Social Sciences
drorzel | May 13, 2009
Angels & Demons - The science behind the story
CERN explains what antimatter is really about.
(tags: science physics education movies particles)
Figgleton v. Ditchens « Easily Distracted
"As with many similarly well-worn discussions, Iâd just as soon review the available lines of argument about why secular or atheistic thinkers perhaps should have an interest in religion or spirituality which goes beyond being resolutely hostile, which takes religion to be an interesting subject to investigate with an open mind (rather than just finding new ways to arrive at familiar criticisms). Any…
pharyngula | May 13, 2009It's been a very long and busy day here in Los Angeles — I've had a tour of USC, I ate a King Torta, I sat around for a long time in very warm black robes, I had a wonderful dinner with some of the faculty here, and oh, yeah, I gave a commencement speech. These events are always fun…I'm not a big fan of ceremony and ritual, but commencement is one of those events where the students can't keep themselves from smiling, and families are all there whooping and cheering.
So, anyway, I've got to get some sleep, and then it's an early morning off to the airport to fly back home, so I'm just putting…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2009From my Australian friend Ian I got a good book, Inga Clendinnen's 2003 Dancing with Strangers. It's an account of one of world history's most absurd situations.
Imagine a tropical continent inhabited exclusively by fisher-hunter-gatherers at a low population density for tens of thousands of years. They're isolated from the rest of humanity. There is not a single permanent building on the continent. Nobody ever wears clothes. Nobody has ever heard of agriculture or stock breeding. Now watch a fleet of colonisation ships from an early industrial society arrive at the continent's south-east…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2009In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means.
If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I have seen it used in journals to mean those who are not religious, those who aim to the elimination of religion, and those who seek to exclude religion from the affairs of the political institutions. None of these are exactly right, as far as I can tell.
In Australia it seems to be a term used largely…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009The evolution blogosphere has lately been abuzz over the question of compatibility between science and religion. Jerry Coyne got the ball rolling with this post, criticizing the accommodationist views of the National Center for Science Education. He writes:
Here I argue that the accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend. By seeking union with religious people, and emphasizing that there is no genuine conflict between faith…
evolvingthoughts | May 11, 2009It is often the case that when non-academics, or even non-humanities academics, talk about my generic field, they refer to it as "arts", and mean by this the creative arts, like performing arts, crafts, and corporate accounting. So they justify the funding for the "arts" (or "the yartz", as a Barry Humpries character calls them) because we are supposed to entertain people and add to cultural life.
Those who know me know this is not what I do. I have been known to sing in the shower, but that is about it. So I was very pleased to see this piece in the Australian Higher Education section…
thusspakezuska | May 11, 2009In the midst of a vigorous discussion on my last post, reader Deatkin expressed his frustrations as to how he might engage in a positive manner in a discussion of feminist issues. In this case, it was not the hairy-legged man-hating feminazi Zuska who was intimidating; it was Comrade Physioprof.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the problem lies with me on this... In sum, I may simply be too immature (I'm 20 and a mere undergraduate) to think broadly and imaginatively enough on feminist issues in order for me to reach a conclusion that somebody such as [Comrade Physioprof] would find…
razib | May 11, 2009You might have already see this chart relating obesity to time spent eating in The New York Times:
The commentary accompanying the chart goes like so:
On Monday, in posting some of the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Society at a Glance report, I noted that the French spent the most time per day eating, but had one of the lowest obesity rates among developed nations.
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Jim Manzi dug deeper into the data and found something very interesting:
I recreated the original analysis (minus the inclusion of the OECD average as a data…
jjacquet | May 11, 2009This is a headline I can easily imagine will appear in the next decade or so.
As skyscrapers replace skylines and concrete replaces trees, I believe art is going to play an ever-greater role in society.
We know that nature has psychological benefits. Studies show that spending time in natural environments can 1) reduce stress and 2) focus attention (hence all the hoods in the woods programs). There is no doubt that art also has similar benefits*.
It is not just that film, theatre, and paintings are an urban phenomenon. They are an urban phenomenon in part because the urban environment…
drorzel | May 10, 2009
Disco Hayes: It's all Greek to me
"And then the joke hits me. It's witty, it's relevant ... ah, it's perfect. It happens so fast, before I know it my lips are making a coy, dry grin to indicate I'm about to be a smart alec. I figure the Doctor has a hundred physicals to perform, I might as well make a part of his day funny. Accordingly, I ask, "Would you say it's my Achilles Heel?" I swear I'm not making this up. It was so perfect. Contextually ... My entire body functions perfectly, but there's one specific area that may be a flaw that could lead to an injury? And it's my Achilles? Gold.…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2009There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows.
The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on:
The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…
drorzel | May 7, 2009You might think that Monday's discourse on thermodynamics in the Goldilocks story was the only children's story in which physics plays a role, but that's not true. Physics is everywhere in fairy tales.
Take, for example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a mysterious little man demands a terrible price for helping a miller's daughter spin straw into gold. This raises the obvious question of exactly how one would go about extracting gold from straw.
The use of the term "spin" might suggest the use of rotational motion-- if the straw were ground up very fine, and mixed with water, it might…
bcohen | May 7, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: So how is the use of evolutionary psychology to explain masculine actions not just quackery? Evolutionary biologists, and many who read science blogs, rightly announce and discredit the quackery of creationists or, more broadly, those who "deny" scientific truths. But, for the sake of argumentative symmetry, can one put that lens back onto evolutionary psychology? Besides the caveman issue, does that field…
jrosenhouse | May 6, 2009That's Michael Coulter, production editor for The Sunday Age. Commenter mrcreosote left a link to a magnificent essay by Coulter in in my post of two days ago. It's so good I felt it deserved a post of its own. Let's have a look.
MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age's Faith column, out of professional duty. Most weeks I am left perplexed, unable to reconcile what I am reading with anything I see around me.
What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and…
worldsfair | May 6, 2009There a nice piece over that the New Scientist (hat tip to Rebecca), that gathers a number of comments from academics in philosophy, sociology, education, law, and literature into how relevant C.P. Snow's seminal essay is today. Here's a sampling from A.C. Grayling:
One of the major problems identified by C. P. Snow in lamenting the gulf between science and literary culture was that almost everyone in a position of power in society was a product of literary culture, with too little understanding of or sympathy for science. That remains a problem, one exacerbated, if anything, by the rapid…
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
terrasig | May 5, 2009I wanted to contribute to today's discussion of anti-vaccinationist, pseudoscience-pawning Jenny McCarthy being given not only an appearance on Oprah but, as reported by Orac, a deal with Oprah's production company for her own show.
The public attention that Jenny McCarthy's rants have gotten were bad enough. But, now, to have the soapbox of one of the most influential names in society?
I had to go outside the science blogging community with this. So, I wrote to the Philadelphia attorney who writes the award-winning blog, Field Negro.
Good evening, Counselor,
I know that your view of Oprah…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2009One of the disturbing trends over the last decade, give or take, has been how ethical behavior has become synonymous with "a conviction overturned on appeal." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's ethical. With that, I give you Matthew Yglesias (boldface mine; italics original):
They're not actually saying that what they did was right. Rather, they're saying that it was selfish but also legal. ...one is within one's rights, under certain circumstances, to insist on one's ability to inflict suffering on vast numbers of people in order to make more money for your rich self and…
denialism | May 1, 2009In order to help spread the word about a dangerous altie quack and HIV/AIDS denier who is responsible for probably hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from AIDS in Africa, I'm reproducing The Doctor Will Sue You Now, here on denialism blog.
The chapter, removed from Ben Goldacre's new book Bad Science due to libel litigation from the quack, Matthias Rath, in response to Goldacre's description of his activities in Africa and around the world. Another profile of a crank, this one goes a long way to show the extent to which denialism can damage a country and even cost thousands of…
cwilcox | May 1, 2009I just read this on Denialism Blog, and simply had to send it out to all of you, just in case you don't subscribe to that awesome blog. What follows will scare and anger you - at least, that was my reaction. Some people are so self-deluding that they are willing to kill millions of people to support their own twisted mindset. Said people are sick, in that should-be-criminally-responsible-for-it kind of way.
The following is a chapter, removed from Ben Goldacre's new book Bad Science due to libel litigation from the quack, Matthias Rath, in response to Goldacre's description of his activities…