The evidence suggests an awful lot of people need it. A recent study by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences found the following: [...]

Fifty years of occupation. Colonizing a neighbor instead of another continent doesn’t make it all right. Having an empire now instead of two hundred years [...]

This is all over the web, but I want to celebrate anyway. As I said elsewhere in blogspace today, ah, the sweet smell of rationality [...]

Yowzer. This one has everything. Freedom of religion, fairness in the workplace, immigration, general free-floating bigotry. (But no sex, drugs or rock-n-roll, so maybe not [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about rights lately, and that took me to Wikipedia’s page on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here’s Article 1 [...]

I have a boring bathroom with not much in it except towels and soap and that kind of thing. But there are inevitably times when [...]

Well, not first, exactly, but long before The Economist. Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work. It is supposed to [...]

There’s a New Yorker cartoon of two gormless hikers lost in the desert and looking at a map. One is pointing at the sun and [...]

They’re all small things. They seem hardly worth noticing. And because Mother Nature has nothing to do with them, we don’t even react with total [...]

Everything from health to wealth depends on science in the modern world, so, obviously, scientific results had better be rock-solid. And yet honesty in science [...]

Knowing the Enemy: The anthropology of insurgency, by George Packer, is an insightful article in the current New Yorker (Dec 18, 2006). He discusses how [...]

There is a big divide, important people say. Muslims are furious about the treatment of Palestinians, about discrimination, humiliation, and marginalisation. To demonstrate how to [...]

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but Dawkins’ pronouncements are just plain stupid. Using religion and God as an excuse to kill people is evil. [...]

Many commenters on the Lancet study (pdf) boggle at the numbers, point at the uncertainty, express disbelief, and note that they’re not statisticians. Well, I’m [...]

I give up. I have to comment on the Foley business because so many people seem to be totally confused about sex. On the left [...]

What is it about popes? With rare exceptions, like John XXIII, what a bunch of benighted enablers of balderdash. Maybe it has to do with [...]