Science & Society

Gerald Warner Blows Wind Gerald Warner is not a scientist: he is a polemicist.  A very good polemicist, if that means someone who knows how to make good use of the diatribe dictionary.  If…

If you want to have a good time, visit Spain.  It isn't just the tapas. They have bars. A lot of them.  The average is one bar for every 132 residents. For comparison, the US state…

Some groups insist that eating meat is bad for the environment. They even invented a bogus metric, it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef, to show the environmental harm of not being a…

It's not often that the Hallmark Channel gets a shout-out on Science 2.0 but when they send young people into space, I'm in. I got an email about an upcoming movie and it intrigued me so the…

One has to be careful how one reads.  A few years ago I used this short bit from Darwin’s Descent of Man (page 174) to tease a Welsh friend: Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons…

Does more food labeling related to calories and nutrition make a difference?  About one third of American kids and teens is overweight or obese, nearly triple the rate in 1963, making it a much…

Pundits are wrong more often than they are right but when preaching to the faithful, being accurate is less important than being confident. It's no different in politics or sports or business shows.…

Ernie Pyle, the iconic embedded World War II embedded journalist killed by Japanese machine gun fire in 1945, made famous the adage, "There are no atheists in foxholes."  He was making a point…

The Importance Of The Literature The public at large, and unfortunately too many writers, do not know how vital a properly conducted survey of the scientific literature can be.  We must remember…

Saffron In one of my school history books, as I remember, there is a story that saffron was introduced into Europe by a pilgrim from concealing some corms in his staff, to avoid the death penalty if…