News
illconsidered | April 29, 2008From DemocracyNow!, specifcally this story, we get the charmingly humble statement from Justice Antonin Scalia I used as this post's title.
What is his view? Torture is not punishment so it is not actually prohibited by the US constitution's eigth ammendment, forbidding the infliction of "cruel and unusual punishment".
It is fascinating and alarming to see the intellectual gymnastics amoral people go through to deny plain and simple reality. Watch the clip here (requires RealPlayer) or go to Democracy Now's April 29th broadcast, around minute 12.
And by the way, the answer to his question "…
dmunger | April 28, 2008Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate further.
Unfortunately for all those involved, those "decisions" very likely weren't carried out through the "deciders'" own volition, but instead were precipitated through the confluence of genetic inheritance and circumstance.
Consider this post from Neuroanthropology, for example, which dissects a forthcoming publication in Nature…
dmunger | April 27, 2008CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
We should be able to include any submissions received before 9 a.m. tomorrow.
dmunger | April 26, 2008There's a fun little test over at the BBC: Spot the fake smile (via Green Ideas).
Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about authentic smiles.
Update: Now I'm curious. I wonder if our readers are really that good, or if people are only posting their scores when they do well, so -- I've added a poll, below the fold.
esiegel | April 24, 2008Even creationists have said that if you find something that's alive now that's over 6000 years old, it would prove to them that the Earth is at least that old.
Previously, the oldest tree in the world was thought to be a Bristlecone Pine in California, known as the Methuselah tree, at 4,840 years old (as of 2008).
It's huge! But you can also date a tree not by its trunk, but by its root structure. And as The Log Blog reports, Swedish researchers have found a tree on Fulu Mountain that is over 9,000 years old! Although it looks puny because its trunk dies every few hundred years or so and it…
dmunger | April 24, 2008ScienceBlogs.de, our German counterpart, is featuring an English-language interview with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel:
Pertinent to Tuesday's post, he discusses free will, and also drug treatment for behavior disorders, the unification of the sciences, and Sigmund Freud.
illconsidered | April 23, 2008So, why do we want genetically modified crops? I thought it was supposed to be part of a new Green Revolution.
Apparently not...
Via CommonDreams, it seems that another major study has found that GM crops are actually worse in terms of total production than conventional crops.
So, besides ensuring global dependence on patented genomes, special pesticides and corporations like Monsanto...what is the point?
(What's that? That is the point...? I'm so naive)
[--original article from the Independent here--]
dmunger | March 24, 2008This coming Friday I'll be at the NISO Discovery Tools Forum in Chapel Hill, NC, to talk about ResearchBlogging.org, along with fellow ResearchBlogger and librarian Eric Schnell. Here's the abstract for our presentation:
ResearchBlogging.org began simply as a way for academic bloggers to identify serious and public posts in what can also be a frivolous and private environment. Then, once these items are identified -- many of them written by experts in a field -- effective indexing, archiving, and discovery becomes a realistic possibility. To date, hundreds of bloggers have signed up for the…
dmunger | March 4, 2008Take a look at this amazing video (via slashdot) showing how traffic jams can occur even when all the drivers are attempting to drive the identical speed.
As you can see, at first everything works fine -- the drivers have all been instructed to try to drive about 30 KPH. But almost inevitably everything goes horribly wrong. See this article for more details.
dmunger | February 18, 2008The Encephalon blog carnival is up and running at SharpBrains after a short hiatus. Check it out for the latest great posts in psychology and neuroscience.
drorzel | February 15, 2008There has been another shooting on a college campus, with a gunman opening fire on a geology class at Northern Illinois, before killing himself. Early reports suggest that the safety measures put into place after the Virginia Tech tragedy all worked properly, and the response from police was as quick as could be hoped.
The word "tragedy" is badly overused in modern life, but this is an appropriate place. This is a horrible event, and my heart goes out to the families and friends of those who were killed.
I should note that this is not an appropriate time or place for political grandstanding.…
dmunger | January 19, 2008I'm posting this live from my presentation at the Science Blogging conference. My session is entitled "How to build interactivity into your blog," and this post offers some links that I discuss in the presentation.
Polling services
Blog Flux polls
Quimble
Survey web sites
Question Pro
Survey Monkey
Survey Gizmo
Reviews of polling and survey services
How to report scientific research to a general audience
dmunger | December 10, 2007There's been a lot of discussion online lately about the relative importance of the position of an author name. Is it more impressive to be a first author on a report? If so, how much? John Lynch made a graph of Guillermo Gonzalez's publication record as a way of illustrating his argument that Gonzalez didn't deserve tenure. But there's a twist to the graph: it not only indicates articles on which Gonzales was an author, but also articles on which he was first author.
As the average number of authors in journal articles increases, does that mean that the contribution of individual authors is…
dmunger | December 3, 2007I've reviewed Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's recent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own over at The Quarterly Conversation. So, is this the science book that should have made the New York Times' Notable Books list? (Several ScienceBloggers have complained that the list includes no science books).
As I point out in my review, the book does have some great highlights:
The Blakeslees ... describe some truly fascinating phenomena. You know about visual illusions, but did you realize there's also such a thing as a sensorimotor illusion? One of the most astounding is the "Pinocchio illusion,"…
drorzel | November 30, 2007One of the strangest things about reading a lot of blogs is the way it's broadened my view of the world. Which is "more or less at random."
I don't follow a lot of mainstream news sources any more, because they mostly just piss me off, so I end up getting most of my news from an assortment of blogs and LiveJournals and other web sites, which means that I have a weirdly spotty understanding of what's going on in the world. I know more than I really need to about Australian and Canadian politics, but I'm kind of fuzzy on events that took place twenty miles from where I sit to type this.
It also…
illconsidered | November 6, 2007According to a recent poll from PIPA (Program on International Policy Attitudes), commissioned by the BBC, people world wide are ready and willing to pay more for energy supplies in order to combat climate change.
Once again the US is defining "leadership" as "dragging feet, kicking and screaming behind everyone else".
The true costs of oil are buried deep in huge military budgets and corporate welfare for the richest corporations in human history. Bottled water costs more.
(don't forget to check the details [PDF's, both])
illconsidered | October 31, 2007"Bright Scientists, Dim Notions" is the title of a NYT article from a few days ago prompted by the recent controversy over scientifically unfounded and racist remarks made by James Watson about the supposedly inherently inferior intelligence of the African race as compared to Caucasians.
The article is an interesting review of a few other notable examples of scientific crack-pottery in one field coming from the mouths of scientists who have in fact achieved brilliance in there own fields. There is also some speculation as to why this happens and why it is different when a famous scientist…
illconsidered | October 30, 2007Oceans are 'soaking up less CO2' is the headline of a recent BBC News article. (Well, it is recent in most senses of the word though not in blogger-land...Rabbet Run discusses it here, Stoat did it here, and Michael Tobis blogged about it here).
So the news is that a some new research indicates that the rate at which atmospheric CO2 is being absorbed into the ocean is falling. The findings are new, the authors are not sure if natural varibility is involved or not, but regardless it is a troubling sign. If it does turn out to be the case it signals the cessation of a free ride nature has…
illconsidered | October 29, 2007Australia's 2007 Person of the Year, Tim Flannery, was interviewed in a long segment on Democracy Now last week.
Listen/Watch/Read
It is an interesting interview on a great daily news source.
illconsidered | October 29, 2007If Gore Were Arrested is the title of an article at The Nation online. According to this report Al Gore has been invited to participate in civil disobedience with the Rainforest Action Network and he is considering it!
The article finishes its headline sentence this way:
If Gore did end up getting arrested during a protest against a coal-fired power plant, it would make front-page news throughout the world and put a spotlight on what some climate scientists and activists consider the single most important priority in the fight against climate change: halting the use of coal as the world's…