Proofiness, slightly different than Stephen Colbert's truthiness, is basically finding statistics you want to believe to enhance your confirmation bias. It was coined by Charles Seife, a long-time science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, because he was outraged at skewed representation on both sides of the aisle, like Al Gore for cherry-picking data about global...
read moreThere has been a shift in both the reality and the perception of conservatives in America – it’s come to mean military jingo-ism and being a cultural busybody – but to old school people it just means some things are too important to experiment with. Society generally agrees with this concept – the courts frown on undernourished children, including one who died, whose...
read moreWhat is the world coming to when a man can't even split atoms in his own kitchen any more? Richard Handl said he has always been attracted to physics and chemistry and so he decided to do a little citizen science. It was no secret, he even kept a blog about it. In it, he described how he managed a minor meltdown at home but there were no dangerous radiation levels.When he...
read moreI wrote an article talking about the spate of "X is awesome" and "Y is bad for you" articles that came out every year and even had a little quiz asking people if they could identify what superfood and/or remedy was popular in years I had edited out for brevity.So if you were on a sugar diet, or a red wine diet or an acai berry diet, I know what year you read health magazines. Some...
read moreCrisis averted, we must hope, at least for a few months; Republicans and Democrats have figured out after a decade of expansive government that there are limits to how much debt they can amass and how much in taxes people can pay to cover the deficits. 1575 will be poo pooed as too far in the past to be a lesson today because things are much different now and parents just don’t understand...
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