The timing of this week’s public inquiry into “the events at the Countess of Chester Hospital”, and the growing suspicion that Lucy Letby’s convictions are unsafe, inadvertently throws up a dramatic forking of two possible worlds. In the first, the …
The problem with banning masks
We can surely be grateful that, more than two years after Covid mandates were relaxed across most of the United States, it is possible to go days without encountering a masked face. Even in the Democratic-run parts of the country …
Why shouldn’t AI write a film?
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in 30 seconds. How can the writers compete with that?” So asks Roald Dahl in his short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, published in 1953.
The eponymous …
How the NYT undermined mask evidence
Amid the storm of US election headlines in recent weeks, a snippet of news began bubbling up on social media that, only a few years ago, would have whipped up a frenzied media hurricane. President Biden had tested positive for …
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History – Part 1 | Roman Bystrianyk
It wasn’t long ago when infections plagued the Western world. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases were once considered a tragic part of life. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in the …
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History – Part 1 | Roman Bystrianyk
It wasn’t long ago when infections plagued the Western world. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases were once considered a tragic part of life. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in the …
China is stealing Silicon Valley’s homework
Up until the 16th century, China was the most technologically advanced region in the world. While aristocrats ruled Europe, China’s meritocratic literati made exquisite scientific discoveries: gunpowder, the compass, papermaking and printing, among others. Now, China hopes to return to …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …
The trouble with political Christianity
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus condemns those who “(either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree”. A regular critique of the nominally religious is that they claim to believe in, …
Trust the (Computer-Generated Gobbledygook) Science!
What do you get when you mix AI-generated nonsense with AI-driven peer review? A story that undermines the Trust The Science! injunction of the technocratic tyrants once and for all, that’s what!
Source: The Corbett Report Read the original article …
The danger of trial by statistics
Sally Clark had two sons. Both died within weeks of birth, a year apart, apparently of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), sometimes called cot death. SIDS is — mercifully — rare; in England, at the time, it struck roughly one …
The arrogance of scientific history
In the Fifties, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published perhaps the most optimistic vision ever of history as an exact science. In his Foundation series (recently adapted for television), he imagined a distant future in which a cadre of …
Why China is winning the weapons race
In 1949, Chinese-born scientist Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) drew a diagram on a blackboard at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that would change the course of military history. It showed the path of a projectile rising elliptically up into the …
Will humans survive the rise of the machines?
If the American futurist R. Buckminster Fuller was right, as he always was, then the boundaries of human knowledge are forever expanding. In 1982, Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”, which showed that up until the year 1900, human knowledge …
The Alzheimer’s industry
In a leafy London suburb, there’s a smart little clinic that promises miracles. Run by Dr Andrew Greenland, an NHS consultant in emergency medicine, the Greenland Centre claims to be able to do something that the drug industry has failed …