Retraction Watch is a watchdog organization that monitors scientific misconduct and, well, watches the retraction of scientific articles. Not only is their work very thorough…
Society, Politics and History
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
NPR’s Planet Money recently released an episode where they tell the story of how big plastic companies convinced the public to recycle more. At that…
Gender Differences Among Top Performers in Chess
Chess is (unfortunately) a man’s world, and gender differences in chess are large. While the gap in average play is not large between men and…
Big if True: Nuclear Fusion
The NY Times reports about Sparc, a nuclear fusion reactor designed by the private company Comonwealth Fusion Systems. The reactor design is called Tokamak and…
Data is Not the New Oil
I have argued before and linked to articles suggesting that advertising is less useful than is commonly thought and that targeted advertising is largely ineffective….
The Economics of Interstellar Trade
In 1978 economist Paul Krugman wrote a paper titled The Theory of Interstellar Trade that was published in 2010. It is pure genius: while the…
More Evidence for Vitamin D and Covid
Vitamin D has been among the supplements researchers suggested may be helpful against Covid-19 for a long time. Now we have the results from a…
Debate Motions I Would Have Liked to Set
Over the last years I spent a lot of time doing competitive debating. As part of that hobby, I also served as Chief Adjudicator (CA)…
A First Step Towards Getting Rid of Universities
Universities are a weird thing. The vast majority of things you learn are either completely irrelevant or quickly forgotten. This is of course not true…
In Support of Super-Rich Philanthropy
The Guardian published an article titled “How philanthropy benefits the super-rich”. And parts of it are making me really really angry. I have seen similar…