I’m so used to thinking of myself as a radical iconoclastic weirdo, but now you’re telling me that I’m actually holding traditional American values? Tom the Dancing Bug Maybe I am the real conservative here? This is messing with my identity ..read more

I’ve never played Warmhammer, never owned any of the books or models, and I only just today learned something surprising. Numerous Warhammer players are cancelling their subscriptions and announcing a boycott of Games Workshop after the company retconned their Adeptus Custodes faction to add females. The surprise is that they never had feeeeemale characters in their game before? What? Following this retcon and the subsequent gaslighting from Games Workshop, numerous hobbyists, enthusiasts, and former customers have cancelled their subscriptions to Games Workshop’s subscription service Warha ..read more

It’s good to be reminded of what the general public finds important, and what it doesn’t. If you don’t like graffiti look away like you do for genocide ..read more

There are many ways to assess the utility of a policy. One way is to simply ask who favors the policy. There are many known bad actors who wear their bigotry on their sleeve, so if you find them favoring something, there may be something wrong with it. The anti-trans frenzy is peaking in England this week following the release of a much-anticipated review by Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender care. Many anticipated that the report would serve as a pretext to ban transgender care in England, and it appears to have been crafted to provide just such a rationale. Nations already enacting restrictiv ..read more

There’s an opportunity for you to teach physics, chemistry, and algebra, and all you need is a bachelor’s degree and student teaching experience. Easy! These are minimal qualifications that lot of newly graduating students could meet. Some of the other expectations, though… The qualified individual must be an evangelical Christian committed to living a biblical lifestyle in all areas and in full agreement with the school’s statement of faith. The teacher is expected to be in alignment with the science and biblical positions held at Answers in Genesis and able to teach physical sciences (phys ..read more

It’s odd that I haven’t seen much skeptical criticism of astrology lately — it’s one pseudoscience that has been laughed into the shadows. On the other hand, I see a lot of flat earth and creationist nonsense, and they’re just as or even more ridiculous as astrology, so I’m curious how nonsense gets promoted or dismissed in popular culture. It may simply be a matter of what bits of popular culture we choose to read. John Gruber finds an example in the magazine Women’s Health. So, what makes the Great American Eclipse of April 8, 2024 so special? Ancient astronomers — who, by the way, were als ..read more

I’ve changed my mind on a couple of things since yesterday. Based on the impression I got from the play Copenhagen, I said that Heisenberg was head of the German nuclear program in WWII. I was wrong. A reader wrote in with the details: A lot of documents regarding the WWII German nuclear program have only been declassified and rediscovered in archives in recent years (much more recently than the well-known Farm Hall transcripts and the main Alsos reports). Based on these documents, Heisenberg was not the head of the program. The chief theoretical physicist in the program appears to have bee ..read more

I’d buy this car before I’d get a Tesla I am increasingly feeling that the very rich have managed to pull a colossal scam on the whole world, where the grossly incompetent have rigged the system to make themselves wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Witness the collapse of Boeing, the entire goddamn Republican party, and of course, King Goober himself, Elon Musk. I appreciate this review of Tesla’s masterpiece, the Cybertruck. As the Bay Area is both a nexus for world-class goobers and the region where Tesla used to be and kinda-sorta still is headquartered, I have seen a lot of Cybert ..read more

I keep hearing from anti-trans activists that this major review of the literature on the efficacy of transgender treatments, the Cass Report, confirms their position, which I don’t understand. What I’ve read of the report isn’t very overwhelming at all. Rather than wading into almost 400 pages of text, though, I thought this succinct summary of the whole thing was very good. A systematic review collects all the published research in an area and ranks the research based on how likely it is to be reliable. The weakest form of evidence are case reports, where a doctor formally writes up an anec ..read more

Last night, I attended a play, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. I was in the odd position of being invited to participate in a discussion at the end of the play, along with two other professors. I felt a bit superfluous — the play was very good, I didn’t have a lot to add. You can watch the whole thing yourself with different players, since it was made into a movie. The movie is also very good, starring Stephen Rea and Daniel Craig, although it is marred by an introduction featuring Michio Kaku. I saw it as an exploration of ambiguity and interpretation. Somehow our discussion afterwards veered i ..read more