Culture
cmooney | February 18, 2009I've been thrilled at the comments I'm getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I've thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.
For the remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution.
After that, here's the schedule I'm working from, and will strive to keep to--with Amazon…
razib | February 17, 2009Felix Salmon on Mini-Madoff Allen Stanford:
Allen Stanford might be a moustachioed crook, but he's not stupid. There's still a good chance that he could live out the rest of his life in sybaritic luxury, even as his investors lose substantially everything they entrusted to him and his offshore bank.
1) 7% on CDs is crazy. If it's too good to be true....
2) If Stanford screwed so many people, what's to stop one of them (or some of them) from taking the law into their own hands? He might be beyond the reach of the law, but vengeance....
razib | February 17, 2009I looked in the GSS on the number of children and age when first child born for evolution related questions. The number of children and age when first child is born should determine the rate of natural increase of a population (balanced with deaths).
# of children
Age when first child born
Humans Evolved From Animals
Definitely True
1.40
26.37
Probably True
1.75
23.72
Probably Not True
1.85
23.31
Definitely Not True
2.12
23.00
Origin and Development of Man
God Created Man
2.14
23.60
Man Has Evolved, But God Guided
1.56
25.13
Man Has Evolved
1.…
razib | February 17, 2009Greg Clark, chair of the UC Davis Econ department, admits he's an idiot:
I myself was so confident of the consensus of the end of the business cycle that I persuaded my wife after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to invest all her retirement savings in the stock market, confident that the Fed would soon make things right and we could profit from the panic of a gullible public. The line "Where is my money, idiot?" is her's.
sheril | February 17, 2009Over at Genetic Future, Daniel is asking whether scientists should study race and IQ. The topic is taken on in the most recent issue of Nature here and here and it's a conversation that resurfaces now and then among various colleagues in genetics: If there might be associations between gender or race and intelligence, should scientists look for them?
But before delving into ethics, I expect it would be extremely challenging to 1. define all of the above 2. extricate societal, financial, and environmental influences 3. account for even subconscious observer bias. So what are we really after…
sheril | February 17, 2009Yesterday, C-SPAN released the Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. Below are the results based on ten attributes of leadership. [Click here to compare this list with scores from 2000].
I'm interested to find out whether readers agree with these rankings, and if not, who would you move and why?
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Harry S. Truman
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Ronald Reagan
11. Lyndon B. Johnson
12. James K. Polk
13. Andrew Jackson
14. James Monroe
15. Bill…
cmooney | February 17, 2009
[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]
In my last post, I talked about the "radically strange" in Copernicus; today, let's go on to catalogue the "strangely modern" aspects of the work:
Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it this way:
I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you…
cmooney | February 16, 2009CJR has the latest, from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Now Peter Dykstra, long at CNN, is writing for an environmental website; and now Seth Borenstein, long at AP, acknowledges that we're in a science journalism crisis (he was at time past a skeptic of this notion).
Meanwhile I sometimes worry that the science blogosphere--supposedly centrally involved in and concerned with science communication--doesn't grasp what is happening. Take this post from Jason Rosenhouse--and it's just one recent example. It's entitled "The Trouble with Science Journalism," and critiques something New Scientist put…
razib | February 15, 2009And in the long run we'll be dead. Put it out of its misery. The probability that GM (let's not talk about Chrysler) could enact a turnaround in a few months was nil. Most people knew that, though it seems some wanted to keep the company from filing for bankruptcy to placate the nervous animal spirits. Is the beast calm enough yet?
razib | February 14, 2009I decided to look at the GSS and see if there was anything interesting about fertility of white Americans of various ethnicities. There's a big wide range, with the lowest numbers for national-origin groups dominated by Jews in the United States (e.g., Russia, Lithuania) and southern Europe (Italy, Greece). As it happens, Italy and Greece have low fertility, so I plotted TFR for European nations on the Y axis and CHILDS (the GSS variable) on the X. TFR is not necessarily going to be the same as the mean number of children per woman in the GSS, but it should be close and the rank order will…
sheril | February 13, 2009Thanks so much to everyone for thoughtful emails and comments. I'm back home and reading them has definitely been helping with recovery :)
Chris and I also want to wish our readers a very happy Valentine's Day...
cmooney | February 13, 2009Folks, it has been a really rough time for Sheril--she may or may not tell the full story herself, but suffice it to say that she has been hospitalized for several days and has only recently been allowed to come home, and this unfortunate turn of events has prevented her from attending the AAAS meeting in Chicago, where she was set to headline at the high profile "Science of Kissing" panel on Valentine's Day.
That's a very sad missed opportunity; but luckily, Sheril has also done a freelance article for New Scientist about the same subject, which has just come out and which you can read here…
cmooney | February 12, 2009Over at Science Progress, I've been involved in putting together not one but two items timed for Darwin Day.
The first is an op-ed coauthored with my prof here at Princeton, D. Graham Burnett, who teaches Darwin. We argue for historical nuance, which leads one to reject the idea that Darwin should be considered an icon of conflict between science and religion. In fact, we call that idea "a hackneyed story, lacking in historical nuance and ultimately running counter to the project of drawing helpful lessons from the life of one of history's greatest scientists." A brief excerpt:
...Science-…
razib | February 11, 2009Daughter blames dad's death on Madoff scheme:
"He used to go to a wound clinic for bedsores," she told NJJN. "After he found out [about his financial losses], he wouldn't go. Then he developed double pneumonia. He needed 24-hour care. It took at least $200,000 a year just to keep him alive."
Pretty straightforward, and not surprising. Among the thousands of investors who lost money because of Bernie there are surely others in similar circumstances who will suffer shorter life expectancies. This is why Bernie should be locked up forever.
razib | February 11, 2009Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down:
Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai's fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city -- or worse.
"I'm really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here," said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still…
cmooney | February 11, 2009This is a post simply to ask for comment on my last three (here, here, here) as a kind of genre exercise. Each post has been about my new foray into studying the history of science here at Princeton and testing out what it's like to be a student again. (The most insane kind of culture shock, is the short answer.)
Anyway, this is a very different kind of thing for the Intersection, although certainly not outside of its mandate. And so far, I like the response it has generally prompted. But I don't have to blog about the history of science for the next three to four months...it's just a…
cmooney | February 10, 2009
Male chauvinist pig? Or worse?
I haven't even read Copernicus yet, and probably won't at least until this weekend. As far as my reading goes, the scientific revolution hasn't yet started and I'm still stuck with Ptolemaic glasses on.
History 293, though, is churning away, and yesterday we did our section on Francis Bacon and The New Atlantis. (Not satisfied with the course packet excerpt, this is the version I ordered from Amazon.) Man, here was a dude who, although writing in the early 1600s, sounds stunningly "modern"--a term I must now put in quotes due to the fact that I'm studying…
razib | February 9, 2009One of the things that really irritates me is when people throw around numbers without normalization. This is a major behavioral economic issue, Robert Shiller suggests that the inability to tell the difference between nominal & real values is one of the major reasons the American public was convinced that real estate was a "sure thing" investment. People confused the nominal rise in housing values with real increases, and didn't have an intuitive sense how weird the last 10 years were in the long-term perspective. In any case, Calculated Risk has a post on Job Losses During Recessions,…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…