Culture
eklemetti | January 14, 2010Sometimes it is easy to feel overwhelmed by a disaster like the earthquake in Haiti - I mean, how much can someone sitting in their office thousands of miles away do? It isn't really feasible for most people to pull up stakes and go to give first-hand assistance during the recovery - but you feel like you need to do something. The first step is just trying to offer whatever assistance you can in whatever limited way you can. Many of us might not have a lot of money to spare - but that is the key word, "spare". That means "leftover". That means you have money to begin with - so some sacrifice…
razib | January 12, 2010This sounds entirely plausible to me, On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life:
I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives. That's how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december.
I can see Google Wave as useful for project management. But for non-professional contexts I guess I like chopping up functionality a bit…
razib | January 12, 2010Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals:
Two sites of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Iberia, dated to as early as approximately 50,000 years ago, yielded perforated and pigment-stained marine shells. At Cueva de los Aviones, three umbo-perforated valves of Acanthocardia and Glycymeris were found alongside lumps of yellow and red colorants, and residues preserved inside a Spondylus shell consist of a red lepidocrocite base mixed with ground, dark red-to-black fragments of hematite and pyrite. A perforated Pecten shell, painted on its external…
razib | January 11, 2010Eric Michael Johnson has put up a three part series on deconstructing the intellectual tradition of Social Darwinism. This is blogging as scholarship at its best. When it comes to intellectual history it is often rather easy to quote a particular passage or emphasize one aspect of a movement, and then leverage that in the furtherance of your argument. From what I can gather Eric seems to present "Social Darwinism" as a sloppy and incoherent set of ideas, more often attaining coherency in the reformulations of its antagonists than in consistency of vision set forth by its presumed luminaries.…
milhayser | January 6, 2010
On the first day of Christmas, one might gift his or her true love with a certain bird in a certain fruit tree...unless one's true love is geology. On Highly Allocthonous, Chris Rowan runs down a seasonal list of twelve geologic features, forms, and phenomena that interest him more than drummers drumming or lords a-leaping, concluding on the traditional twelfth day of Christmas—January 5—with folds a-plunging. From reversing streams and melting glaciers to the flipping of Earth's magnetic poles, Chris probes our planet from pole to pole, serving up a rich holiday feast of geologic goodness…
razib | January 5, 2010Alex Tabarrok has the back story on the infamous Paul Samuelson projections about Soviet growth. It gets interesting:
Tarshis and Heilbroner were more liberal than Samuelson and McConnell but offered a more nuanced, descriptive and tentative account of the Soviet economy. Why? Levy and Peart argue that they were saved from error not by skepticism about the Soviet Union per se but rather by skepticism about the power of simple economic theories to fully describe the world in the absence of rich institutional detail.
The issue can be generalized to many domains outside economics. If someone…
razib | January 4, 2010The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details:
...the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI's 2010 activities.
Starting this campaign, we've put more details of our ongoing and potential work online than ever before, so you can…
razib | January 1, 2010Irish atheists challenge new blasphemy laws:
Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.
The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to â¬25,000 (£22,000).
It defines blasphemy as "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number…
razib | December 31, 2009Noticed a piece at The Root, The Decade in Race: WTF Was That?:
After the tragedy of 9/11, Arab American stereotypes morph from harmless convenient store owner to new American nigger. The Simpsons' Apuh is suddenly nowhere near as funny
There really needed to be more said here. The convenience store owners were not usually Arab (though some were), generally, they were South Asian, most often Indian American. "Apuh" (it's spelled Apu, no "h") is an Indian American, and is depicted as Hindu on The Simpsons. Also, on the order of 50%* of Arab Americans aren't Muslim, they're Christian. Like the…
razib | December 31, 2009If you're getting in at the last second, please see GiveWell's top charities.
razib | December 31, 2009The Massive Stock Market Rally of 2009 Ends Today:
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a comeback of historic proportions," the U.S. stock market's banner year closes later on today. The paper says, "With one trading day remaining in 2009, the Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since 2003, when it rose 25%. It finished Wednesday up 3.1 points, at 10548.51, a fresh peak for the year and the highest since October 2008." Leading its business section, New York Times also takes note of this year's rallying stock markets, which "will ring out one of their most volatile periods in…
razib | December 29, 2009The Audacious Epigone has an interesting post up, Burden of boredom borne by blockheads:
This isn't just me speaking from personal experience--the data confirm it. The GSS asked respondents in 1982 and again in 2004 how often they have time on their hands that they don't know what to do with. Using the familiar categorization method employed here before*, the following table shows the percentage of each group's members who reported to "almost never" be without something worthwhile to do in their free time:
He presented his data in tabular format. I decided to use the variables he kindly…
drorzel | December 23, 2009Janet has a post grappling with the ethical implications of telling children about Santa Claus. SteelyKid is too young for this to be an issue yet, but on this issue, like many others, I turn to my favorite literary philosopher, Terry Pratchett:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE…
razib | December 22, 2009There has been more blogospheric discussion on the topic of my post Doing the right thing, doing the legal thing. Megan McArdle, who started the discussion, has a long post elaborating on her objections to strategic defaults. Steve Waldman has two good posts up. Finally, at The Big Money Daniel Gross concludes:
Of course, corporate managers and financiers don't suffer from these neuroses. Do you think billionaire investor Sam Zell feels any guilt or shame because his buyout of the Tribune Co., which had $12.9 billion in debt, ended in a Chapter 11 filing last December? Rather than worry about…
razib | December 22, 2009
A few days ago I pointed out that actors with visible Asian ancestry, such as Keanu Reeves, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Dean Cain, can play white characters, while those with visible African ancestry can not (I will leave it to debate whether you think Rashida Jones or Jennifer Beals are violations of that rule or not). On the other hand, it does seem that people with no visible African ancestry can identify as black American due to the norm of hypodescent. For example, consider Walter White, who identified as a black man despite his visible white European appearance. White used his ability to "…
milhayser | December 22, 2009
The climate summit in Copenhagen came to a tenuous conclusion on Friday, as five nations pulled a non-binding "agreement" from thin air. This agreement recognizes the threat of rising temperatures and pledges financial aid for developing countries, but sets no emission guidelines and is not legally enforcible anyway. On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk fears what global warming will do to Santa's Workshop, writing that the major players at Copenhagen were "afraid to do hard things," and content to "pretend to do something" instead. Meanwhile, Greg Laden on his blog points out that Copenhagen…
razib | December 21, 2009Tom Rees:
It seems that when Christianity is popular, Christians are content with the idea of a firewall separating Church and State. It's only when Christianity begins to lose it's influence over the population at large that Christians begin to campaign for the State to adopt a Christian character.
Looking at survey data from 18 Western countries, they found:
-The fewer Christians in a country, the greater the support among Christians for a greater public role for religion (as shown in the graph).
-The polarization of views between Christians and non-religious on a public role for religion…
drorzel | December 21, 2009Paul Krugman had a post today calling Obama the WYSIWYG President:
There's a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn't the man progressives thought they were voting for.
But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
(a) There wasn't a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
Now it's true that many progressives were ardent Obama…