Via James Nicoll, a post he describes as "someone actively working in a particular field of science talk[ing] about how they went from embracing wingnuttery to more fruitful activities," in this case regarding the "Face on Mars."
Sadly, other than a couple of passing mentions (he name-checks Richard Hoagland and Carl Sagan, and mentions overdosing on Art Bell), there's very little detail about that transition. And, really, I think hearing the story of how the author went from believing in a real face on Mars to taking high-resolution pictures of the Cydonia plateau would be a lot more interesting than, well, than another picture of the Cydonia plateau.
It's a cool picture, though.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
We'll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we're going to have our work cut out…
Planetary geology is a fascinating area--particularly when it pertains to the search for extraterrestrial life. I wrote about it once during my brief stint as a student science writer, but it's not an area that I've really covered on my blog. However, a former colleague of mine from Oxford,…
Adam Frank has an op-ed at the New York Times that tells a very familiar story: science is on the decline, and we're living in an "Age of Denial".
IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the…
So you won't be surprised that I really like that Erin Podolak has asked, Can We Stop Talking About Carl Sagan?
It feels like I’m committing an act of science communication sacrilege here, but I have a confession to make: Carl Sagan means absolutely nothing to me. No more than any other dude from…
We could use more examples of the wignuttery-to-rationality phase transition. A classic (in a new edition) is:
The God That Failed (Paperback)
by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender, David Engerman (Foreword), Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (Editor).
Pity that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't live long enough to renounce Spiritualism, Shockley to renounce racism. Pity that we couldn't shock Egnor into renouncing Intelligent Design. But it would be VERY GOOD to have a lapsed ID-er on the lecture circuit.