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My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the possibility that big meteorites can trigger volcanic activity: About 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs and maybe two-thirds of all other species suddenly died out. For three decades, the dominant explanation for this mass extinction has been that it was probably […]

My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: Earthquakes are natural disasters. However much culpability there is afterward about the building standards that may have worsened the death toll or the response of the emergency authorities, nobody is to blame for the actual shock. At least, not normally. An exception is the […]

Here’s an interview I did for the Globe and Mail in Toronto during my recent visit to Canada.

Joanne Nova has a really fine essay on Naomi Klein. This is great writing, easily as fluent as Klein herself, only rational. An excerpt: By building her whole argument on un-scientific quicksand, Klein makes mindless statements that unwittingly apply more to her own arguments than anyone elses. She explores “how the right has systematically used […]

My latest Wall Street Journal Mind and Matter column: The list of scientific heretics who were persecuted for their radical ideas but eventually proved right keeps getting longer. Last month, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, having spent much of his career being told he was wrong. “I was thrown […]

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: “You can’t change human nature.” The old cliché draws support from the persistence of human behavior in new circumstances. Shakespeare’s plays reveal that no matter how much language, technology and mores have changed in the past 400 years, human nature is largely undisturbed. Macbeth’s ambition, […]

There’s a fine article at Spiked by Tim Black exposing what Robert* Malthus actually said. Malthus was a reactionary nostalgic pessimist who was not just wrong about population growth outstripping food supply. He was also wrong in his cynicism about helping the poor lest they breed more. (*Everybody calls him Thomas these days, whereas his […]

My lecture on scientific heresy to the RSA this week has been reprinted on bishop-hill.net and wattsupwiththat.com, where it has generated much discussion. Thanks to Andrew Montford and Antony Watts for their interest.

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: This Halloween, the United Nations declared over the summer, a baby will be born somewhere on Earth who will tip the world’s population over seven billion for the first time. Truly do international bureaucrats have the power of prophecy! The precision is bunk, of course, […]

Sad news of the death of John McCarthy, former professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, who coined the very term “artificial intelligence” in 1955 and invented the LISP programming language in 1958. McCarthy was a true “progressive” in that he appreciated the rapid and dramatic improvements in human living standards brought about by innovation. […]