Cognitive Aging – the Perils

I don’t want to get too excited about this but there’s a very promising study about Alzheimer’s that may have found the cause. I’m cautious as there’s been hype about previous supposed discoveries of what’s behind Alzheimer’s that ended up being wrong. This one, from my outsider perspective, does sound promising though. I don’t know [...]

Intelligence, Math and Field

Razib has up a really interesting post on different fields and how intelligent people are in those fields. Specifically he focuses in on verbal skills and math skills on the GRE tests.  The graph of verbal vs. math was quite interesting – especially with physicists out in the corner. More interesting to me was the [...]

Religion, Autism and Cognitive Style

Razib has a slew of fantastic posts on religion today. Most of it is just going over some studies that have been discussed at quite a few blogs. The first post, “Atheism as Mental Deviance” (he’s using that term technically) deals with the recognition that autistics are more apt to be atheist than normal. Honestly [...]

Academic Freedom

I tend to think that academic freedom as idealized is a big myth. I found this comic today that seems to express part of my view. (The other part being all the politics at many universities)

Laser Fusion

Sorry for no OOO posts yet. I want to really understand it before putting my foot in my mouth. In the meantime I saw a link to the BBC story about laser fusion over at Slashdot today. Interestingly this is what I worked on back in my days at LANL. It seems to me that [...]

Global Warming and the Right

OK, I promise I’ll be back to technical philosophy later tonight. I just wanted to promote two great blog posts about the Republican party and Global Warming. The first is from The Volokh Conspiracy while the second is Megan McArdle commenting on that post. Believe it or not Republican darling Chris Christie dared speak in [...]

Evolutionist Cartoon

There’s been an interesting graph making the rounds of Twitter and various blogs today. You’ve probably seen it. It’s from the web comic Calamities of Nature. It’s just a graph of belief in evolution versus per capita gross domestic product. It then has a fit for the data using an equation of the form y [...]

Popular Knowledge of Scientists

Interesting NYT article on the status of scientists. When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name [...]

Fermi Problem

I love Fermi Problems. The idea is to make rough approximations (often by doing order of magnitude comparisons with “common sense”) and then calculate the answers to complex problems quickly.  What I really like about these sorts of problems is that they really illustrate the basics of the way physicists think.  In effect they, better [...]

Philosophy Useless?

The Eternal Universe commented on a recent editorial about how philosophy is bankrupt. There have been similar editorials of late including one in the NYT a few months back. (Sadly I couldn’t find it quickly) The basic idea is that philosophy has failed since it can’t give practical answers to politicians. “Philosophy, it seems to [...]

Bacteriophages

I want to try and do at least one general philosophy post, one science post and one quasi-religious post each week. I’ll probably throw in the occasional political post as well. It’s a bit of a difference from what I was doing before which tended to primarily be just about philosophy. I’ve long said the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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