Miscellaneous
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006The New Republic's Jonathan Chait doesn't like Delaware:
Last night I drove home from northern New Jersey to Washington and it went smoothly enough except that, as customarily happens on such journeys, we hit a wall of traffic halfway through. What was the cause of it? Delaware. Yes, Delaware, that sinkhole of inequity and greed. Delaware, that backward, corrupt parasite state. Delaware, the great underappreciated scandal of modern American life.
Those of us who do not live in Delaware are robbed blind by those who do in numerous ways. Probably the most consequential of those is its lax…
mixingmemory | December 20, 2006More than a week ago, Razib wrote an unfortunate little post in which he displayed all sorts of poor judgment. Since it's short, I'm going to quote the entire post here, including his updates.
The virginity thread generated a lot of response. The virgin lot of the nerd, ah, so cliche. And yet now I'm having a really weird moment, I'm at the local wine bar and a very attractive hostess1 is recommending books in the science fiction genre to another (far less attractive) hostess. So far I've heard Ender's Game, Hyperion and Snow Crash tossed off as appropriate for a "newbie." Is this the Twlight…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006Winter break is the time to complete all of those annoying chores you've been putting off during the term. For example, yesterday my car passed its inspection. Woo hoo!
And today, Isaac and Emily passed their inspection. By which I mean the vet found that they're in good health (though Isaac, like his owner, really needs to lose some weight.)
Vet day is always very exciting. First comes the ritual of wrestling the cats into the carrier. I have a large carrier, really intended for small dogs, that comfortably fits both of them. I figure they take some comort from knowing they are not…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006From the BBC:
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.
Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web…
mixingmemory | December 10, 2006So far, Mixing Memory is not in last place in the voting for "best science blog"! That's saying something, given that this blog is probably the lowest traffic blog on the list by a rather large margin. If you want to vote to insure that Mixing Memory finishes second to last, instead of last, you can go here (if you've already voted once, that's OK; you can vote once every 24 hours).
mixingmemory | December 10, 2006Apparently, there's another new brain blog on ScienceBlogs, though I only learned about it because Bora linked to it. So, a warm welcome to Neurontic.
While I'm linking to other SBers, Shelley of Retrospectacle has a nice interview with Irene Pepperberg, the parrot lady. It looks like Dr. Pepperberg could use some help, funding-wise, so if you're still not sure what to get people for Christmas, you might think about buying them an Alex t-shirt.
Finally, in comments to yesterday's post on cussing and memory, Michael of Peripersonal Space mentioned this paper in which memory for the location…
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006You can go here to get the links for all the categories, or here to vote for the best science blog. You can vote once a day, apparently. Voting ends December 15.
mixingmemory | December 7, 2006Is it wrong that I find this absolutely hilarious? It may be my son's new favorite song, too.
Someone should pass this on to David Chalmers. That zombie clearly exhibits all the signs of consciousness.
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's participated in the discussion in the previous post, and to anyone who adds to that discussion. I may disagree with you, and you with me, and we may even do so pretty vehemently, but I've been impressed with the level of the discussion (a rarity, in the blogosphere, especially on a topic as heated as religion), and I'm grateful for all of the insightful points people have made (even those on the other side).
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006PZ Myers on religion in general, and not just fundamentalism. I think this will be my last post on the topic for a while (I can hear your cheers), because Dr. Myers has shown the ignorance and bias in the "Churchill" position so well that I don't need to add anything else.
"Nuance"? Sweet jebus, where is the nuance in religion and superstition and piety that we're supposed to defend?
I keep hearing these claims that religion is really far more nuanced and sophisticated and clever than we give it credit for, but seriously, every time I turn around and look at the actual practice of the silly…
mixingmemory | December 4, 2006It seems some people are having trouble wrapping their minds around what it means to be a Neville Chamberlain atheist, while other people are just making up any definition they can to make anyone who's not a hyper-scientistic Dawkinsian look bad. Recall that I think the Chamberlain-Churchill distinction is b.s., but since fundamentalists of any sort, including fundamentalist atheists, have a tendency to see things as "either-or," with the eithers and the ors defined by the fundamentalists themselves, it doesn't look like the Chamberlain label is going away anytime soon. So I thought I'd write…
mixingmemory | December 3, 2006Since there's a discussion of profanity out there in the blogosophere, I feel justified in asking the following question:
Is it just me, or does Louisiana look like it's giving the bird to the Caribbean?
Maybe Plaquemines is the Cajun way of saying "va te faire foutre."
Oh, I should connect this to cognitive science. Umm... is my tendency to see obscene gestures in geography related to other people's tendency to see religious icons in, say, pastries?
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great…
mixingmemory | November 26, 2006You've probably all heard about the Beyond Belief series, in which scientists give talks about the conflict between science and religion, as well as the science of religion. I've only watched the cognitive scientists (and Dawkins, for reasons I'll mention below), so far, and that's probably all I'll watch. If you're looking for them, V.S. Ramachandran is in Session 4, Patricia Churchland is in Session 5, Elizabeth Loftus is in Session 6, Mahzarin Banaji and Scott Atran are in Session 7, Atran is in Session 8, Paul Churchland participates in the discussion in Session 9, and Ramachandran is in…
mixingmemory | November 13, 2006I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. I still look upon the time I saw them live in 1994 as a religious experience. Unlike many Floyd fans my age, though, I prefer their early albums to their later ones (up to and including Obscured by Clouds, but especially A Saucer Full of Secrets, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, and Meddle). That means I'm also a huge Syd Barrett fan. Barrett's story, as I'm sure you know, is a pretty sad one. His musical career was cut short (Pink Floyd's first album was released in 1967, and he was, for all intents and purposes, out of the music industry by 1972) as a result of what…
jrosenhouse | November 10, 2006I'm not in the mood for a long blog entry today, so allow me simply to echo Orac's thoughts on the debut of the trailer for Spider-Man 3. It does, indeed, appear that it will rock.
The feature villain this time around is Sandman. I always liked him in the comic books. As I recall, he shows up for the first time in issue four of The Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man defeated hm by sucking him up into a vacuum. I trust they will come up with something less hokey for the movie.
Of course, Sandman later had a run-in with Hydro Man. The two inadvertently got fused together to form a gigantic,…
mixingmemory | October 31, 2006Via Amy Perfors at the Harvard statistics blog, Social Science Statistics Blog, I learned of the Jeffrey-Lindley Paradox in statistics. The paradox is that if you have a sample large enough, you can get p-values that are very close to zero, even though the null hypothesis is true. You can read a very in depth explanation of the paradox here.
I don't find this either surprising or worrisome, as Perfors does. While I'd never heard of the paradox before (it's really pretty cool, if you're into statistics or Bayesian reasoning), everyone who's taken a statistics course understands the perils of…
thusspakezuska | October 23, 2006Got this from Kate, who got it from Coturnix, who was apparently sent there by Shelley....Factorizer!
I swear I am not making this up. This is what it gave me the first time:
"If God had a name, it would be Zuska."
The second time it said "Zuska plays Minesweeper with real mines." Hee.
It changes every 30 seconds so I have no idea what you will see when you look below. Refresh the page and it will change again.
mixingmemory | October 19, 2006I know you're probably not looking for movie recommendations from an anonymous cognitive psychologist, but if you haven't seen