Category Archives: Science

Big Bang Evidence

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very significant new evidence today of the so-called ‘inflation’ of the universe in the very tiny moments after the beginning. Phil Plait has a good overview of today’s announcement about direct evidence for inflation in the very early universe, just … Continue reading →

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A Fellow Heir of Carl Sagan

Posted on Thursday 13 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Friendly Atheist, this post of a Tale of a lapsed Christian who grew up in a household that mocked Carl Sagan when the first Cosmos series was aired. In my childhood home, Carl Sagan was a fundamentalist caricature of … Continue reading →

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Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Follow-up article in Salon about the man whose father was lost to the paranoid outrage of Fox News. (The original article on this topic inspired my explanation about how science fiction represents the antithesis of such dead-end traps of ideology … Continue reading →

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Cosmos Is Great So Far, but It’s Missing Something

Posted on Monday 10 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The new Cosmos series seems to be just fine, so far. It celebrates science and our knowledge of the vastness of the known universe, and takes a legitimate stand against the religious resistance that would deny or trivialize this knowledge. … Continue reading →

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Agnotology, Science Denialism, and Joan Slonczewski

Posted on Sunday 9 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A column in the business section of the LA Times this morning, by Michael Hiltzik, Cultural production of ignorance provides rich field for study [curiously the print edition that I read this morning has the title “Sowing doubt about science”] … Continue reading →

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Being Wrong Over and Over Again

Posted on Saturday 8 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A film documentary about the discovery of the Higgs Boson illustrates the nature of scientific discovery, according to film critic Andrew O’Hehir: “Particle Fever” illustrates the great strength and resilience of the scientific method, with its time-honored propensity for proving … Continue reading →

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Hollywood, God, Stories, and Cosmos

Posted on Thursday 6 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Lawrence Krauss, physicist and cosmologist and author of The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing, responds in The New Yorker about Matthew McConaughey’s reference to God in his Oscar award acceptance speech. Apparently there was a Twitter … Continue reading →

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Cosmos and Beyond

Posted on Monday 3 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Looking forward to the new Cosmos TV series, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The original series, with Carl Sagan, was not so much an influential event in my life as a realization and visualization and confirmation of what I’d learned to … Continue reading →

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Anti-Vaxxers and Irrationality

Posted on Monday 3 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: According to a New Study, Nothing Can Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind Apparently you just can’t change anti-vaxxers’ minds. This reaction, where people become more assured of their stupid opinions when confronted with factual or scientific evidence proving them wrong, … Continue reading →

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Education vs. Indoctrination

Posted on Monday 3 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Friendly Atheist: If Faculty Members Don’t Accept Young Earth Creationism, This Christian College May Fire Them Bryan College in Tennessee — yes, named after William Jennings Bryan of the Scopes trial fame, or infamy — has a notion to force … Continue reading →

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