Summary of the Hockey Stick

Nice overview of the “hockey stick graph” controversy and reconstruction.

Mastery and Value

Over at Secular Right Razib links to a paper by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that goes through purported problems between evolution and conservatism. Now clearly I’m a theist but I find a lot of the purported problems between evolution and faith pretty lame. Without going through all the problems in the paper let me suggest [...]

Donators

People who donate to religions are more likely to punish selfish behavior

Spraying Stem Cells to Heal

Spraying stem cells to heal burns. I’ve not heard how most of the recent stem cell trials have been going. (Say the one in Britain injecting stem cells into heart attack victims) It’ll be interesting to see if stem cells are this generation’s gene therapy or something simple that really works in multiple applications. Thus [...]

Epistemology, OOO, and Ontology

Interesting discussion of a critique of OOO in terms of epistemology. Sorry I’ve not had time to say much about OOO after my promises this summer. It’s just been too busy. Hopefully after Christmas. Adam’s been sending me bit’s of his particular kind of OOO which I’ve enjoyed quite a bit and like more than [...]

SMPT

A few SMPT notes. First a few have left comments here about the audio files for the 2010 Conference. It is up in the member resources section of the SMPT site. They are there, honestly. But you have to be a SMPT member to access them (or past issues of Element). In addition next Wednesday, [...]

Pre-Columbian Native American Influx into Europe

Fascinating post by Razib over at Gene Expression about new evidence of a probable influx of native American genes into Europe – primarily in Iceland. The evidence indicates that this influx took place prior to 1700, probably centuries earlier. (i.e. pre-columbian) Razib speculates that the influx may have come from Viking incursions into America bringing [...]

Do Octopi Have Multiple Minds?

Do octopi have multiple minds? (HT: Marginal Revolution) Octopuses have large nervous systems, centered around relatively large brains. But more than half of their 500 million neurons are found in the arms themselves, Godfrey-Smith said. This raises the question of whether the arms have something like minds of their own. Though the question is controversial, [...]

Radiation Fear-mongering

So everyone is up in arms over radiation in the body scanners. This sort of thing always amuses me were it not so sad. The word “radiation” seems to cause an irrational fear in people who can’t separate out danger from radiation from other dangers. So a mild bit of innocuous radiation is seen as [...]

Cognition: In the Head?

There’s a great review that gets at the issue of externalism of cognition being linked to alot. Note that the topic isn’t content externalism but whether cognition can be said to be all in the head. I think the arguments for content externalism have been remarkably strong and hard to overcome. Cognition is a slightly [...]

Religious People and Children

Religious people have more children because they’re more traditional. Interestingly, “Once [the choice of life trajectory] has been decided, then religiosity has no further effect on fertility.”

Elections

I figured I’d make a few comments. The Republicans beat expectations (which were already quite high) in the House but were quite below expectations in the Senate. In particular they lost the race with Reid in Nevada. While the anti-tea party backlash hasn’t started yet I suspect some of the major Senate failures are due [...]

Anselm’s Ontological Argument and the Problem of Evil

Bill Vallicella has up a great post from tying Anselm’s ontological argument (in its strongest form) to the problem of evil. I kind of enjoy some of the other ways to read Anselm though. My favorite is the reading that doesn’t take Anselm as considering the “greatest conceivable being” but “a greater than which can [...]

Cure for Colds?

A cure for the common cold? Well not yet, but a pretty exciting breakthrough in how the immune system works against viruses.

New Neutrino

New kind of neutrino? Probably the strongest candidate for dark matter out there right now. It’s also interesting what this does to the Standard Model. (Correction: I gather this is acceptable to extensions to the SM)

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