Not the Same Study Section: How the Truth Comes Out
In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells some...
View ArticleWilliam Penn Accidentally Signs Away Pennsylvania
From Wikipedia: A more serious problem arose when fellow Quaker Philip Ford, his business manager, embezzled from Penn. He capitalized on Penn’s habit of signing papers without reading them by...
View ArticleThe Big Short
The Big Short (sent to me by the publisher) is Michael Lewis’s best book, and that’s saying a lot. Moneyball was excellent. The Blind Side was excellent. All three are stories of underdog triumph but...
View ArticleThe Power of Hobbyists and the Impotence of Professionals
One theme of this blog (I hope) is that it’s insider/outsiders — people with the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders — who can produce real progress. Ordinary insiders have the necessary...
View ArticleIs Science Self-Correcting?
Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another...
View ArticleInsider/Outsiders, Chinese History, and the Shangri-La Diet
Darwin was an insider/outsider; so was Mendel. Insider/outsiders are close enough to their subject to have a good understanding and skills yet far enough away to have freedom. In the case of Chinese...
View ArticleCentenary of the Theory of Continental Drift
One hundred years ago (January, 1912), at the annual meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt, Germany, Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, presented his theory of continental drift for the...
View ArticleThe Lessons of Tisano Tea
I was curious how Tisano Tea began (yesterday’s post) because it was an unusual product (chocolate tea). There wasn’t any point I was trying to make. At a party last night, however, I found myself...
View ArticleNick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, the Inventor of Bitcoin
There were many funny things about Leah Goodman’s claim in Newsweek that a California engineer invented bitcoin. One was her observation that he put two spaces after a period — just like the inventor...
View ArticleThe Link Between Lead and Crime
In the 1960s, a Caltech geochemist named Clair Patterson made the case that there had been worldwide contamination of living things by lead, due to the lead in gasoline. There were great increases in...
View Article
