Social Sciences
jstemwedel | October 29, 2008Earlier this month, I wrote a post on California's Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28. There, I noted that some opponents of the law expressed concerns that the real intent (and effect) of the law was not to protect those who do academic research with animals, but instead to curtail the exercise of free speech. I also wrote:
I'm left not sure how I feel about this law. Will it have a certain psychological value, telling researchers that the state is behind them, even if it doesn't actually make much illegal that wasn't…
oracknows | October 28, 2008Warning: Some of the links in this post go to hate sites. I include them because I think it's important for people to see exactly what white supremacists say in their own words, if they are curious to do so and thus learn how low these people will go. However, if you're at work you may not want to click on them.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have a major interest in World War II history and the Holocaust. Specifically, I've spent a fair amount of time writing about Holocaust denial. My interest in Holocaust denial derives from two sources. First, it's disgust at the racism, Hitler…
grrlscientist | October 27, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
A pair of European Bee-eaters, Merops apiaster.
Before a bee-eater shares his catch with his mate,
he woos her by conspicuously preparing his offering --
tossing around a may bug before knocking it out.
Image: Jözsef L. Szentpéteri/National Geographic online [larger view].
People Hurting Birds
One of Australia's rarest and fastest birds, the swift parrot, seems to be plummeting in number, and logging has been blamed. Sightings of the flashy red and green parrot have declined sharply in its winter home of flowering…
drorzel | October 26, 2008Another day, another DonorsChoose incentive claimed. I'm actually late in responding to this one-- I missed my self-imposed 24-hour deadline because we're visiting Kate's parents outside of Boston, but I'll try to make up for it with the answer. Anyway, Helen asks:
How did Emmy become part of your household?
We decided we wanted a dog, and spent a bunch of time talking to local rescue groups and visiting animal shelters. We didn't have much luck, because people kept getting to the dogs we wanted before us, but persistence paid off eventually. The Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society had a…
choofnagle | October 24, 2008In reading a law review last week, I saw a footnote to a booked called Cyberselfish, A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech. Intrigued, I purchased it immediately and have been reading it the law few nights. The author, Paulina Borsook, wrote for Wired and yet was shocked by some of the socioretardation in the Silicon Valley tech community. She published this book in 2000; it's a significant expansion of her 1996 Mother Jones article on the same topic, which concludes:
...Just as 19th-century timber and cattle and mining robber barons made their fortunes from…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2008
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had a religion or six, and although, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out. These…
jwilbanks | October 23, 2008I'm at a workshop on eChemistry today, and we were asked to prepare position statements. I'm not going to blog the conference - it's a private thing - but figured I would post my position statement here.
We were asked to answer some questions. I chose to answer this one: "do you assess the potential of new web-based communication models in Chemistry, i.e. their benefits or liabilities, their transformational power, and their chance of success?"
Full text is after the jump.
A good place to start is the transformation of scholarly communication from "using the internet" to "existing in…
oracknows | October 23, 2008I'll give Mike Adams one thing. He's consistent.
Consistently a crank, that is.
Yes, that purveyor of woo, paranoia, and conspiracy theories, not to mention the creator of one of the five largest repositories of quackery support on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, the other three being Mercola.com, Whale.to, CureZone, and Gary Null, is up to his usual tricks again. He's back promoting cancer quackery in his own inimitable style, in which cancer can be prevented and cured with virtually 100% efficacy using supplements and diet and conventional medicine never cures any disease ever. Perhaps what'…
oracknows | October 22, 2008After posting about some openly racist McCain supporters from--sadly, as it is a state in which I lived for eight years and happened to like, by and large, particularly since it's the state where my wife hails from--Ohio, I hadn't planned on doing more posts like this. But a theme emerges, and I decided that this would make a good intermittent series: People with views that shouldn't still be prevalent in 2008, but are. For example:
The homosexual agenda wants people to think that homosexual men are safe for women to hang around and even be alone with. Nothing could be further from the truth…
tqa | October 21, 2008
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals
This is the beginning of a promised (and late) series of posts discussing Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Alinsky started out in community organizing in the 1930s, working in Chicago's infamous "Back of the Yards" neighborhood. Rules for Radicals is a how-to guide for organizing, based on the…
grrlscientist | October 20, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
These Northern fulmar chicks, Fulmarus glacialis, are from the northern end of the Isle of Lewis (aka the Butt of Lewis) in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.
Image: Dave Rintoul, August 2008 [larger view].
Birds in Science
U.S. and Costa Rican scientists say their research suggests parrots -- with more than 90 species facing extinction -- might be more adaptable than thought. Donald Brightsmith, a Texas A&M University bird specialist, and Greg Matuzak from Amigos de las Aves USA, studied six parrot communities in…
cortex | October 20, 2008Dashi, a Japanese stock made from kelp and dried fish, is going mainstream. It's suddenly appearing on the menus of all sorts of fancy restaurants, many of which have little to do with Japanese food. The reason? Umami.
"It's basically water, but fantastically perfumed water," said Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin. He complements Kumamoto oysters with dashi gelée, finishes mushrooms with the stock, and brushes it on raw fish before layering on olive oil and citrus. "The dashi is invisible," he said, "but it brings more depth."
At Per Se, its chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno, weds the…
gregladen | October 20, 2008 An Overhead Projector I was recently contacted by Glen Gould, a reader who is also a relative regarding the repeated mention by Republican Candidate John McCain of the "Overhead Projector" earmark for a planetarium in Chicago. Glen, together with my sister, Bunny Laden, are very serious amateur astronomers. For instance, when Bunny and Glen bought a car a few years ago, the first thing they did on considering each possible model was to measure the vehicle to see if it would fit their telescopes. Glen is also an engineer and spends considerable volunteer time in areas of the humanities…
tetrapodzoology | October 17, 2008
Last weekend I and about 40 other people worked together in another effort to rid the shore at Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton (UK), of rubbish. We didn't succeed of course - if only that were possible - but, as always, picking up humanity's discarded crap gives you plenty to think about. Here are various random impressions. For a more data-heavy look at the menace of plastic waste and its substantial effect on environments, wildlife and human health please see the article I wrote on the same subject back in March.
Actually, this time round the rubbish - though still present in…
tlambert | October 16, 2008Monckton continues to entertain:
Dear Professor Serene - A Fellow of the APS has drawn my attention to a new policy apparently adopted by the Executive Board of the American Physical Society, to the effect that every paper published in any APS journal must in future carry a disclaimer to the effect that it has not been peer-reviewed. The Executive Board appears to have acted thus because Lawrence Krauss, a notorious, Marxist political activist who found uncongenial the conclusions of a paper by me that appeared in the July 2008 issue of Physics and Society, came under pressure from his…
purepedantry | October 16, 2008Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of Creative Commons, writes in the WSJ in defense of piracy -- or more aptly the culture of remixing of which blogging is certainly a part:
The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a…
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2008
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years.
DP0984826 Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths
Approved Project Title: Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,195
2010 : $ 88,506
2011 : $ 88,446
Primary RFCD 4401 PHILOSOPHY
APD Dr JS Wilkins
Administering Organisation
The University of Sydney
Project Summary
The idea that religion is an evolved feature of…
clock | October 15, 2008Despite 'Peacenik' Reputation, Bonobos Hunt And Eat Other Primates, Too:
Unlike the male-dominated societies of their chimpanzee relatives, bonobo society--in which females enjoy a higher social status than males--has a "make-love-not-war" kind of image. While chimpanzee males frequently band together to hunt and kill monkeys, the more peaceful bonobos were believed to restrict what meat they do eat to forest antelopes, squirrels, and rodents.
Did Termites Help Katrina Destroy New Orleans Floodwalls And Levees?:
Three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, people still…
tlambert | October 14, 2008Remember Dennis Bray's useless survey of climate scientists? The URL and password were posted to the climatesceptics mail list, so the results were biased and included responses from people who were not climate scientists. Bray refused to concede that this meant that the survey was hopelessly flawed. Now he has conducted another survey. Bray has avoided the problems of his previous survey by surveying a list of climate scientists he compiled from journal publications and scientific institutions, and only allowing one response per invitation. However, Gavin Schmidt finds that some of the…
bcohen | October 14, 2008I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis.
Here I'll excerpt that part:
About that axis. Two historians began a call-in radio show earlier this year. One of them, let's call him Ayers, considered it an opportunity to contribute to the public debate about current issues by discoursing on historical context - voting, race relations, the environment, what have you. His…