Culture
razib | August 2, 2008Listen to Lee Siegel, Internet Reading: Speeding Us Up by Dumbing Us Down?. He's positively unhinged, totally out of control. I don't really mind Siegel, he obviously going to spend as much of his professional capital as possible attacking the internet after his own negative self-inflicted experiences. Why is the media putting this guy on the phone? A 7 year old farting on air would be more informative and edifying. Siegel's been all over the place basically claiming that the internet heralds the arrival of Gog and Magog. I really wouldn't be too shocked if during the next interview…
razib | August 1, 2008I've been reading up on the field of cliodynamics recently. But despite the importance of broader macrosocial dynamics, the suicide of the Anthrax scare suspect is a reminder that proximately one determined person can sway the actions of nations....
sheril | August 1, 2008Can it, oh can it be true? As a young lady who regularly goes heroine every Halloween, I couldn't be more excited to hear Hollywood may be on the verge of developing a new, strong, independent female role model! In an age of too many superhero movies about men of steel, men who spin webs, turn green, dark knights, and damsels in distress... Is Wonder Woman really on the horizon for 2009?
..it's time for a new star to step into those red, leather boots and indestructible bracelets. Not to mention the golden tiara that doubled as a deadly weapon.
I hope Firefly creator Joss Whedon…
cmooney | July 31, 2008I really enjoyed Sheril's post last week about scientifically inaccurate movies. As I went to check out the list that she linked to, I found myself nodding constantly.
But of course, that's hardly an exhaustive list. Let me tell you a bit more about the kinds of scientific inaccuracies I've noted in Hollywood films--this by way of leading up to an ultimate question.
Hurricanes vs Tornadoes. The two meteorological phenomena are pretty dang different. One occurs over ocean, after all, and the other over land. One could fit in the eye of the other. Nevertheless, they're constantly, carelessly…
razib | July 30, 2008Some results from the GSS on what people perceive the ideal number of children is based on social variables. Additionally, the realized number of children the respondent has. I limited the sample to whites who were 40 or older (there are people who have children past 40, but I assume that most of the discrepancy, or not, between ideal and realized will be evident by that age).
razib | July 30, 2008Chris Orr at The Plank reports that Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is going to be given the film treatment. Orr is skeptical, and so am I. As far as space opera goes the Foundation universe was a cerebral and sedate treatment; they'll have to rewrite a lot of it to get some action to spice up the story. David Brin's Uplift based novels read much more like the outlines of scripts; but after The Postman they probably won't want to risk that. Even if there's a lot going on space opera doesn't always translate well. Remember David Lynch's take on Dune? Because of the success of Peter…
razib | July 29, 2008I was curious about a few social variables which often associate across generations, and also within families. So I looked in the General Social Survey for denomination, highest degree and socioeconomic index, which I knew were surveyed for the individual (respondent), their parents and their spouse. Below the fold are the correlation matrices generated. Remember that if you assume a linear dependency you square the correlation (e.g., 0.50 → 0.25) to find out how much of the variation in X can be accounted for by variation in Y.
Religious denomination
Denomination
Father's Denom.
Mother'…
sheril | July 29, 2008When this hit my inbox, I thought it was a bad joke:
She's plump, powerful and ready to cause more controversy than "SuperSize Me." She's Fat Princess, the star of Sony's upcoming video game of the same name. Debuting at last week's E3 expo, the colorful Fat Princess is a capture-the-flag game with a twist: you can thwart capture attempts by locking the once-thin princess in a dungeon and stuffing her full of cake, thereby increasing her girth and making her harder for your enemies to haul back to home base.
Games have sure changed since the days I played Nintendo and I'm wondering whether…
cmooney | July 29, 2008The "two cultures" effect that we're seeing with the responses to Sizzle continues: Now the famed industry rag Variety loves the film that has many scientists scratching their heads (or worse). From the Variety reviewer:
The film emerges, more skillfully than "Flock of Dodos," as an exceedingly clever vehicle for making science engaging to a general audience, and also presents climate-change science in a more complex light than the overtly partisan "An Inconvenient Truth."
Does the film perpetrate stereotypes? Variety:
Silpa and Clark push the flaming-queen stereotype right to the edge…
razib | July 27, 2008Chad has a post up The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, where he goes on a rant against humanities academics and their blithe complacency in relation to their ignorance of science & mathematics. Two points....
1) One of the major issues with humanistically oriented intellectuals, I believe, is a lack of anthropological fluency with the culture of science. As a case in point, a contributor to the literary weblog The Valve dismissed my assertion that scholars who study science should have some immersion in scientific education at some point with the quip that experience with multiple choice…
razib | July 25, 2008I've been reading Critique of Pure Reason and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the evenings. It should be no surprise that the former is a more tedious read than the latter, David Hume being the better stylist than Immanuel Kant. In faireness, one presumes that translation from the German might add some overhead in terms of obscurity (though I've heard that the German isn't the model of clarity either). Nevertheless, I'm struck by the fact that Kant's prose reminds me a great deal of Stephen Jay Gould. I think this is interesting because Gould drew so much inspiration from out…
sheril | July 25, 2008
From Jonathan Crow:
If movies were completely scientifically accurate, they'd probably be as interesting as a Physics 101 lecture. In real life, there are no explosions in space, gas usually doesn't explode from a lit cigarette, and Bruce Willis/Jackie Chan/Will Smith would most likely be in a coma after getting kicked in the head. Some movies, though, put science front and center in the story and more often than not the science proves to be head-slappingly bad. Here are some of the worst offenders.
sheril | July 24, 2008Carbon: Seems it's the subject on everyone's mind these days... and for good reason!
It's in the food we eat, the gasoline that fuels our cars, our clothes, jewelry, and beyond. It's us! C is the sixth most common element in the universe and intimately important in the tale of life on planet earth. And fortunately for us, Eric Roston (full disclosure, a colleague and friend) is a spectacular storyteller and has composed it's balanced, structured narrative across 12 chapters (coincidentally carbon's atomic mass) in The Carbon Age.
Admittedly, when I opened the book I had my doubts. It…
razib | July 23, 2008I posted before on Why scientists should do drugs (if they choose), via Tyler Cowen, a Jonah Lehrer article in The New Yorker:
Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus -- one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to "enhance concentration" -- but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios, drugs may actually make insights less like, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity…
cmooney | July 22, 2008
[From Sizzle: No caption needed.]
On Saturday night, along with Molly and two friends, I attended the opening of Sizzle at the Fairfax theater here in Los Angeles. The movie was airing at Outfest, a gay and lesbian film festival, and the woman introducing the film remarked on its pioneering attempt to find shared ground between the environmental and gay communities--to, in short, bring concern about global warming to a broader audience.
There were some 200 people in attendance, along with the entire cast and a few personages from the film--Dr. Naomi Oreskes of the University of California-…
sheril | July 22, 2008Remember the 2007 Scibling meetup? Well it's that special time of summer once again for Seed's science bloggers to gather in Manhattan and take the city by storm! Unfortunately, Chris can't make it this year, but I'll be in town with Jennifer, Bora, Razib, Grrl and many more of the colorful characters that inhabit the interwebs here at Sb. No doubt chaos will ensue...
And for the first time, readers are invited to meet us on Saturday, August 9th, around 3pm. The overlords will decide on the venue when they get an idea of how many readers may come so comment or email if you'd like to be…
sheril | July 21, 2008If anyone's perfected the science of music, it's Girl Talk.
Regular readers know how I feel about music's power to move and motivate people. Well I've just discovered Gregg Gillis who began as a student of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Regardless of whether his art is your style, what Gillis has accomplished on his laptop convinces me he's nothing short of a savant. In what I can only describe as an auditory museum, he samples from Nirvana, Jackson 5, Of Montreal, Metallica, Ludacris, Rick Springfield, Fergie, The Beach Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Missy…
razib | July 20, 2008One social science finding which I've wondered about over the past few years is the result that women care much more about the race of a potential mate than men do. The fact that individuals tend to want to mate assortatively with those who share their characteristics is no surprise. Rather, what does surprise are a series of papers that show a very strong asymmetry in strength of preference between males and females. To be crass about it, an attractive warm body will do for a man, but women strongly prefer a body with the packaging of their own race!
First, let's keep this in perspective…