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The laws of physics haven’t been repealed by AI

You may have read about how a colonel was rescued deep inside Iran using a technology dubbed “ghost murmer.” Great marketing, bad physics. “ By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. ” This is just BS on stilts. “ It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me. “Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. T...
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Was Jesus the result of parthenogenesis?

In a resurrected recording of one of his lectures, Christopher Hitchens says that he cannot definitively rule out that the virgin birth of Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, since parthenogenesis has been observed in other animals*. Here’s the thing, though. The Y chromosome is sex-determining in humans. If Mary had a child by parthenogenesis, it would have to be female, since Mary carries no Y chromosome. So, it would be impossible for Jesus to be the result of parthenogenesis. *for example,   Drosophila mercatorum   can reproduce by facultative parthenogenesis  
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Quote of the day

Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny, fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason . . . ~Christopher Hitchens
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America is abandoning science

I came of age near the end of the golden age of science. Stampeded by Sputnik, America revised its science curriculum in the early 1960s and I was a beneficiary. As a PhD student, I was supported for three years on an NIH training grant, and as a postdoc, I was supported for three years on an NIH fellowship. I got my first NIH grant in my second year as an assistant professor. But by then, federal funding had already declined in real terms. By 1989, a Nobel Laureate molecular biologist at MIT wrote in a major journal that NIH funding criteria had taken on a “mask of madness.” In his 2026 budget proposal, Trump proposed major cuts to federal science funding which were mostly ignored by Congress. Now, Trump is proposing to slash American science again, while meanwhile attacking the immigrant labor force that has been fueling science in America. “ In recent years, various metrics have called into question America’s supremacy in science and technology. For example, the Australian Strategic...
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Will Iran go nuclear?

Until now, Iran has eschewed the manufacture of nuclear weapons, ostensibly based on a fatwa by Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Since Khameni’s assassination by Israel and his replacement by his son, it’s not clear that Iran will continue to observe that fatwa. “ What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades,   publicly   framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam. If that position represented a genuine religious constraint rather than mere diplomatic rhetoric, then his death may have removed more than a leader: it may have weakened the doctrinal restraint that helped keep Iran a threshold nuclear state.”  The elective war on Iran by the US and Israel has underscored the importance of the North Korean nuclear breakout. I’d be very surprised if Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon in the next couple of years. Trump, Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia and the UAW would be to blame. ht...
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Fluoridated water doesn’t make you stupid

When I was growing up in East Tennessee, there were some who claimed that water fluoridation was a communist plot. If that’s the case, then God is a communist because in many parts of the world, water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, it was the recognition that natural fluoridation was associated with fewer dental caries that helped drive artificial fluoridation. The anti-fluoridation fear mongers never said exactly what the commies intended by fluoridating the water supply, but if they were trying to dumb us down, that was a fail. “ A massive 40-year study in the US has concluded that adding fluoride to drinking water does not reduce people's cognitive ability. In fact, kids who grew up with fluoridated tap water performed slightly better in mathematics and reading in later life compared to those who didn’t.” Seems to me that the anti-fluoridation folks were the subversives. By attacking sound science, they were not only undermining dental health, they were undermining Americans’...
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Déjà vu

My dad would stop by the airport LaRouche booths and argue with the nutjobs. Not sure why he found it amusing. He knew they were nuts, but he did it anyway. “It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation political aberration, a shooting-star buffoon. But when you tear him down to his studs, LaRouche was a white supremacist: a man high on his own supply who positioned himself as the sole savior of the planet; a man to whom no founding American ideal was sacred; a wealthy white man preying on both the insecurity and the credulity of others to enrich himself, while claiming to fight for the everyman; a bully who flipped on his loyalists whenever they ceased to be useful to him; a man who trafficked in myths of nonwhite savagery and conspiracies of absurdist proportions in which he was either the scapegoat or the savior. He was also a convicted felon running for office. He seemed so fringe to many that he co...
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