Blogging and old age—a dangerous combination. All bloggers have a tendency toward self-importance. At least, bloggers who are cultural commentators do. It is hard to tell the world what you think of it day in and day out without falling in love with the sound of your own voice. Add to that the well-known inclination [...]
In a jaw-dropping commentary on National Public Radio’s web site, astrophysicist and aspiring New Atheist author, Marcelo Gleiser, has enlisted the popular television serial-killer, Dexter, in his own crusade against religious believers. Gleiser is Professor of Natural Philosophy and of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the author of several popular science books, most recently [...]
A federal advisory panel has recommended that preteenage boys as young as 11 be vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) (see this New York Times article from Oct. 25). The same Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—which was empaneled by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta—previously recommended vaccinating all school-age girls against HPV, also [...]
The New York Times‘s Tuesday science supplement seldom disappoints. Most every week, it brings us some story apt to outrage an ordinary moral sensibility. By “ordinary moral sensibility,” I mean the instincts and feelings of someone brought up in the old-fashioned way to believe in the reality of right and wrong and the freedom of the [...]
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that the student debt crisis may well be the latest in a series of economic bubbles that have ravaged the U.S. and world economies over the past couple of decades. First came the “dot-com” bubble in the 1990s. Then the real estate, or subprime mortgage, bubble blew up in our [...]
A recent article in USA Today reports that cumulative outstanding student loans are set to pass the $1 trillion mark: The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year. Americans now owe [...]
For a fellow who was elevated to the Godhead just a few weeks ago by the votaries of the secular religion of science at The New York Times (here), Richard Dawkins seems awfully insecure. Yesterday, the prominent evolutionary biologist, former Oxford don, prolific author—and possibly the world’s best-known professional atheist—published in The Guardian a short statement [...]
The term “brain drain” refers, of course, to the long-standing demographic trend in which the best students from developing countries come to the United States for their higher education, and then stay here to pursue their careers instead of returning home. In this way, the United States “drains” many of the most talented people in [...]
If fifty years of science studies have taught us anything, they have taught us that scientists are human beings. (I say “fifty years,” because the golden anniversary of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [University of Chicago Press, 1962] is nearly upon us.) You might wonder: Who would dream of denying it? After all, isn’t [...]
Those of you who are like me—male, pushing 60, and someone who watched way too many NFL games on TV when you were a kid—will remember Fran Tarkenton: one of the league’s biggest star quarterbacks in its early glory days. A native Viriginian, Tarkenton led the University of Georgia Bulldogs to the NCAA Southeastern Conference [...]