As a former scientist who performed DNA fingerprinting for cancer, I am keenly interested in the current state of DNA analysis and diagnosis based on it. Services like 23andMe and others promise not only to suggest possible medical conditions your genes might predispose you to,...
I resist the racist interpretation of everything conservative for a few reasons. 1. Reductionism First, it’s a sloppy reductionist approach to a complex issue. We know that conservatives and president Trump object to specific ideologies like Islam that have little to do with race. Even...
One of the most thoughtful and numbers-driven posts I’ve read on gun control is Guns and States from Slate Star Codex. It’s a long article, but well worth the read because it shows how not simple this issue is – yet we can draw some...
One of the most banal challenges from the left regarding President Trump is challenging his assumption that America was ever great. When was it great? When we were killing off the native Americans? When we had slaves? When women couldn’t vote? When blacks had no...
One of my new precious book acquisitions is another anthology by William J. Bennett, The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood. Today, I read The Funeral Oration of Pericles. At the end of the first year of the 27-year Peloponnesian War between...
One of the main ways we can reduce the acrimony in our society is to stop proposing that government should solve all our problems. Specifically, regardless of our political orientation, we should shy away from “coercive legislation,” that is, laws that either prohibit or fund...
One of my greatest frustrations with cloud drives is the inability to see all of my cloud files in Windows Explorer. Not only could I see and search all the files in one place, I could run dedup software against them (try that on a...
This past weekend, I was surprised to enjoy the narrated and re-enacted historical movie KJB: The Book That Changed the World. The story starred King James IV of Scotland, who became King at 13 months old when his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed. Raised...
