Skeptic Blog

Google News, with some custom sections to emphasize news about science and technology and about education, and the many friends I have on Facebook, who post interesting links regularly. I follow several blogs and other websites with regular news updates, especially about science. When I really want to research a subject in depth, I go straight to the academic libraries of my alma mater university across town (now often via its extensive subscriptions to databases that I can access from home with user authentication I gain through an affiliation with that university). For articles to look at for submission to Hacker News, I 1) make sure to have a science section in my Google News set-up, and additionally use Google News and Google Scholar keyword searches to check submissions by other users to HN, 2) follow the recommendations of certain key Facebook friends of mine who are either professional scientists, science writers, or science educators, 3) daily read Science-Based Medicine http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ (I don't submit to HN from Science-Based Medicine every day, but I have found some GREAT articles there over the years) 4) daily read Why Evolution Is True http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/ (which sometimes has personal posts by the site owner but also has EXCELLENT posts by him and by guest posters on cutting-edge science issues, some of which I post directly and some of which lead to professional journal articles I post directly) 5) daily read…

oh, please: http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/02/10/chinas-ghost-cities/ Edit: Note people said the EXACT same thing about china "building roads no body needs" in the early nineties. Now china are running license plate lotteries in order to keep traffic bearable. Just have a sense of scale, when you are trying to migrate 350 million people into urban centres, you need to build a lot of houses.

Well, his teachings are sort of a weird mix of medicine, psychology and pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo, apparently borrowing and adapting liberally from anything that suits him. For example, he has repeatedly tried to tie his ideas into quantum mechanics, to the chagrin of physicists everywhere: http://www.skepticblog.org/2009/11/16/deepak-chopra-mangles-quantum-me… Needless to say, there are a lot of people to whom this does not signal credibility.

This was also discussed in this blog post, shortly after his death: http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to-alternati…

I thought a much detailed explanation was found in another article that was posted to HN earlier this month [1]. The article referred to a 2008 blog post about that. --- [1] http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to-alternati… and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3080176

Stallman is consistent and vastly intelligent and whilst his comments can be seen as insensitive he is quite correct that Steve Jobs did suppress software freedom. We don't go to Stallman for sensitivity (you're a dolt if you do), we go to him for the truth, no matter how painful. We can all do with that sometimes - http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to-alternati…