The Smug Baldy Speaks

Webuser.com reported today that for the first time ever, the collection of Charles Darwin’s private papers and notes can now be accessed online. The Darwin Online website has made correspondence and manuscripts including the first draft of his theory of evolution and Emma Darwin’s recipe book*. You can also find notes from the voyage of [...]

Nobody should be required to take a neutral stance on stupidity. Indeed – here at SmugBaldy, we’re vehemently anti-stupid, so this is the sort of thing that really irks me. I had previously written a short piece about how creationists were trying to worm their way into the hall of power in Texas, and expand [...]

Just when you thought that the battle for America’s soul was won, and the forces of lunacy and idiocy had retreated to the fetid holes from which they sprang, we find that Texas will be the new battleground for creationists bent on the destruction of rational thought in science education. In an editorial today on [...]

Today, Gizmodo is reporting on a new chip camera than can take 3D pictures. (see the original story on cNet). They speculate that the new technology could show up in digital camera in the near future, and may be potentially useful in medical sensors, and face recognition applications. That may be so, but roughly half [...]

OK – I am beginning to love GarageBand. I spent about an hour today putting together my first podcast episode. I apologize for how rough this is, but I figured that, since this blog is called the Smug Baldy Speaks, and I had always planned to put some podcasting together, I should actually get started. [...]

 

 The Smug Baldy Speaks Episode 1 [6:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (537)

Many people like to think that humanity is rightfully master of the universe because only our species can perform complex symbolic reasoning and do cool things with our opposable thumbs. We enjoy our spot at the apex of the food chain, at the very pinnacle of evolution, even though we defined the rules by which [...]

The question is simple enough: As you watched the scores of U.S. Presidential debates, did you ever wonder why there has been no debate devoted to policy surrounding what may be the most important social issue of our time: Science and Technology? Well it turns out that plenty of folks wondered about this, and were [...]

With every presidential candidate shifting into total balls-out (or labia-out, as the case may be) pander-or-perish mode, I think it’s important to cut through the inane hype where possible, and get at their positions on issues that matter to me. One such issue is education. While the uneducated and undereducated aren’t necessarily stupid, they’re still [...]

In the latest issue of the eSkeptic newsletter is a link to an interesting debate held at Cal-Tech between Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer over the relationship between science and religion. In this debate on what are arguably two of the most important questions in the culture wars today — Is Religion a Force for [...]

In this article, I’ll outline a proposal to utilize a well known conceptual framework to increase our ability to rigorously and dispassionately examine the accuracy of psychic predictions of future events. In part one, I propose two sets of guidelines related to data recoding and validation, as well as data analysis. In later parts, I [...]