Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review Part 7
Rey offers Finn her hand, and he takes itThe TIE fighters would make sense if the pilots knew someone was going to fly off the planet, but they have no way of knowing that.
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How a Prof Learned the Hard Way to Put Science First
The replication crisis forced him to grapple with the fact that he was too committed to ideology to assess truthIntellectual diversity is a key reason the public is expected to heed (and often pay for) universities. Apart from that, a university would not differ from a sect.
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A Science Education Group Tackles the Fauci Hearing and Diary
They have every reason to be concerned about what these revelations about the Covid years are doing to the public perception of scienceAt one time, it was the less well-informed people who trusted science less. But repeated episodes like the Covid Crazy will mean that the better informed people will trust less.
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The Daily Mail: Clickbait in the AI Arms Race
Contrary to the article’s premise, the AI did not invent any bad behavior. It copied or adapted techniques that are already well known and widely availableThe real concern is that AI can find, combine, and carry out existing malicious techniques much faster and on a much larger scale than the human one.
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How NOT to Get More People to Trust Science, in Four Easy Lessons
Ethan Siegel had the singular bad luck to write his condescending column about how we should Trust the Science more in the very wake of Fauci’s Covid “diaries” coming to light…Siegel’s essay at Big Think can have one very desirable result: It is a good, though unwitting, summary of attitudes that must change if public trust in science is to be improved.
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Polling Physicists: What the Big Mysteries Survey Shows — and Doesn’t
Physicists who think that the constants of nature are brute facts without need of explanation simply have an incoherent opinionIf nature’s beginning has no explanation, the door is left open to embracing unexplained occurrences anywhere in nature, undermining the practice of science.
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How Is Bluesky Doing as a Kinder, Gentler X?
A flurry of scientists and journalists hoped their participation would strike a blow against misinformation and hateThere’s a moral to this story: If we are departing for a kinder, gentler social medium, we will not get our wish if we pack the hate with us.
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Why Many Top Scientists Suspected Covid Had Leaked From a Lab
A top science writer explains — and offers a theory as to why Anthony Fauci worked so hard to discredit the ideaScience writer Matt Ridley offers some helpful information about why the “furin cleavage site” was a smoking gun for top scientists for a lab origin for Covid.
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Monday Micro Softy 90: Mow Power to You
Why would Charlie's well-maintained lawnmower apparently be losing energy efficiency over the years?To unraveling the multiple negatives in last week’s confusing sentences, we start by remembering that any two cancel each other.
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What Goes on in the Mind of a Suicidal Priest?
Suicidal ideation amongst priests could possibly be linked, amongst other things, to theological illiteracyIn a recent report during Men’s Mental Health Week, The Irish Catholic newspaper quoted a parish priest who said: “Priests are not immune to mental health struggles.” Priests are not immune to mental health struggles, PP says during Men’s Mental Health Week – The Irish Catholic Fr Michael Toomey, of St Carlo Acutis Parish Pastoral Area in the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore, said in a homily: Over the past number of years here in Ireland and around the world, and as recently as earlier this year in our own area, priests have died by suicide… There is a tendency to place priests on a pedestal [*this was surely the case prior to 1990, but not currently], expecting them to Read More ›
It’s Time to Buy Old Books Before AI Destroys Them
This book destruction scheme is the brain child of technicians, people who lead tech companies and tech labs who are wholly committed to a technological view of the worldBefore AI companies buy up all remaining physical copies of older, rare, out-of-print, obscure, or nearly forgotten books, we can buy our own copies.
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review Part 6
Star Wars isn’t science fiction, it's science fantasyThe point behind the “boy on a farm” trope is that the character must grow into the role of hero.
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Colleges and Universities: Still on a Road to Nowhere
One cost-saving proposal has been to eliminate courses with ten or fewer students, irrespective of what the course is teachingSignificantly, no administrators who were contacted recommended reducing schools’ budget woes by reducing the number of administrators.
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Your Dog Presses a Button and … Poof! He Can Speak?
We’ve always wanted to talk to the animals but perhaps we are fooling ourselves againImagining a treasure trove of insight from teaching dogs to use buttons — that is not available just from paying closer attention to the dogs — is surely a loss for both parties.
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Did Art Really Invent Humanity — as Opposed to the Other Way Around?
It’s an intriguing concept, and a welcome departure from more pedestrian claimsArt cannot have helped make us more human if we did not start out that way. And that in turn could not have happened without some impetus that was simply not granted to any other life form.
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More Books for the Bots
AI companies are buying (and destroying) rare booksAI companies are using physical books to train them for their large language models since these texts aren’t already ridden with AI-generated writing.
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If It Is About the Covid Crazy, Don’t Tell Your Diary Anything!
Especially not if you are Anthony Fauci...Fauci’s most revealing 1,141 pages are not a personal diary; despite all the personal material, he was writing at work on a government computer.
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Is the Mind Reducible to the Brain? The Debate in Krakow
Free will, abstract thought, and all the rest...?The debate in Krakow, Poland, sponsored by education foundation Fundacja En Arche is now available, with translation, at YouTube.
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More Scientists Are Talking About a Mind Behind the Universe?
An urban affairs analyst thinks so and he also suggests some reasons whyIf being a scientist means that one must refuse to consider the evidence for design, it’s no wonder if many are looking for alternatives.
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Monday Micro Softy 89: Double Negatives are a No-No
Actually, they do have their uses — for example, if politicians are trying to correctly state views while making them hard to understandTo solve last week’s puzzle: you are told how many heads there are so start by flipping that number of coins.
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