Social Sciences
neurophilosophy | November 9, 2007
The Los Angeles Times reports on "Robo-moth", a cleverly designed contraption, built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, which was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego earlier this week.
Robo-moth is a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot to which attached tobacco horn moth has been attached. A microelectrode inserted into the insect's brain records the activity of a single visual motion detection neuron, which exhibits directional selectivity and which is involved in steadying the visual field during flight.
The moth is immobilized inside a cylinder covered with vertical stripes…
oracknows | November 8, 2007I hadn't intended to write about this again, at least not for a while, but curiosity got the better of me. About a month and a half ago, I discussed a highly dubious story that was going around by e-mail about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whose mother supposedly "cured" him with "natural" treatments. As you might imagine, the story was riddled with incorrect-sounding medical information and inconsistencies. Earlier this week, through a highly credulous blogger going by the 'nym the Angry Scientist, I became aware of an update to the story, in which the names of the mother and child (Laurie…
gregladen | November 7, 2007[Repost with minor modifications form gregladen.com]
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As indicated in a press release by the National Center for Science Education, the National Council for the Social Studies has released a position statement on Intelligent Design.
...There have been efforts for many decades to introduce religious beliefs about the beginning of life on Earth into the science curriculum of the public schools. Most recently, these efforts have included "creation science" and "intelligent design." Following a number of court decisions finding the teaching of creationism and intelligent design…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf to man". I'm beginning to wonder if there is a difference between gods and wolves.
Ask yourself this: why did we domesticate wolves instead of cats the way we did? Why don't we have pet tigers? The answer has to do with the social structure of wolves. They have a pack-mentality. Each wolf is subordinate to some other wolf unless it is the alpha male. This instinctual behaviour, typical of the species and its…
pharyngula | November 6, 2007It's puzzling: he's a rich and successful engineer, but I don't see any particular virtue to his participation at SfN, and judging by these remarks, he just exposed himself for an ignoramus.
During the time Andrew S. Grove spent at Intel, the computer chip company he co-founded, the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion. Over that same period, the standard treatment for Parkinson's disease went from L-dopa to … L-dopa.
Grove (who beat prostate cancer 12 years ago and now suffers from Parkinson's) thinks there is something deeply wrong with this picture,…
evolgen | November 6, 2007During my first semester of college I took an introductory chemistry class from a poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate -- that's all one guy, not three. His Nobel Prize is in chemistry, which made him more than qualified to teach us about acids, transition metals, and the other basics of chemistry. He also advocated a well rounded education, and he required we read The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. In addition to our exams and lab reports, we had to write an essay about one of Levi's short stories.
I bring this up because the intro-chem instructor, Roald Hoffmann, gave a lecture last night…
oracknows | November 6, 2007Over the weekend, it appears that a post of mine, in which I included a link to a video of comic Tim Slagle doing the comedy routine that, in my never-ending effort to live up to the stereotype of the humorless skeptic that the credulous like so much, I castigated for its misrepresentations of science in the pursuit of a punchline, has been invaded by a number of "skeptics" of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, it makes me wonder if someone e-mailed the link to my post to a Libertarian mailing list or something, given that, as of this writing, no one that I can detect has linked to the…
bcohen | November 6, 2007Part 1 | 2 (below) | 3
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Part II with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
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WF: I'll ask the manuscript reviewer's question: why do we need to know about Humboldt's 19th-century exploits?
AS: Because, again, Humboldt helps us to see both history and the present through a different--and, I hope--more hopeful lens. For me, anyway, he provides a reminder that no historical trajectory is inevitable. That's potentially a spur to both thought and action. As the historian Carl Becker said, it's part…
gregladen | November 5, 2007We shall not be moved. ..."
Fifty five of us jammed in a bus designed to hold fourty people plus a driver, rolling down Highway 90 from Upstate New York to Chicago. As a teenager (just turned 15), I was thrilled to be going to Chicago to attend the Fight Back Conference, a thinly disguised Communist Party meeting. I was going, in part for Keith, the young African American kid (about 12 years old) who was shot in the back by a state trooper just under a year earlier. Keith was driving a mo-ped down the toll road, on the shoulder, where he shouldn't have been. It appears that he did not…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2007
What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question:
And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans" and "animals", "human rights" and "animal rights", "us" versus "them"? What rational argument do you bring in defense of speciesism? Perhaps you argue that only humans are capable of suffering, or that our intellectual capabilities are of a different kind from those of other animals. As Dawkins has noted, neither is compatible with what we understand about…
goodmath | November 5, 2007 Now, it's time for the final chapter in my "visits with old friends" series, which brings us
back to the Good Math/Bad Math all-time reader favorite crackpot: Mr. George Shollenberger.
Last time I mentioned George, a number of readers commented on the fact that it's cruel to pick on poor George, because the guy is clearly not all there: he's suffered from a number of medical problems which can cause impaired reasoning, etc. I don't like to be pointlessly cruel, and in general, I think it's inappropriate to be harsh with someone who is suffering from medical problems - particularly medical…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2007If don't already know, the world's frog (and other amphibian) populations are facing a massive decline. One cause is an infection by chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease. Scientists in New Zealand have announced that treatment with chloramphenicol, an antibacterial agent can cure chytridiomycosis:
Fearful that chytridiomycosis might wipe out New Zealand's critically endangered Archey's frog (Leiopelma archeyi), the researchers have been hunting for a compound that would kill off the disease's trigger, the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.
They tested the chloramphenicol candidate on two…
angrytoxicologist | November 5, 2007After the dust up last week about violent anti-animal testing groups (coast down through the comments on the linked Denialism post to get the short version of my take), two things stuck in my head. One, the Dalai Lama says my karma's okay as long as I'm following what looks like a version of the Society of Toxicology's Principles of Animal Use. Two, what would be of practical use to researchers who deal with this problem? Here's my advice:
1) Have compassion for animals in research.
2) Strive to make your research a benefit for humanity.
3) Get this free karmic pass and put it on your lab…
oracknows | November 5, 2007About a month and a half ago, I discussed an e-mail that was being propagated far and wide that described the case of the mother of a 17 year old male who, or so the e-mail claimed, cured her son of stage IV melanoma using "natural means" and was supposedly thrown in maximum security prison by the Department of Child Services in California for "failing to properly care for her child." The e-mail, which was being used by an organization called Natural Solutions USA or Health Freedom USA (I was never quite sure), reproduced here, described what seemed on the surface to be a truly horrific abuse…
oracknows | November 4, 2007I've written before about how animal rights cranks have started resorting to terroristic tactics in order to intimidate or frighten researchers into ceasing to do animal research. As you may guess, I have little but contempt for the Animal Liberation Front (is that anything like the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front?) and their ilk, who routinely use lies such as the claim that no good has ever come of animal research or the utterly risible claim that we can now somehow replace the use of animals with computer or cell culture models, coupled with vandalism and intimidation…
retrospectacle | November 4, 2007Scientists, read this statement.
A new era has dawned for those who fund the abusers and raise funds for them to murder animals with. You too are on the hit list: you have been warned. If you support or raise funds for any company connected with Huntingdon Life Sciences we will track you down, come for you and destroy your property with fire.
- Animal Liberation Front statement on behalf of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
Let it sink in. Now insert your research institution in the place of Huntingdon Life Sciences, and you know what might be in store for anyone doing, or associated with,…
razib | November 3, 2007From a New York Times Magazine piece about Antony Flew. Here is the most shocking part:
When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort -- slightly more, anyway. "There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this," Varghese said. "There is stuff he'd written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views…
scientificactivist | November 3, 2007On October 20th, animal rights extremists acting under the banner of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) flooded the home of UCLA professor Edythe London. I don't have too much to say about this latest incident, as it's just one of a series of destructive actions associated with a movement that seems more interested in intimidation than real dialogue. Since animal rights should be and are a paramount concern to the research community, this is quite an unfortunate situation.
Below, you can compare statements from London and the ALF. Briefly, though, I wanted to point out that I've written…
cevans | November 2, 2007
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-…
jstemwedel | November 2, 2007People with concerns about the use of animals in biomedical research should also be concerned about the actions of the Animal Liberation Front and other "animal rights" groups -- at least if they want other people to take their concerns seriously.
It seems that ALF views actions like the attack of the home of UCLA scientist Edythe London last week as somehow advancing its cause. This in itself makes it pretty clear to me that they have set aside reasoned discourse as a tool and gone straight to violence and intimidation.
Here's how the "Animal Liberation Press Office" describes the incident…