Blogospherics: Hot stuff from Sb Bloggers
In Mixed-race but homogeneous appearance? at Gne Expression, Razib addresses the question of racial assignation for people of so called "mixed race." This refers to an old anthropological concept known as hypodescent, in which one particular racial (or ethnic) category is applied to anyone with what is percieved as a single drop (or nearly so) of that race in their blood. This is a very intersting and in-depth post that I highly recommend.
Mr Time himself, Coturni of A Blog Around the Clock discusses shift work as a probably cause of cancer, expanding on a piece in Courant.com.
The mind body problem: What is the relationship between the mind and action? Is there always a one-way relationship between, say, emotion and expression of emotion, or can expression in the absence of an emotion cause the emotion to exist in the mind? In other words, if you "just smile" will you "feel better?" Cognitive Daily addresses this question in a nice example of Bloggong on Peer Reviewed Research, covering a 2002 paper by Soussingan in the journal Emotion.
Did you know that eating Kobe Beef (the famous Japanese meat) is the moral equivilant of clubbing baby seals to death? I had no idea, but Jonah Lehrer discusses this in a recent post in the Frontal Cortex.
Can Doctored photos create false memories? Neurophilosophy reports on a recent study, in which ...
participants viewed photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing or the protest against the Iraq war which took place in Rome in 2003....Some of the participants were presented with digitally altered photographs, while others were shown the unaltered, original images. It was found that manipulation of the photographs influenced the participants' memories of the events very strongly.
Yes, I know it is hard to believe, but there are still Global Warming Denialists out there. Tim Lambert at Deltoid proposes that despite this business of altered memories, A picture is worth a thousand words and takes the denialists to task.
The dying grandma gambit is where:
An atheist says something assertive about religion; religious sympathizer retorts, "Would you say that to your dying grandmother? You atheists can't give any consolation to the dying or grieving, and all you can do is flip a finger at believers." This extremely annoying phenomenon is discussed at length by PZ Myers at Pharyngula. Don' worry, PZ, I'm sure someone's grandmother is praying for you.
Orac at Respectufl Insolence asks How much science matters to the average American?. This is in reference to Mike Huckabee, who may well be the Next President of the United States of America. One can only hope. NOT.
