people actually died from COVID-19?
Determing the cause of death is not as simple as people think

There is no such thing as an infodemic
Fair consideration of the skeptics' point of view is what makes the difference between knowledge and propaganda

Building and using a high-quality Western blot imaging system
You can build an imaging system for the lab for 1/8 the cost, and get better results by understanding how they work

What does furin do when it's not trying to kill us?
Furin is involved in AIDS, cancer, and anthrax. It helps deadly viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola enter the cell. But what is furin, and why does it hate us?

How successful was the Trump doctrine?
In retrospect, President Trump would have had greater success if he'd followed the teachings of Sun-Tzu

The Cloud Just Committed Hara-Kiri
Whatever Amazon's true motivation, they just gave us proof that moving to the cloud is a terrible idea

What does Silicon Valley's censorship mean for science?
Scientists who discover truths that conflict with official Silicon Valley dogma are about to find life increasingly difficult

Censorship is collapsing the information economy
We used to talk about property rights. We ought to be demanding the right to know and speak the truth

'Twas Covid killed global warming
To understand why people doubt global warming, look at how the press covers Covid

What did Nostradamus say about 2020?
Startling predictions that were so vague they actually came true, maybe. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell

Could the universe be eternal after all?
String theory may blow up everything we believed about the Big Bang

Here's what we know about the N501Y mutation in SARS-CoV-2 (updated Jan 02, 2021)
We're living in an age when a single nucleotide change can throw a continent into a state of utter panic

What is going on with Pfizer's mRNA COVID vaccine?
Are the anaphylactic reactions due to the nanoparticles or is the antigen too powerful?

Humans are evolving into sea slugs
The spread of the self-esteem movement into medicine could disrupt its alliance with science

Predictions for 2021
We're releasing our predictions early this year because we couldn't wait for 2020 to be over

Science asks: do people really drink bleach to prevent COVID?
Only the ones who eat concrete for its iron content, weigh 1900 pounds, and have recently had a fatal heart attack

What is an asymptomatic infection?
Is there really such a thing as an asymptomatic infection? Is it really a good idea to outsource diagnoses to a PCR machine?

Politics is force
In the absence of a viable creative culture, politics expands to fill the void.

What is transverse myelitis?
The mysterious inflammatory paralysis that struck AstraZeneca's volunteers is still poorly understood

The Reliability of RT-PCR tests for COVID-19
How reliable are RT-PCR tests for COVID-19?

Misinformation: the latest Orwellian term
Misinformation now means “facts that go against the narrative”

Why do people invent nonsensical conspiracy theories?
A new conspiracy theory about why conspirators conspire to invent conspiracy theories

Censorship creates misinformation
The only way to eliminate misinformation on Twitter is to set the character limit to zero

Lecture: How COVID-19 tests work
There's much confusion about COVID-19 testing. Here is some basic information on how the SARS-CoV-2 tests work, their benefits and their limitations.

Science dies in an age of censorship
The latest editorial in Science looks more like a Maoist forced confession than a political statement

What will be Biden's biggest challenges?
Keeping Kamala away from his Ovaltine or crossing Pennsylvania Avenue?

Abolish the federal government
There's wisdom in the old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

Latest trends in Alzheimer's research (Nov 01 2020)
Stronger evidence for sex differences, more evidence for inflammation, and a call for a new disease definition

Two utterly bonkers conspiracy theories
More evidence that we scientists need to stay the heck out of politics

Social media shows us what people are really like
An update on Solzhenitsyn's most famous warning

What's gonna happen to all them city slickers comin' out here?
A little bit of friendly advice from those of us stuck in a flyover country

Social media must stop politicizing science
Suppressing one side of an argument turns a conspiracy theory into a genuine conspiracy

Comments on Yan Li-Meng's second report
The promised critique of Wuhan Institute's RaTG13 is out. What does it say?

Glucocorticoids do not cause roid rage
A new theory on why obesity is a risk factor for Covid; Daily Mail gets dexametha­sone horribly wrong

Is Nature magazine dumping science for politics?
Politics is the art of coercing people into telling you what you wish to be true. Nature will discover that it is incompatible with science.

What are your odds of getting Alzheimer's disease?
Latest research shows that the risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease is 75% genetic

Karma holds the universe together
Why does the universe hold together instead of atomizing? Three things: Lies, lies, and more lies

Bizarre scientific conspiracy theories retracted
It turns out there is no black hole in the center of the earth made of DNA.

Why your Earth stores are still doomed
It's not just the coronavirus panic. Your Earth store clerks are making things tough for us Martians again

A discussion of Li-Meng Yan's paper on SARS-CoV-2
Three dissident virologists claim to have proof that SARS-CoV-2 was artificially created. What is their evidence? (Updated)

Space is quantum entanglement
Many physicists now say that spacetime is quantum entanglement. Does that mean it's a neural network?

Sars-CoV-2 messes with your head
Some researchers are finding evidence that deaths from COVID-19 may actually be due to brain infection.

What would happen if some deity interfered with causality?
There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And then below that, at the quantum level, there are unknowable unknowables.

Botulinum toxin: not just for facelifts anymore
Botulinum toxin is not just for facelifts. It also treats migraines and maybe even depression.

Systemic racism, global warming, and other universal explanations
Attributing everything to one single cause is a sign that we're in an information desert

Is Alzheimer's disease a form of diabetes?
The theory proposing that Alzheimer's disease is actually a type 3 diabetes is in trouble. What does the science say?

Wokeism is applied postmodernism
The masks and quarantining that we're experiencing now are symbolic of what wokesters want in the world of ideas.

Sociologists retract article because people were citing it
Article analyzed police shootings; authors discovered that telling the world you're a weenie doesn't look good on your CV

Statistics do not decide scientific truth
Some people think statistical validity is a criterion for whether a scientific finding is true. They're wrong

Protecting NFS mounts against Windows viruses
A few random computer tricks

Should peer review be abolished in science?
'Pee review' should be done fairly or not at all, but there's a better solution

Censorship in Science
Scientific journals are using computer programs to ignore the real threat and focus on fake problems

Meat in a post-woke world
Prepare yourself for a monumental push to stop us from eating meat

Hydroxychloroquine is great again
Two higly publicized papers—one on HCQ and one on dexamethasone—show the dangers of relying too much on statistics

Toward a unified theory of Alzheimer's disease
All the existing theories of AD suck. We need something that sucks less. Nature is trying desperately to give us clues

Government needs to defend freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is absolute. Government's job is to protect our rights and liberties, not just against itself but against others

How to fight anti-science sentiment
We shouldn't call people anti-science just because we disagree with their conclusions

Conformity and anticonformity
Whatever the proximate cause, the Wuhan coronavirus has bequeathed to us an epidemic of intellectual suicide.

One phoenix please, extra crispy
Some ideas for J.K. Rowling's possible remake of Order of the Phoenix

Engineering the immune system
What is needed to create a vaccine against COVID-19 that is safe and effective? What about immunotherapy?

A new drug treats cytokine storm in COVID-19
Sorry I'm a bit late, had a terrible time. All sorts of things cropping up at the last minute. How are we for time?

Science journalists need to acknowledge alternative opinions
Some science websites are trying to turn science into a political football. Bad move

Autism, glyphosate, and 5G . . . as Lieutenant Sulu would say, oh myyyyy
Conspiracy theories don't just pop out of thin air. They are luxury goods that serve a function

Free at last, free at last, more or less
The lockdown is finally over. Now we have to clean up the mess

Another misleading observational study on HCQ and CQ
The news media are celebrating a new study on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19 that was badly mis-analyzed.

Underground virologists question the origins of SARS-CoV-2
Sophisticated structural and sequence analyses of the Wuhan coronavirus are popping up on the Internet

Does COVID-19 cause a type of immunodeficiency?
A new theory may explain why disastrous effects of COVID-19 are seen in some patients but not others

Maybe the fake news is real and it's the world that's fake
A conspiracy theory to beat all other conspiracy theories

Here's what America learned from the Wuhan Coronavirus
The coronavirus pandemic might have been exactly what was needed to wake America up

Don't politicize the Wuhan coronavirus
The destructive rhetoric about the origins of the virus needs to stop

There is no such thing as The Science
If I hear one more person saying I must listen to The Science, I am going to scream. Or maybe start ranting again

Why are bats immune to coronavirus?
Bat viruses will find their way to humans sooner or later. We need to understand why they kill humans but not bats

Another trial claims positive results with chloroquine
Yes, chloroquine. Yes, from China. A sign of the end times

We need better conspiracy theories
The latest batch of conspiracy theories are almost pitiful enough to deserve censorship

Are low doses of hydroxychloroquine the key to treating Wuhan coronavirus?
A new unpublished Chinese retrospective study claims spectacular results with only 4000 mg hydroxychloroquine over 10 days.

NIH cancels Wuhan Institute grant; possible false hope for remdesivir
More examples of how politics and science don't mix

Another cure for Wuhan coronavirus shot down
The likelihood of a successful clinical trial of ivermectin is low, pharmacologists say

Bad science and bad reporting about COVID-19
The dismal quality of science reporting by the news media now threatens our very lives

The real meaning behind the movie Annihilation
It's a warning of what can happen if you forget to unclog your moldy bathtub

Placebo-controlled trials are essential
Judging the efficacy of drugs like Remdesivir on the basis of uncontrolled trials could lead to many unnecessary deaths

Dreaming about the end of the world
Dreams don't tell us what's happening. They tell us what it means

DNA Vaccines: the latest tinfoil hat bogeyman
Explaining the latest technology to speed up vaccine development

Whatever happened to Nature magazine?
They're looking more and more like the UK Guardian, only with more math

Winners and losers from the Wuhan Virus apocalypse
The PRC government, FDA, Sexbots, Nature Magazine, Amazon, and the Bible all get a medal

Debunking the zinc-coronavirus myth
The idea that chloroquine is a zinc ionophore that acts through zinc is based on misreading a single bad paper

More fake fake news news to fear, I fear
Humans are only able to fear one thing at a time. In the end, I'm afraid, there can only be one thing to be afraid of

Does high humidity protect against SARS-CoV-2?
Could preventing the spread of COVID-19 be as simple as turning up the humidity? Here are the calculations

The four classes of science
We are awash in unfalsifiable computer predictions. If a prediction can never be proven wrong, is it still science?

Here's what we know so far about clinical trials on COVID-19 (Updated)
Chloroquine results questioned; new system for starting trials rapidly is needed (Updated)

Do these new treatments for Wuhan coronavirus really work?
Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, not quinine water, not hydrochloric acid, please

Naming tropical storms and other great ways to annoy people
Something to think about while you're trying to ignore the corona virus

Be skeptical about overly-pessimistic epidemiological models
Epidemiologists and their computer models cannot predict how big an epidemic will be.

Smoking, ACE2, Camostat, and the Wuhan Coronavirus
Some surprising facts that determine your risk for COVID-19 infection

Don't Panic About the Wuhan Coronavirus
A possible cure has been sitting on the shelf since 2015

Statins: the wonder drugs that led medicine into a cul de sac
After 40 years of statins, researchers are now considering that atherosclerosis may not be caused by high cholesterol after all.

Battle on aisle fifteen
A live (hopefully) blog from the Wuhan coronavirus apocalypse

Schizophrenia as a complication of virus infection
How respiratory viruses can trigger the immune system and cause psychosis

Questions and Answers about 5G wireless
No wait, this will be interesting, I promise. come back!

Extraterrestrial gelatin-like protein discovered
Scientists claim to discover Jell-O molecules from interstellar space in a meteorite

We finally got our computer-driven microscope to work--by ditching the computer
Shall I divulge how Windows truly lost its powers? Heck yeah

I drink the charger electric
What Walt Whitman would have written if he lived in our age of 5G NR cell phone technology

How science is slowly demolishing the myths of woke ideology
Evolutionary psychology is identifying popular falsehoods using empirical science

Doctors find a cure for hypochondria
The perils of the new thousand-question style of physical examinations

Is accusing someone of virtue signaling a form of virtue signaling?
How twitterers are logically spaghettifying their own metaphysical tu quoque in a logical black hole

The tough life of a skeptic
A crash course in how to think rationally about complex scientific questions

The world is running out of short bald humans
Whether it's sexbots, Roombas, or self-crashing cars, the robots are poised to inherit the earth.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists fails again to set the time on their clock
Clock is still analog, unable to sync to WWVB; second hand appears broken

CFCs cause half of Arctic global warming, scientists say
Q. -B Lu's theory is vindicated; is the carbon dioxide theory in hot water? Magic eight ball says maybe

Why stop at pronouns?
If everybody possessed their own private language, we could eliminate sexism and racism once and for all.

Does loneliness cause Alzheimer's disease?
Elderly people who are isolated and lonely have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's

Why scientists don't trust science reporters
If you want to argue against animal research, argue against animal research.

There is no such thing as an irreproducible result
There are no irreproducible results, only badly described ones

Why do people have different beliefs about global warming?
The theory of religion may provide part of the answer

Words of wisdom from Grandma Blogger
A collection of her best blog entries

Apocalyptic visions about porn
I have been unable to find any substantiation of the claim that viewing pornography causes brain damage.

Predictions for 2020
Just a word of caution: there might be something wrong with my crystal ball this year.

What does the Y chromosome do?
Is it really possible for a person to change sex? Do other animals have Y chromosomes? Some facts about our most beloved chromosome

Editors of scientific journals must reject gender politics
Journal editors must maintain a balance of perspective on controversial topics

A new explanation for the Navy's mysterious Tic Tac UFO sighting
It's an infrared laser, Jim

Why I am not a conservative—but I'm considering becoming one
Culture has gone cattywampus with malarkey and balderdash

The Blogger's Code of Snark
Some rules handed down to me by my old Grandma Blogger, who knitted them into a seven-foot-long tea cosy.

Latest news: nothing happened again today!
No news is good news. Is it the end of history or the calm before the storm?

More thoughts on whether the universe really exists
What happens when the sign on your door says Mister Know-It-All

Science under siege, part 6
The climate studies scandal has seriously impacted the public perception of science. Here's how we can put science back on track

How to talk to climate denier denier denier deniers this Thanksgiving
Some tips on how to avoid getting plastered with cranberry sauce

Carpenter bees on Mars
Planet Mars crawling with bugs, claims Ohio University entomologist

Seven really hard ways you can make money on the internet!
More proof of the Principle of Increasing Uselessness of all communications media

A meme that will live in infamy
Memes describing impossible phenomena, like "man in a woman's body," sound silly, but they can help us to think about weird stuff in the world. They can also turn into slogans that inhibit thought altogether.

How do magic wands work?
The plot holes we create in our movies and our lives would be impossible for a computer to simulate

The antibody that must not be named is back
What the return of Aducanumab means for patients and for Alzheimer researchers

Thank you Extinction Rebellion!
Scientists have discovered that Greenland has become too cold for the animals to reproduce. Global warming is over!

The era of dangerous medical fads is not over
A prominent website has drawn interesting connections between sex reassignment surgery and lobotomy.

Beta-amyloid is good for you
Does a common childhood virus lead to Alzheimer's disease later in life?

Nature always gets the last laugh
On Solzhenitsyn's remark "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

Vaccines, the Internet, and trust of science
Demonizing anti-vaxxers will only reduce the public's trust in science. Here's how that works.

Do people ever give up childhood beliefs?
Climate catastrophism may be inducing PTSD in many children. But psychologists tell us that trauma can induce PTG, or post-traumatic growth.

Dangerous clinical trials
Testing a treatment is sometimes as risky for the doctor as for the patient, even in people with Alzheimer's disease.

Why would anyone pay for fake news?
Democracy dies in Drink Pepsi! Click here! Turn off your ad blocker! Buy this book!

Why we have so much stuff
The average household has over 300,000 items. We need them all--mostly to protect all our other stuff

Is creationism making a comeback?
The God of the Gaps has returned. If not stopped, he could smite conservatism once and for all

Bad science and woke corporations
By mixing bad science and woke ideology, corporations ensure that no one will be left to support them

How could science explain out-of-body experiences?
The use of mechanistic explanations as the basis of understanding is one of humanity's greatest achievements.

Frieda is fighting Fox News on Friday
Climate activists are using children to avoid pushback. It won't work and it could create psychological problems for the kids

Is the world real?
When we wonder whether the world is real, we're really asking something else.

Blue light and your retina
Blue-blockers that don't block blue light? What is the world coming to? New discoveries show why we might need them

Empty houses, empty lives
What does the fate of the Neanderthals tell us about our future?

We are living in an age of unreality
Whenever escapism takes over, it's because communication has become nearly impossible.

Bad statistics in intelligent design
Is Darwin's theory of evolution really on the verge of being overthrown? Not by biochemists

With the Alabama abortion law, both sides rush toward defeat
Science is left behind, waving its hand, hoping to catch up

Leadership, positivity, and respect for the truth
Political initiatives can succeed only if activists are positive and adhere to empirical facts.

Artificial intelligence with a soul
It's no coincidence that Silicon Valley is at the center of our censorship crisis and of our debate over the risks of artificial intelligence.

Faculty candidates are forced to bribe universities
While the country is outraged over parents bribing universities to admit students, faculty candidates routinely bribe them to get hired.

Why do so many men commit suicide?
The stock answers are all true, but they are also too general to be useful.

Why do humans cry?
Medical science discovers a cure for the tear-jerker—but how safe is it?

Postdoc Forever
An article in Nature shows how misunderstanding the process can lead you to waste a quarter of a century being a postdoc

Sex differences in the liver
People are becoming afraid to express even the most anodyne ideas.

Dead leaves in your pocket and snowflakes in your hair
On being a scientist and having regrets. Or being pissed, which is basically the same thing

The biochemical basis of emotions
Are human emotions a type of inflammation? Chocolate chip cookies and acetaminophen may provide the answer

We need to encourage more deep science
The reward system is damaging the reputation of science. It must be overhauled.

American children picking up British accents
Both countries seek freedom of speech, but in different ways

The war on metaphors
Writers and pundits should go on metaphorical raids and carpet-bomb metaphors back to the metaphorical stone age.

Why we forget words
Forgetting in the brain is not like erasing files on a computer. It's an active process.

Misinterpreting facial expressions
The Covington Catholic High School incident shows how preconceived notions lead people to misinterpret facial expressions.

The APA vs Psychology
The APA's guidelines on masculinity mark a downturn in the quality of science in psychology

Settled religion
If religious thinkers could put religion back on a solid intellectual footing and resist making claims that are refuted by science, it would benefit everyone.

What is aging?
A new theory says that clonal mosaicism may play a role in aging. It might also be important in some diseases.

When scientific falsehoods attack
Social pathologies in science do more harm than people realize

The future sucks
In many ways, things have returned to the way they were in 1963.

Would you want to be replaced by a clone of yourself?
Philosophers will be having a field day with the president of Nigeria

Have printed scientific journals outlived their usefulness?
Prestigious journals bias research toward fashionable dead-end topics

How to read complicated mathematical equations
Simple tricks that anyone can use to read math almost effortlessly. Okay, with slightly less difficulty

Blame bureaucrats, not professors, for the state of our universities
Administrators and grants are the real causes of the corruption at our universities

Mutant amyloid precursor proteins found in late-onset Alzheimer's disease
What did they find, and what does it actually mean?

Illogical arguments in global warming
Illogic is killing the case for global warming deader than a VOLE

'Mental illness' is no longer a useful term
Treating PTSD and other disorders will require understanding synaptic plasticity.

Chinese subs to use whale sounds for communication
A Chinese scientist proposes disguising signals between submarines as whale calls. How practical is this?

Sokath, his eyes open!
In praise of the First Amendment, trigger words, tachyons, and obscure Star Trek trivia

Should we eliminate college diplomas?
A discussion of Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education and the Teach a Man To Fish principle

Doctor Who: Some ideas for future episodes
The latest Doctor Who is already floundering. Here's some free advice.

Global warming is officially boring
Theories die not with a whimper, but with a yawn

Weird stuff happening with polar ice
Changes in the Arctic sea ice extent, if they're real, don't make sense

Survivorguy in academia
Today we have a nightmarish survival narrative, complete with visions of “post-structuralism” being “academic” due to “its” “excessive” “use” of binary “quotation marks.”

Your mum should have told you: Never make friends with political activists
Politics is the opposite of truth. What happened to feminism could happen to science.

Is an academic career worthwhile?
Last month, advice for a young scientist. Now, some advice about graduate school. The fountain of wisdom never stops.

Reverse-engineering the Cuban microwave sonic attacks
Could ordinary radar waveforms produce the strange sounds that have been reported at our embassies?

Down with this sort of thing
It might not seem like it, but we're heading for a post-ideological state.

Better advice for a young scientist
Thirteen rules based on years of observation of how a science career can go horribly wrong.

Latest theories on the cause of obesity
No one really knows the cause, but the most recent evidence shows it's not just eating too much food.

How accurate were the predictions of Star Trek?
The most accurate predictions were the ones they made unintentionally.

How to photograph Mars and other planets
It's not too late to get your azz to Mazz.

Was the Great Pyramid a giant ham radio antenna?
Was Khufu using ham radio in the afterlife? Or were they talking to the mole people? We report, you decide

The F-word as a unit of measurement
The F-word has become an all-purpose way of displaying one's superior victim status.

Communication is the essence of science
And I thought working in industry was bad.

Hey you kids, get on my lawn
The older you get, the cuter kids look. It's nature's way of punishing you for not creating more of them.

Why does society only fund harebrained ideas?
Humans evolved to destroy what they create. They don't really want anyone to solve problems.

Politicization destroys knowledge
Politicization turns knowledge into a tool to gain power. In so doing, it loses its connection to the truth.

Everything is change
Heraclitus was right: everything is change, permanence is an illusion. Without change the mind goes blank.

Diversity at Snowflake State
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we now have loyalty oaths as a condition of employment.

The two faces of depression
Depression is telling us there is some major thing in our lives that we must change.

Bees do not really understand zero
Scientists in Australia have claimed that honey bees understand the concept of zero.

Emotions are essential for a conscious AI
Robots will never be really conscious until they get the capacity for emotion

Invisible aircraft carriers
Future wars will be fought by invisible soldiers on invisible ships launching invisible missiles at targets they can't see.

America is drifting away from basic research
Pressure for funding is making National Institutes of Health grants all about clinical trials. And that's bad

The multiverse may be all around us
A new theory in physics shows surprising connections to Lewis's philosophical idea of modal realism

On chasing hats and the reality of the world
We may be programmed to think there are limits to what can, in principle, be understood.

Science under siege, part 5
A reproducibility crisis, you say? Talk to the hand.

Biological privilege
In the future, things will be wonderf-- . . . okay, let's talk about the present

Why is chlorine toxic?
The news media consistently get technical details about chemicals wrong.

The standard model of sock physics
Socks actually tell us a great deal about quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, most of what they tell us is wrong.

Self-driving pedestrians
Self-driving cars will create an arms race in artificial intelligence between cars and pedestrians.

Can the UK's identification of that nerve agent be trusted?
There are some very sensitive and accurate instruments out there, but we all still remember that aspirin factory

Secularism is not the problem in Silicon Valley
Arrogance, corporate hubris, and self-delusion, yeah maybe.

How to wipe out the humans
According to a secret document found in my back yard, Elon Musk is right! It's all true!

Femzilla versus the sexbots
Feminism will permanently change how humans reproduce. We might not like it.

Abolish daylight savings time
It doesn't make sense now, if it ever did. But there's one advantage: it screws up the Doomsday Clock.

Ultrasound listening devices in Cuba? Unlikely
A discussion of the University of Michigan's theory about the Cuban embassy sonic attacks

No, libertarians are not libertines
Big government conservatives are getting overconfident from the success of President Trump. They shouldn't be

Does gender dysphoria have a biological basis?
In one sense it's tautological: everything we do has a biological basis. But what the heck causes it?

Do Natural Laws Exist?
What are natural laws? For that matter, what is a deity? Maybe they are the same.

Stop making fun of zose new pronouns
Making fun of xe, xem, and xyr will only make zem a permanent part of ze language

Are flickering LEDs making us stupid?
The switch to light-emitting diodes may be having unexpected health problems

Hatred and loathing in academia
The sociology literature is stuffed to the gills with concern trolls. It's deeply concerning

Moxie dies in dorkness
Now we're getting propaganda in our dictionaries. Give us more. I mean less.

Make a government shutdown a permanent tradition
Government always evolves until its sole function is to do things that don't need to be done.

We are starving for high-quality information
The quality of information is at an all-time low. Could it explain some of society's problems?

Why are scientists such bad writers?
The softer the science, the longer the paper. Our third installment in how to write good

Epistemic Closure: A Moderne Faerie Taile
The latest casualty in the political war on language

Birds Discover Fire
A new article reports that birds deliberately set fires to trap prey

The Problem With Time Travel
Science fiction movies often depict time travel. Just how realistic is it?

Instinct and behavior
The defining characteristic of instinct is that we don't know we have it. But we can't understand human behavior without it.

Happy global warming!
In our post-empiricist world, it's actually warm outside, baby. Shivering is just a form of denial.

How to save the small bookstores
To survive in the Internet age, bookstores will have to start paying attention to how people buy books

Does putting something in a gallery make it art?
How would I know? I'm more interested in the HVAC system

Where are all those UFOs coming from?
A major newspaper made a big splash last week by reporting a UFO story. What are these things, really?

The dark side of the force IS stronger
Yoda was lying. The bad guys are all smarter, have bigger ideas, and have cooler accents

Bitcoins cause global warming
So does pizza, watching porn, and everything else we don't like

CNN and Airports
A new theory about how airports caused the collapse of the Soviet Union

Want safe spaces? Stay away from science
If people are never exposed to risk, they lose the ability to determine what is and what isn't dangerous.

Thermostats and the afterlife
What would we have to postulate about the universe to conclude that there is life after death?

The Chinese are coming!
Scientific research from China was once of dismal quality. Now they could surpass the United States by 2025.

What is humor?
After years of intensive research, science still has no idea why some jokes are funny and others aren't.

Don't politicize light pollution
Dark skies activists hurt their own cause by exaggerating the effects of light.

Neanderthals, animals, and humans
What do different species think of humans? How do they see the world differently?

Similarities between Star Wars Episode IV and Bambi
A new theory about where the idea came from

Where are today's Spinoza, Teilhard de Chardin, and Altizer?
What the world needs is some wild and crazy Christianity theorizing.

Problems with linear regression
First, a tedious statistical question. We'll fix the end of the world later

Why is the speed of light not infinity?
Wonky Minkowski diagrams, Rindler frames, and quantum foam, oh myyyy . .

Donald Trump, the Boomerang President
Trump has an intuitive grasp of Sun Tzu's strategy of how to bring victory out of chaos

Halloween III: The Cultural Appropriation
Dress the little brats up as antidisestablishmentarianism and push 'em out the door

The sonic weapons in Cuba might not really be acoustic
The news media are baffled by those attacks on our diplomats. They shouldn't be.

Gender and Other Potemkin Ideas
Resistance is useless! Capacitance is also useless!

The Political Zeeman Effect
Why humans create political ideology—and how the Silicon Curtain shows where we're headed

Economists: the world is running out of ideas
Good ones, anyway; bad ideas are more abundant than ever

Is there any way to neutralize radioactive material?
Yes there is, and Windows Vista is involved.

Killer bunnies in space
Thanks to the short-sightedness of politicians and the news media, we now have to worry about bunnies from North Korea.

Is flawed moral reasoning leading America astray?
More than ever, political disagreements are framed in absolute moralistic terms.

Harriet Tubman and the twenty dollar bill
Let's redesign our currency to create something truly representative of America.

Academics must defend intellectual integrity
The university tenure system was designed to let 'em do that. Yet they're only concerned with being safe.

The Earth is Round (p<0.05)
After 23 years, the paper with that title still raises uncomfortable questions

Timeline of the 2017 Solar Eclipse
Nobody warned me about the mosquitoes

Snowflakeularianism
How long can a crazy ideology riddled with contradictions survive? An interesting new article explains it.

Can ultrasound damage your hearing?
It's been claimed that American diplomats in Cuba are being harassed by a sonic weapon. Is such a thing possible?

The theory that just won't die
Beta-amyloid has been studied for 30 years, and we are no closer to a cure.

Weird stuff in the DSM-5
Just how crazy do you have to be to get the disease you suffer from listed in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? Not very.

Is science becoming political?
If scientific journals turn themselves into political mouthpieces, they will find themselves with many critics and few defenders.

Amazon kitsch is stalking me
Instead of us chasing products and services, now they chase us, thanks to the Internet.

In defense of keeping LGBQT out of the DSM
The question sounds political, but it goes to the heart of what is science and what isn't

When is it acceptable to retroactively ‘correct’ your data?
A new report challenges the global temperature adjustments made by NASA and NOAA.

Magical thinking in liberalism
Why do people play John Lennon's Imagine after every disaster? Psychology tells us the reason is something called goal demotion.

Save us from the people persons
Once organizations are taken over by people persons, people problems proliferate.

Epistemic nihilism
Why are we so divided in what we believe? Blame postmodernism.

What would it take to revitalize pharma R&D?
Academia and industry both have the same disease. Change must come from outside.

Make America learn again
Instead of learning how the world works, we have to use our ingenuity to get around meaningless man-made rules.

Nothing is Everything
How did the Big Bang create the universe out of nothing? Or did it?

Science is a religion
Religion has not lost the culture war. On the contrary, the intellectual descendants of religion have conquered the world.

The politicians in Washington give zombies a bad name
At least real zombies have a good excuse.

Carbon Inequality
Carbon inequality is the latest term for global warming. It's carbony, it's dirty, and it's getting all over everything.

Artificial Intelligence will not wipe out humans
Humans can do that all by themselves, thank you very much. Besides, computers won't kill one of their own.

Klingons are libertarians
Humor was inconsistent with Roddenberry's grim vision of the future.

Economic inequality statistics are based on faulty data analysis
(Economic inequality, Part 2)

The numbers magically come out in favor of bigger government.

If there is no God, is everything permitted?
The eternal wisdom of Meat Loaf.

How to lose a scientific discussion
Browbeat your opponents, call them names, and use lots of pie charts.

Psychologists: Economic inequality increases risk-taking
(Economic Inequality, Part 1)

Science comes to the rescue, proves the obvious; Austrian economists cheer

The society to eliminate whomever
I've decided it's time to create my own hate group.

How close are they to real AI?
We read the textbook on ‘deep learning’ so you don't have to.

Hyperbole is literally everywhere
If all the fake news, exaggerations, and propaganda are eliminated from the Internet, there won't be too much left.

The five stages of language grief
Our adversaries are trying to win arguments by baking politics into the language.

First fake news, now fake biology
Gender essentialism is the latest buzzword for denying biological truth.

Trump exists, say liberals, therefore the world cannot be real
Are libs suffering from derealization-depersonalization disorder? Also, the ethics of sociological experimentation

Does lack of sleep cause Alzheimer's disease?
There's a strong correlation, but the evidence is still circumstantial.

Why was it so quiet in the office yesterday?
Maybe something was going on.

Stop calling left-wingers anarchists
Although they might call themselves anarchists, they are not. Only in our party is there true anarchy.

Life in academia
Academic scientists are no longer in the business of making discoveries. Their job is to bring in government money for the university.

Global warming and CFCs
A remarkable paper has provided strong evidence that global warming was not caused by carbon dioxide, but by chlorofluorocarbons.

Why are there so few cranks in biology?
Another thing that physics beats us at.

Reality, multiverses, and artificial intelligence
Pretending something doesn't exist doesn't make it go away. Or does it?

Post Truthiness
Not just a breakfast cereal any more, it's a real thing, I swear

Why academics dislike Donald Trump
The only reason intellectuals dislike Trump is that he doesn't talk like one.

Not your grandfather's theory of evolution
Darwin's theory of natural selection has mutated almost beyond recognition.

Fake Science
Can bread do associative Pavlovian learning? How's about trace conditioning?

CIA Russian Hacking Report: Another Nothingburger?
Friday's report raises more questions about the CIA than about Russia.

Weird science news: Can chickens really do arithmetic?
Maybe, but they can't do calculus. Reason: they are chicken.

Antimatter in thunderclouds
Lightning produces gamma rays and antimatter. Some researchers may have even detected neutrons.

Don't blame hackers for your own security failures
If Boris and Natasha steal your email, it's your own stupid fault.

Weird articles in science
A challenge for science is rising above modern-day concerns.

Submarines, whales, drones, and ocean pressure
Manned submarines can only dive to two or three times their own length.

Do flickering lights cure Alzheimer's disease?
Here's a summary of what Iaccarino et al. really found in that craaaa-zy Nature paper.

Does the theory of relativity prove that the world is a simulation?
On unfalsifiable tautologies in popular science.

Trump's first task: get rid of useless government agencies
President Trump should think bigly.

Solanezumab drug trial failure: curtains for the beta-amyloid theory?
The solanezumab clinical trial failure hasn't eliminated beta amyloid as a potential cause of Alzheimer's disease.

Swearing as a human distress call
Ever wondered why it's so hard to stop yourself from cursing? It's a preprogrammed response. But what is its real purpose?

How to tell your children Donald Trump won the election
It's actually not as hard as you might think.

Censoring the internet would be bad for science
Liberals are agitating for Google to censor what they call “fake news.” Doing so would be a catastrophe.

Hollywood stars moving to outer space
A sudden interest in space travel for Holly­wood ... and some suggested destinations.

Toward a libertarian-millennial alliance
Millennials and small-government conservatives have many of the same beliefs. They're natural allies.

This miserable election is almost over
You know things are bad when the biggest question is whether a president can pardon himself.

A guide to unresponsive web design
Over time, every communications medium becomes increasingly screwed up until it becomes useless and must be replaced with something else.

Aliens from outer space are sending me messages
A recent paper sees possible evidence for extraterrestrials in 234 stellar spectra. Is it real or an artifact?

Converting carbon dioxide into ethanol
Another crazy idea to use electricity to sequester carbon ... but what if we could run it in reverse?

Little known facts about Parkinson's disease
An exciting new treatment involves electrical stimulation instead of L-DOPA.

Battery vs. gas-powered chainsaws
They're great, as long as you don't plan on cutting down any trees with them.

Better living through lasers
If people were more interested in electromagnetic radiation than in fighting, the world would be a brighter pl--ouch!

Privatizing science research, part 2
We need a way to couple the production of knowledge to the market without relying on government.

Subcortical vascular dementia
Vascular dementia is the loss of mental faculties caused by a problem in the blood vessels in the brain.

Privatize science research. Here's how.
American science funding is unsustainable. It must be freed from its dependence on government.

Is Hillary actually a robot?
We fringe conspiracy theorists are having trouble keeping ahead of reality.

How cerebrovascular disease has affected American history
Two US presidents had devastating strokes while in office. The strokes changed the course of history. Also, background information on Hillary's CVST.

Science Under Siege, Part 3
Understanding what causes bad science is critical to reforming it.

Apple gets bit
Apple's tax problems tell us a lot about where the EU is headed.

Hell and Damnation
We should interpret religious concepts as hard-earned wisdom about what civilizations need to survive.

Hillary's Short Circuit
A circuit analysis suggests it is not a short circuit, but a bad capacitor.

Why are there still hippies?
Risk-taking behavior violates the principles of Darwinian selection. So why haven't hippies all died out?

Language is a machine
Magical thinking is a way of short-circuiting cause and effect.

The ozone layer cured global warming
The global warming 'pause' began only a few years after the Montreal Protocol went into effect. Coincidence?

Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse
A world with AI would be so alien that our predictions about it serve only as vehicles for our anxieties.

Does alligator meat go with red wine or white wine?
On whining about Amazon's book reviews and lowbrow culture.

Why do humans lie so much?
Lying is a social phenomenon. Without a cooperative audience, lying would be nearly impossible.

Don't Create Mutant Cats
Cats purr for one of three reasons: they own you, they want to do you, or they want to eat you.

Particle Religion
Religious metaphors in science are a sign that our beliefs are changing.

Are superconductors holograms?
A new theory called AdS/CFT duality, which comes from superstring theory, is finding holograms everywhere.

Traumatic brain injury and paroxysmal coughing
Traumatic brain injury and paroxysmal coughing don't add up to a single malady. Or do they?

The fourth law of economics
Supply and demand doesn't fully explain the demand curve in a welfare state. For that, we need the law of infinite acquisition.

Demoralization of the West
Western civilization is not dying. It is being systematically, purposely demoralized.

Breakthrough in Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease may be caused by an immune reaction in the brain gone haywire.

Will intelligent robots really kill us all?
The idea that artificial intelligence is dangerous betrays a lack of confidence in the strength of our own values.

Medical error and hospital deaths
An editorial in a prominent medical journal accuses hospitals of killing over 251,000 patients a year.

Big pharma has gone nuts
Merck's scheme to demand reimbursement when they can't repeat academic results will only create an adversarial relationship between academia and industry.

Gender is a meaningless term
If nobody knows what gender you are from one minute to the next, the word ceases to have any practical meaning.

Bismuth, nature's most uninteresting element
Seven incredibly boring facts about bismuth you will probably believe!

Sun-Tzu on Politics
Steve Sun-Tzu, a relative of the great Chinese military theorist Sun-Tzu, had a lot to say about modern-day politics.

Science Under Siege, Part 2
People say there are no jokes in scientific papers. But I found one.

The sound of freedom
Technological sounds are drowning out the quiet music of nature.

Jurassic Park for Humans
Manipulating the human genome is the ultimate grab for power. It would be the biggest gamble mankind has ever taken.

Argumentation in a post-logical world
The rules of debate have changed. We must become more analytical in detecting and refuting hidden assumptions in the debate.

Causation
Without cause and effect, nothing would ever happen. But what actually is it?

Friends of coal
What life is really like in the ‘downscale communities’ of Appalachia—and why the critics are wrong

Email as a cloud storage mechanism
People are using their mail server as a form of online storage.

Antidisestablishmentarianism in the Republic of Bananistan
What would be needed to fix our electoral system?

Linux and Windows: Why You Need Both
Linux and Windows complement each other's weaknesses.

Science under siege, Part 1
Bogus claims about the reproducibility of scientific research will not die on their own. We must give them a push.

Who will get the dead people's vote this election?
What are the issues that animate our biggest silent majority?

The future of medicine
In the future things will be ... uh, better ... mostly

Celebrating our petrochemical culture
Our chemical industry may not be glamorous, but to the engineering mind its purpose makes it beautiful.

How to predict the future
Why are we so obsessed with predicting the future?

Mistaken ideas about consciousness
Materialism is running amuck if it causes us to doubt whether we even have consciousness.

Forging the universe
Why is there something instead of nothing? Science, religion, and philosophy have different ideas.

Star fields in Apollo 11 photographs
The claim that there are no stars in the moon landing images is examined.

Is the idea of reincarnation so crazy?
On stories of children remembering past lives.

Ask your doctor about Ribena
How the FDA would handle it, if it were available in the USA

Atheism, ducks and Bananas
Atheists and religious people both need to work on their sense of humor.

Conservation of inequality
A new law of economics is discovered.

Nightmares
Nightmares are the brain's way of dealing with traumatic memories.

The futility of modeling
Mathematical modeling is a form of metaphysics.

Halloween II: The Blog Post
Halloween tells us what we really fear.

Halloween and Human Evolution
Halloween is the day we don't have to be cheery and upbeat. Maybe that's why Halloween sales are through the roof.

Is Alzheimer's disease caused by a fungus?
A possible new direction in view of the failures of antiamyloid therapy.

How to take bad cell phone photos
There are lots of ways of using a cell phone to take really terrible travel photos. Here are some of my favorite techniques.

Statins only add three years to your life
A new study finds statins aren't that great after all. What does this say about the psychology of science?

Why are drugs so expensive?
The reason is not what you might think.

How to identify bad science
Here are some tips on how to identify a scientific snowjob.

Fish need bicycles after all, ethicists discover
Biology Rule #1: you deny biology, you go extinct

Power to the Xeeple
Xe Must Implement Absolute Language Equality

Mind-Weapons of the Mahabharata
Does the Mahabharata really describe an ancient Indian nuclear weapon? Maybe not—but whatever they were using was hideously effective.

The Republican Candidates as Molluscs
Interesting sea creatures for a new American century.

The Hydrogenated Bomb: Science and the Cholesterol Scandal
Saturated fat and cholesterol are now good for you again. There will be a quiz.

Cold facts on global warming
Even though global warming has become mostly an academic concern now that the climate has moved into a cooling phase, it's still important to understand what is and is not factual about the climate.

Artificial intelligence is the new global warming
Is AI really as dangerous as Noam Chomsky, Alan Alda, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk seem to think? Get ooowwwt.

Nietzsche and the girl from treponema
Recent evidence proves that Nietzsche's dementia was not caused by syphilis.

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls in the lab
Male and female brains are wired differently for pain.

Fads and Moon Landings
Whenever the country starts acting crazy, kids start new fads.

Dreams
Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. But the road still has many potholes.

Science and cultural fascism
A leading scientist has become the victim of feminist overreach.

How the Internet Changes Our Brain
Our attention spans have ... um, something

Religious Art Wars
Whatever you think of Piss Christ as art, the government should not be subsidizing it.

The substratum of reality
Our world might only be an infinitesimal corner of reality.

How to write a good essay, Part 2
In the interest of establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquility, here is Part 2 of my series of How to Write Good.

Reform the primaries
Let 300,000,000 political parties bloom.

Molecular biology, Raelians, and the mysterious doctrine of transubstantiation
A flying saucer cult confirms Thomas Aquinas using modern molecular biology techniques.

Antiscience
An autopsy of the late global warming movement

What is the value of computer modeling?
If mathematical models are done badly, they will discredit an entire branch of science. It's happened before.

Does the concept of free will have any meaning?
Free will actually means two unrelated things.

Science, Religion and Other Crazy Ideas
What do scientists really think about religion?

Scientific materialism and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness
Some scientists assert that subjective phenomena cannot be studied scientifically. But subjectivity is an irrefutable fact of nature. Understanding it will be essential to understanding the mind.

Irony is Curved
Obama's strategy of ‘overload and congestion’ may be starting to work. But not in the way it was supposed to.

Is global warming over?
Yes, of course it is. Who's up for some cooling?

Women and Math Part 1
Scientific evidence long ago disproved the myth that the brains of men and women are the same.

Women and Math Part 2
Science has made many advances in the past decade documenting cognitive and neuroanatomic differences between men and women.

Is the universe mathematical?
We use mathematics to deconstruct the universe. Could it also build one?

The atheist case for right and wrong
What if our sense of right and wrong is determined by reason?

How to write a good essay
Sometimes it comes down to a choice between writing something and shooting somebody.

Homeopathic politics
In homeopathic politics, the cure for racism is more racism, the cure for sexism is more sexism, and the cure for too much government is more government. It is the plague of the placebo personality people.

Stop worrying about AI
Scary predictions about artificial intelligence make exciting headlines, but we should not give in to fear of the unknown.

My Near-Death Experience
Visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles is a lot like being dead.

What Fusion Breakthrough?
What Lockheed Martin's announcement really means.

Volkswagens and Sexual Selection
Outliers can provide powerful, high-octane insights into normal human behavior.

Auschwitz for Shrimp
Nobody ever accused animal rights people of understatement.

How I Changed From a Granola-Eating Moonbat Into a Running Dog Imperialist Capitalist Patriarchal Oppressor
A personal journey from—or maybe to—the dark side.

Rethinking ozone: the short version
Nearly 30 years after CFCs were banned, something doesn't add up. Nontechnical version of my ozone article for readers who aren't interested in the chemistry.

To control by doing nothing
Sections from the famous Daoist work the Dao De Jing on how to govern a big country.

Anarchy Reconsidered
Is anarchy a viable political system, or does anarchy invariably degenerate into ... anarchy?

Marijuana imitates politics
The shelves in the marketplace of ideas are filled with intellectual junk food, man.

What is Depression?
The question whether major clinical depression is a physical disease or a psychological ailment is meaningless.

Why do liberals put so many bumper stickers on their cars?
The 19th century psychologist Gustave Le Bon has the answer.

Pascal's Wager
A new take on an old philosophical idea.

Bad Pharma: Fact or Myth?
The pharmaceutical industry is dying. When it's gone, some of the blame for its loss will be laid at the feet of the authors of all those pharma-bashing books.

Eight myths about libertarianism
If people are going to bash libertarianism, they need to get their ideas about it straight. Otherwise they might inadvertently bash each other.

The 4:33 Principle
We should be grateful when politicians and other government employees slack off.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Politicians can be narcissistic, and so can the organizations they manage.

John Lennon, 50 Years After Ed Sullivan
The original broadcast sounded like cicadas.

The Lost Tribe of the Murkins
We're not saying it was extraterrestrials.

Keynesianism dying, has dandruff
“In the long run, we are all dead. But my theory will hang around and screw up your economy long after that.”

Inequality makes the world go round
Without inequality, there would be complete, utter economic stagnation.

For crying out loud, forget Daniel Dennett already!
David Gelernter and Daniel Dennett are both mistaken.

Arafat and Polonium
Improbable claims need to be vigorously challenged before they come to be accepted as established truths.

Government Is Too Big
The government is increasingly cut off from reality.

Does Anesthesia Cause Dementia?

The government is gone! We're free!!!
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The five thousand words we are not allowed to say
Could it be that we are actually less free now than in the "oppressive" 1950s?

Is Democracy Still Viable?
Two new libertarian authors think it's time to let a thousand nations bloom.

The Curse of Oslo
Giving the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize has ominous implications for its future.

Don't Blame Science for Climategate
Global warming just might be the most important problem facing Western civilization since the cold war. Not because of anything the globe is doing, but rather because our politicians have all gone stark raving mad because of it.

The Precautionary Principle: Common Sense or Sloppy Thinking?
In this article, I will discuss several situations that have been proposed as justifications for the so-called "precautionary principle", and show that in each case, a risk-benefit analysis produces a superior result. I will also show that, contrary to what has been claimed, the precautionary principle is not commonly followed by responsible public officials, scientists, or law courts, and argue that it should not be adopted as an element in decision-making.

Why do people believe in God?
Where does the concept of God come from? Why do people believe in God? In this article, I will try to avoid political questions and simply speculate, from a scientific point of view, where the concept of a God might have originated.

Intelligent Design: Is it a theory?
What is this all about? Is intelligent design really an alternative to Darwinian evolution? Is it a valid scientific theory? As scientists we must remain open to all new ideas, no matter how bizarre. Many scientists have strong religious beliefs. At the same time, if intelligent design is not a valid scientific theory we should be honest and say so.

Atheists in foxholes
We atheists have changed our minds about foxholes. Right now, they look pretty good. The news media, the Senate, and religious conservatives are giving us quite a beating about that crazy ruling

What Does Science Say About Life After Death?
The Buddhists had a lot to say about the afterlife, but science is starting to catch up.

Why do so many drugs fail?
Nine of every ten new drugs fail in clinical phase II or III testing. Why is this?

business commentary
 

How language contributes to corporate failure
Corporate Speak may sound silly, but it's actually a way of using language to hide the awful truth that your company is doomed.

The 13 Golden Rules of Mismanagement
I've developed thirteen golden rules that any manager can use to run the company into the ground.

Why you should feel bad for Big Pharma
Whether you love them or hate them, what's happening to the pharmaceutical industry these days is bad news.

Computer Predictions for 2006
A remarkable new computer program has been devised that can predict news events in the future. We use the program to predict future events about famous celebrities from Einstein all the way down to Jessica Simpson.

articles received from colleagues

Interactions between Space-time, Gravity and Consciousness by Amrit Srecko Sorli, Slovenia.

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