Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?
In 2005, I became, briefly, a tool of the military-industrial complex. My service began when I received an email from Centra Technology, a defense contractor.
Cross-Check
Critical views of science in the news
Does Sandy Mean We Should Have Fewer Nukes, or More?
I've been trying to come up with something to say about Sandy that hasn't already been asserted and questioned and reasserted and so on. So I thought I'd talk about how nuclear plants weathered the storm.As I mentioned in a previous post, environmentalists in my hometown and throughout New York want to permanently close the Indian Point nuclear plant, which they see as a potential "Fukushima on the Hudson," as the green group Riverkeeper put it...
"Dexter" and British Psychologist Ask: Who Wants to Be a Psychopath?
How's this for a confluence of cultural currents? A British scientist chats about psychopaths with an American actor who plays a psychopathic serial killer on TV in front of an audience at a museum loaded with Buddhist art...
Ethicist Peter Singer Critiques Roe v. Wade, Obamacare, Romney
Last week the man whom The New Yorker called "the most influential living philosopher" came to my school, Stevens Institute, to talk about "Ethics and the Election." Peter Singer, who was raised in Australia and now teaches at Princeton and the University of Melbourne, espouses utilitarianism, an ethics that seeks to minimize suffering and maximize wellbeing.Singer's work is challenging, not because his writing is difficult to understand but because it is all too clear...
No Nukes + No Fracking = More Coal? Indian Point Debate Highlights Green Quandary
Cold Spring, New York, my lovely Hudson River home, has long been a hotbed of environmental activism. In 1962, the utility Consolidated Edison announced plans to carve a power plant out of stately Storm King Mountain, just across the Hudson from Cold Spring...
Comrades, Join the "Peer Progressive" Movement!
Fed up with Obomney? Sick of both Democrats and Republicans? Do you see the parties' similarities—their cowardly hawkishness and craven obeisance to deep-pocketed donors--as more significant than their differences?...
Darwinian Giant Robert Trivers Riffs on Toddler Tantrums, Homophobic Denial and Other Lies
Earlier this week the legendary biologist Robert Trivers gave a talk, "Why We Lie (even to ourselves)," to a packed auditorium at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology.
Is Cosmos a "Piece of Light Verse" Tossed Off by a Bored God?
Last spring, I offered a harsh assessment of A Universe from Nothing (Free Press, 2012), in which physicist Lawrence Krauss proposed that physicists have finally, probably, maybe, sort of, answered The Question of All Questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?...
Journalist Gary Taubes Raises Bucks to Disprove His Diet Theory
There's no such thing as objective science journalism, any more than there is objective science. Some journalists are just more overt about their biases.Gary Taubes has been ferociously attacking conventional dietary wisdom for more than a decade...
Did the U.S. Overreact to the 9/11 Attacks?
Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States, I posted a column arguing that the U.S. overreacted to these horrific acts of terrorism...
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