Over at Wired News, a piece about Gordon Rugg and the verifier method. What is that? Well, you see, in and around every field of speciality, there is an “expertise gap” that exists… approaches and possibilities that lie outside the mainstream of extant disciplines. This “expertise gap” is rife in academia, but few recognize it, let alone know how to correct for it. It starts with the best of intentions. Institutions want top-notch people, so they offer incentives to attract and groom experts. Young grad students learn early that if they want to carve out a niche, they must confine …

Via Arts & Letters Daily, this is a taste of Dawkins’ new book Walking back to genesis. It looks like a fascinating piece, exploring the path of our evolution backwards to the first life on earth, conceived of as a Chaucerian pilgrimmage. And it’s probably of particular interest to SF geeks like me, who could use some help considering how aliens might look: This kind of comparative exercise, counting which things evolve often, and which seldom, might help us to predict things about life outside this planet. Which features of life are parochial, and which universal? This is a question …

Walking back from class today I noticed that literally half the people walking around were on phones. They were all chatting, and though I didn’t catch much of the conversations, being that it was at 11:20, I am certain most people were simply making plans to meet their friends for lunch. This is neither good nor bad, but it is interesting. Most of the students I saw had just come out of class, very likely within the previous five minutes. And so many of them were already on their phones. I tried to imagine what they would have done in …

Again linking to Uncertain Principles—I haven’t been there in a while and it’s worth visiting— I have some thoughts on “The Singularity, which Orzel masterfully describes as follows: One of the Big Ideas in modern SF is the idea of a “Singularity,” a term coined by Vernor Vinge (I’m not sure if he originated the concept, but I’m pretty sure the term is his). The idea is based on the observation that the pace of technological change has increased dramatically in the last several decades, and if anything appears to be accelerating. Extrapolating out from this, Vinge (and others working …

Over at Every Topic in the Universe(s?), the blogger for whom I have no other name than either “omniverse” (or “impressed”, the name under which she last posted) raised the following question: If they give a rat a lever it can push to get a food pellet, it’ll push whenever it wants a food pellet. If they give a rat a lever it can push that will SOMETIMES give it a food pellet, it will push the lever CONSTANTLY, will become virtually obsessed with pushing it. HUH?!! It’s counter-intuitive, isn’t it? To me, not really. It makes a lot of …

From Ritu, news on SIDS research. It seems that a study out of Cambridge is correlating high levels of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in the mother’s blood during the second trimester with a higher chance of stillbirth or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS, also known as “crib death”). Lime and I recently had a disagreement about this, I claimed that (according to what I’d read a few years ago) it had been pretty conclusively shown that parents leaving their kids unattended contributed to most crib deaths (especially considering that SIDS is rare in a lot of countries where parents never leave infants …

This was just too potentially big not to mention: via Katolik Shinja: Yahoo! News – Could Space Signal Be Alien Contact? LONDON (Reuters) – An unexplained radio signal from deep space could — just might be — contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday. The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico. I’m very curious to see what comes of this.

Here’s a review of physicist Roger Penrose’s new book. I won’t spin out all of what I think about Penrose, but I will say that despite the fact I admire his dedication to the ability of “everyman” to understand what the hell he’s talking about, he sometimes also talks about stuff that, it seems to me, he’s pulling straight out of his arse. When I attended a talk by him, I got this impression very clearly; he was pushing the microtubules-in-the-brain-quantum-computing stuff and I got the feeling nobody in the room was biting. He fielded some pretty harsh questions, which …