Reading Time: 4 minutes My YouTube channel ATP Geopolitics is a calm, measured, and wide-ranging look at the Ukraine war from micro- to macro-level. But as its presenter and curator of sources, I am angry. Very angry indeed. YouTubing is a job for me. Indeed, in my post-teaching life, where multiple sclerosis has restricted me to working from home, […]
Science
Science stories that matter, reported from a secular perspective at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inThe Future
A deluge of artificial stories: The chatbot crisis at Clarkesworld
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two days ago, Clarkesworld shut its doors to tackle a rising tide of story submissions that had all the hallmarks of being generated by chatbots. The surge happened especially as ChatGPT functionality became more widely accessible in the last few months. Solutions have not yet emerged to this problem, but my industry of speculative writers, […]
Posted inHealth
Antivax idiocy asks: ‘How many more kids have to die?’
Reading Time: 8 minutes An article from the right-wing news source The Stream gets a lot wrong in a recent anti-vax article. Let’s take it apart.
Posted inTechnology
You thought HAL was creepy? Meet Sydney
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve already seen what havoc technology-exploiting evil operators can wreak on people and societies. More than 70 million presumably-sensible Americans voted in 2020 for a presidential candidate whose entire political message was—and continues to be—built on easily-shredded tissues of falsehoods.
Yet considering that advances in AI are currently sprinting at breakneck speed into reality, Trump’s seduction of a huge swath of the American electorate was decidedly low-tech.
Posted inEnvironment
Too many people
Reading Time: 2 minutes Wealthy, well-developed nations are nearing ZPG (zero population growth), which makes life better for everyone.
Posted inLeaving Religion
A journey through chronic illness to freethought
Reading Time: 17 minutes Take yourself back to the mid-nineties, if you’re able to. We’re in a British Christian evangelical youth meeting, in a long white canvas tent on an agricultural showground a few miles North of the historic Cathedral city of Lincoln in the East of England. It smells of trampled grass and teen sweat. A sweet soaring […]
Posted inTechnology
Understanding Sen. John Fetterman’s struggle to understand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Note to readers: The New York Times reported February 16 that Sen. John Fetterman checked himself into a hospital the week before for treatment of his clinical depression, which has worsened as he adjusted to the rigors of US Senate work after suffering a life-threatening stroke last year. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman isn’t deaf, exactly, […]
Posted inHealth
Why anti-vaxxers get in more car crashes
Reading Time: 4 minutes People who reject the COVID vaccine also get in more traffic accidents than vaccinated people. What explains the link between these seemingly unrelated events?
Posted inSpace
Early black holes simplify the question of ‘dark energy’
Reading Time: 7 minutes The physics of our universe can be splendidly straightforward at times, even if it takes physicists a while to get there. That’s the current major takeaway from a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15, authored by 17 astronomers in collaboration across nine countries, led by the University of Hawai’i. You’re going to […]
Posted inHealth
Living and teaching in an unruly body
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m not disabled. Not yet. If I had to state it succinctly without referencing any diagnoses: my body is punitively fine-tuned—which doesn’t work well in academia, or anywhere else.