Tim Worstall

Via.

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Measurement error or the real thing?

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I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. I’d call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend [...]

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Psychology Today tries to explain what was wrong with Kanazawa’s piece pointing out that black/African women are perceived as being less physically attractive than those of other genetic backgrounds. It’s a very politically correct and very bad fail: The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in [...]

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Opened something of a hornets’ nest here, has our intrepid researcher. Satoshi Kanazawa’s racist nonsense should not be tolerated The psychologist’s latest article asks ‘why black women are less attractive’. What will Psychology Today and the LSE do about it? Well, go have a look at what he actually said (using Google cache). As I [...]

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Potential cures for dozens of debilitating conditions are under threat from a European ruling that claims that making money from embryonic stem cell research is immoral, leading scientists have warned. As one raised as a Papist I can see the logic being deployed. Good cannot come from an evil act. This was used a decade [...]

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Sensible words: The Royal Society said that China was now second only to the US in terms of its share of the world’s scientific research papers written in English. The UK has been pushed into third place, with Germany, Japan, France and Canada following behind. “The scientific world is changing and new players are fast [...]

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Damn science.

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Hmm. Up to a point. Priya Shetty is among those to note that the Vatican is hosting an Aids conference on 28 May, but wonders whether a forthcoming update on bioethics issues in stem cell research and reproductive technology will be as “pragmatic” as its new stance on condom use. But, umm, ethics, bioethics, are [...]

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Via, this. It was a decision point. I had to find out if the bacteria could really affect a healthy person and cause gastritis. I’d been working very hard in the previous 12 months on piglets, but I have to tell you that piglets aren’t piglets for very long. They just about grow before your [...]

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Why does Stephen Hawking think science has overtaken philosophy? Erm, because philosophers are still arguing about “what is truth?” as they have been for some 3,000 years that we know of while scientists have actually been able to find out the odd thing over the same time period? You know, ‘leccie, evolution, gravity, trivial things [...]

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This profile of Elon Musk* has two fun bits in it: He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space [...]

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We get the usual “scientists should get tax money” argument rolled out at The Guardian. My comment left there: Scientist in doesn’t understand economics shocker! The argument in favour of tax funding for science is that science is a public good. This means that it is non rivalrous and non excludable. If Mr (sorry, Professor? [...]

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Sir David King writes: Today, the rest of the world pours more than $2 trillion a year into the Gulf states, which is $6m per day. That’s $6 billion a day of course (well, it is if all we’re going to worry about is those pesky orders of magnitude). That the Government’s former Chief Scientific [...]

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I am all for online debates, and all for stroppy females — one of the happiest moments of the Blair years was seeing the Women’s Institute give him the bird, and the naked panic on the old fraud’s face. And this: In the grip of extreme parenthood you may, of course, care about other people’s [...]

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This report leads to this paper. I’m really rather hoping that the actual paper doesn’t say anything quite as stupid as is being reported: Their new research argues that estimates of conventional reserves should be downgraded from 1,150bn to 1,350bn barrels to between 850bn and 900bn barrels and claims that demand may outstrip supply as [...]

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DOCTORS have uncovered the first evidence that fathers of test-tube babies may be passing on their infertility to their sons. Genetically based problem passed on through genes. That’ll have the evolutionists perplexed, eh?

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Dr Frank Drake said the phasing out of analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar was making our planet electronically invisible from outer space. While old style signals used to spread out millions of miles into outer space, even reaching some distant stars, digital transmissions are much weaker and therefore are less easy to detect [...]

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Conclusions Listening to Nellie the Elephant significantly increased the proportion of lay people delivering compression rates at close to 100 per minute. Unfortunately it also increased the proportion of compressions delivered at an inadequate depth. As current resuscitation guidelines give equal emphasis to correct rate and depth, listening to Nellie the Elephant as a learning [...]

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There’s a bit of a disconnect here. Yes, we know that (especially from the sub-Continent but also in other parts of Asia) the lighter the skin the better looking the woman is considered. Thus the proliferation of lightening creams. We also know why: Perhaps it was once a sign of social class: only poor people [...]

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