Culture
cmooney | March 4, 2006This is just a post to thank everyone for the many, many great comments on my recent post about Firefly. As you can see, I am doing my part to evangelize for Firefly/Serenity and spread the word to a few more viewers. (My brother will be getting all 5 DVDs as a gift soon.) In this way, we can all help make Fox look just a little bit stupider for canceling the show.
In this respect, I was particularly delighted to see that the Firefly series DVDs have been hovering all week in the top 5 on Amazon, despite the fact that they have been out since late 2003 (!). On Amazon there are also well over…
razib | March 3, 2006USA Today has coffee shop rankings up. I've been to two on the list, Stumptown in Portland, and Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village. All I've got to say is that Caffe Dante is weak compared to Stumptown's muddy blend. They should have kept World Cup on the list. Frankly, Starbucks was the best coffee I found in New York. Pacific Northwest representing!
cmooney | March 2, 2006Best sci-fi television drama ever, or damn near to it: Firefly. I have a confession to make: I have recently become one of the many obsessive fans of this prematurely-killed Fox series, probably the only unsuccessful television show ever to be reincarnated as a big time movie (the recently released Serenity).
I completely agree with all the other junkies out there that what makes this story so great is the characters and their interactions. It's kind of like Friends set onboard the Millennium Falcon, but with a lot more action thrown in (and much smarter humor).
But what's probably best…
razib | February 23, 2006I've been blogging a lot about "religion" recently, but I haven't reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide range of combinations of traits, some more common than others. One of the problems addressing this topic is that everyone has a different perception of the subject, a perception shaped by their own cognitive and social biases.
Here are a few of the axes which I believe religion explores:
1) The…
razib | February 21, 2006A few days ago Janet posted on the importance of critical faculties in science in response to a series of posts by PZ and John on how we get the public to understand science (mostly evolution in this case). Critical thinking is obviously important in science, as is experimentation, model building, reproducibility, etc. etc. If you are a fan of Karl Popper or Thoms Kuhn (or other less luminous figures like Imre Lakatos) you have an idea about how science should or does work.
All these thinkers capture essential components of Science, but I think one important point which is often forgotten…
razib | February 19, 2006Update: Link fixed.
I have a long post on my other website commenting on Amartya Sen's new piece in The New Republic, Chili and Liberty. First paragraph below:
Amartya Sen has an interesting piece in The New Republic titled Chili and liberty: the uses and abuses of multiculturalism. Sen's piece addresses the paradox in the interpretation of "multiculturalism" in some quarters where it implies separation of distinct cultures into a "plural monoculturalism." That is, a nation where separate ethnic and religious groups live apart within the same polity. A pre-modern form of this system would…
razib | February 19, 2006OK, a question. Imagine that you are the only adult left in the world and everyone else is under the age of 6. Assume helper robots obviate the need to micromanage the lives of the children, toddlers and infants in your care. You can choose one book from each of the disciplines of humanity to educate these children. Ignoring your own field of specialization, which book would you choose for "science"? You have 30 seconds!
My answer: I initially considered The Principia by Isaac Newton, but upon 15 seconds of reflection concluded that that might be too high of a level and the tome might…
razib | February 18, 2006Janet Stemwedel has a long post which elucidates various angles of the Cohen & algebra story. I agree with many of Janet's points, and I tend to believe that knowing algebra is an important necessary precondition for being a well rounded modern intellect. But I want to emphasize modern, I've mentioned before that John Derbyshire is writing a history of algebra, Unknown Quantity. Derb mentioned to me that though the Greek mathematician Diophantus lurched toward symbolic algebra 2,000 years ago, his work did not lay the seeds for any further developments because a scientific culture did…
razib | February 18, 2006A friend of mine told me that they thought my comment on Richard Cohen's infamous algebra column was pretty lame and lightweight. I had to plead that time was at a premium when I threw that up there, and a lot of the ground had been covered. But, as someone who writes posts titled 8th grade math for the rest us, I figure I should add a bit more, and that bit is this: knowledge of algebra is sufficient to balance the "two sides" to every issue phenomenon. Algebra allows one to swim out of the sea of noise and impute a sense of proportionationality to various alternative defensible…
razib | February 16, 2006Richard Cohen's column dismissing the importance of algebra is so plainly stupid that it beggars the imagination. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that mathematics is important in "practical" contexts because it is a collection of unified techniques which happen to have wide ranging utility in the world around us. But Cohen's point that kids should take more history and English is actually a good one, technique must be married to material, tools without tasks are as worthless as tasks without tools. In other words, more scientists need to be aware of the humanities and more…
razib | February 1, 2006From the BBC: Muhammad cartoon row intensifies: Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. I have posted comments over at Ed Brayton's weblog on this topic, they are verbose, but they encapsulate many slivers of my thinking. I will assume you know the general outline of this story, so, from the BBC piece:
Newspapers across Europe are reprinting the offensive cartoons to show solidarity with the Danish paper.
An editor at a French newspaper was sacked over this by the owner, his…
cmooney | January 25, 2006Just imagine the uproar we would hear if every time a Jew was featured in a Hollywood film or mini-series, he or she converted to Christianity by the end. Such a situation would be intolerable and widely denounced, and rightly so. Yet Hollywood does precisely the same thing to another minority group--atheists and agnostics--and nobody even makes the slightest fuss about it.
It happens again and again: In supernatural thriller after supernatural thriller, an atheist/agnostic character is gradually brought around to a belief in forces beyond. In a UFO flicks, former "skeptics" repeatedly…
razib | January 24, 2006A few weeks ago Edge.com asked prominent thinkers what their Dangerous Idea was. The poser of the question was Steven Pinker, and he's on Radio Open Source today (you can listen on the web, wait 'till 7 PM EDT). I offered my 2 cents in the comments, the basic gist of which was that the explosion of information and the ability to access it in the modern world makes secure understanding and knowledge more difficult than in the past. Professionally obfuscatory paradigms like Post Modernism and neo-Creationism can arise precisely because trust and good faith are more crucial in a world where…
cmooney | January 24, 2006PZ caught Kurt Vonnegut mouthing pro-ID nonsense recently. This is deeply depressing. Myers attributes it to Vonnegut getting pretty old and addled, but I'm not so sure.
Back in 1998, Vonnegut showed up at Yale University for a master's tea at my college, Silliman. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I remember him making a remark about rattlesnakes that suggested that he thought in a "design" sort of way. I don't recall precisely what Vonnegut said, or what question he was responding to. But I distinctly remember him likening rattlesnake fangs to syringes, in that they are ideally "…
cmooney | January 23, 2006Some of you may have seen that there is a vampire-werewolf movie in theaters starring Kate Beckinsale. The title is seriously disturbing: Underworld Evolution. I haven't seen the movie yet, although it sounds like my kind of trash. But how much do you want to bet that it misuses or distorts the scientific concept of evolution? If I know anything about these schlocky films (and I do, having seen far too many of them), I'd say the chances are quite high......
cmooney | January 20, 2006I went and saw a movie the other night, and in the process also wound up seeing an ad that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It's for Coca Cola, and it involves cute penguins and surprisingly benign polar bears getting together to enjoy fizzy beverages at the North Pole.
Now, the conceit of polar bears and penguins being buddies--rather than the former devouring the latter--is ridiculous enough. But let that pass; this is, after all, a cartoonish ad campaign obviously aimed at kids.
What troubles me more, though, is the blatant ignorance the ad both embodies, and spreads, about…
cmooney | January 16, 2006I know I'm about a year late on this, but it was only recently that I finally watched the notorious Sci-Fi Channel version of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea cycle. LeGuin has complained at length about how the adaptation destroyed her novels. I heartily agree. The Sci-Fi version simply invents, out of whole cloth, weird subplots and characters that don't exist at all in the books, for no apparent reason. Kargad warriors sacking the wizard stronghold of Roke? Come on.
The Sci-Fi adaptation also blends two different Earthsea books together so that their events happen simultaneously, instead of…