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A better addiction

My first year in undergrad I was like many first year college students. I had been spoon-fed information during high school, so I didn't study much when I hit college - not having developed these habits before then. This resulted in a rough first semester. (If you or someone you know is getting ready to enter college next year, probably the most important lesson to learn is to become personally responsible for learning most of the information. That's a good thing, and it's a shame this is a lesson most kids aren't learning until college.) In one of my classes, Intensive Writing, I procrastinated turning in most of the assignments. The professor told us we would have a surprise prompt for the final exam, but gave us some direction before about what kind of prompt it would be. I mulled over what she told us, knowing that if I didn't get a good grade I'd fail the class, based on my performance thus far. When I got to the classroom for the final, the professor confe
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Covid-19: Epidemiology is useful

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I pulled this data from Google Trends of searches for "coronavirus".  I had to set a range that excluded everything from mid-December 2019 to the present, because they dwarfed all the other searches and compressed the scale. As you can see, there's a natural die-off of coronavirus-related searches by mid-March, which is good news for those concerned with the present crisis.  I've heard a lot of speculation about the current coronavirus, Covid-19, and I want to talk about a few ideas from epidemiology to get at more general principles.  First, the reproduction number (R 0 ) of Covid-19 looks like it's about 2.2.  Meaning each infected person is likely to infect 2.2 additional people before they clear the virus or die and are no longer infectious.  That means it's likely to spread quickly - or more accurately exponentially. In fact, given an R 0 of that magnitude, it's unlikely we'll be able to stop it from spreading, no matter how good our qu
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Open Questions: The Origin of Life

In a previous post , I covered the claim that science proves there is no god.  This is one of the weaker arguments I hear when religion and science are discussed, because it's easy to disprove.  You simply have to challenge the claim, "How does science prove there is no God?  What experiments demonstrate this?"  However, in my experience most people who make this weak claim are actually thinking of a stronger atheistic claim, namely: "Science takes the place of religion.  It has now explained all the old gaps in our knowledge, and now we're just filling in the small gaps that remain."  In my last post, I talked about how the domains of science and religion don't generally overlap.  The popular conception is that science explains the how and religion explains the why  of the world.  However, there is one major area of overlap for science and religion and that is creation, both of life and of the universe.  If science can explain the creation of the unive
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