Search Content

Displaying results 50251 - 50300 of 87947

Woo Math: Steiner and Theosophical Math

While waiting for I was innocently browsing around the net looking at elementary math curriculums. I want to be able to teach my kids some fun math, just like my dad did with me when I was a kid. So I was browsing around, looking at different ways of teaching math, trying to find fun stuff. In the process, I came across woo-math: that is, incredible crazy woo justified using crazy things derived from legitimate mathematics. And it's not just a bit of flakiness with a mathematical gloss: it's big-time, wacky, loonie-tunes grade woo-math: the [Rudolph Steiner Theosophical version of…

Haskell and Scheme: Which One and Why?

While I was waiting for stuff to install on my new machine, I was doing some browsing around the web, and came across an interesting article at a blog called "The Only Winning Move", titled [Scheme Death Knell?](http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/scheme-death-knell.html). It's not a bad article at all, but I disagree with its conclusions, and I thought it would be interesting to discuss why. The article was brought on by *another* blog post, this one at [Lambda the Ultimate](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) suggesting that someone translate Douglas Hofstadter's columns introducing…

Behold the Mammoth

As you may remember, a beautiful mammoth fossil was discovered in Serbia a couple of months ago. I promised I'd try to go and see it myself on my recent trip to Belgrade. And I did get to see it. But the story is more fun than just that.... ;-) First, I tried to get in touch with Dr.Miomir KoraÄ, the Director of the Archaeological park Viminacium to ask for permission to photograph the fossil as well as to interview him. After a couple of e-mail addresses bounced, I got what I think is the correct address...but got no response. Once I got to Belgrade, I asked my contacts there about this and…

Books: "The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family" by Mark O'Connel

It is great when you write a blog post about somebody, then that somebody shows up in the comments and clarifies his position thus starting an interesting conversation (both in the comments and via e-mail), then you realize that his book-signing tour is bringing that somebody to your town, so you go there and meet that somebody in person and have a great conversation, which inspires you to write yet another blog post - the one under the fold.... It's too late and I am too tired to write a long post on this, but I know I won't have time tomorrow. All dirty, scrungly and unshaven after a day…

More on sleep in adolescents

This is the third part of the series on the topic, from April 01, 2006... This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and in the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days. I have covered this issue a couple of times last week, e.g., here, here and here. Recently, Lance Mannion wrote an interesting post on the topic, which reminded me also of an older post by Ezra Klein in which the commenters voiced all the usual arguments heard in this debate. There are a couple of more details that I have not…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

Today's crop of new articles published in PLoS ONE is an emebarassment of riches. It's hard to make just a couple of picks out of 39 papers, but I'll try to restrain myself and you go and look around for the rest of them.... Chimpanzee Autarky: Economists believe that barter is the ultimate cause of social wealth--and even much of our human culture--yet little is known about the evolution and development of such behavior. It is useful to examine the circumstances under which other species will or will not barter to more fully understand the phenomenon. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are an…

Birds in the News 69 (v2n20)

Bateleur Eagle, Terathopius ecaudatus, photographed at a zoo in North Carolina. Click image for a much larger view. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Chris Losinger. Birds in Science Like bacteria, various farm animals have been cloned to produce a variety of protein drugs that benefit humans. These protein drugs can counteract medical conditions such as anemia and diabetes and even some cancers. However, these cloned animals are expensive, large, and most take years before they can produce these desired protein drugs in sufficient commercially-viable…

Putting the cracker in context ... again

Guest blogger Sastra: When I log into Pharyngula, as a matter of habit I usually glance at the little Recent Comment bar on the side, to see who has just responded to what. It helps to show which threads are particularly lively at the moment. Every now and then there's someone responding to an "old" post - one that's been otherwise inactive for days, weeks, months, or, in very rare cases, years. Given the recent major fuss caused by "Crackergate," we can still notice the occasional newcomer weighing in on the contents of PZ's kitchen garbage can. Presumably they've followed one of the many…

Love, Sex and War in the Seychelles

tags: researchblogging.org, Seychelles magpie-robin, Copsychus sechellarum, behavioral ecology, conservation biology, endangered species, population dynamics, ornithology, birds Seychelles magpie-robin, Copsychus sechellarum. Image: Tony Randell (Wikipedia) [larger view]. Every once in awhile, I read a paper that surprises me. Today, I read one of those papers, and it surprised me because it analyzes a phenomenon that is so obvious that I wonder why no one ever thought of studying it in a systematic and rigorous way before. I am referring to a paper that was just published by a team of…

Auf wiedersehen, Lindau!

Yesterday was my last day in Lindau, I'm sorry to say — it was also the day of the closing ceremonies on the island of Mainau, in case you were wondering why it was so quiet on the blog. I decided to leave all my electronical gear behind at the hotel and venture out for the last session with a stark naked brain. The day began with a walk down to the harbor to board the Sonnenkönigin, a very impressive ship that can only be inadequately be called a ferry. We were welcomed aboard with a glass of wine or a glass of juice if you felt 8 am was a little early to begin, and tables heaped with food.…

Finnish Emergency Medicine: One American's Experience

tags: medical emergency, Finnish Emergency Medicine, Malmin sairaala, Malmi Hospital, Töölön sairaalan, Töölö Hospital, Klinikka 22, Helsinki Finland Ambulanssi Töölön sairaalan tapaturma-aseman edessä, Helsingissä [Ambulance in front of Töölö hospital, Helsinki, Finland] Image: Hehkuviini, 29 January 2009 (Wikipedia commons) [larger view]. As you all might recall, I was going to visit Tallinn, Estonia yesterday. I spent a few hours looking at maps, photographs and reading about other people's visits, and generally getting very excited about this unexpected adventure. Alas…

How Life Began

As I said I would, I'm watching this History Channel documentary about the origin of life. How about a little live-blogging? 8:00. Ugh. It begins with a bunch of tripe from Coyne and Polkinghorne, claiming we need religion to understand the meaning of life. This is a bad, bad start, but I'm hoping it's nothing but a weasely preliminary that they will then abandon to get to some real science. There are lots of gimmicky special efects, but OK, let's get the general audience interested. I'm not too keen on the parade of talking heads, though: they keep trotting out different investigators,…

Judge Wilkinson on Gay Marriage Amendments

Color me surprised after reading this op-ed by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson. Long considered one of the most conservative judges on the Federal bench, he has been on virtually every short list for a Supreme Court nomination since 2001. Yet he comes out against both state and federal constitutional amendments against gay marriage. That's on top of the fact that it is highly unusual for a sitting judge to so boldly assert his opinion on an ongoing political controversy. But he makes some really good points, including one about how such amendments may very well backfire on those who advanced them:…

Classic Edition: Video Killed the Rhetoric Star

Poking through the archives to find some old physics posts to fill space while I'm away from the keyboard, I realize that back in 2002, I wrote a lot more about politics than I do now.This is largely because most of what I wrote about politics back then makes me cringe now. And, in fact, made me cringe about two weeks after writing it, which continues to be true of most of my writing about politics. Here's one of the rare posts that doesn't make me cringe (I'm not entirely happy with it, but it's not completely embarassing), on the subject of political rhetoric (which seems vaguely…

Curry, part 2: the papers

My general feeling about Judith Curry's stuff over at Collide-a-scape was that it was all tolerably vague. But there was one specfic. Over there, she copied Bishop Hill and proposed "Jones 1998 and Osborn and Briffa 2006" as key neglected papers. More directly she has proposed: 1. The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years Timothy J. Osborn* and Keith R. Briffa (Science 10 February 2006:â¨Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 841 - 844â¨DOI: 10.1126/science.1120514) 2. Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia Michael E. Mann and Philip D. Jones,…

Weekend Diversion: Holiday Roundup, Reviews and an out-of-this-world Giveaway!

"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending." -Fred Rogers I know it's still the middle of November, but I know that many of you are already thinking about holiday gifts for the lovers of physics, astronomy and the Universe in your life. People send me books and other educational materials throughout the year for review, and although they all have good and bad points about them, I'm…

How would you figure out whether Global Warming is real? Part 2.

"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." -Orison Swett Marden If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it's real or not? And if it is real, how would you figure out what humanity's role in it is? To answer this, I've decided to do a three-part series on how you'd go about figuring this out, putting aside all politics, economics, opinion and any other non-scientific factors. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here; today we're going to build on that and talk about what determines the temperature of a planet with an…

The 4 Jobs of a Referee in Peer Review

"From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: one, those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and two, those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review." -Isaac Asimov You'd never know it unless you were one of about six people in the entire world, but today is a landmark anniversary for me. Three years ago, I was on summer break from teaching at my local college, when I got an email from the Royal Astronomical Society in England. Image credit: Royal Astronomical Society, R102/0155 Herschel's Great Telescope. The UK-based society at the forefront…

Now that we've got the Higgs, what's next?

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been discovered at both detectors -- CMS and ATLAS -- at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Image credit: CERN / Particle Physics for Scottish Schools. For a little more on this, check out the earlier posts here celebrating Higgs week: The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs How the Higgs…

Why Should There Be Dark Matter?

"And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask." -Donald Johanson You can learn an awful lot about the Universe by asking it different questions than you asked about it previously. If all you ever used were your own senses, there would be an awful lot to learn, but you would be severely limited. Image credit: Kerri Rankin Thoreson. Even from the highest mountaintops, for example, you'd never be able to distinguish whether the Earth was round like a sphere or flat as a pancake,…

Will Clinton or Sanders win the Democratic Nomination?

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are viable candidates to win the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States. There are polls and pundits to which we may refer to make a guess as to who will win. Or, we could ignore all that, and let the process play out and see what happens. But, spreadsheets exist, so it really is impossible to resist the temptation of creating a simplistic spreadsheet model that predicts the outcome. But we can take that a step further and suggest alternate scenarios, based on available data. So I did that. I have removed the so called "Super…

WHO tells us about red meat and processed meat cancer risk?

See what I did there? As you know, the UN WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer has listed Red Meat as Group 2A (probably carcinogenic to humans) and processed meat at Group 1 (causes cancer). And everyone is upset. The most common reaction to these listings is to criticize WHO. The least common reaction to these listings is to learn what the listings are, what they mean, what they mean to you, to the meat industry, to cancer research, and all that. Here, I will try to provide some perspective on some of this. WHO is probably more likely to list something as cancer causing It is…

Are we watching NASA Astrophysics commit suicide?

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering." -Ben Okri Let me take you back 20 years, to the early 1990s. Back then, the world's most powerful particle accelerator was right here in the United States: Fermilab's Tevatron. With energies of one Tera-electron-Volt (hence Tevatron) per beam, and a beam of protons colliding with anti-protons, it was the most powerful accelerator in the world by a large margin. And even though plans for the Large Hadron Collider were in the works (with 7 TeV per…

Weekend Diversion: Opening up about religion and beliefs

"Dang it, I am sick and tired of everyone's asinine ideas about me. I'm not a redneck, and I'm not some Hollywood jerk. I'm something else entirely. I'm... I'm complicated!" -Hank Hill One of the most common questions I get from writing all I do about the Universe is whether or not I believe in a higher power, in any religion, whether I'm an atheist, etc. And up until this point, I've always declined to answer, on the grounds that it really shouldn't matter for what I do. But I've also declined to answer because, well, my own personal views don't really align very well with the views I've…

Defining the Big Bang

"As far as I see, such a theory [of the Big Bang] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. He may keep, for the bottom of space-time, the same attitude of mind he has been able to adopt for events occurring in non-singular places in space-time... Science has not to surrender in face of the Universe and when Pascal tries to infer the existence of God from the supposed infinitude of Nature, we may think that he is looking in the wrong direction." -Georges Lemaître Recently, David Dilworth has been getting…

Righting America: An odd book that you may like but that made me squirm

Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) is a strange book and I do not fully approve of it, even though I'm mentioned in it (not in a bad way). Here is the write-up of the book provided by the publisher: On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting…

3rd Response to Ilona

Ilona has responded to my latest response in two places. First, in a comment in response to that post, and second in a post on her own blog. Rather than posting response and counter-response as in past entries, I'm going to try and just subdivide this into the issues under dispute so that they'll be easier to follow. Issue 1: Is she conflating evolution with atheism/materialism and presuming they are essentially synonymous? I said in my first response to her that she is doing that. Her reply then: I have to think about this. Perhaps I do think that way...never looked at it from that…

Testability 3.0

In a recent posting, Rusty answers me once again on the issue of testability. He proposes an actual test for both creationism and evolution. This is what he says: But in the strictest sense of the term testability, a falsifiable prediction must be made in order for a scientific theory to be considered valid. Fair enough. So, although I am not associated with Reasons to Believe, I think I can make the following testable prediction from their model: Further research will reveal function for so-called Junk-DNA sequences. Although considered by evolutionists to be a closed case, the Creation…

The Personal Benefits of Doing Archaeology: Subversive subsurfaces.

In discussing the relevance of archeology to anything, there is an easy answer provided by my friend Peter Wells, a specialist in Culture Contact and the Central European Iron Age. Peter tells his students on the first day of class that "Archaeology is the study of everything that happened anywhere, any time, with any human beings that ever existed or exist now." And if you think that he is exaggerating, you don't know much about Archaeology. Recently, my friend Elizabeth Reetz has asked a more narrowly defined question: "What are the benefits of environmental education through…

Why I Will Vote For Rebecca Otto, and Not Matt Entenza

How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up.* DFL activists and party leaders were both surprised and annoyed when perennial candidate Matt Entenza filed at the very last moment to run for Minnesota State Auditor against sitting Auditor Rebecca Otto in this year’s primary. He claimed he would fight corporate giveaways at the local level and scrutinize spending on education, addressing the state’s achievement gap. Also, he would be nice to out-state local governments and not favor the Metro, because he was born out-state. Entenza has a habit of…

Can Recent Extreme Weather Be Attributed To Climate Change? U can help answer that question.

There are few different, related, ways in which climate change, including anthropogenic global warming, can cause extreme weather events. One is that climate zones move. This may result in "normal" weather for a different location occurring elsewhere. For example, if southern warm air system shift north, than the frequency of low and high temperatures, and their distribution throughout the year, can change. Another is the rise of entirely new conditions that were previously either rare or virtually unknown. One example of this might be the steering of Hurricane Sandy into the northeastern…

Some but not all Irish Celebrate Saint Patrick's Day

I am (half) ethnic Irish and I grew up in a city that was as Irish as the Blarney Stone itself. When I was a teen armed with a false ID and a strong sense of purpose (that being to get drunk with my friends) we'd cruise the bars, starting on or near Madison, Lark and State (where I generally lived) in our regular hangouts, but quickly working our way up to the nominal Irish Bars (they were all Irish bars, but only some had Irish names). Somewhere between GJ's and O'Heaney's we would find the bar where Charlie Tapps was hoofing his Irish Tap Dancing act and ... well, join in. If I recall…

What the hell is going on with Tularemia? or, a Rant about public health problems

It's situations like this that really irk me. I mentioned the tularemia detection in DC here almost 2 weeks ago, already annoyed that there hadn't been more information about it. There has been some discussion on the ProMed list, but it's hardly been a blip in the mainstream media. Yesterday, there was an article in Salon further discussing it. The background: On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue. They had arrived from all over the country for a day of speeches and concerts to…

Where is Everybody? (Part II)

“If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody?” -Stephen Webb It's one of the biggest conundrums in the Universe, known as the Fermi Paradox: if the Universe is so conducive to life, and if there are so many opportunities for it within our galaxy alone, why isn't there any evidence (outside of the History Channel) of extraterrestrial life? Image credit: Peter Essick, via National Geographic. Moreover, why haven't we been visited by some extraterrestrial intelligence? After all, given the fact that our Universe is nearly 14 billion years old, while our galaxy itself is only a…

The new swine flu: don't panic, but there is a very bad WCS

I have a handful of comments, mostly about how what you are seeing on the news is unimportant, and one comment about why you actually should worry. Within reason. The new Swine Flu has now been verified in nineteen US states, with 141 cases. Technically there is 1 death, but since the young girl who died actually caught the flu in Mexico (and came to Texas for treatment) it is hard to say how that should be counted. WHO characterizes the global spread of the flu as a "rapidly evolving" situation. As of an early morning update from WHO, the swine flu has been confirmed in Mexico (156…

Adam and Eve

A common theme at this blog is that I don't like blanket statements to the effect that science and religion are incompatible. The main problem I have is that “religion” means so many different things to different people that it is pointless to paint with such a broad brush. A secondary point is that science is vast, and most of it does not address anything of interest to the world's major religions. However, we can certainly make the more modest claim that specific findings of science are at odds with some commonly held religious views. In particular, evolution at least appears to conflict…

Hatchet Jobs

The book review I discussed in Wednesday's post is an example of a “hatchet job.” This is a literary form in which the goal is not merely to criticize an opponent's work, but to show that it is utterly worthless. Hatchet jobs are often marked by large amounts of snark and snideness, often at the expense of making a cogent argument. Such was the case in the essay at the heart of Wednesday's post. We were discussing William Deresiewicz's review of the book Jane Austen: Game Theorist, which was written by UCLA political scientist Mark Suk-Young Chwe. The review appeared in The New Republic,…

Do Mathematical Objects Exist?

I am slowly working on an article for Skeptical Inquirer about the ways in which religious apologists use mathematical arguments in their rhetoric. Among these arguments are the familiar creationist claims about probability and information theory, but there is also a family of arguments based on the effectiveness of mathematics itself. The basic argument is that mathematics is so useful for describing the world solely because God, in his benevolence, designed the world to be describable in that way. They will often cite Eugene Wigner's 1960 article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of…

Evolution is Not in Crisis

If I told you that evolution was in crisis, what would you think I meant? You would probably think I meant that the theory was on its way out. You would think that new discoveries had shown the untenability of evolution, and that biologists were in despair over their lack of a central organizing principle. You would think that maybe those creationists and ID folks weren't as crazy as you had been told. If you're an old hand at this you might even recall Michael Denton's 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which proved so inspirational to ID folks in the years before Philip Johnson…

New Atheism's Critics Need to Suck it Up

Continuing with the process of getting caught up on things I should have blogged about a while ago, let's take a look at this bizarre article from Bryan Appleyard, published in The Guardian. It is a contribution to a familiar genre, in which the New Atheists are criticized for being so mean and nasty: Two atheists - John Gray and Alain de Botton - and two agnostics - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I - meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered…

Brown on Good Religion

The Anglican Church has decided to apologize to Darwin for the rude manner in which their nineteenth century forebears responded to evolution. That's decent of them, I suppose. Spearheading the effort is Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs. In this article, entitled “Good Religion Needs Good Science,” he makes his case for the compatibility of evolution and Christianity. Alas, it is a sadly typical, and poorly argued, representative of the genre. Here's the opening: The trouble with homo sapiens is that we're only human. People, and institutions, make mistakes and…

One More Round With M and K

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have another of their New Atheist bashing essays up, this time in The Los Angeles Times. It is, alas, a dreadful piece of work. P. Z. Myers has already wieghed in here, as has Jerry Coyne here. The actual arguments in the op-ed are standard fare: The New Atheists are needlessly confrontational, they scare away moderates, blah blah blah. The novelty here is the bizarre, and very misleading, way they go about making their points. Even as they encourage mutual understanding and nonconfrontationalism, they are perfectly happy to ignore their own advice in…

The Other March of the Other Penguins

This is an archived post from October 2005. It is one of my more whimsical entries, but it does have aserious intent. The recent National Geographic film, title="Official movie website" href="http://wip.warnerbros.com/marchofthepenguins/">March of the Penguins, has generated a tremendous amount of controversy: an avalanche of deconstructionism that surely was not intended by its creator.  It seems that the controversy started when Micheal Medved claimed, in an NYT href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/13peng.html?ei=5090&en=36efde9c1de3fa22&ex=1284264000&adxnnl…

What's All the Blather About Road Rage?

A news item that was displayed prominently on Google News for a couple of days, which was picked up by hundreds of news outlets, was an item about href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_Explosive_Disorder" rel="tag">Intermittent Explosive Disorder.  One example is href="http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-rage06.html">here, in the Chicago Sun-Times.  This generated a lot of blogging: href="http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=intermittent+explosive+disorder&offset=50&operator=and&start_date=&end_date=&sort=date&max_results=10">…

Ant Research Roundup

Iridomyrmex reburrus Highlights from the recent technical literature: Savanna ants more resistant to fire than forest ants. Parr & Andersen. 2008. Fire resilience of ant assemblages in long-unburnt savanna of northern Australia. Austral Ecology. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2008.01848 Abstract: Tropical savannas and rainforests contrast in their flammability and the fire resilience of their associated species. While savanna species generally exhibit high resilience to burning, there is much debate about the fire resilience of forest-associated species, and the persistence of forest patches…

Singularitarianism?

Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age. That's the only way I can explain how his nonsense gets so much press and has such a following. Now he has the cover of Time magazine, and an article called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It certainly couldn't be taken seriously anywhere else; once again, Kurzweil wiggles his fingers and mumbles a few catchphrases and upchucks a remarkable prediction, that in 35 years (a number dredged out of his compendium of biased estimates), Man (one, a few, many? How? He doesn't know) will finally achieve immortality (seems to me…

Slow Science

The "slow movement" is a vast beast: there's Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and even, I kid you not, Slow Reading. These movements all begin with the premise that modern culture emphasizes ever increasing speed and convenience (cue the Eagle's: "Listen, baby. You can hear the engine ring. We've been up and down this highway; haven't seen a goddam thing.") The prescribed medicine is a moderance in life. More smelling of the roses (but watch out for Ringo), more taking the long road, and most definitely more chewing your food slowly. While the movement suffers from large doses of…

Communicating the Second Premise: Whether Obama or Bush, Values Drive Science Policy Decisions

This past weekend, a diversity of scholars and experts were called to Oregon for what might be described as a "three cultures summit" on climate change. The two-day deliberation included scientists, philosophers, poets, writers, social scientists, and filmmakers. Our focus, as Oregon State philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore defined it, was to figure out how to effectively communicate the "second premise on climate change," a set of moral and normative frameworks that can stir policymakers and the public to action. An overwhelming majority of scientists have concluded that climate change is an…

Look! Up in the Sky! Flying Hobbits!

In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As Ive detailed in previous posts, this claim has inspired a lot of debate, much which revolves around whether the fossils, found on the Indonesian island of Flores do in fact represent a new species, or whether they were human pygmies. This week a new study was published in the journal Biology Letters (link to come) that puts this debate in the proper evolutionary frame. The paper is not about hominids, however…

Towards a Post-Newtonian Era in Psychology: SIMPLE

It's been said that psychology is a primitive discipline - stuck in the equivalent of pre-Newtonian physics. Supposedly we haven't discovered the basic principles underlying cognition, and are instead engaged in a kind of stamp collecting: arguing about probabilities that various pseudo-regularities are real, without having any overarching theory. Some of this criticism is deserved, and some of it applies more widely to the life sciences. Perhaps the only underlying principle in biology is "why use just one solution when using many works just as well?" (Natural selection is no exception to…