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Introduction Both traditional creationists and intelligent design scholars have invoked probability arguments in criticisms of biological evolution. They argue that certain features of biology are so fantastically improbable that they could never have been produced by a purely natural, “random” process, even assuming the billions of years of history asserted by geologists and astronomers. They . . . → Read More: Does probability refute evolution? One would surely think that first-world nations, in a bid to retain leadership in science and technology, and to fend off the very real challenge of the “Asian tigers” (India, China, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan), would pull all stops to ensure that university students in mathematics, computer science and related fields obtain the very best education . . . → Read More: Poor-quality math and computer science courses threaten technological leadership Introduction What do iPhones, Twitter, Netflix, cleaner cities, safer cars, state-of-the-art environmental management and modern medical diagnostics have in common? They all are made possible by Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law stems from a seminal 1965 article by Intel founder Gordon Moore. He wrote The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of . . . → Read More: Moore’s Law and the future of science and mathematics [This is a repost of an article that appeared on 21 Dec 2011 at Science Meets Religion.] One of the most common refrains in news and commentaries, from both the religious right and the secular left, is that modern society is in sharp decline: skyrocketing rates of crime, divorce, teenage sex, teenage births, drug abuse . . . → Read More: The great decline of Western society: What are the facts? [This is a repost of an article that appeared on 23 Dec 2011 in The Conversation]. Recently there was an excellent, and much read, article on The Conversation entitled There’s no place for pseudo-scientific chiropractic in Australian universities which made the case against chiropractic “medicine” all too well. Dodgy doctors are dodgy wherever they . . . → Read More: Chiropractic: crackers now, and crackers way back when Many will greet the title of this piece with considerable skepticism — in this day and age how could one possibly talk about a decline in violence? Yet it is true. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker begins his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined as follows: This book is about . . . → Read More: The remarkable decline of violence Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet few are very good at it, and there are significant consequences to the public’s collective inability to accurately assess risk. As a first and very important example, most people presume, as an indisputable fact, that the past century has been the most violent in all . . . → Read More: Innumeracy and public risk In two articles [BaiBor2011a; BaiBor2011b], two earlier blog posts [BlogA; BlogB] and a Conversation piece, we have examined the discovery and development of our modern system of decimal arithmetic with zero, which discovery we believe to be among the greatest of all historical mathematical achievements. It is certainly nontrivial, as evidenced by the fact that . . . → Read More: That mysterious but important number zero From time to time, the scientific community is rocked with cases of scientific fraud. Needless to say, such incidents do not help instill confidence in the public mind that is already predisposed to be skeptical of inconvenient scientific findings, including biological evolution and global warming. One notable case of fraud came to light in 2002, . . . → Read More: Mathematics and scientific fraud Introduction Many of us know that the sun is approximately 150 million km or 93 million miles away, a distance that is known as the “astronomical unit” (AU). Neptune, the most distant planet, is 30 AU from the sun, or some 44.8 billion km (27.9 billion mi). The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, reached . . . → Read More: How far away is everybody? |
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