Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is too relevant to this blog's conversations for me to pass up calling your attention to it. Click through to see the full size version. via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Month: January 2014
Ask Ethan #20: Is the Mars One crew doomed? – Starts With A Bang
What Mars One is counting on is that they can safely land a heavier payload than ever before, that they can do it more precisely than ever before (as in, within just a few hundred meters of previous successful landings), and they can do it for only 12% of the projected costs, with a total … Continue reading Ask Ethan #20: Is the Mars One crew doomed? – Starts With A Bang
Mars exploration is always 20 years in the future
There is a lot of news about the assessment of experts on the feasibility of a manned mission to Mars. Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s is affordable, a group of experts finds, but some key changes are needed if it is going to happen. I remember as a boy in the 1970s reading that we'd … Continue reading Mars exploration is always 20 years in the future
Do we all do science?
Massimo Pigluici has a cartoon response up on Rationally Speaking in reply to Sam Harris' Edge response. Harris thinks that science is defined too narrowly, is suspicious of talk of the limits of science, and sees the distinction between science, philosophy, and history as illusory. Massimo sees this as too broad. I may be missing … Continue reading Do we all do science?
Unapologetics: Time to ditch falsifiability?
The End of the World: Science or Religion? | Seth Shostak
Harold Camping died last month. In case you don't remember, Camping, the president of evangelical Family Radio, predicted that the world would end in 2011. Twice. He made these prognostications on the basis of numerology, which sounds like it might be a sophomore-level math subject, but isn't. The data for the calculations Camping used to … Continue reading The End of the World: Science or Religion? | Seth Shostak
The path to moral behavior | Machines Like Us
The brakes of your car fail suddenly and on your path are five people who will certainly be hit and killed. You can steer, but if you do another pedestrian will find himself on your course. Just one. What do you do: do you take action and kill one person or do you do nothing … Continue reading The path to moral behavior | Machines Like Us
Time to ditch falsifiability?
Related to my last two posts, and our discussion, Sean Carroll turned in an answer to the "What Scientific Ideas Are Ready for Retirement?" His answer? Falsifiability. Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity … Continue reading Time to ditch falsifiability?
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? | Science | The Observer
Each year a forum for the world's most brilliant minds asks one question. This year's drew responses from such names as Richard Dawkins, Ian McEwan and Alan Alda. Here, edge.org founder John Brockman explains how the question came into being and we pick some of the best responses via What scientific idea is ready for … Continue reading What scientific idea is ready for retirement? | Science | The Observer
Farewell to Reality
Jim Baggott has written an important book, 'Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth', which takes a hard look at many modern ideas in theoretical physics, and finds that many of them are not science. Philosophy of science Baggott begins with a chapter on basic philosophy of science, identifying … Continue reading Farewell to Reality
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