So Antti’s got a post up on the PD Memo team’s having received prssure from the government not to out the fact that Dr. Hwang was a lying bullshitting son of a —–. Because, what, it might be embarrassing to Korea? Yeah, covering this kind of thing up is even more embarrassing, because the truth often comes out. So if politics can interfere even in what science news gets published, what discipline is safe? It’s hard to trust academia in a country where the government is censoring the very mechanisms by which bad, fake, dishonest science is outed and discredited. …
Tag: Science & Technology
Only the Surface of Things
So my mother and I have this off-and-on discussion–it’s been going for years, and usually it works out to my main criticisms of New Age conceptions of the world being, well, arbitrarily descriptive without any rigorous demands for evidence, and my mom’s criticism of science is that it “only looks at the surface of things, and not the deeper levels”. Much as I love my Mom, this really frustrates me.
MissIzzy on Alan Turing
Miss Izzy’s thoughts on Alan Turing remind me of my own essay on the fellow, which for some reason was marked private for over a year. I’m not sure exactly why. UPDATE: On having read the Alan Turing essay, I think I know. There’s a little crackpottery near the end. I agree with it, but it does wax a little apocalypso. Ah well…
THANK GOODNESS! by Daniel C Dennett
Here’s an excellent little piece by Dennett on why he thanks goodness, and not God, for his survival of a medical emergency. Quite worthwhile to athiests out there. Here’s a snippet: One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are …
Die, Spammer, Die!!!
Spam. I know, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but… This letter may come to you as a surprise due to the fact that we have not yet met. No, I’m quite used to spam. I have to say that I have no intentions of causing you any pains so i decided to contact you through this medium. But now that I’ve received spam from you, I’ve decided that I have an intention of causing you pains. As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday. That’s very …
Sometimes I think of Olaf Stapledon…
You know, the guy who wrote Star Maker, that novel in which a man wondering if all intelligent species just destroy themselves is taken on a trip through spacetime to see that, indeed, they probably do. Sometimes the news puts me in mind of him, and I wonder what he’d say or write if he saw this: THE SPECTRE of a nuclear race in the Middle East was raised yesterday when six Arab states announced that they were embarking on programmes to master atomic technology. Then again, there’s always Martin Rees.
The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, & The Ostensibly Weak Identity of Teenagers
I just finished this book this evening. Fascinating stuff… so much so that I put off starting grading just so I could finally actually finish it. Granted, there wasn’t a lot in the book that I didn’t sort of know, or suspect, and there are sections that are very clearly his later (and equally fascinating, though somewhat more flawed at the beginning and end) book Guns, Germs, and Steel in embryonic form, but still, it was an excellent read. I really quite enjoyed it. One of the funny side effects of reading this book of Diamond’s is that I’m always …
The Point of Depression
This transcript explores the possibility that like most things in humans, depression has an evolutionary basis, and that it was actually selected for in our ancestral habitat. (via who knows?)
Human species ‘may split in two’, says dimwitted British Evolutionist
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. Uh, okay, along what lines? The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. Now I am laughing. He thinks our over-dependence on technology will lead to this? Look at yourself, Mr Curry: we have no claws, no fur, no fangs. We’ve been dependent on technology since we first were human. And who’s to say, if only two clades emerged, …
Ozone Hole Double Record Breaker This Year
Yup, we have been decreasing our use of ozone damaging stuff — at least on paper — since 1995, but the hole is at a record size now, and we’ve got another 29 years of most of this stuff floating around leftto go. Scary pictures here. And Greenland’s looking kind of apocalyptic (to me, anyway) too.