Almost two decades ago, the Sokal affair occurred. A physicist tired of philosophical pseudoscientific gibberish and set out to write a paper of barely comprehensible jargon and get it in a peer-reviewed journal. It dutifully espoused philosophy as superior to science and then used science terminology for legitimacy. It was, in short, the perfect example of what was wrong.Paul Feyerabend is dead and so is postmodernism, now you can just generate rubbish in an automated postmodernism generator and dispense with being creative, but its techniques are still with us. In psychology, Feyerabend's belief that any crazy thing is possible is being shown true.
What was the line between being a Buccaneer and a Pirate?It was fuzzy, but it mostly seemed to involve having a royal charter from some seafaring nation or other, and an agreement not to sack their ships - everyone else was fair game.But just like modern online video technology was spurred by porn and our efforts to improve online privacy have been spurred by the Obama administration, in order to stay one step ahead of a well-armed navy, swashbucklers had to use the latest advances.And they did. From current, wind, and reef patch information to new species size, coloration, behavioral patterns, and most importantly, edibility, pirates did a lot
Smoking cigarettes is bad because of, you know, smoke. Right?So why are e-cigarettes, which are not smoking, facing the kind of social authoritarian ban hammer usually reserved for Happy Meals and golf and Big Gulps while those same people are gushing all over marijuana, which is smoking?After all, it's not third-hand cigarettes epidemiological woo that is the latest front in the health war, it is third-hand smoke.While any mention of the health detriments of smoking marijuana gets hippies with pitchforks out in force, they are happy to let Democrats (naturally) promote made-up stories like that e-cigarettes cause cancer, nicotine addiction and don't help smokers quit.
Imagine what the reaction would be if it were 2006 and President George W. Bush had an environmental report on his desk from government scientists and chose to ignore the data and stall in order to placate his entrenched constituencies.Well, we do know, because that's exactly what happened. What is different in 2014 is the reaction from all of the people who insisted Bush - and all Republicans - must hate science. It is an ethical ghost town when President Obama does that same thing, just like there was scant reaction when President Obama edited science reports to match his agenda, about Deepwater Horizon.
Recently, President Obama made a clear endorsement of biotechnology.That's good, right?Maybe. He has also made clear endorsements of nuclear science and vaccines, yet his actions in five years have been anything but clear. His administration consistently opposes inconvenient science that disagrees with the beliefs of his base - and nothing offends a giant swath of Democrats like nuclear energy, GMOs and vaccines.
Vani Hari, the Foodbabe, promises that if you follow her diet you will look pretty like she does - and to bolster her case she trots out the naturalistic fallacy and a healthy dose of chemical illiteracy, the most famous of which is 'if she can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it'.As Josh Bloom has noted on Science 2.0, she is missing out on delicious chemical-laced treats like Tris-(9-octadecenoyl) trigyceryl mixed esters and (2E)-3-phenylprop-2-enal. And no science at all would get done without 3,7-Dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dion.
Airplane food tastes bad, right?It depends. Before our somewhat dopey security efforts turned flying into a third-world experience, I have had some pretty good meals. But efforts to create gourmet meals fall pretty flat - and there is a science reason why.The Fraunhofer Institute did a study on why delicious food on the ground tastes dull in the air. In a mock aircraft cabin, researchers tried out ingredients at both sea level and in a pressurized condition—and the differences in taste were startling.
Take a look at this 300 foot high wall in Bolivia, which has over 5,000 dinosaur footprints.3 miles from downtown Sucre, Bolivia is Cal Orko, a limestone slab 0.9 miles long and over 328 feet high. On this steep 73 degree face can see tracks from 68 million years ago. Cal Orko has 462 distinct dinosaur tracks from at least 8 different species - 5,055 individual dinosaur footprints. So how do thousands of dinosaur footprints end up on a vertical rock face hundreds of feet high?
Let's give it up for Livescience. Their article on an arousing Champagne ice cream, the brainchild of Welsh food inventor Charlie Harry Francis, is sold with a clever graphic. They didn't even have to create it. Lick Me I'm Delicious, the name for this brainchild of Francis, did. It has 25 mg of Viagra.Get it? Lick me? Viagra?Maybe their photo will help.Link: Pinterest
A litany on Science 2.0 is that when something comes up that might be about fish, call Neil Shubin - because he can make anything about fish.That's because we can make almost anything about fish. He has told the story before, and recounts in his new television show, that students in an anatomy class he taught likely wanted a refund when he explained he was a fish biologist, until he showed them what we all had in common.Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old Devonian period specimen, is one of the great examples of multi-disciplinary science collaboration; biology predicted it, geology predicted how to find it and paleontology predicted where to look. Then they found it.
