I just noticed that the Columbia Journalism Review‘s blog picked up the story about the Pew survey on religious voting habits. The conclusion:
The survey concludes that religion is “not always the most important factor, but one important factor” for voters. This statement is about as mushy as they come, and if you ignore the headline and read to the end of the AP article, you pretty much arrive at the same place—nowhere.
What happens when we declare that this is the truth?
Skeptic’s Circle #68 is ontube at Aardvarchaeology. I enjoyed this post at Evangelical Realism, and also Andy Lewis’ description of Charles Darwin’s encounter with homeopathy. During one hospital stay, Darwin became an unwilling recipient of homeopathic “treatments,” of which he wrote,
I grieve to say that Dr Gully gives me homoœopathic medicines three times a day, which I take obediently without an atom of faith.
Oh, Humbert, hadst thou been living at this hour!
Why? In two words: “Pirate Lolita.”
Continue reading Nabokov Could Not Have Foreseen
Ye newe Carnival of Mathematicks is up at John Kemeny’s place, and Ben Webster resurrects the question of a second, mathier Carnival over at the Secret Blogging Seminar. The next host of the CoM, Kurt Van Etten at Learning Computation, says that he plans to group the submissions he gets into “math” and “math research.”
Continue reading Carnival o’ Mathematics #15
What did I ever do to deserve being in the first page of Google hits for the phrase, “In Soviet Russia“?
OK, I might as well tell my favorite “Russian reversal” joke, one which is deliciously anachronistic.
America, what a country! Everywhere I go, I see Firefox web browser. In your country, you keep open tabs in browser. In my country, web browsers keep tabs on you!
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
Bug Girl reports that Wired has a story laying out the concept of “life hacking.” Thus:
What is life hacking? Is it like computer hacking? Is someone going to break into my life?
Life hacking has little or nothing to do with home invasion. It’s the practice of using clever little tips and tricks to make your life easier, more efficient or more productive.
Really? That sounds kind of familiar. Hasn’t it been around for a while?
Yes, previously it was known as Hints From Heloise.
So why is it called life hacking?
Because a new name makes it sound like a new idea. Geeks can’t admit that anything worthwhile was invented before 1981. Soon, “making cocoa†will be called “milk hacking.â€
As a geek, I am not impressed. By rights, “Life hacking†should refer to the invention of new and clever patterns in Conway’s Game of Life. But in their smugness, the people of Wired have made a gross misestimation of geek culture and personality, all for a joke which — I’m the blogger, I can decide these things! — isn’t all that funny anyway.
Continue reading “Life Hacking”?
Brownian and Zeno have been inducted into the Order of the Molly, joining the eight others who had previously been granted that distinction by the Pharyngula commenter community. Rock on, fellows.
Over at Michi’s blog and John Armstrong’s place, there’s lately been some discussion of starting a new carnival devoted to higher-level mathematics. John Armstrong summarizes his view thusly:
The Carnival of Mathematics has become a de facto carnival of lower-level mathematics, brainteasers, and mathematics education. And I’m fine with that. I’m leaning towards letting it be and just starting a new carnival for actual mathematics. There are certainly many more mathematics weblogs than there were when CoM began, and they could support at least a monthly carnival on their own now. Or maybe this more academic community is inclined to disdain the carnival approach entirely.
Other people have suggested that there’s something to be gained by mixing the levels, and while I agree that something could be gained, I don’t think anything is being gained. People coming from the lower-level and dilettantish weblogs are not reading the higher-level material. And higher-level people can still read the Carnival posts and find what’s new in sudoku-land if they want, whether high-level blatherers submit to CoM or not.
Alon Levy suggests that the composition of the CoM could be changed by a host soliciting posts from a different set of blog- um, blatherers. I wonder if this could be sustained over multiple editions.
Head on over and discuss!
In the brief interlude between my morning of debugging PHP code — Semantic MediaWiki isn’t compatible with Cite.php, the bastards! — and my afternoon of category theory, I’d like to call attention to a few items.
First, an observation: for some reason I can’t quite fathom, I was able to adapt myself to using HTML entities for punctuation marks, writing — for — and the like, but my brain didn’t process the fact that HTML entities also exist for accented letters. Instead of typing, say, à to get à, I would hit Ctrl+T to open a new Firefox tab, hit the Tab key to move to the Search bar, type a French phrase which I knew had the accented characters in question, copy the characters I needed from the search-result summaries, and paste them where I needed them.
Searching was easier than typing. Now, that’s either a sign of advanced Internet-induced brain rot, or an indication that our interconnected world has definitively left TwenCen far behind.
OK, it could be both.
Next, interesting items recently spotted on the Weboblagospherenet:
Continue reading Link-Love
The seven-and-sixtieth Skeptic’s Circle is ontube at The Bronze Blog.
I’m not sure if the next host will be able to top the sheer coolness factor of Circle #67. I mean, it’s going to have to involve giant-killer-pirate-ninja-robot-cephalopods, or something like that.
The thirteenth Philosophia Naturalis, carnival of the physical-science blagnet, is ontube at Cocktail Party Physics.
Scott Hatfield, my colleague in the Order of the Molly, will be debating the creationist Theodore “Vox Day” Beale beginning next Wednesday. Vox declares,
Since biology is entirely outside my areas of both interest and expertise, I think this should be an interesting experiment as to whether decades of science is enough to trump raw intellect.
Excuse me while I clean up the beverage my spit-take just sent across my desk.
Continue reading Five Days Till Intellect Sushi
At 19:20 this afternoon, someone found their way to Science After Sunclipse by searching for the query, avoid girlfriend attachment. I’m the second hit. Of 312,000.
For my post, “Preferential Attachment in Python.”
Continue reading Google WTF
OK, I know I said I wouldn’t write anything more about “framing science.” I mean, when Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet used Lakoff’s concept of “frames” to say that Richard Dawkins was doing wrong, and when Sean Carroll used the public-policy notion of the “Overton Window” to argue that Richard Dawkins was doing right. . . “Windows”? “Frames”? I think it’s time for a beer. Or more.
Despite all that, I think I need to say just one more thing. I’ve discovered why scientists are apt to hate the terminology of “framing,” no matter what they think of the challenges involved in communicating science. And, believe it or not, I made this discovery thanks to Doonesbury.
Peter Millar writes for the Times Online about Richard Dawkins and his latest antics.
Even modern global oil corporations have used dowsers to search for deposits. But now Richard Dawkins, the man who told you that God was not only dead but had all along been a bogeyman invented by bogeymen, has levelled his sights at the whole new age caravanserai, including astrologers, spirit mediums, faith healers and homeopathic medicine. Is it high noon for the Age of Aquarius? It is the believers in Aquarius (and Leo and Taurus and Pisces) who attract the first body blow in Dawkins’s new Channel 4 series The Enemies of Reason, which begins next week.
Dawkins is horrified that 25% of the British public has some belief in astrology — more than in any one established religion — and that more newspaper column inches are devoted to horoscopes than to science. Leaning back on a sofa in the faded gothic splendour of Oxford’s 14th century New College he sighs with something approaching despair: “It belittles our universe. To have astrologers demeaning astronomy by tapping into the spine-tingling wonder of the universe is . . .†he struggles briefly for a word, then finds one and pronounces it with a keen awareness of the irony: “Sacrilegious!â€
Channel 4 commissioned The Enemies of Reason as a follow-up to The Root of All Evil? (2006). The first broadcast is scheduled for 13 August 2007, with the second installment broadcast one week later.
