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pharyngula | May 8, 2009Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish get another drubbing, this time at the hands of Matt Taibbi. I'd almost feel sorry for them, except that I'm still feeling the trauma of being trapped on a plane with Eagleton's book, so I say…sic 'em.
This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant…
cortex | May 8, 2009In his review of State of Play, David Denby laments the rise of incoherence as a filmmaking technique:
"State of Play," which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at--a relationship, a motive, an event in the past--then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once, but they feel no obligation to resolve what they tell us. Recent movies like "Syriana," "Quantum…
clock | May 7, 2009There are 23 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Does Sleep Really Influence Face Recognition Memory?:
Mounting evidence implicates sleep in the consolidation of various kinds of memories. We investigated the effect of sleep on memory for face identity, a…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2009Odious Catholic League President William Donohue had this to say about the forthcoming Ron Howard film Angels and Demons:
Finally, the pop culture offers many challenges. The film “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opens May 15. Once again, the tag team of Dan Brown and Ron Howard have collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales. And once again, the message conveyed to the audience is invidious: the Catholic Church, which did more to keep the universities open and flourishing during the Middle Ages than any other institution, is painted as…
pharyngula | May 7, 2009Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter. There's a common argument, for instance, that a lot of biomedical research is untrustworthy because it is done at the behest of Big Pharma dollars — it's more persuasive to people than it should be, because there is a grain of truth to it, and it would be easy to get sucked into the lucrative world of the industry shill. However, we also have a counterbalance: scientists don't go into research because they want to be rich, and we are also educated with a set of principles that puts the integrity of our…
mspringer | May 7, 2009Ryan North of the exceptionally brilliant and somewhat esoteric Dinosaur Comics penned a comic a while back about the possibility of being the perfect detective by using physics. Quoth T-Rex in the strip:
Someone in the room says something to another person, and then they both leave. Assuming you know exactly how they moved when they left (and therefore how they displaced the air!) then any remaining displacement is due to sound waves. By looking at the location of air molecules in the empty room, you can reconstruct what was said in the past!
Of course there's the minor engineering hurdle…
sb admin | May 7, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Breathing easier, may be an apt phrase for an almost audible collective sigh of relief. So far, the incipient swine flu pandemic is not extremely nasty. Is this perhaps premature? The world's premier scientific journal, Nature, and many flu scientists, suggest it is:
Complacency, not overreaction, is the greatest danger posed by the flu pandemic. That's a message scientists would do well to help get across.[snip]
There is ample reason for concern: a new flu virus has emerged to which humans have no immunity, and it is spreading from person to person…
gregladen | May 7, 2009... is up and running here, produced by Mike at Quiche Moraine. Please visit this excellent carnival, click on the links, read them, and become more liberal. Thank you very much.
sciencepunk | May 6, 2009
If you're free in the capital today, head to the Royal Courts of Justice for the preliminary hearing of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against science writer, journalist and broadcaster Simon Singh. The hearing will clear up some legal grey areas and decide what the judge requires as a valid defence for the full trial in autumn.
The case stems from comments made by Simon in his book Trick or Treatment, and an article published in Guardian entitled "Beware the spinal trap" (mirror). The BCA seem to consider it defamatory to tell people there is no evidence that the…
nisbetmc | May 6, 2009That's the revealing thesis of a new book reviewed at New York magazine, examining the disconnect between the reality of the Columbine shootings and the many false media reports and explanations for the tragedy.
mspringer | May 6, 2009Sorry for the light blogging this week. Finals are this week and next, and so I'm pretty swamped. Today I'm going to pose a straightforward but slightly counterintuitive probability question, of the sort that in modified forms aren't so uncommon in physics:
A densely populated authoritarian state issues the following population control policy: each family may have one child with no restrictions. If that child is male, the family is not allowed to have more children. If that child is female, the family may have one more child. The family may not have a another child regardless of the sex…
pharyngula | May 6, 2009That Pat Robertson video in the last post was just too ghastly. Right now, the sun is shining and I just finished my very last lecture of the semester, so here's something to celebrate with: two of the coolest people in the world, David Bowie and Annie Lennox. It'll cheer you right up!
Right now, I think I need to take a walk in the sunshine.
gregladen | May 6, 2009Have you ever:
... tried to order a BLT at Subway?
... been really hungry so your bones stuck out and you passed out now and then?
... given someone a sandwich so they could get through the next day?
Well, who cares. But do go read my latest post at Quiche Moraine on these topics. Thank you very much.
cortex | May 6, 2009John Stewart had some fun the other night mocking conservative politicians and talking heads for criticizing Obama's desire for an "empathetic" Supreme Court justice, who will make legal decisions, in part, by "identifying with people's hopes and struggles."
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First of all, I can't imagine this is good politics - do voters really want a party that brags of their callousness? I know empathy is a code word for "activist judges," but it's…
cortex | May 6, 2009The NY Times has a kind review of the Bruce Adolphe/Yo Yo Ma/Antonio Damasio performance that I was lucky enough to hear in person. (I also got to ask the collaborators a few questions afterwards, as moderator.)
Most composers would shy away from depicting the evolution of consciousness. Well, maybe not Mahler, who grappled with the afterlife in his "Resurrection" Symphony. Mr. Adolphe, who had already written two works based on Mr. Damasio's writings, plunged right in.
The result was "Self Comes to Mind," a 30-minute work for cello and two percussionists, with video imagery based on brain…
clock | May 5, 2009There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today (as well as 13 last night and 5 on Friday night). As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Darwin's Manufactory Hypothesis Is Confirmed and Predicts the Extinction Risk of Extant Birds:
In the Origin of Species Darwin hypothesized that the "manufactory" of…
sb admin | May 5, 2009Today, the CDC reports 403 confirmed cases of H1N1 (the flu formerly known as "swine") in the US, and the WHO reports a total of 1124 cases in 21 countries. There have been 25 deaths in Mexico and two in the US.
The increase in numbers is largely due to cases that had already been reported as probable finally being laboratory confirmed. Here in the DC area, we're hearing less news about additional probable cases, and several school districts that had announced closures have now reversed themselves, as the CDC changed its stance from advising school closures when a flu case was reported to…