April 1 – 5 On April Fools day, Jennie Dushek teased the internet with the obituary of a great dad. I wondered whether science has anything interesting to say about stupidity. Cassie examined the evidence from the anti-vax side of the aisle and found it wanting. Guest poster Michael Balter told us about the dinosaurs […]
Sally
What is stupidity? That’s the question I set out to answer this week for New Scientist. The idea was to look at the science of stupidity, but it took me a good couple of weeks to stop hitting brick walls in my research. Respectable scientists don’t like to talk about stupidity. “Stupidity is an evaluative […]
I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s day, but I love the ads. They are so utterly, transparently awful that they cross the line from crassly offensive into entertaining. Business Insider just did a brilliant roundup of the worst offenders of all time. They have a certain evolutionary-psychology simplicity to them — if you present […]
“Well, you know we only use about 10 per cent of our brain.” I don’t like when people tell me this. Someday, I hope to acquire the guts to issue the following rejoinder: “Which 10 per cent do you use?” But because I don’t like confrontation, I usually just make a face of mute disappointment […]
Dec. 17 – 21 Refereeing by a goal-line technology called — as Sally says, “(awesomely), Hawk Eye” — is outsourcing our judgment to a technology and its algorithms. Is that going to work? Given the history of human judgment, sure, why not. Here’s Guest Sujata Gupta with a story about macaques with SIV that get […]
August 13 – 17 In his second guest post, Erik Vance tells us that, with regard to end-of-the-world prophecies, we’re doing it wrong. Christie wonders how sincere repentant dopers really are. Abstruse Goose considers the success rate of astrobiology. Guest poster Nicholas Sunzeff wonders if cosmology is a meaningful endeavour in a world filled with […]
July 2 – 6 This week, Tom wondered why one of the greatest mental capacities our outrageously successful species possesses hardly works at all. Faced with parenting in a region “where a high school diploma confers a solid elementary school education”, Jessa weighed her home schooling options and whether they could guarantee a prodigy. Cassie’s […]
In 2010, an epidemiologist was asked by a California school to investigate its high levels of dangerous dirty electricity. When he arrived to take readings, he found that some classrooms contained levels of electrical pollution so intense that they exceeded his meter’s ability to measure them. This story was reported in a major US news […]