Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are disturbingly inconsistent, and the characters are primarily stock types and authorial mouthpieces. To top it off, many of these novels are ambitious, earnestly offered as novels of big ideas. These ideas are usually sympathetic (tolerance, freedom, racial equality, escape from religious tyranny), but generally reduced to platitudes expressed in long, somnolent sermons by the your standard pointy-headed philosopher-scientist.

So why bother to read these books? Continue reading “Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic”

Knievelism – Is your stunt dramatic enough?

The Comedy and Tragedy Masks
Previously, I wrote about the issues that The 10:23 Campaign and its participants needed to consider in their laudable opposition to homeopathy. There, I wanted to focus on technical issues like safety and logic.

A major tactic of The 10:23 Campaign in 2010 was to generate educational opportunities by means of an attention gathering stunt – the mass overdose. While I have safety and scientific issues with the mass overdose stunt, it is also not clear why it should be a particularly compelling event to the relatively disinterested audience that is the general public. Why?

The mass overdose stunt is boring. Continue reading “Knievelism – Is your stunt dramatic enough?”

Hunting with Catapults

Not fake. The British are weird. In population genetics, this usually occurs on islands due to founder effects, inbreeding, or both.

The headline implies that this might actually be similar to Fox Tossing.

Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out

A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe

Fans of British apocalypse novels a la Wyndham and John Christopher ought to enjoy Chalres Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out, another story focused the catastrophic disintegration of British society in the context of a world-wide disaster. Journalist Philip Wade writes a speculative story about the potential adverse geological effects of nuclear testing, and inadvertently almost reveals a tightly held state secret. The recent nuclear tests of ‘Operation Nutcracker’ have busted open the earth’s crust, and the oceans are draining away into the earth’s interior. Wade has his story pulled at the last minute by mysterious government officials. But oddities offer clues: frequent earthquakes trouble seismically mild Britain, and the tide steadily decreases. Soon shipping is impossible, and Britain (and the rest of the world) goes into crisis as the world dries out – no clouds, no rain, no crops, etc.. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out”

Supreme Court declines creationist appeal

We can add one more case to creationism’s long record of legal failures. Yes, a creationist biology class is not adequate preparation for college coursework. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a case involving applicants to the University of California system who were deemed to have inadequate college preparation in biology. From the NCSE:

On October 12, 2010, the Supreme Court declined (PDF, p. 12) to review Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al., thus bringing the case to a definitive end. The case, originally filed in federal court in Los Angeles on August 25, 2005, centered on the University of California system’s policies and statements relevant to evaluating the qualifications of applicants for admission. Continue reading “Supreme Court declines creationist appeal”