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Random Thoughts

Sweden’s First College Student Doodled A Lot Too

In the absence of any evidence for why different people perform differently in school - other than that people are different - pundits have invented everything from genetic math anxiety to stereotype threat as an explanation. read...

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Cosmos Ratings Are Not A ‘Disaster’ For Fox

Cosmos Ratings Are Not A ‘Disaster’ For Fox

The Drudge Report is saying that "Cosmos" ratings are a disaster and, I as I discussed in Is "Cosmos" Suffering From Unrealistic Expectations? the overnights showed numbers down from the premiere, but that is hardly a disaster.1) It's a science show. That a science show was on a prime time broadcast network - and took third place in its premiere - I would say is bordering on miraculous. read...

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Cool Job In Biology: A Day In The Life Of A Beer Taster

I play guitar but I don't play out for money. Aside from a high level of stage fright about playing guitar in public I think doing it for money would take away a lot of the relaxation.That doesn't apply to all things. I write every day and always enjoy that. So at first blush I might be inclined to think a job tasting beer would be a bad thing, but perhaps it is just like writing and if you would...

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4.5 Things Cosmos Gets Wrong

In The Federalist Today, I have a piece titled Five Things Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” Gets Wrong.  read...

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Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey – The Review

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality - Carl SaganI missed the big Carl Sagan thing when it happened. I was in high school when Cosmos came out, we lived in the country and if you wanted to watch a different television network, you had to go up into the attic and turn a giant antenna with a pipe wrench. Sports and girls and D&D were more of...

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Missed It By That Much…

For THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 annual prognostication issue, predictions for the year by some of the luminaries in science media, I predicted that one of the Big 5 organs would be created.The benefit is obvious; organs created from a patient's own adult stem cells mean no chance of rejection and no need for expensive immunosuppressive drugs. Science-fiction/ethical scenarios like raising animals or...

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