Ridicule is one of the best defenses against pseudo-scientific nonsense. This guy Dara O’Briain is particularly good like that. Bonus points for the Irish accent. Awesome.

I’m re-reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; it’s been so long since I last read it I can barely remember what happens (one of my favorite parts of revisiting previously read books). I do recall this brilliant passage though, when protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a man unstuck from time, experiences a World War II movie backwards:

Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in the racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.

Fox News, in what was intended as a xenophobic scare story, reminds me why the Netherlands is one of my favorite places.

What? A country filled with reasonable people making adult decisions? You’re right, idiot Fox News man, it sounds horrible.

Brilliant and awesome American physicist Richard Feynman, author of several excellent books, speaks about science, doubt, and religion:

It’s worth watching to the end.