13 March 2015

Three Things You Really Should Read before The Weekend

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Spotten on Twitter, but I cannot find who did it. If you did it, let me know for a credit.

spotted on Twitter, but I cannot find who did it. If you did it, let me know for a credit.

Trying to define pornography, a frustrated U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously declared “I know it when I see it”, and perhaps you can say the same thing about critical thinking. Greg Laden (at Science Blogs) wrote a great post today about Bjorn Lomborg, a “famous” climate denier, and a statement he made about sea level rise. Laden then goes on to show just how ridiculous the argument is, and I really cannot pass up the opportunity to say “read it!”. The graphic at the top is an excellent info graphic showing how ridiculous almost all of these claims are, and I think we really must realize the fact that these folks have given the science community some valuable teaching moments. Kudos to Greg Laden, who took this one and ran with it.

If you have a friend who is “into” Homeopathy”, they may not like this, but slip it to them in a discrete manner anyhow, or better yet, print it out and leave a copy (or two?) on the shelves in the herbal supplements area at Wal-Mart.

The geological epoch we live in is called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago as the last ice age abated, but It looks very likely that geologists will soon declare that we now live in a new geological time called the Anthropocene; but when did it begin? Bob O’hara at the Guardian in London has a really well done piece on a paper in Nature that posits the year 1610 as a good date. Am reading the Nature article but his summary is all you need to understand the issue.