The United States has become the land of conspiracy theorists. From QAnon followers to those who believe the moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick on a soundstage, these people are growing in numbers, and they’re becoming increasingly resistant to logic.
On December 4th, 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Welch drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington D.C. to rescue children being held in basement cages. With his AR-15 style rifle, he broke into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria and concert venue. His plan was to free victims of a satanic, international pedophilia ring run by high-powered Democrats, a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. After firing 3 shots, he gave himself up to police and explained that he had found no evidence of children or cages. The building didn’t even have a basement.
Beginning in 2009, the on-going NutriNet-Santé study has collected data on nearly 200,000 participants, leading researchers to important conclusions about our diets.
The goal of the study is to collect as much data as possible on participants’ diets, lifestyles, genetics, medical backgrounds, living conditions, culture, etc. and find connections to increased rates of mortality. Participants submit most of this information online, but researchers also collect plasma, urine, and serum. Medical and insurance records are used for cross-reference.
Using this vast trove of data, researchers have uncovered results that should make us think twice about what we consume.
Processed Foods Are Much Worse Than We Thought
We’ve known for decades that processed foods generally have less nutrition and are associated with increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, among several other…
More than 300,000 low-IQ soldiers were sent to the front lines of Vietnam in a sick experiment dreamed up by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara
It was October 1966. The United States military was sinking into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson occupied the presidency, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara paced the halls of the Pentagon.
On McNamara’s mind was a disturbing development: the Soviet Union had just confirmed what they already expected. In an article published on October 2nd in Red Star, a Soviet military newspaper, they admitted to providing military and economic support for the North Vietnamese. Although the war was already escalating out of control after events like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, this revelation changed everything. It was now…
It’s true that artificial intelligence is self-learning, but it still heavily relies on human interaction. So of course it’s now as horrible as we are.
In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo, a computer program built on a neural network, did the unthinkable. It beat Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of all time, in a 5 game match. Before this, the ancient and still popular game was considered far too complex for a computer to master because, with 10^360 possible moves in a game, even our greatest supercomputers couldn’t get anywhere close to performing the necessary calculations.
DeepMind got around this problem by creating a sophisticated artificial neural network loosely modeled after biological neural networks that can learn and adapt to new information. DeepMind…
It may seem silly to wonder why it’s dark at night, but with so many stars in the universe, the night sky should be completely illuminated, a conundrum today known as Olbers’ paradox.
Although it’s now attributed to Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a 19th century German astronomer and physician, this paradox has perplexed people for centuries. Numerous well-known people have tried to unravel it, including Kepler, Lord Kelvin, and even Edgar Allan Poe, but it wasn’t until the advent of modern cosmology that we figured it out.
And the solution is deeply connected to the age and size of the universe, as well as our place in it.
Olbers’ Paradox: the Problem
It’s not hard to understand why a great thinker like Aristotle thought the universe was finite, static, timeless, and homogenous. Like us, when he looked at…
Data confirms that stricter environmental regulation doesn’t hurt the economy. In fact, it leads to increased capital accumulation, worker productivity, and innovation, proving the Porter hypothesis true.
It seems like common knowledge that government regulations are burdensome for companies. In many cases, this is true, as regulations create obstacles for businesses, which limits their output and requires more resources to overcome. Many free-market advocates echo this sentiment when they talk about “reducing government red tape” and wanting “smaller government.” They see it as a tug-o-war between private industry and government.
This is especially true with environmental regulations. Laws like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act put strict limits on dumping and emissions, both of which are seen by some as hindering the economy. In…
“The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” ― Isaac Asimov
Asimov said this in his rarely published 1980 Newsweek piece “The Cult of Ignorance.” Although it was a relatively short essay, it was meant as a warning against the dangers of a growing anti-intellectualism tide in the US, and in the post-Trump era, his words are more poignant today than when he wrote them.
The crux of Asimov’s essay is that the educated were being demonized instead of celebrated. Being intelligent meant you were an elitist, and knowing more than your neighbor meant you were an arrogant know-it-all who’s out of touch with the American people. He illustrated this idea…
Earth has a space junk problem. The amount of debris from the collisions of rocket parts and defunct satellites is growing, bringing us closer to the Kessler Syndrome, in which launching new spacecraft and satellites is too risky.
On 15 October 2020, scientists watched in fear as a 16-foot long inoperative Russian navigation satellite and part of a 25-foot long Chinese rocket whizzed passed each other at 33,000 miles an hour, more than 600 miles above the southern Atlantic Ocean. Had they collided, the debris cloud would’ve been large enough to put every other spacecraft and satellite in low Earth orbit at risk.
These types of near-miss events happen multiple times a year, but occasionally collisions do occur. Back in 2009, a communications satellite struck a Russian military satellite somewhere above Siberia, resulting in some 18,000 pieces of…
The 3 branches of the US government were designed to keep the power of the other 2 in check. However, the president’s power has slowly grown, giving one person far more control of the government than originally intended.
The powers of the president are clearly listed in Article II of the Constitution. It’s surprisingly short and specifically gives the president the power to command the armed forces, enforce the laws created by Congress, veto legislation, convene/adjourn Congress, receive ambassadors, grant pardons, enter into treaties, appoint employees to federal agencies, and appoint judges. The last 3, though, are supposed to need Senate approval.
However, modern presidents have far more power and fewer checks and balances. 3 forces are responsible: abuse of the Unitary Executive Theory, a two-party system, and the erosion of states’ rights.
Unitary Executive Theory
Article II states “The executive…
Naïve realism is the psychological condition in which people believe they see the world objectively and their opponents as uneducated, biased, or illogical.
In 1954, researchers showed students from Dartmouth and Princeton a football match between their schools. They saw the same footage, yet they couldn’t agree on what they saw. Each side was more likely to notice the other team’s fouls and bad behavior and more likely to miss their own team’s. Both groups felt the referees favored the other team and were biased against theirs. Their perceptions of objective reality differed because they were on different teams and all were confident they were correct.
This should sound familiar to anyone that’s been paying attention to politics for the last few years…
