Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Now here is an interesting twist on things, and yet if you think about it, not really a surprise. There now exist websites that provides free access to scientific articles that normally reside behind paywalls, and so the official publisher, Elsevier, has responded by filing a complaint at a New York district court against Library Genesis (LibGen) and Sci-Hub.org(currently at this URL http://www.sci-hub.club, but … Read more
So here is the story (I’ve stolen the following text from the Wikipedia page all about this) … on 19 February 2010, when the multinational tobacco company Philip Morris International filed a complaint against Uruguay.[1] The company complains that Uruguay’s anti-smoking legislation devalues its cigarette trademarks and investments in the country and is suing Uruguay for compensation under the bilateral … Read more
Freedom of speech is a rather important right, and while it is quite easy to support the concept when it is manifesting itself as criticism of ideas we oppose (drawing Mohammed for example), what happens when we are faced with the promotion of things that we find to be highly offensive and utterly absurd – … Read more
Time for me to indulge myself in a little rant about the increasing pervasiveness of what can best be termed click-bait, but first, since it is January 1, I’ll start with a bit of crowd sourcing by taking a quick look at the statistics to see which of my posts got the most views in 2014. Here are the … Read more
Ireland rather absurdly has a Blasphemy law, and this is not some archaic dictate inherited from the dark ages, but was introduced in July 2009 by the then Fianna Fáil-led government. Enacting something like this as recently as 2009 would appear to be truly bizarre, because nobody was demanding it should happen, and nobody was particularly bothered about the lack … Read more
Back in 2012 there was an apparently utterly absurd decision by an Italian court to convict six scientists and a government official for failing to give an adequate warning of a 2009 Earthquake and sentenced them all to six years in prison. That 2012 judgement has now been overturned. As explained in Wired … An appeals court in … Read more