In a previous article on Fair Observer, I describe an unusual new way of communicating the most important parts of “scientific truth” through potentially noisy, biased news media. The key innovation is to consider them together, all at once, as a kind of jigsaw-puzzle about scientific truth, or a “jigsaw...
What is science doing next to news, anyway? Is “science” whatever a scientist says? Is it just another buzzword politicians use to mask their motives? “News” comes from “new,” just like “information” comes from “inform,” both terms over 500 years old. In print, news usually means information about current events,...
Easter Sunday morning and the three Sundays since, I’ve sheltered at home on my sofa between my wife and adult son, both Catholics, to listen to Holy Mass livecast from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. I play the sound through stereo speakers carefully arranged to create a 3D...
Let’s call my type “sympathetic breathers” because we often interrupt our breathing using the sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze). We tend to hold our breath when we concentrate. Coaches and choreographers have to remind us to breathe and to inflate our entire belly, back and sides, not just the chest. Making...
The good news about COVID-19 is that being forced into physical social separation and remote interaction is teaching people how precious real life is, and which remote technologies preserve reality best. Of those, videoconferencing has the most potential to do good, or harm, because it merges our highest-bandwidth external senses...
It is terrible to be sick, and more terrible to be sick and alone. Ten years ago, my mother’s hospice unit was in quarantine for E. coli. In her last week of life, none of her friends were allowed to visit. Now everyone gets to taste that isolation in what...
I’ve changed my mind. Loneliness isn’t so much an epidemic as an anti-epidemic. Just now, COVID-19, a regular coronavirus, is spreading like a regular epidemic. So far only tens of thousands are affected, not tens of millions, but already public health is a top priority. Stopping viral spread trumps profit,...
Last fall, I applied to the yoga teacher training program at Avalon Yoga in Palo Alto. I wrote the following to the director, the scientist and historian Dr. Steve Farmer: “I am perhaps the least naturally-gifted yoga student ever. I was surprised to find through a chiropractor’s X-ray, at age...
Isolation, loneliness, anxiety and alienation are trending worldwide. They feed on themselves to breed the anti-social reactions of mistrust, hostility and depression, and thus create yet more isolation. That feedback loop makes isolation structurally self-reinforcing, which is the key scary feature of a spreading epidemic. Hence, a global isolation epidemic,...
Newspapers were already good business, way back when they carried actual news, on paper. Gather some news, write it down, stamp cheap ink on cheap wood-pulp and presto! — scalable revenue, with no obvious upper bound. In fact, the more people read printed news, the more valuable it is, being both trusted by...
