Culture
razib | December 16, 2008Sometimes social data are weird & unexpected. Below the fold are two charts which compare the self-reported happiness of people of various weight classes. From left to right: below average, average, above average and considerably above average. Red = very happy, blue = happy and green = not too happy.
The Inductivist has the full post.
razib | December 13, 2008The New York Times has a piece, Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches:
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. "We have the greatest product on earth," said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.
Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation's largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and…
razib | December 11, 2008I used to watch Jack Horkheimer's show when I was a kid back in the '80s. In fact, sometimes I would stay up late just to catch it. Today I found this out on Wikipedia:
Question: Why did you change the name of the show from 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR HUSTLER' TO 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR GAZER' ?
Answer: The name was changed due to our presence on the internet. When people, especially children, were accessing our Star Hustler site by using a search engine, STAR HUSTLER was not the HUSTLER they got to link to...so, after some upset folks wrote to us calling attention to the situation we realized…
razib | December 11, 2008The Audacious Epigone has a long critique of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. The main criticism is that Andrew Gelman did not emphasize the affect that race has on voting patterns enough; a criticism brought to sharper focus by the 2008 election.
razib | December 9, 2008Prompted by Paul Bloom's piece in Slate, Does Religion Make You Nice? Does atheism make you mean?, I went out and read Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment , the book which which Bloom references. It's a very slim volume, and though the author is a sociologist its is very thick on ethnographic observations and personal interviews. The societies in question are Denmark, and secondarily Sweden (the author lived in Denmark, but drew upon a great deal of surveys of Sweden as well). Perhaps I'll have more to say later, but there are three major…
razib | December 8, 2008Of all the bloggingheads.tv "regulars" I enjoy Will Wilkinson's "Free Will" the most, probably because of an intersection of our interests and general outlooks (though Will is far more liberal than I am). Though the headline for this week's episode has to do with atheism, the really interesting part of this interview with Paul Bloom is the second half. By the end of the diavlog Will admits that he aspires toward being a traitor to the United States, and that he isn't too inclined to engage in a cannibal feast where his grandmother is the main course due to her lack of attraction to his…
razib | December 8, 2008David Kirkpatrick points me to some interesting new research, Religious beliefs and public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe and the United States:
...Recent research suggests that 'religious filters' are an important heuristic for scientific issues in general5, and nanotechnology in particular6. A religious filter is more than a simple correlation between religiosity and attitudes toward science: it refers to a link between benefit perceptions and attitudes that varies depending on respondents' levels of religiosity. In surveys, seeing the benefits of nanotechnology is consistently…
razib | December 7, 2008Check it out (below). Ed is British. I knew that, but the accent is still funny. I listen to the BBC, so it didn't feel like bloggingheads.tv, rather, I thought it was the World Service.
razib | December 5, 2008The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula:
Most studies of European genetic diversity have focused on large-scale variation and interpretations based on events in prehistory, but migrations and invasions in historical times could also have had profound effects on the genetic landscape. The Iberian Peninsula provides a suitable region for examination of the demographic impact of such recent events, because its complex recent history has involved the long-term residence of two very different populations…
drorzel | December 5, 2008A few days ago, I complained again about the relative lack of science books in the New York Times "Notable Books of 2008" list. Yesterday, one of the big stories was CNN axing its entire science unit, such as it was, which drew comments from lots of blogs (and more whose links I can't be bothered to track down).
I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, these two are related. I'm not saying one caused the other, but that they're both symptoms of the same thing: the broad lack of respect for science among educated people. (Which I've ranted about before.)
One of the…
amillikan | December 2, 2008When the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Genesis and Creation Museum announced a combined admission offer November 30, protest erupted in the blogosphere. "I believe the Cincinnati Zoo has betrayed its mission and its trust in a disgraceful way by aligning themselves with a creationist institution," said ScienceBlogger PZ Myers from Pharyngula, urging his readers to contact the Zoo. Subsequently, the zoo and the museum have removed the offer pages from their websites and the Creation Museum's president Ken Ham issued a statement of disappointment.
cmooney | November 26, 2008
My latest Science Progress column, about a recent, cutting edge attempt to bring science and Hollywood together, is now up. It's entitled, "Attack of the Nerds from Outer Space," which should be more than enough of a teaser.
You can read it here.
razib | November 25, 2008Since the Right is roiling with faction, I thought I'd point you to a new weblog, Secular Right. No need to explain what it's about, the title says it all. John Derbyshire recounts an interesting experience at the H. L. Mencken Club:
Well, so there I was sitting down to dinner on the first evening of this Menckenfest. Seeing a plate of salad in front of me, I applied some condiments and started eating. In between the second and third mouthfuls I heard an amplified voice coming from the speakers' tables: "All right, everybody, we shall now say Grace. Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts…
razib | November 21, 2008In my post yesterday where I compared Catholics & Protestants in New England with Southerners in the McCain Belt, I was struck on the evolution question that in New England Protestants exhibited much more variance than Catholics. More Protestants rejected evolution or definitely believed it was true than Roman Catholics, who tended to agree that it was probably true. To me, this indicates the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism, whereby new sects emerge from schisms within denominations, in contrast to the "broad church" philosophy of Roman Catholicism as well as the due deference…
razib | November 20, 2008OK, not really, but I have a new piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free on polygamy.
razib | November 20, 2008At my other weblog I have a post which presents dozens of charts gleaned from the GSS. The intent was to compare Catholics and Protestants of New England origin to whites from the McCain Belt, and adduce whether the various Catholic immigrant groups such as the Irish and Italians in New England absorbed the values of the Yankee natives.
cmooney | November 19, 2008My latest Science Progress column attempts to imagine what Barack Obama would do if he had been elected "president of science." My answer: He would try to close the gaps between scientists and the public, and try to defuse the divisive culture war over science and religion.
You can read the full column here.
razib | November 18, 2008A new working paper, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings. After some regressions:
In sum, in a large sample of blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative. Unless they are experts, individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. Our results suggest that both price tags and expert recommendations may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers who care about the intrinsic qualities of the wine.
You already know this, but can't hurt to repeat in these times when we are…