Miscellaneous
mixingmemory | May 26, 2007Last night, I took my son to his favorite diner to celebrate the end of 3rd grade. Just before our dinner arrived, a song came on the radio and he stopped talking, listened for a second, and said, "Hey, it's my favorite song!" This is what was playing:
His revelation was timely, since today is Mile's Davis' birthday. Now, I don't think anyone's done a study on the relationship between music and personality in childhood, but I figure picking one of the best songs on one of the greatest albums of the 20th century as your favorite at 9 years old is a good sign.
cmooney | May 25, 2007I've had fun following comments and feedback from Wednesday's series on Framing Science. Many of you bring up excellent points and I particularly enjoy hearing from folks who do not wholeheartedly agree. It's also encouraging that other science bloggers including PZ Myers and Coturnix are open to re-examine the concept from a different perspective.
A special thanks to readers who challenge my ideas and in doing so, open up the discussion to new potential trajectories and dimensions. Thought-provoking remarks and debate are the best way to develop a broader understanding all around. And…
cmooney | May 24, 2007Today at 2:22 pm, I'll have circumnavigated our sun exactly 27 times. I love discussions revolving around that spectacular star of ours, because it's capable of altering all sorts of perspectives and intimately tied to the future of our home planet. Fast forward about 3.5 billion years and the sun's luminosity is expected to increase by 40%. Like Paris Hilton *didn't* coin, "That's Hot!" By then, does the cause of climate change matter? Unlikely we're still emitting CO2 anyway. And computer models even suggest the loss of the oceans. Hard to imagine that version of our world, but I expect I'…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007Two other items caught my eye while I was slumming over at Town Hall. First, here's William Rusher warning us all about the pernicious influence of junk science:
As regular readers know, I seldom review books in these columns, preferring to leave that important job to professional reviewers. But every once in a while a book comes along that illuminates a major political problem so effectively that I cannot resist calling it to the attention of thoughtful readers.
What book would that be, Mr. Rusher?
That is the case with Tom Bethell's “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” recently…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007Well, I guess it's about time I weighed in on the Gonzalez situation.
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, but he is best known as the coauthor (with Jay Richards) of The Privileged Planet, published by Regnery. Richards and Gonzalez present a novel, and especially vapid, gloss on the old fine-tuning argument. When I attended the big ID confab in Knoxville some weeks ago, one of the featured talks was by Richards, specifically discussing this book. I discussed some of the problems with their arguments here.
Gonzalez recently came up for tenure at ISU, and was…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2007Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my call-up to the bigs! Since then I have done 339 posts and have received over 6100 comments. Seems like a good opportunity to thank Seed for putting together this little party, and to all the readers and commenters who have shamelessly enabled my blogging addiction. Here's to another year!
jrosenhouse | May 9, 2007Robert Farley, writing at Tapped, has an excellent review of the new Spider-Man movie. I think he perfectly summarizes the film's good points and bad points. He makes the point, exactly right in my opinion, that it's not that Spider-Man III is unusually bad, it's that Spider-Man II was unusually good. I've placed two excerpts below the fold:
I suspect that much of the negativity about the third film stems from how poorly it stands up to the second. I think that we have an Empire Strikes Back problem. Thinking people everywhere understand that Empire was, by far, the best of the original…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2007I saw Spider-Man Three this weekend. I liked it. A lot.
The critics have been panning it pretty severely, but they are wrong. They've been complaining that there is too much CGI, that there are too many supervillains, and that the story is unconvincing. Actually, I was impressed by how restrained the film is. In a two and half hour movie there are really only a handful of big action sequences. Unlike many recent action movies, people actually talk to each other in this one. And, c'mon! The CGI is pretty spectaular. The Sandman effects alone are worth the considerable price of…
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2007The last week or so, some of you may have noticed that you submit a comment and it doesn't show up in the comments thread right away. I'm assuming you get the message that the comment is being held for approval by the blog owner. At least I hope so.
Please note: you are not being singled out for any special treatment. Usually, comments with more than one URL in them will be automatically flagged as possible spam and shunted to a special folder for me to review and approve. Unfortunately, my checking in is sporadic and sometimes a comment in holding gets held up for a long time. I do…
jrosenhouse | April 26, 2007I am happy to report that the little dust-up between Shelley Batts and Wiley has ended peacefully. Wiley has apologized for their rather heavy-handed treatment of the matter. When I read the good news over at Shelley's blog, I had a number of reactions. Happily Rob Knop has saved me the trouble of having to write them down.
So congratulations to Shelley for weathering the storm and emerging victorious, and an extra loud “Boo! Hiss!” to the blogger who criticized her for caving to Wiley's pressure by taking down the disputed graphics. It's easy to talk tough when you're not the…
jrosenhouse | April 25, 2007In this post, my SciBling Shelley Batts, of Retrospectacle, analyzed a recent paper claiming that fruit becomes healthier when consumed with alcohol. Something about boosting the antioxidant properties of the fruit.
Interesting stuff. Even more interesting was what happened next. The paper in question was published in Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, published by Wiley. In writing her post, Shelley reproduced one table and one graph from the actual paper.
That provoked the following e-mail from Wiley:
The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a…
mixingmemory | April 25, 2007In case you haven't heard about it already, fellow ScienceBlogger and neuroblogger Shelley has been threatened by lawyers for using images from a journal article in her blog posts. Now, I do this all the time (check two posts back), because the whole point of posting about research is so that people who probably aren't reading the cog sci literature can learn about and evaluate theories and studies. My main reason for blogging is promoting this stuff, not stealing journals', authors', or publishers' thunder. Letting people see figures that are a pain to reproduce in Excel or R (like large…
thusspakezuska | April 23, 2007Hello again, everybody. I've not exactly been blogging up a storm lately, have I? Well, I am feeling better this week so I'm hoping to get back to a more regular blogging schedule - in between sneezes and sniffles from spring allergies. It's absolutely gorgeous here today and I can practically hear the hostas sprouting up and the tulips unfolding. Most of the bulbs I planted last fall came up this spring, including a few I don't remember planting. I am afraid my record-keeping last fall left a little something to be desired. Basically, my record-keeping consists of the labels from the…
jrosenhouse | April 16, 2007In light of the events today at Virginia Tech, I'm suddenly not in the mood to talk about framing, or Imus, or the Pope's statement on evolution. At this point the death toll is up to thirty-three people.
Blacksburg, VA, where Tech is located, is a roughly two-hour drive from my home in Harrisonburg. I just spent the weekend at a local math conference that included quite a few faculty members and students from Tech. I made some new friends, and renewed some old aquaintances. I do not know if any of them were directly affected. It's hard to imagine that after the high spirits and light…
mixingmemory | April 14, 2007I recently made my third attempt at Finnegan's Wake, and as with the first two, failed miserably. At some point I'm going to decide, once and for all, that I will never be able to read that God forsaken book. It helps that I heard this the other day (via The Valve). I figure if the author reads his own book, and I can't understand half of what he's saying, there's no point in trying to read his damn book.
mixingmemory | April 10, 2007Everyone should stop by and tell Richard of Philosophy, etcetera congratulations. He was accepted by pretty much every top analytical philosophy program in the U.S., and after a whirlwind tour of the states, has chosen Princeton.
Richard's was one of the first blogs I read (and I think he was one of the first to read mine), so when he's a world famous philosopher in a few years, I'll be able to say, "I knew him when..."
mixingmemory | April 3, 2007Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I've got some half-written posts that should be interesting, but between baseball 4 day a week, and an unhealthily large number of current research projects, I'm completely exhausted. So instead of finishing one of those half-written posts tonight, I'm just going to be lazy and link you to two recent discussions between Sam Harris and religious folk.
Sam Harris v. Andrew Sullivan
Sam Harris v. Rick Warren
I don't think Harris, Sullivan, or Warren really come out of these discussions looking that great, but that could just be because I disagree with all of…
cmooney | March 27, 2007My last Huffington Post entry, about why many Republicans reject mainstream climate science, now has 125 comments. That's gotta be a personal best for me as a blogger. Of course, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there are global warming "skeptics" over there who post comments and tick everybody else off.....