First the link to this week’s complete list.
In centuries past it was hard to antagonize the church or the monarch and still keep your university position. This has passed but as Kupferschmidt demonstrates in the case of Edzard Ernst another powerful religious belief system coupled to vested financial interest (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list.
Finally there is some sense talked about nuclear power in Germany. However, who reads Scientific American? Kuczera et al. will have no effect whatever on the self-declared educated, convinced that nobody can be trusted, who actually knows the least bit about what they’re talking about. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list.
Isn’t economics wonderful? Those beautiful diagrams in Beale et al. would represent a distinct improvement to quite a few arts exhibitions. And isn’t it a noteworthy science of renown, that can warn about and predict a danger four years after it happened? (more…)
Melhuish and Sammons confirm one of my preconceptions, that with all the good others can do, the main and largest influence on children’s attainment are the parents, though I am somewhat surprised at how little the father seems to matter. My other preconception is summarily disproved though. (more…)
Johnson et al. are another attempt to replace guesswork and unfalsifiable storytelling by quantitative and testable results. („Man kann zwar ohne Mathematik einen Gegenstand sehr geistreich besprechen, man kann aber nicht ohne Mathematik etwas Zusammenhängendes in innerlich zusammenhaltender Weise überdenken. Unerquicklich und unzusammenhängend sind die Abschnitte, in denen die Mathematik noch nicht Fuß gefaßt hat.“; Georg Simon Ohm) (more…)
There are again several contributions to the Out of Africa question. According to Argue and the comment by Trueman H. floresiensis seems to have split from the tree earlier than H. erectus. Argue sees the Dmanisi specimens (more…)
The most interesting result in Shannon is hidden in his figure 3. From it it seems that 18 years is the lowest possible reasonable age of maturity. Regarding the natural variance (more…)
As always Boyd and Richerson are pure gold. It seems humans are not smarter than apes, in fact according to Whiten 2009 they seem to be less so, but base their success on being better plagiarists. Naturally then among themselves too it is plagiarists that are most successful and rise to government, so the treatment of former Dres. Guttenberg, Koch-Mehrin and Chatzimarkakis is quite unfair.
On a more serious note (more…)
Voigtlaender proves once more, how looking at only last fortnight’s history does not suffice to understand today’s problems. The problems of peoples living together, multinational states, and minorities are just as pressing now as they ever were and the solutions that worked best and longest in the past are often not those, current political correctness approves of. (more…)
I’m ninety percent sure, that Misarti must be nonsense. Looking at their graphs they measure trace elements in soil at concentrations up to 10^9 ppb, i.e. purity. (more…)
