Social Sciences
drorzel | June 8, 2011
What is morally off-limits in pop culture? | Music | The Big Questions | The A.V. Club
"What I can't relate to as I read the defenses written by Powers and Barthel is the implicit denial that anything might offend them. This is where the argument that morality always should (or can) be kept separate from artistic judgments falls apart for me, because while I instinctively side with the Non-Moralists, I know there are times when I must switch sides. It's difficult for me to believe that we all don't switch sides from time to time. This is not easy to admit, because acknowledging that…
drorzel | June 7, 2011Over at Dynamics of Cats, chief herding theorist Steinn has a post on what we know about how to teach physics:
To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes.
You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated syllabii for parallel and successive classes, providing an initial short review of the previous material.
You also need a parallel sequence of coordinated mathematics classes, such that the mathematics needed for a physics class are taught before it is…
sastyk | June 7, 2011Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here.
Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I believe in the big tent. But there is something to be said for even metaphorically making people take ownership of their politics - and the implications of their politics.
I realize someone is going to be outraged by this - ah well, can't please everyone! I find it funny, not because I want to…
gregladen | June 6, 2011Thirty years ago yesterday, "the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMR) published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California." (see This Blog Post for details). Morbidity and Mortality Weekly is a really fun journal to read. It contains the latest reports of, well, death and serious illness as a means of disseminating information in a way that will allow quick response. So, if there are suddenly a bunch of cases of some disease scattered across the country, this kind of reporting may…
jrosenhouse | June 3, 2011So, I went to the midnight show of the new X-Men movie yesterday. Short review: Wowee wow wow! What a great movie! Best comic book movie in quite a while, and since there have been several good ones that's really saying something. Longer review below the fold. Only minor spoilers ahead, but if you truly want to know nothing about the film going in then it might be best to stop reading now.
The X-Men are a bit of a hole in my comic book education. A while back I worked my way through the first volume of The Essential X-Men, which collected some of the original 1960's comics, but that's…
jtoney | June 2, 2011
Imagine you have two months to live. What would you do, what would you write to your friends and colleagues? I don't know if I have two months - do you? No one does. Life is an ongoing risk, an opportunity to embrace challenges, to coast, or to be numb.
One of my dear colleagues, Dr. Richard Pierre Claude, a scholar of human rights, wrote an extraordinary letter to his friends and colleagues, exactly two months before he passed away. I have no idea if he knew that he had two months before the end, but his first sentence in this letter is the following:
{written on Martin Luther King…
pharyngula | May 30, 2011Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is wonderful news, happy happy joy joy, gosha'mighty, I'm wiggling in my chair like a tickled puppy. What has made me so happy, you might ask?
A week from today I'm going to be speaking at the Crystal Palace in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be talking about the developmental evidence for evolution, and it should be great fun.
But that's not the exciting news.
Glasgow has its very own Centre for Intelligent Design, and a fine collection of know-nothings it is. And they are being encouraged to attend my talk! So maybe there will be a contingent of critics present —…
jdupuis | May 30, 2011A very, very long time since I've done one of these...
For your reading and collection development pleasure:
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-…
gregladen | May 26, 2011It is easy to make fun of other people with whom we disagree, but when it comes down to it, how do we really know when we are being smart about something vs. getting it all wrong? Gut feeling? Our friends agree with us? Some smart person tells us what to think? This is a problem that as plagued humanity since the first time anyone tried to establish ground rules for leaving flint chips around the camp where our unshodden Neanderthals brothers and sisters, who came by to visit now and then, would step on them1.
Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing by Swarthmore Professors…
dr. dolittle | May 26, 2011It should not be surprising that the decline of most bird species may be attributed to changes in their habitat. These changes may include human-related causes such as increased farming, urban sprawl, industrial development, logging, drilling and mining. Global warming is to blame for earlier springtimes that can impact the mating habits of birds. Fires are additionally potential causes for the decreased populations of some bird species. Whatever the reason, many populations are on a downward slope.
Here is a list from the National Audubon Society of the top 20 common birds in decline:
1.…
pharyngula | May 26, 2011These people do exist.
I am a fellow atheist from Germany. I have to say I enjoy reading your blog Pharyngula. I study molecular biology and strongly believe in evolution.
I am, however, rather conservative in my views. That's what troubles me with atheism lately, it seems that atheists are generally on the left side of the political spectrum. Esp. your last post about how atheists should have progressive views in terms of "racism", "gender equality" and "disability rights" made me thinking.
I feel like I agree with Conservative Chirstians on most political and social issues. For example…
tfk | May 24, 2011On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They'd do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year's worth of their online subscription service.
A much smaller version of that same genome survey would have cost you a thousand dollars or more only a couple of years ago. For your money, you get data on single nucleotide polymorphisms at about a million spots in your chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA: mutations that can tell you about your ancestors' migrations across the globe, about your propensity for certain diseases, and about…
tetrapodzoology | May 24, 2011
I've long had a special interest in the sleeping habits of small birds. In fact, as you'll know if you read the article I published here back in September 2008*, I've covered this issue before. In that article, I noted that at least some passerines secrete themselves away in crevices or thick foliage. I first became really interested in this subject after making one of my greatest natural history 'discoveries': a sleeping Blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus that I encountered while it was tucked deep beneath the broken bark of a tree, just the tip of its tail betraying its presence. I didn't have…
bioephemera | May 22, 2011. . . they could have. Or pretty darn close, at least - they just needed to visit one of the many European cabinets of anatomical curiosities, to see the work of anatomists like Honore Fragonard.
Fragonard's eighteenth-century ecorches were the clear precursors to Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds" exhibits: preserved, injected, partially dissected bodies in lifelike, dramatic poses, with ragged strips of muscle draped like primitive clothing over exposed vessels and nerves. The effect is eerie - like a Vesalius illustration sprung to (half-)life:
Man with a Mandible
Several of Fragonard's…
jdupuis | May 22, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World, is from November 19, 2011.
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OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a…
drorzel | May 21, 2011As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy.
This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…
drorzel | May 18, 2011
Book View Cafe - Exordium 01, by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
"Smith and Trowbridge describe the flavor of their five-book space opera Exordium as a cross between Star Wars and Dangerous Liaisons with a touch of the Three Stooges. With its fast-moving blend of humor and horror, of high-tech skiffy and the deep places of the human heart, The Phoenix in Flight launches the reader into a complex, multi-layered universe as Brandon nyr-Arkad, dissolute youngest son of the ruler of the Thousand Suns, abandons the life of Service planned for him and flees into the lawless Rift. Only slowly…
pharyngula | May 17, 2011That long-winded charlatan, Deepak Chopra, has scribbled up a whiny criticism of Hitchens' address in absentia to the American Atheists. Hitchens wrote a wonderful, brave, and inspiring exposition on his mortality, and urged everyone to keep up the gallant fight; Chopra carps and squirms, trying to find an excuse to reject Hitchens' argument. He fails pathetically.
This was a tough one to address thoroughly, because every sentence, practically every phrase in Chopra's essay is foolish and wrong, so I've instead taken the path of annotating the central chunk of Chopra's chunder. My comments…
drorzel | May 17, 2011
Generalist's Work, Day 5 « Easily Distracted
"In humanistic writing, I'm struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence, we often expect scholarly work to exhibit the author's "quality of mind", and that in turn is often best established by the degree to which the analysis and interpretation in scholarly writing appear to be original and highly…
bioephemera | May 16, 2011They're doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don't do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we're talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all…