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Category Archives: Not Research

I just met Sandra Day O’Connor

She is cool.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcnulpfQTcg

I am too drained to write anything original

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVcqyB2Rbz8
The spatial theory of disease:
In his under-appreciated novel Super-Cannes, easily amongst his best, J.G. Ballard explored the psychological, sexual, and even epidemiological implications of landscape design. This is “the secret life of the business park,” Ballard writes.
At one point the book’s narrator is speaking with the corporate director of Eden-Olympia, a planned live/work community in [...]

Who is Logan Gage?

I was beginning to think that DI had given up on attacking neuroscience as they had not posted an anti-brain article since January.  I was wrong, however.  There is an article marked April 27 about free will.
But it’s not by Egnor.
It’s by a guy named Gage.
All that it says about him on the DI website [...]

Uncool things from uncool people

Courtesy of James Holden
So I’ve read through the leaked ICRC report on “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques”, or, to those of us who aren’t douchebag politicians, kidnapping and torture.  And I am disgusted.
It wasn’t just torture.
These sound like they were experiments.
Remember hearing about those Nazi doctors who would put people and vacuum chambers and [...]

Cool things from cool people

Highlights from Discover’s interview of Robert Proctor:
Agnotology – (n) the study of the politics of ignorance
How common is the active creation of ignorance?
It’s pretty common. I mean, in terms of sowing doubt, certainly global warming is a famous one. You know, the global warming denialists who for years have managed to say, “Well, the case [...]

We elected you

NSFW
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4a9vyf1_iE
From Tim Dickinson’s story on Ken Salazar, Obama’s secretary of the interior:
Salazar, for his part, is unapologetic. “I’m not here to please the environmental community,” he says. “From my point of view it was a science-based decision.”
In another disturbing move, Salazar placed an additional 1.2 million acres of Western land on the auction block, inviting [...]

More bad science journalism

This time from the NYTimes.  These are currently the two most popular stories on their website:
An anti-evolution analysis of morality by David Brooks:
 The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but [...]

Paging Dr. Collins

More on skepticism v. cynicism
 httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI&feature=player_embedded
 I sent that Collins article to a sociologist friend of mine, and she explained that both his faulty understanding of what science is and his extraordinary mistrust of it derive from a tradition in anthropology of anti-westernism left over from guilt about the field being founded to study indigenous peoples during [...]

Memories of Millington

We moved the lab today (for the second time) into the old chemistry building (it was called Rogers, now it’s ISC2 or something).  The first time we moved, a water main broke and flooded the building, ruining the walls and brand new furniture, and we had to move everything back.  Hopefully this won’t happen again [...]

I’m not going to make a new flowchart yet

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6CSIFi78Nw&NR=1
An important step to be sure, but I am not convinced enough in its efficacy to advocate stabbing someone in the neck in order to win an argument.  The big advantage of punching someone in the neck is that it almost immediately renders them immobile, thus facilitating an easy escape.  I guess I worry that [...]