How vision operates is a complex task thehuman brain (and now “computer brains” have to take on). We take much of whatour brains do for granted.

It surprises most millennials to learn that only about 10 percent of all retail purchases are actually made online. Each semester, when I ask hundreds of undergraduate business students to estimate, they consistently guess that between a quarter and half of all retail spending happens on the internet. But this holiday shopping season, as ever in the past, the overwhelming majority of purchases will still happen within four physical walls of a store.

My wife and I annually host Thanksgiving dinner for extended family and friends.  It’s a big affair and since we live in a fairly remote, albeit stunningly beautiful, part of northern Michigan, and our guests have to travel hundreds of miles to get here, the event stretches over multiple days.  One of my responsibilities is to ensure we have sufficient quantity and diversity of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages to appeal to all of our guests who span four generations and have varied tastes.

Since writing on intelligence and race, many who know me and that I am capable of Aspergerian levels of critical thought, such as the boss of Science2.0, cannot understand how I, the quantum relativist unforgiving of any simplification, can be suddenly so naïve as to, for instance when discussing IQ, neglect different kinds of intelligence and “creativity”. Such dismissals occur in spite of, as it is relevant for this particular example of discussing intelligence, my discussing analytic-verbal versus spatial intelligence and “emotional intelligence”, and also knowing from personal experience what can be described as a “lack of creativity/critical thinking” of East Asians (I teach East Asians for 15 years, a decade in China!).

I have had lots of questions about this today because of a poorly researched Daily Star sensationalist article based on a many years out of date NASA press release. As usual with Google News this nonsense has gone right to the top of its search results. They really do need to fix this! 

Anyway I am writing this in the hope that it gets into Google News and helps some of the people getting scared by this story. So far I can't see any debunking articles there and the Science 2.0 articles do often get placed high in Google News.

Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomer" fame has a few choice words about this "tabloid fish-wrapper" - in case you don't get it, newspapers are often used to wrap fish and chips - he's suggesting that's all it is good for.

Each year the holidays bring with them an increase in both the consumption of alcohol and concern about drinking’s harmful effects.

Alcohol abuse is no laughing matter, but is it sinful to drink and make merry, moderately and responsibly, during a holy season or at any other time?

This is another silly story that is scaring people including very young children and giving them panic attacks. The claim is a fantasy story that a 'black star' (??) at the far side of the sun is going to somehow send powerful earthquakes to Earth on Sunday 19th November from a distance of over150 million miles. There is no truth to this, it's just a made up fantasy like a script for a bad movie. Not even a pseudo science explanation of how it is supposed to do it.  We are getting so many comments, posts and PM's about it in our Doomsday / Nibiru support groups on Facebook, and so far there are no news stories debunking the story properly. 

Following the appearance of Kent Staley's review of my book "Anomaly!" in the November 2017 issue of Physics Today, the online site of the magazine offers, starting today, an interview with yours truly. I think the piece is quite readable and I encourage you to give it a look. Here I only quote a couple of passages for the laziest readers.

By Chris Gorski, Inside Science -- Hard-shelled football helmets first emerged nearly 80 years ago to protect against catastrophic head injuries like skull fractures and brain hemorrhages, and they have evolved over the decades to offer better protection. Recently, public attention has increasingly focused on other consequences of hits to the head, including concussions and long-term degenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The Foundation for Economic Education, with the inevitable acronym FEE, aims to “promote new content and distribution techniques for free-market ideas.” Fee has “distilled ‘economic thinking’ into 12 key concepts.” 

Let’s pray that the “distribution” fails and these concepts never reach America’s classrooms, because they’re all… well… wrong.

FEE’s words in plaintext, with my rejoinders in italics: