Is there a more urgent problem in the world today than war? And when I say “war,” I mean also militarism, the culture of war, the armies, arms, industries, policies, plans, propaganda, prejudices, rationalizations that make lethal group conflict not only possible but also likely.
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
I lack the tribalism gene. I don’t identify strongly, emotionally, with clusterings of people, whether nation, hometown, religion, ethnic group, profession or sports team (although long ago I endured the horror of being a Mets fan).
Corvid cleverness is making news lately. Researchers in New Zealand recently reported that crows can mimic the fictional hero of Aesop’s ancient fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.”
In my last column, I commented on an anomalous riff by Sherlock Holmes–who usually shuns metaphysics—on whether a beautiful flower is evidence of God.
I’ve become, belatedly, a Sherlock Holmes groupie. I dig the BBC series Sherlock, starring the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as its American counterpart Elementary (I prefer the latter, in part because of Lucy Liu, the best Watson ever).
I hope I was wrong about inflation. For decades, I’ve been bashing this theory of cosmic creation, lumping it together with strings, multiverses, and other highly speculative propositions sprung from the fecund minds of physicists.
In my previous column, I criticized Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the new science series Cosmos (which I’m loving), for downplaying historical links between science and war.
I hope Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, launched on Fox launched two weeks ago, becomes a smash hit, as much so as the 1980 version of Cosmos, hosted by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
We just launched a new undergraduate program in Science Communication at Stevens, and I continue agonizing over what I should teach.
There is a shamefully broad gap between the lip service that we Americans give soldiers—or “heroes,” as we love to call them—and our actual treatment of them.