GrrlScientist has injected Encephalon 32 into the InterTubes. Among the very nice posts collected there is The Neurocritic’s take on that political brain study. And in the “Uh-oh” department, I note that the Neurocritic also mentions that Ray Kurzweil has a moving coming out next spring, entitled The Singularity Is Near (2008).
Continue reading Links to Keep Work at Bay
Survived High Doses of xkcd
Just got back from the xkcd meetup. For those who hadn’t heard, Randall Munroe stuck a date, time and pair of coordinates into a comic strip, which turned out to be this afternoon at a park near Davis Square. Naturally, I had to go, at least to see who else would show up.
Imagine a county fair, infested with red spiders, a Wikipedian protester, people wearing T-shirts from several generations of Internet memes, at least one toy velociraptor, a tape measure extension contest and a jungle gym densely packed with people who unanimously declare that science works, bitches.
I forgot my camera.
I did meet Joshua, though, and he might have some pictures uploaded soon.
New Poll to Flood!
The New Humanist Blog has announced that it plans to poll its readers on topics of interest and/or importance. First up is — not much surprise here — the question, “Are Dawkins and Hitchens good for humanism?”
Now, I have to say that I’m never entirely sure what people mean by humanism, anymore. Back in the early 1990s, I thought it was the idea that human beings are responsible for the problems which afflict our species, and that human beings are going to have to solve them. (This line comes straight out of Isaac Asimov’s memoir.) Today, it sometimes sounds like a label people apply to themselves to distance their position, at least in their own eyes, from the Uppity Atheists. It can also be an umbrella term to include religious folk who like Asimov’s line about human responsibility (though they might be a little put off by the remarks in the same memoir about the history of religion being “the history of human misery and black times”).
I’m also curious why New Humanist has chosen to focus on Dawkins and Hitchens. Is it a straight-up question of book sales? (PZ, where’s your book? When all the Uppity Atheists meet in the South Pacific at the antipodal point of Nicaea, you’re going to get left out of the Godless Orthodoxy!)
Da Gama Reports on Stark
Regrettably, other obligations prevented me from attending Congressman Pete Stark’s speech at Harvard last night. Fortunately, however, Joshua did, and he’s written a report for the rest of us.
Recommended reading.
He also links to the TV Tropes Wiki, which looks like a fantastic time-sink for a Friday afternoon. They’ve got extensive documentation on anime, for starters. The entry for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was clearly written by fans. “The Major’s clothes are too hot for espionage,” it says, and I agree. I might be indirectly responsible for part of the entry, too, since I recall putting an awful lot of work into the Wikipedia articles on “cyberpunk” and “postcyberpunk” back in 2005.
In Happier News
Apparently, I win the Internet.
Uh-oh — does that mean I’m now responsible for keeping the tubes flowing?
Denyse O’Leary Provides Amusement
ERV made me aware of a new bit of silliness from Denyse O’Leary, resident “journalist” of the antiscience advocacy blog Uncommon Descent. (She’s also a proponent of non-materialist neuroscience: if being a doofus about evolution is a ticket to fame and riches earned by fleecing the gullible, then trashing other well-established sciences must also be quite a racket.) This is what O’Leary has to say on the complicated and tendentious subject of women in science and mathematics, a topic in which even intelligent people are led astray by emotive arguments and spuriously “scientific” ideas not supported by the data.
Anyone who thinks that the fact that girls are not as good as boys in math means that girls do not rule is obviously not in contact with many girls.
[spit take]
Barf out! Gag me with a spoon! Gross!
I’m still not accustomed to the creationist ability to pack so many kinds of wrong into a single sentence. First, the “fact” that girls can’t do math as well as boys is, ahem, anything but; beyond that, what trait makes the female of the species “rule,” in O’Leary’s estimation? Their ability to cook, clean, and fit within a well-molded wet T-shirt? Or a mystic synchrony with the energy of the Moon, no doubt a gender-specific modification of the miracle circuits which receive the soul’s instructions to the brain.
Blech. Uncommon Descent leaves an icky taste all over me. To get it out, I think I’ll learn about adjoint functors and their relationship to monads.
Good Work if You Can Get It
PR consultant Eric Dezenhall estimated that a six-month strategy of intimidating people and obfuscating the issue of open access would cost between $300,000 and $500,000. This is according to the proposal he made to “the Coalition,” a plan which has yielded the fruit known as PRISM.
Below the fold is my re-keying of the PDF file sent to Jim Giles.
Continue reading Good Work if You Can Get It
Laden on Evolutionary Psychology
Greg Laden summarizes the evolutionary origins of human gender disparities.
I live with two females, and one of them is the only person in the house who can program the VCR. I can do it if I need to, but I threw out the directions and it will take me a while to figure out, and blood will be spilled and profanities uttered. Both of my female house mates are about as fixated on the remote as I am. They tend to be able to find it more easily than I can, because their ancestors were gatherers and finding the remote is roughly the same thing as finding nuts, berries, and most importantly, plant underground storage organs. I, on the other hand, descend from a long line of hunters, so I tend to hunt the remote. Hunting, as is well known, tends to yield a more inconsistent return. So most of the time I don’t find any remote at all, and now and then, I find three or four of them in one episode of searching.
I’m sure that a similar argument will soon be able to explain the different sizes of the male and female crockus. Clearly, the crockular region of the frontal lobe was once used to coordinate the swimming motions necessary when holding a child in the water, as per the aquatic ape hypothesis.
The Relativity of Wrong
Phil Plait points out a link to one of my favorite Asimov essays, “The Relativity of Wrong.” Like most of his essays, it begins with an anecdote: in this case, Asimov receives a letter from a fellow “majoring in English literature,” who took offense at Asimov’s implication in an earlier essay that people have made definite gains in understanding Nature.
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern “knowledge” is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. “If I am the wisest man,” said Socrates, “it is because I alone know that I know nothing.” The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
Asimov goes on to defend this position. This is actually a short version of the essay which appeared in The Skeptical Inquirer; a longer one was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and later became the title essay of the collection The Relativity of Wrong (1988). The introductory anecdotes of the essays in that book also tell how Asimov met Harold Urey and, many years later, F. Murray Abraham — so, even without the science content, it’s an interesting little book.
Great Moments in Duplicity
It’s late enough (the Boston sky is violet and orange outside my window) that I feel like posting these without much additional comment:
As this matter of faith is so much talked of, I have to reply that we accept it as useful for the multitude, and that we admittedly teach those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons.
— Origen (c. 185–c. 254), theologian and early Church Father
Continue reading Great Moments in Duplicity
Non-materialist Neuroscience
Trent Toulouse writes to say that RationalWiki has finished switching its service providers, so that it is once again available at rationalwiki.com. I had previously pointed to their growing article on non-materialist neuroscience, the domain of Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary. The article is clearly a work in progress, but it’s already a good read.
I added some stuff on the abuse of quantum mechanics, too.
Worst Figure Yet
Larry Moran and TR Gregory have found the worst figure yet to grace a slick science publication. Whenever the horizontal axis is a unitless, unquantified measure of “complexity,” you know you’re in trouble.
Monads on Video
Tired of strange British comedy videos and musical numbers which just get stranger and stranger? Wishing for some serious mathematics on this Web of ours? Well, consider your wishes fulfilled:
Be forewarned — Dr. Cheng goes fast, and she mislabels one arrow in the associativity square ([tex]T \mu[/tex] instead of [tex]\mu T[/tex]) before catching herself.
Via The n-Category Café.
Quatrain
If watches could but timely watchlings breed,
Their hatchlings on minutest clocksprings feed,
And win their loves by telling truest time,
Of Watchmakers then would we have no need.
Found Poetry: Search Queries
How do people find there way here, anyway?
Salvinorin A Acts on k-Opioid Receptors
Really, that’s about the size of it (although I do get a small kick from writing about psychedelic drugs immediately after wallowing in cultural heresies like multilingualism).
Salvia divinorum, which is scientist’s Latin for “diviner’s sage,” is a smokable plant which induces powerful but relatively short-lasting hallucinations. The main active ingredient, salvinorin A, acts on a class of nerve-cell input devices known as “κ-opioid receptors.” It’s a κ-opioid agonist, which is the opposite of antagonist — inducing activity, rather than suppressing it. Folks in the know had hypothesized that salvinorin A acted on the κ-opioid receptors, but Catherine B. Willmore-Fordham of Ohio Northern University and her colleagues were recently able to prove it. Of course, they had to work with rats, instead of people.
The paper, damnably, is locked behind a subscription wall, because Neuropharmacology is an Elsevier journal. (You did hear that Elsevier publishes a journal called Homeopathy, didn’t you? I guess they had to make up for the lost profits of not running arms fairs anymore.) Still, ye olde trusty webloggers will come through in a pinch:
Continue reading Salvinorin A Acts on k-Opioid Receptors