We need some creative solutions to our problems, so long as those solutions are the right kind of creative solutions. You know which solutions I mean, the ones we already know about but we just need to try again and do it better this time. Yeah, we need creative solutions, like the ones we already … [Read more…]
The main point of this article, Put Down That Game Controller: Researcher Suggests Video Games May Not Boost Cognition, is that we should pay attention to the ways in which social scientists recruit participants in their study. The argument is that earlier researchers claiming to find improvements in such attributes as hand-eye coordination from frequent … [Read more…]
Without a doubt, we are children of our age. There have been indications that the young folk with higher IQs tend to drift away from Christian and Jewish belief and practice. The interesting exception in some of those studies is the Church of the Latter-day Saints. I’ve read lightly, but substantially by current standards, in … [Read more…]
This article, Power Corrupts, Especially When It Lacks Status, explores a very important subject and extends a line of research which is decades old or centuries old if you wish to consider the work of Jeremiah and Plato, Tacitus and Augustine, Dante and Goethe, and so on. That older understanding is substantial but poorly focused … [Read more…]
On a regular basis, commentators of various viewpoints will re-evaluate what we Americans have done in Afghanistan and other occupied countries, wondering whether we could have acted more effectively. Some even express a bit of concern for the impact of our actions on the innocent civilians who have been killed or injured or impoverished in … [Read more…]
I’ve started rereading Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne, the physicist at Cambridge University who left his professorship to enter an Anglican seminary before returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator. Father Polkinghorne is quite polite to those who denigrate natural theology and to those who simply question what natural theology can really tell … [Read more…]
In a recent short post, Not Probabilistic Smudges but Relationships, I jumped the gun and said: In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.” Mr. Gleick … [Read more…]
Our current nuclear power technology is at least dirty, that is, it generates lots of dangerous waste. That is part of the attraction to the leaders of the United States since Truman. That waste includes weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Yet, we have a need for large power-plants or — better — lots of smaller plants … [Read more…]
This article, Rebalancing the Nuclear Debate Through Education, tells us: Better physics teaching with a particular emphasis on radioactivity and radiation science could improve public awareness through education of the environmental benefits and relative safety of nuclear power generation, according to leading Brazilian scientist Heldio Villar. He suggests that it might then be possible to … [Read more…]
I’m speaking of rational ‘conspiracy theorists’ which means those who claim, rightly, that power-elites develop and are quite capable of engaging ruthlessly in focused criminal conspiracies when their interests are threatened. I don’t even know how to make a pitch to those who think there is a tight-knit conspiracy run by Satan or Jesuits or … [Read more…]