Slashdot Mirror
Science Luminary Martin Gardner Dead at 95
From James Randi's blog comes word that science writer Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. I never met Gardner, but one of his books (Entertaining Science Experiments With Everyday Objects) has been a favorite of mine since I was 6 or 7 years old; I didn't realize until just now quite how many books he authored.
Let me put in a cheer for the "Alice in Wonderland" he annotated.
Phil Plait has a writeup as well.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Organic farming in and of itself isn't pseudoscience, but sometimes the claims made about it fall into that realm. Examples being that the products of organic farming are necessarily healthier for you, or better for the environment, or conversely, that the use of pesticides and genetic modification are necessarily detrimental. They can be or not be, and such claims have to be analyzed on an individual basis. But there does exist a large segment of the population that adheres to the naturalistic fallacy that what is "natural" is better for you than what isn't, despite straightforward counter-examples (all-natural poisonous mushrooms and berries), and despite the fact that "natural" in this context is not well-defined (is a domesticated food crop that has been genetically modified by hundreds of years of selective agricultural breeding considered "natural?").