My higher level maths class for Leaving Certificate (the state exam at the end of secondary school in Ireland) was entirely populated with boys. I think there were one or two girls in the class at the beginning of the year, but they found the subject too time-consuming relative to the six or seven others [...]
Posts under ‘Science and Skepticism’
Is That All?
I’m happy to live in a world where I can read a blog post about two extraordinarily large stars in orbit around each other; think, “that orbital period makes it sound like they must be pretty close to each other”; and within moments have Google presenting me with the answer that these two stars are [...]
Dara O’Briain and Reality vs. Pseudoscience
Any time you spend reading what I write is time you’re not spending watching Dara O’Briain skewer pseudoscience.
For the sake of “balance”, we must now turn to Barry, who thinks the sky is a carpet painted by God.
A New Hope
Over the few days since my recent post about my hopes for 2020, I’ve come up with a few more ways in which I hope we can collectively improve our situation before this new decade is spent. Just like last time, these aren’t things that I necessarily expect to be fixed by 2020, but they [...]
Bad Astronomy
There are two things right now that I’m quite unsure of. The first is how long I’ve been aware of the Bad Astronomy blog by Phil Plait. I know it has been at least a few years though. The second and more perplexing is why up until now I have been content to follow the [...]
2020 Foresight
We have reached a milestone. When counting from an arbitrary time in the past, using an arbitrary date system built on an arbitrary numeral system, we reached a day whose date, when compared to that of an average day, possesses a more pleasing roundness. That is to say there’s nothing inherently magical or mystical or [...]
You can believe Mary had three heads and wings
“Our Christian tradition of 2,000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph,” she told the New Zealand Herald. “Such a poster is inappropriate and disrespectful.”
So? You can believe Mary had three heads and wings and gave birth to Jesus through her anus to preserve her [...]
World’s First Lab-Engineered Organ Transplant
Woman given lab-engineered organ transplant – The Irish Times:
A woman has become the first person in the world to be given an entirely laboratory engineered organ in a landmark operation.
Claudia Castillo’s stem cells were used to create an artificial airway which replaced the bronchus to her left lung, which had collapsed after she suffered a [...]
I Feel Fine
So today is our last day before the world is destroyed by a black hole which will inevitably be created by that giant ring in Switzerland called the Large Hadron Collider. What does it say about us all that at the brink of doom we’re all scrambling frantically—not to save ourselves from oblivion—but to come [...]