Social Sciences
oracknows | July 14, 2010Wendy, I'm home.
Oh, wait a minute. I'm not that crazy. Yet.
Sometimes, though, it does seem as though the constant barrage of quackery, anti-vaccine pseudoscience, and pseudoscience in general might drive me to become like poor Jack Torrence of the Stephen King novel and movie The Shining. Fortunately for me, I discovered that there really are people out there who share my passion for science and reason and my dislike of woo. Unfortunately, I waited several years before venturing forth to gatherings of like-minded (and sometimes not-so-like-minded) skeptics to meet people in person and start…
sastyk | July 13, 2010"How did you get there, Roo?" asked Piglet.
"On Tigger's back! And Tiggers can't climb downwards, because their tails get in the way, only upwards, and Tigger forgot about that when we started, and he's only just remembered. So we've got to stay here for ever and ever - unless we go higher. What did you say, Tigger? Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan't be able to see Piglet's house so well, so we're going to stop here."
-AA Milne, "The House At Pooh Corner"
Note: I wrote this essay several years ago, and have been thinking about it a lot in relationship to the BP problem, so I…
emjohnson | July 11, 2010Three years ago I didn't even know what science blogging was. Frustrated as a freelance writer, I typed "science blog" into my search engine and was thrilled when this network showed up first on the list. Here was a community of researchers and writers whose love of learning and the sharing of knowledge was communicated on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. After spending much of the day reading through posts by GrrlScientist, PZ, Bora, Carl, Chris and Sheril as well as John and Afarensis I was hooked. I made a decision right then and there that I would write for ScienceBlogs. I…
vlicata | July 11, 2010BP has released the first slug of oil-spill hush money to LSU: $2 million for research on the Effects of the Oil Spill and it's Cleanup. Sounds like a lot of research money, until you realize that LSU does about $200 million dollars of research a year. So, it's kind of like if your next door neighbor (the one who knocked down his house and opened a strip mine) came over to your house and crapped in your refrigerator on $200 worth of groceries you just bought, then gave you two dollars so you could look into what effect his actions had on your food (and so you would feel good about him again…
pharyngula | July 11, 2010There's a time to take religion seriously, and a time to laugh at it. Sometimes we have to do both at the same time.
When you read the works of apologists for religion, there's a common theme: they are all very serious. Religion is important. Faith is about a relationship with the greatest being in the universe. We need God to find purpose in our lives. Religion is about community and bringing people together. Rituals are tools to cope with the great events in life, from birth to death.
It's all true, of course, in the sense that believers really do believe that their God matters, and…
neurophilosophy | July 9, 2010MAGNETIC nanoparticles targeted to nerve cell membranes can be used to remotely control cellular activity and even the simple reflex behaviours of nematode worms, according to research by a team of biophysicists at the University of Buffalo. The new method, which is described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could be very useful for investigating how cells interact in neuronal networks, and may eventually lead to new therapies for cancer and diabetes.
Heng Huang and her colleagues synthesized manganese-iron nanoparticles, each just 6 millionths of a millimeter in diameter, and coated…
tetrapodzoology | July 8, 2010
In the previous article I discussed the outside section of the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition's pterosaur display (hosted at Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank). The exhibition (which finished on July 4th, sorry) incorporated three flying, life-sized azhdarchids - suspended from the two adjacent building - as well as two walking ones (the latter roughly reproducing Mark's terrestrial stalking scene).
But there was much more to the exhibit than this: it also had an indoor component. The main feature was a wall covered with life-sized pterosaur heads: it looked great, sort of…
clock | July 5, 2010About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone "Read This Book".
What I wrote last month,
"I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but…
sastyk | July 2, 2010Madeline Holler at Salon has a rather cute essay about her failures at becoming a radical homemaker. On my first quick skim through it (it was sent to me by several readers, so thanks!), I was inclined to give it a total pass, because I found myself rather liking Holler, and sympathizing to an extent.
At least she was trying to live on a comparatively lower income. At least she made the yogurt. If she really hated it, well, at least she was sort of trying to live up to her principles - something all of us have a tough time doing. I may make my own bread, but I have my own hypocrisies.…
sastyk | July 1, 2010
(Awesome image of zombie me by Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre and the originator of the cool RPG Gearhead Check out my fellow bloggers to see their zombie pix! I wonder if New Society would let me use this as my book jacket photo for the new book?)
As all of you obviously know, July 1 is International Zombie Day - celebrated around the world by the zombifying oneself, posting brain recipes, strategies for fightin' em off, etc... Well, ok, it is kind of a new, science-blogs-only-holiday so far (credit for the idea goes to Scicurious!), but following the stunning success of international…
gregladen | June 30, 2010And by faithing it, I mean using faith rather than critical analysis of the available information to make important decisions about what to regard as valid.
Let's do a couple of informal experiments to explore this issue more closely. For the present discussion, I'm assuming that you are a non-scientist and non-medical person who self identifies as a skeptic.
Do you know the following terms, without looking them up (which you can do, in part, by clicking on them)? In some cases you may be able to guess meanings, in some cases you may have a vague idea from prior reading. But that's not…
oracknows | June 30, 2010ORAC SAYS: Please note my disclaimer.
After the events of last week, I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to matters like the one I'm about to discuss. Having the anti-vaccine cranks over at the Age of Autism weblog trying to get me fired over my blogging has a tendency to do that to me. (The details are out there if you haven't heard of it; I will say nothing more of it here.) In any case, if there's anything the events of last week drove home to me, it's that a sina qua non of anti-science cranks like the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement is that, when faced with serious scientific…
tfk | June 29, 2010PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds:
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulfâ¦and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological…
sastyk | June 29, 2010For someone in her mid-30s, I have a fairly large experience of being someone's caregiver. In high school, 'I began working in a nearby nursing home. I can't remember quite what drove me to seek that work out - it was not the kind of work that most teenagers I knew did. I think what intrigued me about it was its importance - as a teenager seeking meaning, caring for people at the end of their lives seemed urgent. It was only later that I came to realize that taking care of the elderly and disabled was, in our society, viewed as not onlyl not urgent, but not integral or important. Even as…
sastyk | June 29, 2010This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition.
What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…
emjohnson | June 29, 2010Author's Note: The following is an excerpt from my review of Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. For additional information see my posts Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, Those Cheating Testicles, or Who's Your Baby? as well as Helen's Lament and the Origins of Forbidden Love. Christopher Ryan also blogs at Psychology Today.
When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don't picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases…
jhalper | June 28, 2010
Professor Daniel Zajfman, president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, is a physicist in the fields of atomic and molecular physics. He has a strong interest in the popularization of science
George Mallory, the man who almost made it to the top of Everest, is probably most famous for his terse reply when asked why he attempted to climb it: "Because it's there." Scientists often resemble mountain climbers: We want to understand nature because it's there. Why, in today's world, should we be devoting precious resources to finding out what happened in the Universe's first billionth of a…
emjohnson | June 28, 2010Thanks to Greg Laden for the anniversary wishes. One year ago today I wrote my first post here at ScienceBlogs (technically, my first post was yesterday, but that was posting the live twitter transcript of my son's birth). I would like to thank everyone at Sb (bloggers, administrators, and commenters alike) for their support as well as for their arguments. Without the feedback I'm certain I wouldn't have been challenged to interrogate my own assumptions and produce the best analysis that I could.
I haven't had the opportunity to write as often as I would like the last few weeks since I'm…
tetrapodzoology | June 27, 2010
Good, non-technical books on anatomy are rare; good, non-technical books on avian anatomy are just about non-existent. Gary Kaiser's The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution stands out as one of a kind - it is not brand-new (having been published in 2007), but still has yet to be widely recognised as the valuable piece of scholarship that it is. I will state here at the outset that I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Containing a wealth of information that ranges from the Mesozoic ancestry of birds to neornithine phylogeny, flight dynamics, functional morphology and ecology, it should be…
dgmacarthur | June 25, 2010In October last year I reported on a presentation by direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Honolulu, in which the company described results of genetic association studies performed using combined genetic and survey data from their customers. The results of their study include replication of several known associations for traits like hair colour, eye colour and freckling, as well as the discovery of previously unpublished associations for things like asparagus anosmia (the ability to smell urinary breakdown products after eating…