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cortex | January 4, 2010I loved Avatar. Sure, I chuckled at the schmaltzy dialogue and found the neon color scheme a little garish and could have done without all the pantheistic moralism...But the movie was still mesmerizing. For 150 minutes, I vanished into the screen, utterly absorbed in the stereoscopic world unfolding before me. I was lost in Pandora, transfixed by a perfectly predictable melodrama.
The modernist critic Clement Greenberg argued that art should be evaluated on its adherence to the "specificity of the medium". Painting, for instance, is defined by its abstract flatness, which meant that artists…
pharyngula | January 4, 2010Won Chong Boyd, the wife of Mark Boyd, president of the Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics, has died suddenly while on a trip to Korea. This is a deep personal shock for him, of course, but it's also a serious financial hardship. If any of you can help out, go to the link.
zooillogix | January 3, 2010Atlantis. The Loch Ness monster. The National Aquarium. What do these things have in common? They were only fabled to exist, until now! I know what you're thinking, "I've been to the National Aquarium in Baltimore... and I love tater tots and also was once attracted to a cousin." Well, you'd be dead-wrong about the aquarium thing! How is that? Well that's because I'm not talking about the National Aquarium in Baltimore, but the actual 'National Aquarium ' which is in DC. DUH!
And who do we have to thank for proof of existence of this fabled institution? None other than Linda Lombardi of…
gregladen | January 3, 2010The other day there were cops in front of my local grocery store cajoling people to put money in the Salvation Army bucket. This might be worse:
gregladen | January 3, 2010Yet another blogger is calling for your input and involvement in relation to a session planned for Scioten, the Science Online 2010 conference coming up later this month.
Janet Stemwedel writes: #scio10 preparation: Is there a special problem of online civility?
cortex | January 3, 2010In the Boston Globe Ideas section, Kevin Lewis highlights a new paper on "the restraint bias," or the dangers of overestimating self-control:
One way to enhance self-control is to avoid tempting situations. The irony, according to a recent study, is that people who think they have more self-control allow themselves to get into more tempting situations and, as a result, are more likely to give in to temptation. For example, students who were made to feel fatigued were less confident in their ability to control fatigue and were less willing to put off studying for exams. Smokers who were led to…
gregladen | January 2, 2010Bora has put out a list of SoTen participants as a twinter .... thing. A list or something.
Do you follow me on twitter? Are you my facebook friend?
mspringer | January 2, 2010Happy new year! While we're thinking about years, why don't we think about one of the first guys to explore the physical reason behind the year?
This nattily dressed gentleman is Johannes Kepler, who worked out three basic mathematical laws of planetary motion around the year 1605. He did so from scratch, purely based on phenomenological examination of astronomical data. Newton wouldn't figure out the theory behind these laws for about another century, but with Newton's classical mechanics we can show that his basic laws of motion imply that Kepler's laws must be true.
The third of Kepler…
gregladen | January 1, 2010Four Stone Hearth #83 the totally cool "The Avatar Edition" ... is manifest at The Primate Diaries.
gregladen | January 1, 2010Not everyone can go to SoTen, but the participants in this upcoming bloggy/onliney conference are tying to keep the discussion broad and involve readers and commenters. The latest effort along these lines is by Ed Young who has posted a post (linking to other posts) pursuant to a panel on science journalism in the age of the web. So you may want to go to his post and poke around.
You may also want to take a look at the whole SoTen program, here. The session I'm involved in, organized by Stephanie Zvan, is to be on trust and critical thinking, and a description of the session and a set of…
gregladen | January 1, 2010is a new organization designed to direct charitable contributions towards atheist/humanist projects.
Find out about it here.
gregladen | January 1, 2010Selected Peer Reviewed Blogging posts of continuing from previous Junes and Julys:
Morning Sickness is not a sickness!
The American South, Urban Areas, People of Color, Native Americans ... In short, the poor and disadvantaged ... suffer greatly from poverty-caused neglected diseases
The Origins of the Evil Eye and Horticultural Fertility Cults?
The Poison in the Leaf: Macro Evolutionary Patterns in Plant-Herbivore Co-Evolution
The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular
agelman | January 1, 2010The newest way to slam a belief you disagree with--or maybe it's not so new--is to call it "religious." For example, "Market Fundamentalism is a quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results," and so is global warming ("The only difference between the religions right and the religious left, is that the religious right worships a man, and the religious left worships . . . Mother Nature"). As is evidence-based medicine ("as religious as possible . . . just another excuse, really--to sneer at people"). And then there's the religion of…
gregladen | December 31, 2009In ten seconds:
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OK, everybody back to work, party's over.
gregladen | December 31, 2009Ginkgo biloba has failed -- again -- to live up to its reputation for boosting memory and brain function. Just over a year after a study showed that the herb doesn't prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a new study from the same team of researchers has found no evidence that ginkgo reduces the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging.
Details.