I’ve hinted at my views on philosophy before. Summarised I think modern philosophers are undeservingly arrogant and accord themselves a level of prestige in intellectual spheres that they don’t actually deserve.

But it’s only recently that I think I figured out why this is. When you view philosophy in its proper historical context, their increasingly loud screeching – especially on matters where science is making progress in leaps and bounds – is revealed as the desperate pleas of an intellectual pursuit rapidly being made obsolete.

As was pointed out to me on Twitter by Sander Tamaëla, the early philosophers were the scientists of their days. They tried to understand how things worked, and why they worked the way they did. They were restricted to the tools of their age, which meant they had little to rely on except their own minds.

As a result of this limited toolset, philosophers put conscious thought in the center of their discipline. It was all they could rely on at the time, and ever since it’s been the axle around which the entire philosophical discourse of the past few millennia has moved.

So philosophers have been building pedestals to their champion, the conscious mind, for thousands of years. And now, thanks to the advances being made in neuroscience and other disciplines, they’re finding that this proclaimed champion is actually a bit of a dud.

Our conscious mind is not in charge. Free will is pretty much proven to be mostly – if not entirely – illusory. We are not enlightened creatures.

And philosophy, as the herald of consciousness’ greatness, is struggling to accept it. Which is why philosophers are spending an awful lot of energy trying to discredit the scientific advances that are hinting at philosophy’s obsolescence.

From the rather untenable – and frankly ridiculous – posturing of philosophy as the purest of all scientific endeavours (evidenced in this Infinite Monkey Cage podcast) to their shrieking rebuttals (peppered with logical fallacies) in the neuroscience debate, philosophy is obviously in distress.

It’s reminiscent of the desperation with which religion has grasped at as-of-yet-unexplained phenomena as evidence for the existence of God. This is called the ‘God of the gaps‘ argument, in which religion finds increasingly small areas where science has not yet been able to provide enlightenment. Philosphy is doing the same, wrangling itself in to the ever-narrowing gaps of knowledge that science is rapidly breaking open and exploring.

While I believe there is a role to play for philosophy in scientific discourse, it’s not nearly as big a role as philosophers wrongly think they ought to play. It’s time they realise that their best days are behind them, and that they should stop trying to artificially inject themselves in to every discovery that further gnaws at their crumbling foundations.

This is the age of science, and philosophy would do well to keep pace.

If you don’t know who Marie Curie was, you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place. I’ll assume you’re all at least passingly familiar with this historic figure.

What you may not be aware of is exactly how epically awesome Marie Curie really was. This is a woman who, at the turn of the 19th century, when feminism was pretty much non-existent and most women around the world did not even have the right to vote, managed to become a widely renowned and respected scientist.

Science, in those days, was considered a strictly male endeavour, and I can only imagine the depths of bigotry and sexism Marie Curie had to overcome in her voyage to become a scientist that was taken seriously.

Then, in 1903, she wins a Nobel prize, the first woman to do so. Her role in the discovery of radioactivity earns her the Nobel Prize for Physics. Remember, this is at the start of the 20th century, when women were on the whole not taken particularly serious as scientists.

But it gets better. In 1911, she wins a second Nobel Prize. This time it’s the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which she received for her discovery of the radium element. That made her the first person – not just the first woman, but the first person in the history of mankind – to have won two Nobel prizes in different disciplines. Only one other person has since matched that feat.

Marie Curie died in 1934 from the effects of radioactive poisoning. She literally gave her life in service of her craft. When her remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in 1995, she became the first – and so far only – woman to be entombed in the Panthéon on her own merits.

Regardless of her gender, Marie Curie was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. And when you do take her gender in to account, the fact that she was such a great scientist in a day and age when sexism was the norm, we can only conclude that she was without doubt one of the greatest human beings to have ever lived.

Marie Curie was truly, epically, awesome.

I am increasingly convinced that I’m living in the wrong country. My current status as a resident of the United Kingdom means that I could potentially go to jail for nothing other than speaking my mind online.

Those who know me know that I tend to have very vocal opinions that are often expressed with an abundance of profanity. I rarely hold back, and I swear often and loudly.

Apparently that is enough to get me sent to jail, should the wrong person choose to take offence and make a case of it. That is not an exaggeration. There are abundant examples of people going to jail for nothing more than saying something rude on Twitter or Facebook. Some prominent examples:

Facecook riot sentences: Two men are sentences to four years(!) in prison for posting messages on Facebook calling for riots. As those riots never materialised, these two men are effectively jailed merely for saying something online.

Twitter Joke Trial: Paul Chambers is convicting for making a bad joke on Twitter.

Offensive tweets: Student Laim Stacey is jailed for 56 days for posting offensive tweets about a footballer.

Olly Cromwell: Blogger Olly Cromwell faces prison for indirectly insulting a councillor with the c-word on Twitter.

All these cases are examples of a growing – and very worrying – trend in the UK to criminalise people’s opinions. What you say online can and will be used against you. All it takes is for someone to take offence and get the litigation ball rolling, and before you know it you’re behind bars for merely speaking your mind.

I fiercely believe that no one has the right to never be offended. I believe that everyone should have the right to speak their mind, just as everyone else has the right to disagree and to reply with criticism, mockery, and ridicule.

So for someone like me this criminalisation of opinion is an almost unbearable state of affairs. The UK is simply not a free country. A nation where citizens cannot speak freely because they fear being jailed for what they say is nothing short of a fascist police state. There is no other conclusion possible.

The latest edition of Wired’s UK magazine features a short article about a high tech record player designed and built by a former NASA aerospace engineer who was involved in sending spacecraft to Mars.

The record player, shown below, is superior to standard record players because it “allows only one degree of freedom, around the vertical axis. A film of oil — rather than the usual spring – suspends the bearing, eliminating unwanted resonance and distortions, and the drive equalises noise from the motor in the same way that noise-cancelling headphones work.”

So, basically, it’s a maginally better turntable. It cost’s $150,000 plus shipping. Yes, that’s one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And at that price, the creator says, he does not expect to make a profit on these.

That, for me, encapsulated everything that is wrong with NASA: redesigning something to be only marginally better for an exponentially greater cost.

That makes me wonder if, by forcing NASA to use primarily existing technology and not re-invent the wheel at 10,000x the cost, we could build a moonbase for under $10 million. We probably could.

I’ve frequently blogged about the impact of the internet on how our brain functions, seemingly turning us in to instant-gratification button mashers with short attention spans.

This is not just the opinion of a bunch of online pundits. There is actual data out there that suggests we as a species are all about quick fixes. Even a fraction of a second’s delay can put us off an online consumption, as this infographic eloquently explains:

Click image for full size

Created by: Online Graduate Programs

For a while the FairSearch organisation has been fighting in the USA against Google’s anti-competitive behaviours. Now finally FairSearch has crossed the Atlantic and has a European presence: fairsearcheurope.org.

While many Google advocates dismiss it as a marketing tool for competitors like Microsoft, what FairSearch actually does is incredibly vital to our continued enjoyment of a free and unfiltered internet. In Europe this is an even more pressing concern than in the States, as here Google enjoys marketshares of well over 90% in most EU countries.

So an organisation with some economic and political klout behind it, fighting for search neutrality and limitations on Google’s anti-competitive practices, is a good thing. See the slideshow below about why FairSearch matters:

The other day my eye caught an AdWords ad for a book called “The Final Theory” by Mark McCutcheon, an author previously unknown to me. This book allegedly solves all of the existing scientific conundrums and supposedly introduces ‘a new scientific perspective’ that ‘radically re-thinks’ all we know about how the universe works today.

Now, as you may know, I’m a bit of a science geek. I’m also a sceptic. De Omnibus Dubitandum, and all that. The description of this book in the ad and on its website set off all kinds of bullshit alarms in my head. The book’s marketing material focused purely on how this new final theory would overturn all established science and revolutionise our understanding of the laws of physics, casting in to doubt centuries worth of scientific advancements.

I’ve seen similar tones struck in many different promotional materials, usually those published by creationists, homeopaths, energy healers, and other similarly delusional quacks. So I did what any physics geek of sound mind would do: I went to Amazon.com and looked at the book’s reviews.

Amazon tends to be a place where works of atrocious quality are skilfully eviscerated by a horde of merciless reviewers who will destroy a work if it lacks merit. At least, that’s what I thought.

As it turns out, the vast majority of reviews for this book on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive, with no fewer than 71 five-star reviews at last count. According to the Amazon reviewers this book is at least on a par with Stephen Hawkin’s “A Brief History of Time”.

That, too, set of further bullshit alarms. I’d never heard of this Mark McCutcheon fellow before, and I try to keep myself at least moderately informed of what’s going on in the world of science. As this book was originally published in 2003, if it truly had such amazing scientific merit as is claimed by these countless Amazon reviewers, there should by all accounts have been quite a shockwave going through the scientific establishment. And there most certainly was not.

So I dug deeper. Wikipedia was, mysteriously, devoid of any mentioning of the book and its author. In fact, Wikipedia was so diligent in not mentioning Mark McCutcheon and his Final Theory, that I suspected it was a deliberate deletion. That turned out to be the case, as is evident from this administrators’ discussion page (search for ‘McCutcheon’ on that page to find the relevant passages).

Also there are various sceptical forum threads and blog posts dedicated to the book, specifically to how negative reviews on Amazon are mysteriously and inexplicably deleted, leaving only a vast bulk of four- and five-star positive reviews. These positive reviews are themselves rather suspect, as they seem to be posted by new Amazon users without any significant review history, and many of them use very similar phrasings and writing styles.

The last damning piece of evidence comes from a forum thread on a physics community site where the book’s ‘Final Theory’ is thoroughly slaughtered for the nonsensical quackery that it so obviously is.

What is most disturbing about this whole episode is Amazon’s complicity in the whole affair. There is, for all intents and purposes, deliberate censorship at work here in an effort to promote a book that espouses such an obviously farcical concept. Genuine criticism is being silenced in favour of a commercial message, trying to get you to buy a book that contains patent falsehoods, distortions, and lies.

I suppose when there is money to be made, truth is entirely optional.