Our ignorance made it plausible

That’s a new phrase in my critical-thinking arsenal now. By itself, it seems counterintuitive, but that’s really the point. Let me explain.

A century or so ago, as telescopes got better and we began to understand more about our closest stellar neighbor Mars, we realized that it was not too much smaller than Earth and not too far away, and surmised that, given these conditions and the read more

“Mean?” Please.

It’s been a while since I’ve tackled a post of this nature (instead of a post of nature,) and I’m out of practice, I think. More, my reading and web surfing hasn’t been related to this as much anymore, so I’m not inspired to address such topics anywhere near as much. But in light of recent developments (as well as re-reading Richard Dawkins’ The god read more

Rehab redux reload

It’s slow of course, and I have little to post about – some lens tests, if I can get motivated to do them – but it’s also approaching that time of year, and so I’m once again reposting something that originally fell into the ‘Amateur Naturalist’ category, but now with a new name while lacking any actual new content (thus, like most product upgrades anymore, read more

But how? Part 30: Responsibility

[As a throwback to the early days, I did this one as a podcast too, so you can hear the audio of it immediately below. But if sounds like a long-overdue brake job bother you, you can simply read the text version.]

Walkabout podcast – But How? part 30: Responsibility

This is one that I’ve touched on here and there before, but I was reminded of it while watching Julia Sweeney’s read more

Asking the right questions

Believe me, I’m well aware that I’m not posting much and then I come in with something like this. You’re right to feel offended. Not that I care at all, but I won’t deny you your affrontage.

So I was thinking earlier of the varying attitudes held when the subject of UFOs (or UAPs if you prefer, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) and extra-terrestrials and so on comes up. read more

I am not an American

And I feel it needs to be said.

It might seem strange, especially when you know that I was born in New Jersey, grew up in New York, presently reside in North Carolina, and a few hours spent in Canada is my life total of time in other countries. What else could I be?

But it must be something else, because I can easily tell you what I’m not.

I’m not someone who needs to tell everyone who read more

But how? Part 29: Selfishness

It’s been over a year since the last example of this topic, which is intended to answer the questions raised by a non-religious worldview, and it was making me suspect that I’d exhausted just about all of the possibilities, but new ones still pop up here and there. Today’s is kind of a multi-level one, because several aspects run together, so bear with me. I’ve also tackled read more

Here’s why, part 4: Alternative Medicine

In this ongoing series answering the question of why ‘mainstream science’ doesn’t take certain topics ‘seriously,’ we get to Alternative Medicine, or alt-med as it is often abbreviated. This term actually doesn’t have a firm definition, except for specifically being not something that a qualified physician would recommend (or alternately, would often read more

Going critical

I’ve been considering this post for far too long now not whether or not it should be done, but the most effective approach to the topic, finally realizing that there is no one effective approach to anything. Additionally, the threat of playing pop psychologist was arising, something that already does a lot of damage, but then I realized that it couldn’t cause anywhere read more

Throw numbers in the air

Over at Universe Today there’s an article about rewriting Drake’s Equation, and after reading it some time earlier, it’s been stewing in my mind a little potential posts about it have changed several times, and resulted in this one.

Long story short: an astronomer named Frank Drake wrote out a simple equation, back in the sixties, to examine the possibility of read more

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