Social Sciences
tfk | May 31, 2010A year ago today, George Tiller was murdered in cold blood. Tiller was a Wichita OB/GYN known for being one of the few doctors who would perform third trimester abortions. Scott Roeder came into Tiller's church, where Tiller served as an usher, and shot him to death before his family and friends.
In memory of Tiller's death, here's a repost from a year ago.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Growing up black in a state where dark skin was a crime, he had the courage to stand up for his rights and the rights of his friends and family. He organized boycotts, sued for…
palmd | May 28, 2010As summer approaches and people spend more time outdoors, many parts of the country will start to see cases of Lyme disease. It is carried by deer ticks and is especially common in the Northeast. Tick bites often go unnoticed, but the rash of Lyme disease is pretty characteristic and occurs in about 70-80% of those who are infected.
Erythema migrans, the typical rash of Lyme disease. Source.
It's easily cured with antibiotics, but if untreated can have significant complications, such as arthritis, and various neurologic problems. As most of my readers know, there is also a movement…
laelaps | May 28, 2010
Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009)
When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely - it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…
emjohnson | May 27, 2010 New research finds chimpanzees follow prestigious models when learning new tasks. Monika Thorpe / Creative CommonsIf one were to play psychiatrist to the natural world, most human beings would be committed for our certifiable obsession with other peoples' behavior. We compulsively examine, study, appraise, size up, and scope out what those around us are doing and then gossip with others about what we've seen or heard. New ideas or behaviors are especially compelling and will often have cultural critics discussing them at length, whether they're tribal elders or the United…
hrynyshyn | May 26, 2010Back in the winter of 1990-91, when I was a between-real-jobs freelancer hanging out in Vancouver with plenty of time on my hands to read, I would cycle down to Stanley Park each rainless day, find a quiet stretch of beach, and read. I went through dozens of books before returning to the working world, but the only book I remember in any detail is Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. It was the first full-length, popular-science take on climate change, and I've spent much of the last 20 years thinking and writing about the subject, thanks to that book. So has McKibben.
eaarth is an oddly…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010We have a wicked, psychotic cat who went insane during a time when we were fostering other cats for the humane society — some cats just don't tolerate novelty and company — and ever since he's been plotting to kill me. The only reason we're keeping him around is that I'm pretty sure he's the feline anti-christ, and confining him to our house in Morris means he won't be conquering the world any time soon.
He attempted a prison break today, though, and ran loose in the yard for a while. And what happened? He found a baby bunny, killed it, and brought it back into the house. Then he gave me that…
gregladen | May 25, 2010I previously noted that to survive as a Westerner, you can get away with participating in a culture that asks of you little more than to understand the "one minute" button on the microwave, while to survive in a foraging society you needed much much more. Moreover, I suggested that the level of complexity in an individual's life was greater among HG (Hunter-Gatherer) societies than Western societies.
However, this is not to say, in the end, that one form of economy and society is more complex than the other. I happen to think that the maximum level of complexity ... of thought, social…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010The Paul Kurtz I remember was the serious, scholarly fellow at the forefront of the atheist movement, who wasn't shy about saying it the way it was. The New Kurtz is a more timid observer, who wants to criticize religion mildly without giving offense, and is more concerned about policing his fellow humanists and atheists than actually working to overcome the folly of religious belief.
In the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Kurtz has an editorial that is all about tone rather than content; it de-emphasizes what we say and wants to make how we say it the most important criterion. It's…
gboustead | May 24, 2010
Maybe you think you already know enough about music. After all, we've been experiencing and describing it for ages. Beethoven called music the "mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." Others know it as the "universal language" or the "voice of angels." T.S. Eliot said "you are the music while the music lasts."
But many of these sentiments only heighten the musical mysteries legendary "wired" composer Tod Machover has spent his career trying to answer--Questions like: How can music help order emerge from the mind's chaos or conjure thoughts, emotions and memories? Can we learn…
illconsidered | May 23, 2010Still back at Keith Kloor's place, Judith Curry seems determined to dig in to her position that governments and the IPCC and consensus minded science bloggers need to take the climate skeptics more seriously. Personally I think she completely misses the boat, because most of these folks have in fact been soundly debunked, or at the very least thouroughly addressed in purely scientific manners. We are talking about Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, these are her candidates. As well as having had their more serious contentions seriously looked at, these sites bury any potentially…
sa smith | May 21, 2010I didnt know what to say about Venter & Crew making a bacterial genome from scratch.
No such luck from the BASTION of child rape, homophobia, misogyny, and flat out stupidity human morality and ethics, the Catholic Church:
Church warns cell scientists not to play God
Catholic Church officials said Friday that the recently created first synthetic cell could be a positive development if correctly used, but warned scientists that only God can create life.
heh.
"It's a great scientific discovery. Now we have to understand how it will be implemented in the future," Monsignor Rino Fisichella,…
sciencepunk | May 19, 2010In 1926 German illustrator Fritz Kahn drew Der Mensch als Industriepalast, part of a series of artworks reinterpreting the body as a mechanical factory. Now fellow countryman and artist Henning Lederer has updated the the famous image, turning it into an interactive animation.
He says:
The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn's artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy…
omnibrain | May 18, 2010I'm sure by now you've heard about inattentional blindness, as I've posted about it a million times since this blog began. It's an amazing effect! It shows us that we really aren't as aware of the world as we think we are. If you haven't heard about it by now I encourage you to go right here to try out a demo on yourself! Inattentional blindness isn't the only time this happens though, there are a number of cognitive illusions that make you realize you're a lot stupider than you thought you were.
There's a brand new book out today by the semi-discoverers of inattentional blindness (well…
oracknows | May 16, 2010Late last week, a crank I hadn't heard from in a while showed up in my comments. I'm referring to DaveScot, who normally was known for promoting anti-evolution rhetoric in the service of the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design" creationism. This is what he said:
Hi Orac,
terrasig suggested you do a followup article on dichloroacetate (DCA) given the paper just published on the phase 1 trial in Edmonton.
Three years have passed and countless cancer patients were denied this drug. Now at the end of its first phase one trial we know exactly what we did from the reports of people self-…
pharyngula | May 16, 2010Half the people in the world commit this sin against god: they are born women.
It's an astounding thing that any women at all accept Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; these are profoundly misogynistic faiths. Throughout the Christian Bible, women are treated as chattel to be abused and misused, and uppity women are regarded as the worst of the lot, fit only to be slaughtered. There are parts of the Bible that read like snuff porn — but it's all OK, because it's the Bible, God's holy word, and if God is gonna have to choke a bitch, who are we to question it?
We can trace the attitude right back…
sa smith | May 14, 2010A while back I wrote about how the lead researcher at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, Judy Mikovits, is speaking at Autismone, a huge anti-vax rally in Chicago later this month.
I thought Judy was just a crank. Dime a dozen, whatevs.
Turns out things are worse than that.
Much much worse than that.
Its cranks all the way down.
Vincent Lombardi, first author on the original 'XMRV causes Chronic Fatigue' Science paper, founded some weird testing company several years back. This weird testing company was then bought by Harvey Whittemore (father of The Princess That Cant Be Named), and turned…
sastyk | May 14, 2010From occasional partner-in-crime Keith Farnish (and author of _Times Up_) comes a scathing but accurate indictment of superficial youth environmentalism.
(our heroine in her pricey electric car, cruising the streets of Beverly Hills)
Farnish writes:
I have met some incredible young people with vision, passion and the willingness to stick two fingers up at the system in order to create some kind of change. I have learnt from some young people what it feels like to be a concerned person in a society that values shopping, celebrity and vacations above the fundamental need to have a functioning…
tfk | May 13, 2010Ophelia Benson continues to tangle with the silly and unjustifiable argument by Sam Harris that science can produce morality. Harris has shown himself to be beyond the realm of reason on this matter (and perhaps others), but if it brings her joy, I say mazel tov. At long last, someone is deploying against Harris what may be the most powerful argument against using theism to justify morality: Euthyphro's dilemma.
Classicists reading this will recall this from the Socratic dialogue in which Socrates prepares to fight the accusation that his views corrupted the youth of Athens. Euthyphro is…
oracknows | May 11, 2010In yesterday's post, in which I discussed the President's Cancer Panel report on environmental toxins and cancer, I criticized one of the reactions to it, specifically that of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), even referencing a truly hilarious Daily Show clip in which Jeff Stier, Associate Director of ACSH didn't exactly come off looking particularly good. (Let's just leave it at that.) Apparently my criticism didn't sit too well with Gilbert Ross, MD, the Medical/Executive Director of ACSH, because he actually showed up in the comments, apparently wounded that I would point…
jgoldman | May 10, 2010Deborah Blum has plugged herself into the Borg, and brought her blog Speakeasy Science along with her for the ride.
She says:
Although my most recent book, The Poisoner's Handbook, is about murder and the invention of forensic toxicology in the early 20th century, my earlier works have focused on primate research, the science of affection, biology of gender differences, and even a 19th century scientific quest to prove that we live on after death. Does this variety of interests suggest a short attention span? Well, maybe. But it's more that I'm fascinated by the intersection of science and…