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Posts Tagged ‘science’

Yet more Queensland floods. Third time in about a year for some towns? Was struck by one farmer’s comment – “I’ve lived beside this creek for 65 years, but I have never heard anything like the frightening roar of the water last night”. The roar would clearly stick in his mind the rest of his [...]

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When the bible was written humans* didn’t know: About bacteria and viruses and parasites Blood circulation Earth going around sun More than 5 planets About galaxies There was a southern hemisphere Earth round What lightning is That whales aren’t fish What mental illness involves About genes and inheritance About Chinese, Aztecs, Zulus, Aborigines, Navaho, Japanese, [...]

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Bit of serendipity other day. As I was planning this post I was taken to task by a right wing tweeter unhappy, for some reason, that I had repeated the obvious truism that conservatives are much dumber than progressives. Progressivism, in fact, has an intelligence bias. Anyway, left him to his own world after a [...]

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How can every human being on the planet not spend their days being puzzled about pretty much everything? Every day I ask myself questions like: How does that work? Why did that happen? Who was responsible for that? What was the purpose of that? Where did that come from? Constantly, one or more of the [...]

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[Note this was written to follow on from discussions which began in comments on post "When you wish" below and continued into those of "Extraordinary". One of my most regular commenters on this blog, Eric, is trying to understand evolution. I, we, are trying to help him. This post arose from Eric's comment that "I [...]

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Once upon a time the question about life elsewhere in the universe was complicated by lack of basic information. From the time we knew that we lived in a galaxy and there were 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and that there were 200 billion other galaxies (so that’s, um, 80,000 billion billion stars as [...]

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This morning (15 January 2012) I experienced an unpleasant sense of deja vu as Australia’s tv channel 7 ran a propaganda piece for the so-called “mountain cattlemen” who are battling the federal government to once again allow their cattle to smash up the national parks of the high country. The new conservative Vic state government [...]

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When I was young, a year or two ago, the world seemed a somewhat predictable place. You knew, each New Year’s Eve, what you would be doing, as school year followed predictable school year. You knew what family would be doing, as they lived daily lives, worked at long-term jobs. The country seemed predictable, Robert [...]

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It is not just the media which aims at the lowest common denominator these days, and not just politicians (notably Abbott), but government itself. The stupidity and ignorance of the limits placed on wind farms by the new Victorian and NSW governments is only exceeded by the stupidity and ignorance of the people whose “opinions” [...]

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A comparison between public perception (and I use the term loosely) of climate science and other sciences has been made in various ways from time to time, but is worth making again. You are sitting in on a case management conference in the oncology area of a hospital, with all the specialists, nurses, medical technicians [...]

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