Category: Science & Technology

Books versus E-readers

Books & Reviews / E-books & E-readers / Technology & GadgetsOne Comment

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Back in February, Naomi Baron wrote a piece called “Reading on-screen versus on paper,” in which she compared the two reading experiences: printed books and e-readers in five areas: Cost Container vs content Environmental impact Quality of screens Concentration Baron actually looks at these as true-or-false questions, not really comparisons. She doesn’t address issues like aesthetics, tactile sense or emotional response, or the relative value of hypertext to content, nor does she tread into the science and ergonomics of reading. For that, you have to look elsewhere. Which, of course, I did. First let me state that it is not really an ……… click below for more ↓

Fishy Thoughts

Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Education & Learning / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Canadians, the headline reads, now have shorter attention span than goldfish thanks to portable devices. The story in today’s National Post underscores a growing problem that is fuelled by technology: our dwindling attention spans. The Microsoft study of 2,000 Canadians found our collective attention span has dwindled to a mere eight seconds, down from an already embarrassing 12 seconds a similar study found back in the year 2000. Goldfish have an average nine second attention span. Eight seconds! How can you read a newspaper article, let alone a novel, with such a short attention span? How can you write or ……… click below for more ↓

The Worm Turns

Animals & BIology / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

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This morning when I was doing my regular news search online, I came across two stories that stopped me cold: we’re being invaded. By worms. Yep. Worms. Not the slimy invertebrates who write scurrilous, defamatory self-aggrandizing blogs and whine about free speech when they are taken to court over their lies, but actual earthworms. Nightcrawlers. The little invertebrates we have in our gardens and at the end of fishhooks. They’re invading Canada. And they’re doing it rather quickly. For worms, that is. They’re actually being aided and abetted by us. Humans are the reason they’re here, and the main reason they ……… click below for more ↓

Pompeii: Swords-and-Sandals Flop

Film & Reviews / History & Biography / Places & GeographyLeave a comment

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As a film setting, the town of Pompeii in the first century CE is a lot like the deck of the Titanic in 1912: no amount of special effects or clever script writing is going to save it from the disaster awaiting. As a film, Pompeii has a lot of the former, but precious little of the latter to rescue it. That’s probably why it’s in the $7 section at the DVD store. Let’s start with the history. Pompeii was a Roman town on the west side of Italy close to the slopes of an active volcano, Mount Vesuvius. The recipe ……… click below for more ↓

It’s Official: Homeopathy is Bunk

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & Technology4 Comments

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“Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds,” reads a headline in The Guardian this week. Well, that’s hardly news. But it repeats saying anyway. It’s a story about the latest in a series of studies that again and again debunk homeopathy as a treatment and conclude it is useless. Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) “…thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement,” the paper reported. And on Gizmodo they said: An analysis of over 225 medical studies and 1,800 scientific papers has found that homeopathy is ineffective as a ……… click below for more ↓

Smoking = Stupidity

Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Science & Technology2 Comments

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I don’t know how to sugar coat this in some politically-correct, sensitive, caring way that doesn’t overtly offend anyone, but if you haven’t already figured this out by now, here it is: smoking is stupid. Really stupid. Even worse, smoking makes you even more stupid while you do it: Researchers tested the IQs of more than 20,000 healthy men between the ages of 18 and 21 who were either serving in the Israeli military or who had recently completed their service. Twenty-eight percent of the men in the sample smoked, while 3 percent were former smokers and 68 percent had ……… click below for more ↓

Evolutionary Dead-Ends

Creationism / Critical Thinking / Evolution & PaleontologyOne Comment

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Some people seem genetically inclined – perhaps I should write doomed? – to believe in nonsense: believe in conspiracy theories, in myths, legends, superstitions and supernatural, in magic, in pseudoscience and pseudomedicine. Nothing – no amount of fact, truth, education, reason or contrary evidence will change their minds. The harder you try to correct them, the more firmly they believe. Watch, if you can, this painfully dim woman trying to dismiss paleontology and evolution as she blunders through Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History’s exhibit on the evolving Earth and comments on the displays. It’s a tough video to view for ……… click below for more ↓

Robocalls from Real Robots

Education & Learning / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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“mmm…buzzz…. click…. This is your friendly….buzzz…. automated calling device…click…hummmm… reminding you that….mmmm….buzzz…..click… there are only three days left to…. zzzzz…. take advantage of the Black Friday sales at…. mmmm…. buzzzz….. your…. zzzz… Collingwood…..insert box store name…. mmmm…buzzz…. click….thank you…” Well, maybe robotic telemarketers won’t sound like the solenoid robots on Roger Ramjet, but within the decade, most telemarketers will be machines, not humans. So when they interrupt your dinner to tell you you’ve won a free cruise, shouting at them and slamming down the phone won’t hurt their feelings at all. Mmmmm….buzz…. click… Of course, a lot of this work is ……… click below for more ↓

The Pinnacle of Homeopathic Stupidity

Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

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“Have Homeopaths Reached Peak Stupid?” asks the headline on Quackometer.net. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting dumber than a belief in homeopathy (aka The One Quackery to Rule Them All), but apparently there are higher levels within their madness that homeopaths continue to scale. This, however, looks like their Everest of stupidity. The story in question is about the plan by homeopaths to “heal the oceans” last week. Admirable goal, but it’s the implementation that will make you laugh so hard you’ll snort your morning tea right out of your nose. You have been warned. I speak from experience. Here’s how they ……… click below for more ↓

Comets, Aliens and Conspiracy Wingnuts

Astronomy & Cosmology / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology / Technology & GadgetsOne Comment

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The European Space Agency has accomplished one of the greatest engineering and scientific achievements in human history this past week. Not only did it get a space vehicle into orbit around a comet travelling at more than 55,000 km/hr (34,000 mph), it landed a probe on the very rough surface of that comet. Outstanding, brilliant, superb… the superlatives fail me when trying to describe this event. The Rosetta spacecraft chased Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for ten years (since March, 2004) travelling almost four billion miles (6.4 b km) to rendezvous with the small chunk of icy rock, currently about 510 million kilometres away ……… click below for more ↓

Crazy Cats and Brain Parasites

Animals & BIology / Science & TechnologyOne Comment

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It reads like a script for a scary movie: an alien parasite invading our brains, taking control of our minds, changing our behaviour silently, secretly; making us do what it wants. And it’s happening now, in homes across Canada and the USA. Alien puppet masters over-running the nation, one household at a time. But it’s not fiction, although my scenario is a trifle exaggerated. They’re not some right-wing aliens from outer space subverting our natural goodness and compassion; not some cyber-bullying bloggers dripping political poison into the gullible minds of their readers.They are microscopic, found worldwide, on land and in ……… click below for more ↓

Timothy Leary Was Right. Maybe.

Behaviour & Psychology / History & Biography / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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This is your brain on drugs. Or rather, the right-hand image is your brain on psilocybin. The other side is your brain on a non-psychedelic drug. Researchers recently discovered some amazing facts about how our brains work on some chemicals. And some psychedelic drugs prove to have pretty amazing effects. But don’t try this at home… stick to building toy rockets and drones for your science experiments… Apparently Timothy Leary was right: psychedelic drugs change the way users think. For a long time, possibly forever. In his pioneering work, The Psychedelic Experience (1964), Leary wrote A psychedelic experience is a ……… click below for more ↓

Debunking Homeopathy. Again.

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Pseudoscience & QuackeryOne Comment

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Homeopathy. It’s absolute bunk. But you already know that. All those forms of ‘magic medicine‘* are bunk, of course, but homeopathy has a special place reserved for it in the kingdom of codswallop. Codswallop is dangerous to the mind, and often to your wallet, but homeopathy compounds that by being dangerous to your health, too, even fatal, as Penelope Dingle discovered. Yes, homeopathy can kill you, if you take it’s fake cures instead of actual medicine or treatment.** But, you ask, if a placebo works (in some cases), what’s wrong with it? As Joel Gottsegen wrote in the Stanford Daily ……… click below for more ↓

Words, Your Brain and Sex

Behaviour & Psychology / Books & Reviews / Language & GrammarLeave a comment

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One of the reasons I’m a dedicated librocubularist* can be found in a story on IFL Science that is headlined, “Learning New Words Activates The Same Brain Regions As Sex And Drugs.” It opens: While it doesn’t get much better than sex and drugs for many out there, new research has found that simply learning a new word can spark up the same reward circuits in the brain that are activated during pleasurable activities such as these. No wonder there are so many bookworms and scrabble addicts out there. So nothing like a good, brisk read through the Compact English ……… click below for more ↓

The Ebola Panic

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Ebola has gripped the imagination of North American media and been spun into a terrifying spectre looming like a horseman of the apocalypse over us. So widespread has it become that Jenny McCarthy, one of the top wingnuts of quackery and pseudomedicine, and poster girl for the pro-measles-pro-mumps parents, felt compelled to pipe up with her own “cure,” should it spread to the USA: Lemon juice. Yep. Wonder how the scientists missed that one. A quick trip to the grocery store and you’re immune. Safe easy and natural! Well, okay, she didn’t really say that. It was from a story posted on ……… click below for more ↓

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