America has the luxury of being able to dash from one culture war to another, primarily because we are a wealthy country with plenty of food and medicine and energy, providing ample opportunity for people who have never lacked for any of those to be opposed to science related to food, medicine and energy, while others can claim pollution is our friend or worry about abstract ideas like the...
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New York Times Style columnist Nick Bilton worries the Apple Watch might give you cancer, so he consulted...Joe Mercola.Yes, that Mercola, the famous homeopath who has been fined by the federal government for making bizarre unsubstantiated medical claims that probably sound legit to osteopaths and residents of Marin County, California, but make no sense in the evidence-based...
read moreLast Friday and Saturday, the 2015 Synopsys Sac STEM Fair was held at Folsom High School.I moved here from the football town of Pittsburgh and one thing everyone in football fandom knows about football towns is that for 8 or more days during football season, the parking lots at stadiums are jam-packed with "tailgating" fans, even if they don't have tickets to the actual game. Tailgating is named...
read moreWhither The Celts?In the 1980s there was a terrific British documentary called simply "The Celts", made because of ongoing fascination by entitled western elites with indigenous people and perhaps the lingering hope/fear that maybe they were somehow better than the winners.The Celts were a blanket name for a lot of people who were just The Other to Romans, any number of tribes that the Romans...
read moreA few years ago, bees suddenly had a sharp decline in numbers. This "Colony Collapse Disorder" as it is called, is a disorder in the sense that it is a recurring phenomenon, detailed for the last 1,000 years even when record-keeping just consisted of sporadic anecdotes. It was noted more frequently as record-keeping became more thorough. so it appeared far more often by the 1800s. By the 1900s,...
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