Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Is it Christmas Everywhere in the Universe?

Is it Christmas everywhere in the Universe?  

Dennis Overbye, one of my favorite science journalists, has taken a stab at this question in a light-hearted and fun way in this article in the Times, asking himself, "would an alien know it is Christmas?"  I love how he manages to stimulate our thinking by posing some interesting questions with a few answers but without writing a treatise on the philosophy of science and religion.  How exactly does he do it?

Saturday, March 1, 2014

A Journalist Asks "How Do We Know"

Dean Miller, the Director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University posted this warning on his New York Time blog.  News literacy, whether you are a producer or consumer of news, is based on skepticism and, perhaps more than anything else, a healthy awareness of your own bias.

But it seemed odd to me that he could ask the question "how do we know" and feel obligated to restrict his assessment of veracity to the text itself and not even mention objective sources or empirical evidence outside of the story.  Is that the best we can do?

Thursday, January 2, 2014