Environment
jgoldman | April 13, 2010What are the cognitive and neural systems that allow us to build buildings, play checkers, do multivariate statistics, receive DVDs by mail, follow Dr. Isis's pesto recipe, or navigate the tangled LA freeways?
You may ask: what can studying children and non-human animals tell us about the complexity of the human experience? Only educated human adults engage with formal mathematics, cooking, or map reading. Right?
This is a reasonable question to ask. But when human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms…
sastyk | April 13, 2010A reader of mine named Aaron emailed me to ask if I'd respond to Alex Steffen's latest piece at Worldchanging. Aaron writes:
I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Alex Steffen's recent post over at worldchanging.com. I think that it is a well considered and well informed post that addresses many of the things that make me uncomfortable in your writing.
I'm really not interested in criticizing your work, or anything of that sort; I believe that the sustainability movement as a whole needs to have a strong and well reasoned message if it is to take root with the public at large…
tfk | April 12, 2010Shorter Sam Harris: FAQ :: How can you derive an âoughtâ from an âisâ?:
No.
This is not quite how he'd probably shorter himself, but that's not the immediately important issue. The immediately important issue is that he thinks we could get from "is" to "ought" by saying that actions which produce the worst possible suffering for all sentient beings are bad actions, and we ought to do something else. In other words, the "ought" Harris manages to derive (by various assumptions) is that we should not do the very worst thing possible.
As a reply to his critics (cf.), this goes nowhere special…
illconsidered | April 12, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News April 11, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, COP 15, COP 16, MEF, Cochabamba, Krugman, Ecocide, Tremblor, Barometer, Eli's Expositions Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Medupi, Corporate Coup, Weathermen, Science Bashing, FOI Abuse, CRU Kafuffle Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics of Arctic Resources Food Crisis, Neoliberal Food Policies, Food vs. Biofuel,…
cwilcox | April 12, 2010The Wildlife Conservation Society has just released their newest book, State of the Wild 2010-2011. It's a collection of essays that center around current and emerging issues in conservation from conservation experts and powerful nature writers. It's a must-read for anyone driven to understand and protect our ecosystems.
In this year's edition, there is a particularly interesting essay called "Rarest of the Rare." It highlights twelve of the most endangered species on the planet, only two of which are on the Road to Recovery. These are animals that may disappear in the next decade or two, and…
clock | April 6, 2010At World Science - listen to the podcast and join the online discussion:
Our guest in this Science Forum is economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University's Earth Institute. Chat with Barrett about the science and politics of geoengineering, the emerging field of science aimed at cooling the planet.
Barrett is an expert on international environmental agreements. He is currently studying the politics and economics of geoengineering. He says countries are more likely to geoengineer climate than reduce their carbon emissions. Read his paper on The Incredible Economics of Geoengineering.
Barrett…
illconsidered | April 6, 2010[editor's note: an initial name confusion had the orignal version of this article referring to Jay Rogers instead of the actual author of the AEI piece Jay Richards. This has been fixed and as well a no longer relevant paragraph has been removed. Apologies for any confusion.]
[Preliminary Note: Coby asked me to edit this essay for a guest post on "A Few Things Ill Considered" (AFTIC). The original post is here, but this version cleans up the salty language (I'm kind of a roughneck and freely curse on this forum) and polishes up the content and provides the links to the relevant source…
illconsidered | April 5, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information overload is pattern recognitionApril 4, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Endangerment Comments, Weathermen, Lovelock Bottom Line, UN CFG, IPCC Support, CRU Inquiry, Stickiness of Myths, Mclean, Late Comments Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Neoliberal Food Policies, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures…
clock | April 4, 2010There are 23 new articles in PLoS ONE published last Friday (sorry, I'm late....). As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
ARNTL (BMAL1) and NPAS2 Gene Variants Contribute to Fertility and Seasonality:
Circadian clocks guide the metabolic, cell-division, sleep-wake, circadian and seasonal…
illconsidered | April 3, 2010I would like to share a press release from the University of Minnesota I received a few days ago announcing a short video on environmental sustainability.
Press release as follows:
Greetings from the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.
For 10,000 years, our world seemed endless. The sky was the limit. But today's world looks much smaller. We've cleared, consumed and polluted our way across the globe. The planet is shrinking. Have we pushed Earth past the tipping point? That's a critical issue we explore in our second Big Question video, which draws on research from "…
gregladen | April 1, 2010Various environmental organizations have been using imagery of dead baby birds with toothbrushes in their guts and solid floating masses of garbage to describe and raise alarm about what has become known as the North Pacific Central Garbage Patch. Yet, the small but important amount of research that has been done there shows that the NPCGP consists of many (alarmingly many) pieces of plastic that are very small, the largest being "about the size of the fingernail on your pinkey."
Albatross may or may not be affected by garbage, but it is not likely that the garbage shown in the guts of…
illconsidered | March 30, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the internet firehose...March 28, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, WWD, Upcoming Meetings, Oh Oh, Anthropocene, Mitloehner, Mclean, Earth Hour Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Risk, UN CFG, The Race, Lewis, Pro IPCC, CRU SAP, Samanta Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes,…
drorzel | March 26, 2010Somebody at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a really high opinion of this blog, as they not only sent me an Advance Reading Copy of Paul Davies's forthcoming book about SETI, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, they followed it up with a finished hardcover. I read the ARC on the plane on the way back from the March Meeting, and put the hardcover in the mailbox of a colleague who just finished co-teaching a course on astrobiology.
This book is being released in 2010, which Davies cites as the 50th anniversary of an active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI…
oracknows | March 26, 2010I have an MD and a PhD. While many people find that to be impressive, personally I've become so inured of it that I certainly don't take note of it much anymore. Certainly, I rarely point it out. So, you may ask, why am I pointing it out this time, even going so far as to start a post with it? The answer is simple. If there was one thing I always thought about having both an MD and a PhD, it's that it should render one more resistant to pseudoscience and woo. I know, I know, maybe I'm being incredibly arrogant or incredibly naive--possibly both--but it was what I thought for a long time, even…
illconsidered | March 22, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years March 21, 2010 Equinox, COP15, COP16, PWCoCC & MER, Bonn, MEF, State of the Climate, Samanta, Earth Hour World Bank, Outsourcing CO2, Mean Green, IPCC Failures, IPCC Support, Wrong Green, CRU Melting Arctic, ASTI, CITES, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…
esiegel | March 17, 2010I have this one little saying. When things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man. -Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix is almost right: helium is the second lightest gas known to man, behind hydrogen. But there are many applications for helium -- both scientific and non-scientific -- that make it incredibly useful and practical. Helium is far lighter than air and is inert, which means it won't combust when you combine it with air and energy, like Hydrogen does (below).
(Too bad for the kids who want hydrogen balloons for their birthday parties!)
In addition to being lighter than…
clock | March 17, 2010There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Generous Leaders and Selfish Underdogs: Pro-Sociality in Despotic Macaques:
Actively granting food to a companion is called pro-social behavior and is considered to be part of altruism. Recent findings show…
illconsidered | March 16, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Information overload is pattern recognition March 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16 and Beyond, Paris, Wrong Green, CERA, Outsourcing CO2, World Bank, UN CFG IPCC Review, IPCC Support, CRU Theft, UK Wind, Samanta, Anthony's Question, NASgate Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Svalbard, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate…
revere | March 14, 2010The US and Israel are near the top of the list in having citizens who believe in evolution -- at or near the top, that is, if you turn the list upside down. In international surveys the US ranks last and Israel 4th from last among 27 countries regarding belief in the proposition that "human beings developed from earlier species of animals" being definitely or probably true (US, 45%, Israel, 54%). There's another similarity. The US has fringe fundamentalist crazies in positions of authority (like the Texas State Board of Education) who deny evolution (and this just in: took The Enlightenment…
jdupuis | March 11, 2010A big list of 35 titles in various categories: Astronomy, Biography, Biology, Climatology, Environmental Science, Evolution, Geology, Health Sciences, History of Science, Mathematics, Natural History, Neurology, Oceanography, Paleontology, Physics, Psychology, Science, Technology, Zoology.
This particular list that Library Journal does every year is one that I always use for collection development. I'll order pretty well all the books that we don't already have. It's also heartening that a good chunk of the books that we do have were checked out when I checked the other day.
BTW, I may get…