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gregladen | September 21, 2009I just found out that Scienceblogs has a facebook page.
You should join it!
cortex | September 21, 2009I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth:
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression…
gregladen | September 21, 2009NCSE: National Center for Science Education
STOP RACISM!
STOP RACISM Minnesota
The Friends of Charles Darwin
Minnesota Atheists
The Beagle Project
cortex | September 21, 2009There's a fascinating article in the NY Times Magazine by Sara Corbett on the publication of Jung's infamous Red Book, in which he attempted (often in vain) to map the infinite labyrinth of his unconscious:
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book -- what it is, what it means -- is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much…
gregladen | September 20, 2009First, some important business. If you have a science post, send it to Scientia Pro Publica. . They are due NOW and, I assume owing to the beginning of the school year, there is a shortage.
Second, check this out: Something interesting happened the other day when Almost Diamonds produced this post on purity movements (or, purity as a trait of a community. For convoluted reasons, this led to two largely separate communities bumping a little into each other, which is probably a minor fender bender, but that event resulted in THIS POST at Almost Diamonds, which is a list of posts that…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2009
Image: courtesy of Bob O'Hara, author of Deep Thoughts and Silliness.
Vote for me here.
gregladen | September 20, 2009It turns out the war of Gog and Magog starts tomorrow, so I'm going to spend the rest of the time before The Rapture cleaning out my father-in-law's Scotch Collection which I happen to be alone with right now. Details here.
KTHXBYE
grrlscientist | September 20, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | September 19, 2009
Image: courtesy of Bob O'Hara, author of Deep Thoughts and Silliness.
Vote for me here.
According to my vote count, I owe more than 2000 people belly rubs. Hrm.
razib | September 19, 2009This is a weird little fact which I've known for a while, but I thought readers might get a kick out of it. What is the longest-lived vertebrate individual which we have records to the extent that we can confirm with a high degree of certitude? You can guess the age and the rough species, but click below the fold for the answer. As hints I will state that the age was in excess of 150 years, and that the individual was not a tortoise.
It was a koi named Hanako who made it to the age of 226 years. Hanako was born in 1751, and died in 1977. (I notice this was posted on Boing Boing, so likely…
gregladen | September 19, 2009Go wish Rebecca a happy birthday, and find out what the heck else I'm talking about here.
rskloot | September 19, 2009It's that time again: Today , September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Japanese Respect for the Aged day ... and my birthday. It also happens to be the day Giles Corey was
"pressed" to death by villagers who stacked increasingly large rocks on
him because he'd been declared a witch in the famous Salem Witch Trials
(1692). It was the day women were finally allowed to vote (1893) and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid committed their first robbery
(1900). It's the anniversary of the first underground nuclear bomb test
and the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field (1957), where they…
esiegel | September 19, 2009I've got to say, I get some weird things in my head sometimes. I don't know how many of you know who Vashti Bunyan is, but you may have heard a snippet from one of her songs last year in an NFL commercial. The beautiful, haunting song is called Train Song and it was the first song I thought of when I heard that Patrick Swayze died.
The song, of course, isn't about death at all. It's about traveling to meet someone you haven't seen in a long time and having your heart in your throat during the whole journey while you do it.
You might know Patrick Swayze best for Ghost, Dirty Dancing,…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009
Image: Sneer Review.
The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 6800 - 3095 - 2010 - 1947 - 1262 out of 617 candidates registered. With less than 2 weeks remaining, things are heating up and voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. [Yes, you can change who you voted for, even if you voted weeks or months ago! All you have to do is log in using the account you created to cast your original vote, a process that takes only seconds] Already, two of my fellow competitors are appealing to their supporters to…
gregladen | September 18, 2009When something goes wrong we fix it, sometimes making a new rule so it does not happen again. After a while we may get a bunch of related rules and they can be, and often are, organized into a system, perhaps a paradigm, maybe a dogma, or even an -ism. Once you've got one of those, it is easy to fall into the pattern of making your ism more ism than hism. In other words, the isms may start to compete with each other for purity, or internally, the practitioners of an ism strive for purity for their own Freudo-Junkian reasons. Purity becomes an objective.
Does this sound unfamiliar to…