If we kill all the sources that transmit electromagnetic waves, like TV and radio, maybe more people will read the NYT

I’d actually like to own something like the Apple Watch. It’s a step towards ubiquitous computing, it’s got health features that I should be paying more attention to as I get older, and it’s designed to work with my existing crop of gadgets at work and at home. I’m not going to, though, at least not for a few years, because the current implementation is less useful utility and more ostentatious, over-priced status symbol. So I’ll wait a while for the sensible wearable Apple widget.

But there’s one bad reason to shun the Apple Watch: that it has mysterious unknown deadly health risks. But that’s exactly the argument an article in the New York Times has made.

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Cancer coming to your television

The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer. Therefore, party hard and burn out young. Wait, no, that’s not the lesson: therefore, you should all learn about cancer, and a good starting point is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I’ve recommended it before, and I’ve used it as assigned reading in a biology of cancer course, so you know I think highly of it.

But, you say, it’s so long. It is a rather substantial text. But there is going to be an alternative.

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Down the rabbit hole with Ken Ham

Ken Ham claims to have been reading the science news. Oh, really?

Sometimes when I read the science news I just have to laugh. It seems that secular scientists are willing to believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, rather than admit the truth that they know in their hearts. There is a Creator (Romans 1:20–21). Well, in the news recently there was a story about scientists from the UK who reportedly found a “tiny metal circular object” in Earth’s stratosphere, and they are now “suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.”

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Do you need another reason to despise Answers in Genesis?

Sure, they’re young earth creationists. That’s ridiculous enough, a view that is in complete denial of all of the evidence, and it makes them a fringe group that, if they didn’t have so much political influence, could be safely ignored. Just the fact that they reject the entirety of science ought to make them pariahs.

By the way, my latest reading is Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters, a very good book on the history of science, and I have to quote a paragraph from the introduction, in which he argues against the simplistic claim that it’s just Science vs. Religion.

…I try to show how an emerging sense of the Earth’s deep history was related to earlier conceptions of a much briefer kind of history in far more interesting and important ways than this tired stereotype allows. The surprising revival of “young Earth” ideas by some modern religious fundamentalists, and the even more surprising political power of such ideas in certain parts of the world, should not distract us from tracing the main story. I deal briefly with the modern creationists at the very end of this book, but in such a way that I hope it will be clear that they are a bizarre sideshow, not the climax of the narrative.

Even as a bizarre sideshow, though, their beliefs have social and political repercussions, and unfortunately, belief in creationism has a host of correlated consequences.

One of those consequences is the possession of a set of rigid sexual mores that defy biological reality. Another of the horrible, nonsensical ideas that AiG promotes is that gender is fixed and unchangeable, ordained by God, and so transgender people are freakish abominations who should not be accommodated in any way.

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Why inequity and injustice ought to be a men’s rights issue

Men are also the victims. Read this analysis of a recent paper in human population genetics: coincident with the rise of agriculture, there was a drastic bottleneck in the effective population size of men, but not women — the interpretation is that there was a massive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few men, who basically used that power to put all the reproductive rights in their hands, and the hands of their sons.

There is a nice infographic to explain the concept.

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