With all the stories about the NSA spying on the communications of people all over the world, we may have an exaggerated sense of the NSA’s code-breaking capabilities. Matthew Green, the cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was temporarily censored, explains that there are three ways to get past encryption. [Read more…]

Religion thrives on mysteries, those things that seem so inexplicable that we do not know how to even begin investigating them, what questions to ask, and what tools to use to study them. We are tempted to just throw up our hands. Puzzles, on the other hand, are those things for which we do not as yet have answers but do know what questions to ask, have hypotheses about what might be going on, and can investigate systematically. [Read more…]

In setting standards for their science curricula, state and local boards of education invariably have to deal with the question of the nature of science because having students understand it is usually one of the mandates given to the drafting committees. This becomes especially necessary in order to know how to best respond when efforts are made to insert religious ideas into the science curriculum or to undermine those scientific ideas (like evolution) that are viewed by religious people as being opposed to religion. [Read more…]

The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is the name given to the geologically short time period of about 20 million years that occurred around 500 million years ago in which there seemed to be a surge of new kinds of organisms that appeared in the fossil record. Critics of evolutionary theory, always on the look out for what they see as possible signs of divine intervention, seized on it as something that seemed unlikely to have happened due to the slow processes of natural selection and thus a signal that god may have intervened to speed things up a bit. [Read more…]

One of the most famous experiments in psychology is that of Stanley Milgram who in 1962 purported to show how a surprisingly high percentage (65%) of ordinary people could be persuaded by authority figures to inflict extremely high levels of pain on others, well beyond what one might expect normal people to do. I wrote about this back in 2008. [Read more…]

While I am pretty ignorant about the processes of encryption and decryption, I have become intrigued with the topic, particularly since the decision by the mail service companies Lavabit and Silent Mail to shut down their businesses rather than having to be forced to hand over the keys to the government to snoop on their clients’ emails. [Read more…]

I was interested that the government of Costa Rica has decided to close all its zoos as part of its program to protect animals. The country banned circuses with animals in 2002. But what will happen to the animals in the zoos? The government plans to return them to the wild, which is not as simple as it sounds. [Read more…]

I wrote recently about Stephen Pinker’s efforts to defend scientism, where he argued that although the use of the word is not consistent and is often used as an epithet, it deserves to be defended because there is a positive meaning that can be salvaged.

There are some problems with his essay. One is that he starts out with a partial straw man. [Read more…]

When it comes to probabilities, our intuitions are not reliable, as I have written about before (see here and here). On so many occasions, I have thought that the result to a problem was so obvious as to not be worth thinking about more deeply, only to find myself proven wrong. And the new solution seems also so obvious that you wonder why you ever believed the earlier wrong answer. [Read more…]

We are constantly told to make our passwords more complex and harder to guess. And that is a good thing. But we should not imagine that merely making them longer or more obscure is sufficient.

Consider for example the password: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn1 [Read more…]