Social Sciences
developingintelligence | January 18, 2007The media is currently blowing up with reports that a 27-year-old woman who disappeared in the forests of Cambodia has now been found, 18-20 years later (reports vary). She was spotted on January 13th by a villager who saw a "jungle person, sneaking in to steal his rice," and was subsequentely identified as Rochom P'ngieng by a scar on her arm.
Reports suggest that she does not speak the local language, although she does communicate with gestures: she pats her stomach to indicate she is hungry.
Her father said that she initially resisted the wearing of clothes and use of chopsticks, and…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2007My SciBling Josh Rosenau had a different reaction to the exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. Sadly, he gets most of the important points wrong.
Rosenau writes:
As for “the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence...,” I'd merely note that this ought to lead us to a state of profound agnosticism. There can be no natural evidence for God (philosophy of science and theology generally agree on this point), and neither could there be natural evidence against the supernatural. Insisting that others acknowledge the fundamental importance of one's own answer to…
tfk | January 18, 2007Thanks to Framing Science for pointing me to a debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan about religion and religious moderation.
Shorter Sam Harris: If only religious people understood religion as well as atheists do, they'd be atheists like I am.
Honestly, Harris writes "Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects—often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy." While his own absolute rejection of faith gives him what insight into "full-tilt religious" … what, exactly?
When Andrew Sullivan, of all…
oracknows | January 18, 2007Geez, I might as well just put a paper bag over my head right now around my fellow ScienceBloggers.
You've heard me lament before about the woeful ignorance about biology and evolution common among all too many doctors. (You haven't? Well check here, here, here, and here.) Heck, you've even heard me lament about it just a few days ago, my irritation being piqued by a physician by the name of Dr. Geoffrey Simmons.
Now, as if to rub my face in it, Dembski's crew over at Uncommon Design have made me aware of an orthopedic surgeon named David A. Cook, M.D., who's adding to my embarrassment. As…
j7uy5 | January 17, 2007The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site is back to normal, only now they have a new, secondary theme.
They are considering both climate change AND the risk of nuclear catastrophe. Based upon their deliberations, they have moved the clock two minutes closer to midnight. The announcement was made at a conference at the Royal Society in London. Stephen Hawking spoke, as noted by The Independent:
"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about…
jrosenhouse | January 17, 2007Christianity Today has posted this interview with Francis Collins. Collins' goal is to persuade us that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Let's see if he's right:
How does evolution fit with your Christian faith?
[Evolution] may seem to us like a slow, inefficient, and even random process, but to God--who's not limited by space or time--it all came together in the blink of an eye. And for us who have been given the gift of intelligence and the ability to appreciate the wonders of the natural world that he created, to have now learned about this evolutionary creative process is a…
cmooney | January 15, 2007I am quoted at length in this recent Boston Globe op-ed column by Cathy Young, entitled "Common sense in the warming debate." (Via Prometheus.) I really appreciate the attention from Young, but without necessarily intending to do so, she appears to have put me in a box that I don't wish to occupy. So allow me to clarify.
Young starts off like this:
Global warming is the subject of intense debate. But if ideology is getting in the way of science, maybe both sides of the debate are letting that happen.
While the evidence of global climate change is overwhelming, there are skeptics who challenge…
tfk | January 15, 2007Beyond Vietnam, by Martin Luther King, Jr. Delivered at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. How little do times change. Dr. King was careful to show that his comments were directed not at the Vietcong nor China or Russia, but to the people of this nation:
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2007
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2006 were announced yesterday. (See also the 2005 awards.)
Professor of international healthcare Hans Rosling receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his enlightening efforts to spread a fact-based picture of the state and development of the world, particularly as regards the link between popular health and global economy. Hans Rosling is co-founder of the non-profit foundation Gapminder, that has produced software to visualise and compare statistics from various countries, making it comprehensible and available to anyone."…
tfk | January 15, 2007Lawrence has made an important step towards true equality by taking up the possibility of a local registry of domestic partnerships. This would allow a centralized place where companies that choose to provide partnership benefits to check the status of their employees, and would allow hospitals and other institutions to verify the relationships between people.
The city is limited in what it can do with this registry, since state law forbids granting anyone but one man and one woman the right to marry or even "the rights or incidents of
marriage." No one seems quite sure how far that…
mikethemadbiologist | January 15, 2007You'll hear a lot today about Martin Luther King and race. But what you won't hear nearly as much about, particularly from conservatives, is his views on economic justice. I think that his views on race were inseparable from his economic views which were based on a universal call for justice and equality for all. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their…
mixingmemory | January 14, 2007Welcome, everyone, to the 14th installment of the brain blogging carnival Encephalon. If you're in the United States, I hope you've got today off, and that you've at least taken a moment to think about the contribution that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. made to our society. If you're not in the United States, you're going to have to take a break from whatever you're doing, because this installment's got a hell of a lot of posts for you to read. So wherever you are, grab a cup o' joe, make sure you're in a comfortable chair, and enjoy.
Let's start, randomly, with some cognitive neuroscience.…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007I absolutely loved this book, Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (New York: Perennial, 1990). Even though the book was published 16 years ago, I cannot understand how I could have missed it. But thanks to my friend, Coturnix, who sent the book to me, I had the priviledge to finally read it, so I include a review of it here. Not only is the prose surprisingly rich and evocative, but this book is probably one of the best examples of the new genre, LabLit -- short for Laboratory Literature -- which deals with real-life scientific themes without being science fiction.
This interesting story is…
oracknows | January 11, 2007Since I started this blog, I've become aware of all sorts of weirdness and woo. One special category of woo that irritates me is psychics, particularly the ones who claim that they can contact the dead, like Sylvia Browne or John Edward. They are arguably the worst kind of "psychic," usually using cold reading or some variation of it to take advantage on the hopes of people desperately missing their loved ones who died. Sometimes, however, I learn of a self-styled "psychic" who's so off the wall that my revulsion wrestles with my bemusement, and it's not clear which will win. This is one such…
ddobbs | January 10, 2007
Capt. Andy MacLean, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, after his unit's first night of serious combat in the Iraq War, Apr 1-2, 2003. Image by David Leeson/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS SYGMA
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The floor of the National Museum of Iraq after it sacking during the second week of April, 2003.
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Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of…
stoat | January 10, 2007At the third or fourth chance, the convenience of having this thing screened at BAS in the (extended) lunch break was too much to miss, and I've seen it. Its a documentary (I suppose) but a partisan one (maybe they all are...). Nothing really gets any caveats, unlike all my posts (for which see Ms. Rabett's Nude Scientist Exam). It ends with a fervent exhortation to do Your Bit and visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/ - when I did that, the first thing it offered me was the chance to buy the DVD, so clearly this is Consumption for Climate.
How would we stop global warming? Since Gore fervently…
catdynamics | January 9, 2007Interesting American Astronomical Society meeting here in Seattle.
The "big" result is undoubtedly the COSMOS collabortion release, although there were several other significant "big" results announced.
Nothing earth shattering, so to speak, but that happens only every 2-3 years, can't have it every single meeting.
This year was interesting for me, because I got the press releases in advance, still have 25 to go, from todays late releases and wednesday's releases.
It is always interesting to see what the press picks up on: the really big results are obvious, but only a few percent of the…
oracknows | January 9, 2007It is with a bit of trepidation that I write about this.
The reason, for anyone who reads ScienceBlogs specifically or science blogs in general, should be obvious. Richard Dawkins is such a polarizing figure with a penchant for stirring things up with regards to the most deeply held beliefs of both the religious and atheists, that he has all too often served as a flashpoint for battles between secularism and religion or a convenient excuse for the two most popular of my fellow ScienceBloggers to indulge their mutual animosity publicly. Posting about Dawkins, whether you defend or criticize…
tfk | January 6, 2007One of the various labels variously applied to the group of people who don't believe in the supernatural is "secular humanist." This emphasizes the importance of ethical behavior by and toward other humans. Indeed, you'll sometimes see "secular humanist" and "atheist" used interchangeably. Richard Dawkins seems determined to clarify the difference.
In a piece written for the Los Angeles Times, he writes Saddam should have been studied, not executed, and argues in particular that:
Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler, but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2007A while back I posted about how awful it would be for the FDA to approve the use of cefquinome, an antibiotic similar to the medically important drug cefepime. I even coauthored a letter about it. Well, it turns out the IDSA wrote a letter about cefquinome too (the whole letter, in pdf). There's good and bad things about the letter. First, the bad--the IDSA proposals about what to do if cefquinome is approved:
1. Limit the marketing status to prescription only.
2. Prohibit extra-label use of the product.
3. Limit the extent of use to "low," meaning that the drug will be administered…