November 23, 2024 – 3:50 pm
Following on my previous — and alarmist — post about AI, I think I should add some further remarks about what may or may not be possible. Back in 2014 I wrote a post, as part of a linked series on free will and determinism, about the idea of what the English scientist Stephen Wolfram […]
In his “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940 — eighty-four years and two days ago — Winston Churchill warned of “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” With news now appearing of the widening spread of the deadly H5N1 virus, there’s […]
Here’s a splendid little video (found on X) on how energy moves through and around an electrical circuit. 5 minute clip explaining that energy does not flow through wires it flows around the wires through free space based on electric & magnetic fields How have I never known this?? pic.twitter.com/rgK5WjF8DI — JessicaGenetics (@JessicaGenetics) May 26, […]
Having had, last night, a lively conversation over dinner with a woman who chid me (and sought to correct me) for insisting that sex is indeed binary, I think a clarifying post is in order. Before I begin, I’ll pause to express surprise and dismay at how stubbornly fashionable, and how prevalent, denial of the […]
I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality. In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, […]
March 31, 2024 – 10:27 pm
Over American Greatness, Jeremy Carl discusses Steve Sailer’s new book, and the man himself. (If you don’t know who Steve Sailer is, you should; he is arguably the sharpest and most influential American thinker and writer of the last quarter-century, and were it not for the suffocating taboos enforced by our cultural commissars, he would […]
Get ready for a shock: men and women have different brains.
December 20, 2023 – 12:41 pm
We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]
October 2, 2023 – 11:42 pm
Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]
Korean researchers are reporting that they have developed an easy-to-make room-temperature superconductor. If so — well, hang on to your hats, folks. Story here. Update, 8/10: Never mind.
We live in an age dominated by scientistic materialism. Ever since the Enlightenment, the explosive growth in our scientific understanding of nature has rocked religion back on its heels by providing mechanistic and mathematical explanations for phenomena that had previously been wholly mysterious. The great paradigm by which we understood the world was slowly inverted; […]
Woody Allen once wrote: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” On March 29th, Time magazine published an article by Eliezer Yudkowski titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. […]
January 2, 2022 – 8:23 pm
By far the most polarizing issue at the moment is the Wuhan Red Death, a.k.a. COVID — and things got sharply hotter over the past few days, when (as I’m sure you’ve heard) Dr. Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA-vaccine technology and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccinations and disease outbreaks, […]
December 22, 2021 – 11:46 pm
Following on yesterday’s post; here is OpenVAERS, which is a more easily accessible front-end for the VAERS data.
November 29, 2021 – 10:10 pm
Here we go: With the help of a supercomputer running AI software, boffins at an American university have created a new life-form they call “xenobots”, which are are tiny, motile blobs of tissue made from frog stem-cells. Under the guidance of the AI — which, as AIs tend to do these days, took off on […]
November 29, 2021 – 3:15 pm
Please watch — this might not be up for long.
October 3, 2021 – 12:58 pm
The “Spartacus Letter” mentioned in last Wednesday’s post discussed the use of graphene nanoparticles as a transducer for brain-computer interfaces, and expressed concerns that the vaccines now being forced on everyone — which are said to contain these particles — might in fact be an insidious step toward mass behavioral control. I said this seemed […]
September 11, 2021 – 1:50 pm
The blank-slatist axiom at the heart of contemporary racialist Leftism is beginning — as was always inevitable, barring complete governmental suppression of all relevant research — to crumble under the patient advance of genetic and cognitive science. Here’s Steve Sailer, writing about this at Taki’s Magazine. Prediction: as this motte becomes indefensible, “luck egalitarianism” will […]
October 23, 2020 – 1:27 pm
I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually […]
Next time you hear someone refer to carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”, mention this: Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds Carbon dioxide is plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide, make human food, and release oxygen. Humans breathe oxygen, eat plants, and release carbon dioxide. Simple and elegant.
Here’s another item over the transom from our e-pal Bill K. — a software engineer’s look at the modeling software that was relied upon to shut down the West. (As a former C++ developer myself, I can say that it sounds awfully bad.)
March 22, 2020 – 11:18 pm
I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that our reaction to this Wuhan virus, if it keeps the economy comatose for any appreciable length of time, will do more damage than anything the disease itself might have wrought. On the more benign end of the scale, we have at minimum a crisis that has already been […]
February 21, 2020 – 6:31 pm
Naturalism asks us to believe that we are just a pile of protons, electrons, etc., pushed and pulled willy-nilly by mindless attractions and repulsions — or even that we are, at bottom, nothing more than a set of solutions to some fundamental equations. Yet we think and dream; we feel love and grief. We taste […]
With a hat-tip to Nick Land, here is a densely mathematical paper that purports to model the world economy in terms of the degree of restriction of migration policy. I have looked it over, but I cannot say that I have followed its argument in detail. (If any of my readers would like to do […]
November 6, 2018 – 6:23 pm
You may recall the curious object Oumuamua, a visitor from beyond the solar system that passed by the Sun on a hyperbolic orbit late last year. It was no ordinary asteroid: it had a strange pattern of reflection that suggested it was a long, skinny cylinder, and as it left our solar system it appeared […]
September 11, 2018 – 1:49 pm
Here is a remarkable video clip of the center of Hurricane Florence.
Over at Kakistocracy, Porter tosses and gores one Jessica Wood, a Ph.D. student at the university of Guelph, who has written a report that arrives at the following conclusion: “We found people in consensual, non-monogamous relationships experience the same levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being and sexual satisfaction as those in monogamous relationships… This debunks […]
April 26, 2018 – 12:05 pm
Over the transom today: It’s “ethically inappropriate’ for government and medical organizations to describe breastfeeding as “natural’ because the term enforces rigid notions about gender roles, claims a new study in Pediatrics. “Coupling nature with motherhood”¦ can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that […]
I’ve been busy catching up with work, and have no time for writing just yet. But I do have something good for you to read: a substantial essay by Toby Young on heredity and heresy, and the scientific denialism of the progressive Left. It’s so good that I won’t excerpt it: you must go and […]
Making a bit of a splash at the moment is a new book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. (Any book that says anything truthful about heredity and human groups is going to attract attention these days, […]
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology. It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
January 22, 2018 – 1:22 pm
This is nice: a 3D simulated fly-through of the Orion Nebula, in visible and infrared light. What times we live in! The nature of astronomical nebulae was almost completely unknown as recently as the beginning of the last century; it wasn’t even a hundred years ago that astronomers debated whether the spiral nebulae* might in […]
August 2, 2017 – 11:27 am
From my pal Dennis Mangan: a warning about industrial seed oils (which are everywhere in the modern American diet). Here.
Making the rounds recently: an excellent article at Quillette about the ongoing purge of moderates and conservatives from the social sciences. After beginning with some evidence that the purge itself is real, accelerating, and is driving the academic community sharply to the left, the author, Uri Harris, compares two ideological narratives. The first is the […]
Here’s an interesting angle: using Benford’s Law to spot falsified data in academic papers.
Our e-pal Bill Keezer has sent along an essay by Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Dr. Hutchinson is also a Christian, and his article is a riposte to people like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who flatter themselves that the certainty of their atheism is grounded in truth, rather than their […]
Big news, if true: humans emerged in Europe, not Africa.
I’ve mentioned Charles Murray rather a lot recently; this is because he is often in the news lately, and has been right on the frontlines of the culture war. The pillorying and excommunication of this meticulous and mild-mannered scholar also shows the extent to which ideological and cryptoreligious loyalties and prejudices have contaminated science as […]
If you’re like me, you may be feeling “out of step” because you’ve been having trouble adopting the Progressive way of thinking about things. You have to watch everything you say in public, and your maladjusted belief system may have cost you friendships, or even your job! Have you found that despite all this, no […]
February 28, 2017 – 5:54 pm
Remember Supernova 1987a? (Of course you do.) Well, NASA’s been keeping an eye on it for you. Fantastic video and images here.
January 27, 2017 – 1:40 pm
I’ve just run across an interesting and illustrative story about academic heresy. It’s by a dissident researcher who took on the high priest of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, and describes the storm of opprobrium that followed. In brief: a central tenet of Chomsky’s model is that a particular feature — recursion — is universal to all […]
January 25, 2017 – 12:18 pm
From our e-pal P.D. Mangan (who, as people who used to read his now-defunct blog will know, already has the mens sana part covered), here is a list of 20 principles for good health and longevity. Many of these principles are obvious common sense. A controversial one, though, is number ten: The cholesterol hypothesis of […]
January 11, 2017 – 9:54 pm
This is fantastic: a centrifuge, spinning at up to 125,000 RPM, made out of paper and string. Brilliant. Here.
December 4, 2016 – 11:03 pm
I’ve been on the road today, with no time for writing. So for tonight we have for you an evergreen speech by the late Michael Crichton on how real science works. Money quote: In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke […]
November 1, 2016 – 11:57 pm
A dramatic clip from NASA Heliophysics. Here.
Over the transom today from our commenter Henry: an article about the failure of nature to deliver the heavy particles that physicists have been predicting for decades. One possible explanation: perhaps the world is simply odder than we can imagine.
Some science items for today: With race front and center in every news cycle, it’s good to be prepared for encounters with those who insist that race is “only a social construct” (many of whom also spend all their waking hours totting up accounts of how one race is doing compared to another). Readers of […]
From Stephen Hsu’s blog, here’s a video of an hour-long panel discussion with Dr. Hsu, Steven Pinker, and Dalton Conley on the subject of genetic engineering and the heritability of human traits, particularly intelligence. This topic is a minefield in the West, and so great care is taken, and necessary pieties uttered — and some […]