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razib | October 10, 2006Via Afarensis I got word that Four Stone Earth, an anthropology carnival, has just debuted. I will probably participate in the future.
razib | October 7, 2006A Firefox 2.0 preview is available now. Most of my plugins and extensions seem to work fine.
razib | October 6, 2006Richard Dawkins is going to be on Science Friday. It should be easy to find a live internet feed if you are on the web at work. It's for the second hour (i.e., 12-1 PM for me here on the West coast).
Update: An MP3 file of the interview.
razib | October 5, 2006Radio Open Source had a show on about "free will" with a foody focus inspired by Clay Shirky's Edge response, "Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account." Megan McAardle offers a good skeptical and rational rebuttal to the emotive talking points spouted by some of the guests, nevertheless, I do think that libertarians (and I still consider myself one) must face up to the reality that advances in the science of the mind inevitably lead to "applications" which manipulate our mental architecture with greater precision and prediction than anything imagined by…
razib | October 4, 2006Bora is having some non-trivial financial deficits right now, if you read his content & enjoy his blog and have a local surplus, considering redistributing it via PAYPAL (click the icon on the clock blog) or via AMAZON.
razib | September 26, 2006Update: Make sure to read the comments, some of them are worthy of posts.
John Wilkins has a long response to my post Cultural Cladistics. Now, John knows several orders of magnitude more about systematics than I do...so he emphasized the cladistics aspect and traced out the misimpressions, fallacies and problems. He begins:
He repeats the usual [redacted] canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of…
razib | September 26, 2006Along with Dave I would like to bring to your attention AlphaPsy, a blog devoted to the naturalistical paradigm in cultural anthropology, drawing deeply from the well of cognitive science. Posts like this, exploring the cognitive grounding of our understanding of biology, are typical. Also, I want to point to you this post over at alt.muslim titled The Evolution of Monotheism. I am generally skeptical of the existence of a "religious Left" in Islam, but only because I believe they are thin on the ground, not because they are non-existent. This post is witness to the existence of such a…
razib | September 21, 2006
Pure Nerd
82 % Nerd, 17% Geek, 30% Dork
For The Record:A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.
The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences…
razib | September 21, 2006Mike Dunford has the low down on how to help by doing something. If you have a blog, consider linking and bringing attention to this matter. Mass action is crucial!
revere | September 20, 2006Nature's senior correspondent Declan Butler is one of the print science journalists who understands the internet and its power. He is now part of an effort to see if it can save six lives.
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. On 28 August, when the prosecution was scheduled…
razib | September 20, 2006John Derbyshire reviews a book about Christian Europe slaves in North Africa. I've read that book, and it's pretty good, though one should also check out Islam's Black Slaves as a companion.
razib | September 15, 2006The other day I was IMing a friend of mine. She's a college graduate with two liberal arts degrees. Anyhow, I accused her best friend of racism. See, what happened was that I asked how many men this woman had dated. My friend stated 6 men. I asked if they were all white. My friend said, "Yes, all white." Well, I was like, "She's racist, she only dates white men!" Well, this wasn't convincing, so I was like, "Well, there's only a 12% expectation that she would date 6 straight white men!" Now, here, my friend was intrigued, "What, where'd you get that number?" I was like, "Well, 70% of…
razib | September 11, 2006Do you remember the famous saying by which began Martin Niemöller "First they came for the Jews...." The moral is that evil targets the weak and the vulnerable and works its way up the food chain. By safeguarding the rights of the weakest of us we safeguard all our rights. By humanizing the least of us we reaffirm what makes humanity precious.
This week there has been talk of banning women from praying near the Kaaba. I am not a believer, but I can see how religious women would become upset by this exclusion. The rationale was simple: there was overcrowding which was causing a public…
razib | September 11, 2006You might remember the Donors Choose drive a few months ago. It worked out well, we here at Gene Expression raised nearly $2,000! Now that it's back to school time, I encourage you to give if you can. A few of my projects are still underfunded (though it is nice to see that most of them have hit 100%) and there are many back to school causes that are worthy. Thanks for reading this blog, and thanks very much for helping out!