Culture
razib | April 2, 2008A few days ago The New York Times published an article, Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race. Who are the multiracials? Because of the history of black-white relations in the United States, and Barack Obama's own background, the term is often framed so that that dimension is front & center. But what do the numbers say? Census 2000 found that 2.4% of Americans selected more than one race; i.e., they identified as multiracial. The breakdowns were:
Rank
Multiple Race Selection
% of Total Pop.
% of Multiracials
1.
White × Some Other Race
0.78%
32.32%
2.
White × American…
voltagegate | March 31, 2008So Saturday was Earth Hour, and as if anyone reading this blog didn't know, lights were supposed to be cut off from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. to send a message to mysterious world power that the world was ready to cut down on energy use. Sort of.
I didn't honor the Earth Hour. We rarely have more than one light on in our home at a time on a daily basis because it's wasteful and increasingly expensive. I don't have a million electronic devices running 24/7, we walk to the store when we can (Heather can walk to work) and luckily, my commute is only about 15 minutes a day. In every daily activity, even…
razib | March 30, 2008At my other weblog a long post on religion:
On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran's In God's We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm are operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First,…
sheril | March 29, 2008This hit my inbox last night, and after a week that left Scienceblogs reeling, it's a much needed reminder that we all ought to stop taking everything so seriously and laugh at ourselves too now and then. I don't know who made this, but atheist, agnostic, or spiritual at all, it's absolutely hilarious! Listen for mention of expletives, framing, and references to that ridiculous new movie. PZ's already got it up at Pharyngula, and look out for Darwin raising the roof at the end!
sheril | March 28, 2008Today's the start of Canada's annual seal hunt and this year a new rule is in place to ensure seals are dead before they're skinned. Hunters must sever the arteries under a seal's flippers in an effort to make sure 'it's humane as it can be.' Seal pups 10-21 days old who haven't molted their downy white fur must be spared.
Animal activists call the hunt cruel with little supplemental income to sealers. The Fisheries Department says the practice is sustainable and well-managed, providing supplemental support for isolated fishing communities. The most recent survey in 2004 estimatese the…
razib | March 23, 2008Do minorities feel they have more in common with each other rather than whites? See Inductivist.
cmooney | March 21, 2008...are either dead, not scientists, or not American. They are:
Albert Einstein, 6 percent
Bill Gates, 6 percent
Al Gore, 6 percent
Stephen Hawking, 2 percent
Bill Nye the Science Guy, 2 percent
Ben Franklin, 1 percent
Thomas Edison, 1 percent
Of course, most Americans can't even identify a living scientist. And note that Bill Nye is actually an engineer.
Details on all this here.
Gee, does anybody else think American science has a massive PR problem?
razib | March 21, 2008It was in the 7th century of the Christian Era many of the events which shaped the course of Islamic sectarianism occurred. The major one you are aware of is the Shia-Sunni split; the reality of the origins of this schism and the way in which in manifests today is more complex than the cartoon cut-out you are normally presented, but I want to focus on a group which is outside of the Shia-Sunni dichotomy, the Ibadi. The Ibadi are descended from one of the assorted Kharijite sects. The Kharijites were extremists in the early history of Islam, they rejected Ali because he offered to parlay…
sheril | March 21, 2008In this month's Evolutionary Psychology, an article titled 'Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities and Emotional Commitment' out of The University of Texas at Austin, reports women ideally want partners who have all the characteristics they desire, but preferences can be influenced by their own attractiveness.
"When reviewing the qualities they desire in romantic partners, women gauge what they can get based on what they got," Buss said. "And women who are considered physically attractive maintain high standards for prospective partners across a…
razib | March 20, 2008How a Film Triggered a Global Panic:
But Balkenende is only doing what he believes is the best thing to do under the circumstances. Meanwhile, both the secretary general of NATO and Iran's deputy foreign minister have offered the Dutch advice on how to neutralize Wilders: by invoking Article 29 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
According to Article 29, individual rights must be limited when it comes to respect for the freedoms of others and where the public order makes this necessary. Ironically, the man who invoked this article is the deputy foreign minister of a country,…
sheril | March 20, 2008Last week, Inoculated Mind's Karl J. Mogel interviewed me about ScienceDebate2008, science blogging, sea cucumbers, the intersection of science and policy, and the truth about PZ Myers fear to debate me over the best marine invertebrate.
vs
No contest! Cukes would eat squid for breakfast...
I'm thrilled Karl chose the Firefly theme song and you can find me about 30 minutes in...
Listen to the mindcast here
razib | March 19, 2008Everyone on ScienceBlogsTM is talking about Arthur C. Clarke. I put up a short post where I noted his passing. I wasn't a super fan of Clarke's fiction, though I found it interesting and thought provoking. My personal favorite was the The City and the Stars, which tells the story of a future human civilization of immortal citizens who have turned away from the cosmos. Clarke, being a science fiction writer, does not depict this inward looking conservatism positively, though to some extent one might posit that it is a sort of Benthamite utopia.
And that is the significance of men like…
voltagegate | March 19, 2008
I heard this morning on the news that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed. NPR did a nice piece on him, if a bit focused on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke was a big influence on me and my interest in science and science fiction, and I thought it would be nice to have a permanent memorial of sorts, celebrating some of his own words.
Here's to the long, influential life of a great author and scientist.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of…
sheril | March 17, 2008Well it's St. Patrick's Day and what better way to celebrate than taking pause to consider the science of BEER!
According to History.com, Americans annually consume 21.6 gallons per capita. Today, you might be able to imbibe green-dyed beer at one of the nation's 47,984 drinking places--many among them Irish pubs.
Beer brewing has come down to a science. We've got approximately 40 flavors common to our two broad types of beer: lagers and ales. Ales include pale ales, amber ales, and stouts, with pilsners and bocks among the lagers.
So is all this drinking bad? Well, that depends. Everyone…
razib | March 16, 2008Hasidic actor walks off Portman movie:
First he couldn't hold Natalie Portman's hand - and now a Williamsburg Hasidic Jew-turned-actor has to give up his chance to hit it big in a Hollywood movie.
....
"I am backing out of the movie," said Karpen, a kitchen cabinet salesman. "It's not acceptable in my community. It's a lot of pressure I am getting. They [the rabbis] didn't like the idea of a Hasidic guy playing in Hollywood.
Sounds kind of meshugana to me. But there's more:
Then came the howls of protest about his unorthodox job.
"This is when I woke up and saw that I made a big mistake. My…
razib | March 16, 2008Daniel Larison says:
Reliable information is a bit hard to come by, but it seems as if the policy of increased Han Chinese colonisation in Tibet has finally run up against a violent popular backlash. I haven't anything very insightful to say about this, but it is one of the major foreign affairs stories this week and merits some mention here.
Made me wonder. Wikipedia says that the Tibetan Autonomous Region is still a little over 90% Tibetan. In contrast, in Xinjiang at least 40% of the population is Han. The main city, Urumqi is 3/4 Han. So comparatively Tibet is actually not much…
razib | March 14, 2008Our old friend Noah Feldman has a new article in The New York Times Magazine exploring the subtly of shariah law. I know that Feldman is exceedingly bright, and as someone raised as an Orthodox Jew and a law professor, he is very well placed to explore this topic and translate to a Western audience. There are many resemblances between Rabbinical Judaism and Islam when it comes to civil jurispurdience. But details do matter to me, and Feldman oversimplifies the nature of Islam and underestimates its boundary conditions in my opinion. For example, he says, "All Muslims would agree, for…
sheril | March 12, 2008
You know, here I try to have a nice relaxing week in New York City, and Governor Eliot Spitzer up and resigns...
Go figure.
razib | March 6, 2008Small kerfuffle about the fact that ScienceBlogsTM is so white. Some amusement that I am one of the white science bloggers. In any case, this comment caught my attention:
Second, it is no secret that minorities of most stripes are seriously underrepresented in science. Bloggers are even more pointedly underrepresented in the pool of scientists. (Hard to categorize the "pool" from which the non-working-scientist SBers are drawn, so let's not even go there). It takes no genius to see that even if minority scientists were more likely to blog that this pool would be pretty dang small.
This is…
razib | March 3, 2008Josh Donlan has joined Shifting Baselines. If you don't know who Donlan is, read Re-wilding North America. A few months ago I suggested that biologists who argue against mass extinction on basically aesthetic or normative grounds need to remember that these are distinct from consequentialist homocentric and professional rationales (i.e., we must preserve for medical research and we must preserve so we can study evolution).
I think Donlan does a good job being up front about his normative biases. I tend to share those beliefs and the values which inform those beliefs. I know that some…