New wrinkle cream helps fight the signs of scientific evidence
Dean Burnett deconstructs the bunkum afflicting “beauty” products and their presentation to the public.
Now, I’m sure this experiment was completely thorough and conformed to rigorous scientific standards. I wouldn’t wonder why the “miracle” ingredient (A-F33, or Amino Fill 33) is only seemingly referenced in other, parroted press releases from Avon, the company that could make millions from this “breakthrough”. I’d have thought that a protein that can penetrate the protective epidermis and increase collagen and elastin output, effectively but safely altering the processes of the extracellular matrix, would be of substantial scientific interest. But no, no sign of it in any journals I could find. Odd, that.
This is why, especially in our capitalist society, education must not be primarily for training workers or consumers (both tools of capitalism, as Marxists might say). Rather, schools should aim to produce self-determining agents who can see through the blandishments of the market and insist that the market provide what they themselves have decided they need to lead fulfilling lives. Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil. But it becomes evil when it controls our choices for the sake of profit.
Understanding the world or explaining phenomena through superstition, dogma and orthodoxy — instead of facts and reason — invariably leads to some very ugly and uncivilized behaviour. The reason for this is fairly straightforward — namely, beliefs that are rooted in superstition, dogma and orthodoxy are not sustainable … sooner or later their veracity will be tested by facts and evidence. Those who need these beliefs to sustain their interests and power therefore must enforce at the point of a sword or remove those who might prove them to be untrue.
Anger as Iran bans women from universities
What do you do if you are a backward-thinking theocracy whose women threaten to overtake the men (who hold the power)?
In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation by Iran’s most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be “single gender” and effectively exclusive to men.
A couple of weeks ago I built a website for One to Watch using GitHub Pages. It’s incredibly simple to do: just create a website — either static or Jekyll generated — within a branch of your existing GitHub repo called gh-pages. It’s automatically published for you as soon as you push the branch to GitHub. Obviously as it’s hosted by GitHub it’s very fast to load. Even better, there’s no extra cost to using your own domain.