This is “Splash goat” by Zhelong Xu. It’s not pottery. It’s computer generated. It was made by a Chinese artist and it beautifully illustrates how easy it will be to fake just about everything. I expect forgery will make a comeback, only rather than forging “lost” works of art, talented artists will be paid by nation-states, media outlets, and criminal syndicates to forge reality itself … Continue reading The link between digital art and hegemony
In case you haven’t heard, The History Channel recently aired a documentary suggesting that Amelia Earhart survived her trek across the Pacific. The evidence was based mostly on a photograph, recently discovered in the National Archives (where it had apparently been misfiled), showing a woman with an appearance similar to Earhart’s sitting on a dock watching a boat haul a plane that also looked a … Continue reading A Case Study in Post-Factualism
In the early 2000s, I took a second job teaching Biology on nights at weekends at the local community college. Teaching Biology means teaching evolution, because nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It was then I realized just how awful science education is in this country — how we spend 95% of class time on atomic facts, treating science like … Continue reading The Shocking Truth
There’s an idea going round now, inside all the rest of it, that anything short of violent resistance is, at best, appeasement, and at worst, tacit collaboration. It’s the language of extremes that admits of only two distinctions (what is formally called a false dilemma): those who are with us — where you’re only truly with us if you’re with us in full — and … Continue reading I resist violent resistance
In light of recent news, and after a brief exchange I had when I shared this picture yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about science and science education. I blame teachers for this mess. I used to teach science. I even taught Science, which is different than science, after one of my freshman biology students, a Christian and a creationist, asked to learn more about … Continue reading In which I blame teachers for things
Originally posted on Serum:
The American Presidency is a fascinating institution and one that has grown and changed over its two-and-a-quarter centuries. Like any complex social phenomenon, it has both manifest and latent functions. We all learn in school, for example, that the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, as specified in the Constitution, but did you also know he is the chief… Continue reading Understanding Our Century: How We Got Here (in two short acts)
I think a lot of the angst in the English-speaking world, from Trump to Brexit and everything in between, comes from the disillusionment that inevitably followed the unwarranted optimism of the early 21st century, by which I mean since 1989. For those who don’t follow history, generally scholars divide the modern era into a long 19th century, stretching from the French Revolution to the end … Continue reading What do you call the end of the end? (the world since the Cold War)
