society
clock | March 28, 2007Times are changing and the variety is endless. See what Anton and Erin, The Woomers and Jenny F. Scientist ended up doing and why.
Then, read the posts and comment threads by Amanda and on Chaos Theory.
clock | March 23, 2007Apparently, in Denmark, the 'larks' (early-risers) are called 'A-people' while 'owls' (late-risers) are 'B-people'. We all know how important language is for eliciting frames, so it must feel doubly insulting for the Danish night owls.
Today, in the age of the internets, telecommuting and fast-increasing knowledge about our rhythms and sleep, retaining the feudal/early capitalism work schedules really does not make sense.
And owls are by no means minority. Among kids and adults, they comprise about 25% of the population (another 25% are larks and the rest are in between). But among the…
clock | March 19, 2007You know how on comment threads on blogposts about evolution you, sooner or later, get a commenter saying something that reveals complete lack of understanding of even the basics of evolutionary biology? It is usually accompanied by some creationist canard as well. What do you do? If you stop to explain the basics, the thread gets derailed. You REALLY want to discuss that latest study, not go back to basics over and over again.
So, instead of explaining the basics, you post a link to the appropriate page on the TalkOrigins FAQ or Index of Creationist Claims and move on with the…
clock | March 8, 2007Growing up in Eastern Europe, there was no avoiding March 8. It was an official holiday, though still a workday (only in the USSR did people get a day off from school and work). It has also evolved over time into an incredibly kitchy holiday, a combined crass commercialized equivalent of Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, despised by feminist women for the hypocrisy of the essentially patriarchal society which used this day to put a woman on a pedestal for a day instead of barking orders to the kitchen for another bottle of beer.
See more history of the holiday on Wikipedia, the official…
clock | March 5, 2007And you don't even have to believe in dinosaurs to share their fate.
From here. And the preceeding paragraph? Another great quote:
"You know how taking so long to end slavery is a shameful part of our history, and how long it took us to give the vote to women is a shameful part of our history? Well, I think in 20 years, we're going to think that denying marriage to gays for so long is one of the great shames of our nation, too." That's from a teenager in Redneckville. She's our future--and Donohue, LaBarbera, and company are just desperate dinosaurs.
clock | February 23, 2007Evolution works according to a very small set of simple rules. If a) there is variation in a trait in a population and b) that variation is heritable and c) one variant is better adapted to the current local environment, then d) the best adapted trait will increase in the proportion within the population in the next generation. Once you understand this simple algorithm (perhaps, for fuller understanding, learn some basics of the ways genotype maps onto phenotype via development), everything about the living world is explainable without magic.
John McCain works according to a very small set…
clock | February 20, 2007You know that I think that Wimp Factor is one of the most important yet least appreciated books about ideology and politics in recent years. So, I was really glad to see an excellent review of it by Amanda:
Regardless of you feelings about whether or not he's got the right reasons for why anxious masculinity exists, his examination of the effects of it is right on the money.
clock | February 14, 2007This (from March 09, 2006) was a precursor to this...
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Every now and then I see articles about the "future of the car", like this one. I am trying to figure out what is so smart about the mindset of the people who think these things up. Leaving comfort, speed, entertainment, information, fuel efficiency and environmental impact aside and just focusing on safety, what are these "futurists" thinking?
They have two general ways of thinking about this. The first is: make the car bigger, heavier and built of stronger metarials so that it can withstand…
clock | February 11, 2007Yup, like Amanda, Atrios and Ed, I hate the telephone.
That is why I don't have the cell phone. That is why my landline phone has an answering machine.
If you call and the machine picks up and I actually want to talk to you at that particular moment, I'll pick up. If not, leave a message and I'll get back with you....by e-mail.
And if you use a phone with me, stick to the brief exchange of information. Business only. Chatting over the phone is reserved for my mother and my brother only.
I prefer to communicate on my own time, in my own way and do not like the tyranny of the phone ring.
clock | February 8, 2007Ah, why do I have to be so busy on a news-filled day (no, not Anna Nicole Smith)? I barely saw the computer today. I'd get home, have about 5 minutes before I have to go out again and so on. NPR did not mention Edwards until 4pm or so (that I heard in the car), so when I first got home I only had time to open e-mail, scan about 50 new messages, home in to the one that had the news, open it, get the links and quickly post without more than a quick skim of the statements by Edwards and others, let alone any time to add commentary (except for what the title implied I felt at the time). And…
clock | February 4, 2007Alan Sokal (famous for attacking the Lefty postmodernist abuse of science in the 1990s) and Chris Mooney (famous for attacking the Republican War on Science in the 2000s) sat down and wrote an excellent article in LA Times that came out today:
Can Washington get smart about science?
The article gives a historical trajectory of the problem, how it moved from political Left to the Right and what the new Democratic Congress is doing and still can do to bring back the respect for science, or for that matter, the appreciation for reality (which, no matter what the Bushies wish, they cannot make…
clock | February 2, 2007Continuing with the last week's topic (originally posted on March 11, 2005 - click on the spider-clock icon to see the comments, including by Mark O'Connell - who I subsequently met and blogged about, on the original post)
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Last night I listened to NPR's "On Point" about adolescent sex (http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/03/20050310_a_main.asp). As you may have guessed, I am interested in this topic as it can reveal something about the current fixated-on-sex femiphobic culture, as well as evolution of the institution of marriage (http://…
clock | January 31, 2007In light of my post earlier today about the discrepanices between 'real time' and 'clock time' (or 'social time'), it is heartening that the Parliament in the U.K. wisely decided not to switch their clocks to the time the rest of Europe observes. If they did, they would be seriously out of whack. After all, at Zero Meridian in Greenwich (yup, I stood astride it, of course), midnight is really midnight - it is the middle of the time zone. Resetting it by one hour would put the Brits at the far Western edge of another time zone and they would always experience true midnight a long time (60-…
clock | January 30, 2007Parenting is hard. Are you ready (re-posted from October 20, 2005)
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Earlier today Mrs.Coturnix and I took Coturnix Jr. and Coturnietta to the pediatrician (and the dentist - they are in the same building). While sitting in the waiting room we saw a strange scene. A father and a son (about 14-years old, I'd say) walked out of the office, the boy vigorously rocking a little baby, the father saying "It's great we have a car. Cars are good things".
I guess I made such a face that the receptionist started laughing: "It's a doll". A girl waiting in…
clock | January 27, 2007Nicole Eugene recently defended her Masters Thesis called Potent Sleep: The Cultural Politics of Sleep (PDF) on a topic that I find fascinating:
Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless, thought to be a moment of absence and powerlessness? Where did this devalued notion of sleep come from and how can we situate sleep studies within a continuation of a historical processes and economic infuences? In other words, how does sleep effect and exist within systems of power? To answer these questions I turn to a range of scholarship and theoretical studies to examine…
clock | January 26, 2007This is two years old (February 16, 2005) but still as provocative....(also my belated contirbution to the Blog For Choice Day) and I'll repost the second part of it next Friday.
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William Raspberry wrote an editorial in Washington Post last weekend (I picked a link to a syndication that does not require registration instead of dinosaurid WaPo) about the sexual practices of young people, mainly college people. This is not the first time he wrote on this topic. For instance, he wrote a column a few years ago, immediately after the release of the…
clock | January 24, 2007Most of our anti-Creationist battles are over efforts to infuse Christian religion into K-12 education. One common battlefield is the courtroom where our side has (so far, until/unless the benches get filled with more clones of Priscilla Owen) won. But another place where we can stop them is the college admission office.
Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog (which everybody should read daily) revisits, in more detail than I ever saw on any science blogs at the time this first started, the legal battle between the University of California and the Calvary Chapel Christian School over what…
clock | January 16, 2007 *N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences
/Downtown Raleigh/
**Thursday, January 18
"Flock of Dodos" screening with filmmaker, Randy Olson
7:00 p.m. Museum Auditorium
Free
*Filmmaker and Evolutionary Ecologist , Dr. Randy Olson, presents his
new film */Flock of Dodos/*: /*The Evolution / Intelligent Design Circus.*/
"Flock of Dodos" is the first feature-length documentary to present both
sides of the Intelligent Design / Evolution clash and tries to make
sense of the issue by visiting Olson's home state of Kansas. The film
digs below the surface of the debate by examining the language being
used by…
clock | January 10, 2007For a blogger - by definition on the cutting edge of technology - I am quite a Luddite. Perhaps that is too strong a term and I should rather call myself a "patient techno-skeptic".
I watch the development of new technologies with interest, but I almost never get any kind of visceral excitement "I Have To Have This! Now!"
There is always a lot of experimenting going on and the Darwinian forces of the market ruthlessly destroy almost every new gizmo and gadget within a year or two. After a while, the dust settles, and one particular system or gadget becomes the universal standard - it…
clock | January 9, 2007There is a new manuscript online which I will undoubtedly find interesting, I bet, once I find time to read its 52 pages (OK, double-spaced TXT with a long list of references and an Appendix of stats):
The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind (pdf) by Dana R. Carney, John T. Jost, Samuel D. Gosling, Kate Niederhoffer and Jeff Potter.
ABSTRACT: Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality differences between political liberals and conservatives has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and…