I think I might actually pay to see this movie:

Mad propz, as I think the kids once said, to Citizen Z at Pharyngula.

My friend Ben Allen, a mathematician (he is what I play on TV), has started his own blag, Plektix. This is his way of spelling plectics, Murray Gell-Mann’s suggestion for what to call the study of complexity and simplicity. OK, as far as neologisms go, it’s not quite as shiny as Buckminster Fuller’s replacement for the word sunset, but it’s not bad. Let’s give Ben a warm welcome to the fractious, contentious, infuriating and sometimes enlightening pursuit that is online science writing!

I hope he doesn’t mind if I add that everybody says he looks uncannily like John Cusack.

This sounds like a good time, or as good a time as any other, to mention a few suggestions for anybody who wants to get into the blagging hobby and attract a bit of a reading audience. None of these remarks are particularly original with me, and I won’t pretend that I’m the most successful at implementing them or attracting an audience at all, but what the heck:
Continue reading Welcome to the Party, Ben! →

File this under “he could never get elected in the United States”: Matthew Parris, a former Conservative MP and supposedly the “73rd most influential gay man in the United Kingdom,” has published his critique of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent suggestion that the United Kingdom give legal recognition to Sharia law. Quoth Parris:
Continue reading The Judgment of Parris →

A couple weekends ago, some friends and I watched Jurassic Park (1993) for the first time in mumble-mumble years, and the experience brought a few things to mind.

First of all, I remembered reading Michael Crichton’s novel, and while the helicopter was flying to the island, I pondered how the movie took us back to a more innocent age, when the world and we were young, while in retrospect the book seems to look forward to Crichton the global-warming denier, Crichton the anti-scientist, Crichton the general jerk. (Yes, looking forward in retrospect is an odd feeling.) What do I mean by “innocent age”? Well, consider: back then, dinosaurs were just cool because they were dinosaurs, but if Jurassic Park came out today, in Year Two After Dover, the Young-Earth Creationists would bitch and moan on national TV that the movie accepts a 65-million-year gap between dinosaurs and people, and of course, the national media would give them equal time with the real scientists. Meanwhile, over at the Discoverup Institute, we’d have Dembski, Egnor and Behe saying, “Cloning dinosaurs from DNA is really Intelligent Design,” to which O’Leary and Cordova would add, “Yes, and Charles Darwin was a flatulent puppy-killer who didn’t know algebra and who was directly responsible for the Holocaust. Uh-huh. Jesus came to me and said that if I said potty-mouth things about Darwin, I’d get a pony in Heaven.”
Continue reading You Bet Jurassic’s A Pun →

The Podblack Cat has the seventy-ninth Skeptic’s Circle up and running. The mascot attached to my entry captures how I feel when in rant mode — disturbingly well, in fact.

“Okay, I’m going to hold a small piece of ice against your tooth to test for cold sensitivity. Are you ready?”

“Oh-hay.”

“First, I’ll hold it against the right side, which isn’t having any problems. How does that feel?”

“A i’hl ‘old — ah, ulp, a little cold, not too much pain.”

“Good. Now I’ll move over to the left side and touch it against tooth fifteen, where you’ve been having the ache.”

“Aaaaaaahhhh!”

On the plus side, I got my own copy of the X-ray picture which the dentist took. The older work on my upper left-side molars shows up as opaque blobs. Years of dissipation and unmoderated sugar intake, all condensed into a symbolism of metal! And, of course, it’s a picture of inside my head taken with invisible light. How cool is that?

Via Quantized Thoughts comes the first album meme. The rules:

• The title of your album is the last four words of the last quote listed on this random quote page.
• Your band name is the first article you get by visiting the Wikipedia random article page.
• The album background is a (dubiously legal) derivative of the third image on Flickr’s last seven days of interestingness.

My title is Which We Created Them, since my quotation was, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them,” attributed to Albert Einstein. My band name is Köprülü family: I’m triply heavy metal. Just call me osmium, biyotch.

The original image also has its umlauts: Gümüş martı / Yellow-legged Gull / Larus michahellis.

All the way back in 1981, Teresa M. Amabile of Brandeis published a paper on the “perceptions of negative evaluators,” examining whether you sound smarter by saying cruel things or kind things.

Using edited excerpts from actual negative and positive book reviews, this research examined the hypothesis that negative evaluators of intellectual products will be perceived as more intelligent than positive evaluators. The results strongly supported the hypothesis. Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness. At the same time, in accord with previous research, negative reviewers were perceived as significantly less likable than positive reviewers. The results on intelligence ratings are seen as bolstering the self-presentational explanation of the tendency shown by intellectually insecure individuals to be negatively critical. The present methodology is contrasted to that of previous research which obtained apparently contradictory results.

Or, in pithier terms, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”
Continue reading Perceptions of Negative Evaluators →

PalMD has the seventy-seventh Skeptic’s Circle up at WhiteCoat Underground. Lots of the up-and-coming critical thinkers are represented.

One step away from me, in the world where you know me, Russell Blackford has been suffering through the heat — “around the century mark on the old scale” — to see the fireworks. Here in Boston, we have to brave the cold to see the colorful explosions. It’s a funny round world we live on, isn’t it?

Last night, we confirmed a discovery first made many a year ago: you can’t put any number of MIT and/or ex-MIT people together and give them any sort of numerical task, like paying a restaurant bill or counting down to a zero point, without something going terribly awry. In this particular case, a dozen or so of us were standing atop a building, passing around a champagne bottle and looking off to the east, where the harbor and the explosions were supposed to be. “Ten, nine, eight, seven,” somebody called out, at a random time a few minutes before the New Year. This countdown sputtered into giggles, but then another broke out: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six —” And a medley of other voices joined in: “Seven! Eight! Twelve! Twenty-two! Seventeen! Sixty-nine! π!”

Finally, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

“Hey, it’s midnight by my cell phone!”

Others soon agreed: “It’s midnight by my phone too! Happy New Year!”

And then the harbor fireworks started, but they were too far away, and with too much of Boston in between us and them, to get a very good view, or to feel the visceral impact of the detonations.

Today, we observe that Monty Cantsin is the Nicolas Bourbaki of pop rock:
Continue reading X is the Y of Z →

According to Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), the United States is spending $15 billion a month on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is almost three times the National Science Foundation’s annual budget, spent every month.

The original cost estimate for Mars Direct, a manned mission to Mars relying on present-day propulsion technology, was only $55 billion, which would be spent over a decade.

You know, whenever grant-writing time rolls around, everybody jokes about working in “fight the war on terror” applications for their research (in carbon nanotubes, or category theory, or whatever). I don’t think it’s working.

(Tip o’ the accountant’s visor to Phil Plait.)

Diacanu at RichardDawkins.net:

I wish there was an archbishop of Cadbury, and all he did was hand out chocolate to children.

I’m still a child at heart, you know, and my heart won’t grow up without a continual regimen of cream for the arteries.

Today’s Red Meat is, well, oddly apt:

Click to embiggen, since I’m lazy and don’t feel like chopping up images today.

Steve Novella offers an observation which could make the ideal jumping-off point for a metaphysical conceit:

The average blog has the life expectancy of a red blood cell — about 120 days.

In other news, I think I just used a vocabulary word from high-school English in an actual sentence.

If correlation did correlate with causation, then I guess this would be the inevitable consequence of not getting laid:

Princeton student Francisco Nava (class of 2009) forged a series of e-mail threats, sending them to four students who belong to a “conservative values” organization, in addition to a professor who had aligned himself with that organization. To add weight to the threats he delivered to his own Anscombe Society, Nava found a brick wall and scraped his head across it, then broke an Orangina bottle over his own cranium.

No joke.

Nava faces disciplinary proceedings, in addition to possible legal repercussions due to filing a false police report — and a great many quizzical looks.

I was never much of a joiner in college. Even when I had the time, I just didn’t have the spirit, for the most part. I doubt I would have tried to attract attention for our cinema club by bashing myself with blunt objects and then blaming it on elitist written-word devotees from West Campus.

(Tip o’ the fedora to Mollishka.)