This episode is a Rational View review of 2023, and an outlook for 2024. Happy New Year! 2023 was a big year for yours truly in that I uprooted my family and moved to a new city, and I apologize for the interruptions that this entailed. I’ve finally gotten settled in my new home and it’s time to take stock and make new plans.

If you are interested learning about The Rational View and are in need of a quick overview of last year's podcasts to decide where to start in then you've come to the right place. If you are a long-time listener, then I hope you enjoy reminiscing with me about the past year and are looking forward to a new year filled with more learning and evidence-based exploration of important issues.

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In this episode I am returning to a topic that has become a favourite for pundits and trolls, and that is carbon dioxide. The near doubling of the atmospheric concentration of this colourless odourless gas has been identified by scientists as contributing to an accelerating heating of the biosphere that has significantly affected the climate.  As a by-product of one of our most lucrative industries, the burning of fossil fuels, CO2 has gained a lot of friends.  And because of that it is the subject of a targeted disinformation campaign, becoming headline political news.  This is a job for The Rational View.

Bärbel Hönisch grew up in Germany and studied at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen, as well as the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven. She received her Diploma in Biology in 1999 and her PhD in Natural Sciences in 2002. After moving to the US, she held academic positions at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, the City University of New York at Queens College, the State University of New York in Stony Brook, and Bremen University. She joined the faculty of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University in 2007.

She is interested in the effect of global carbon cycle perturbations on climate and the oceans, in particular past variations of seawater acidity and its relation to atmospheric CO2. As she was originally trained as a marine biologist, her research includes culture experiments with living marine calcifiers to validate proxies for past environmental conditions. She applies the resulting calibrations to reconstructing seawater carbonate chemistry and atmospheric CO2 variations through Earth history. Over the past 7 years she has led a consortium of paleo-CO2 proxy experts to compile, vet and modernize published paleo-CO2 estimates over the Cenozoic.

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In this episode I am starting on a new interest—I want to talk about the emerging field of human enhancement.  Technology is allowing us to modify our bodies in ways that people only dreamed of in the past. We’ve discussed genetic enhancements in previous episodes, but in this thread I want to dig into the state of the art of and ethics of alterations, additions, and modifications.

Giulia Dominijanni is a Ph.D. student at the Neuro-X-Institute and School of Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Neutouch International Training Network alumna. Her research focuses on developing bidirectional Human-Machine Interfaces for augmenting physical abilities, particularly through control strategies and sensory feedback approaches for extra robotic limbs aimed at human augmentation.

Her doctoral studies included a visiting period at University College London and the University of Cambridge, where she studied the impact of a feet-controlled extra thumb on body representation and biological lower limbs abilities. 

She holds a Master of Science in Bionics Engineering from the University of Pisa and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, and a Bachelor's degree in Clinical Engineering from La Sapienza University of Rome.

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This episode is a re-release of a much earlier episode (#11). While I'm busy moving houses I wanted to follow on the theme of my last episode on preserving an inspiring and beautiful natural resource for future generations: the vista of the universe. Please enjoy my discussion with friend, amateur astronomer and dark sky enthusiast Rob Dick.

Amateur astronomer and long-time RASC member Rob Dick is CEO of the Canadian Scotobiology Group, and CTO of EcoLights and a lecturer at the University of Ottawa.

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream”: Vincent Van Gogh.

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In this episode I’m returning to the insidious advance of light pollution and what we can all do to bring back the night sky. I’m now in Guelph Ontario and the municipality is considering introducing a light pollution by-law. If you also would like to see the stars at night from a population centre, this episode will help you to understand the issues and the best approaches to combatting the tragedy of the commons that is unabated artificial light at night.

My guest today is Mr. Jim Goetz, a retired soldier with an interest in astronomy. He is the Vice President of the Kitchener-Waterloo Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. His current interest is the promotion of the coming Total Solar Eclipse on April 8 next year.

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On this episode I chat with a long time friend and host of the Run Your Life podcast, Mr. Andy Vasily. Andy has been exploring learning methods and works professionally on coaching athletes to achieve peak performance. I have been exploring the science of consciousness and the technology of Artificial Intelligence. In this episode we explore the nexus where these interests all meet. What does artificial intelligence teach us about how human brains learn? What lessons can we take from sports psychology to help us understand minds and consciousness? Come and have a listen as we discuss the science of brain training.

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In this episode I’m going to go on a bit of a Rational Rant. It’s a pet peeve of mine, and probably of yours too, but today I’m jousting at the windmill of excessive banking fees and lack of customer service.

So be prepared to let off some steam for a cathartic ride through the wonderful world of our banking system as I get back a little of what they take from us all.

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In this episode I have a returning guest to discuss the fall.  No not the weather. The fall of civilization. Our previous interview released September 12, 2020, was titled ‘This is how liberty dies’, where we discussed the frightening parallels between the evolving political situation in the US and events in multiple failed democracies. Despite these fears, my guest was quite upbeat about the prognosis for US to avoid an authoritarian uprising, noting that Trump was not as smart nor as popular as the leaders of successful revolutions. This was only a few months before the unsuccessful January 6th 2021 coup attempt, and it seems that for the moment anyway, he was right.  I thought it might be fun for us to touch base and see if he might be interested in revising his opinion.

Dr. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, mostly in Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), which was a New York Times Best-Seller and has been published in 22 languages. He is also author many books regarding politics and authoritarianism in Latin America. His most recent book, also with Daniel Ziblatt is titled ‘The Tyranny of the Minority’.

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In this episode I will be taking a look at the ugly side of unrestricted capitalism, and how lobbying has skewed the public debate and shifted the Overton window to the right. Some would argue that unrestricted capitalism has been a great boon lifting society into an age of plenty. Others would argue that it has done this by maintaining an economic class hierarchy that enables the rich to enslave the poor. Are workers entering into employment agreements between equals for a mutually beneficial exchange of labour for wages, or are people forced into degrading wage slavery under duress by withholding the essentials of life like food, housing, and healthcare? My guest today will help us grapple with these issues.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and the author of nearly 200 scholarly papers and popular articles and numerous books including Merchants of Doubt and The Big Myth, both co-authored with Erik M. Conway. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Times (London), and many others. Her TED talk, "Why We Should Trust Scientists" was viewed more than a million times. She is an active participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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