Archive for May, 2007
Posted in Blurb, Technology
May 30, 2007 at 8:25 am
“Microsoft Corp. will unveil a coffee-table-shaped “surface computer” Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch… In a demonstration, Microsoft placed a digital camera with a wireless chip on the tabletop. The Surface recognized the camera and sent its pictures to the display, allowing people around the table to sift through them, grabbing and turning pictures or making them bigger or smaller by spreading or narrowing their fingers.” Link (thanks, Will) Link to YouTube video.
Posted in Atheism, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science
May 29, 2007 at 10:47 am
Following up on his work showing children to be “Natural-Born Dualists,” Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom shows us that children have a harder time believing science that clashes with their everyday interactions with the world. This should not surprise anyone, and the only thing it tells me is that adults who believe in creationism are both childish and lying to themselves.
In sum, the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans’ resistance to science is the strongest.
Link to Edge article – read more.
Link to Descartes’ Baby at Amazon.com
Posted in Blurb, Philosophy, ethics
May 25, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Another lesson is that the deep problems of meta-ethics are not just about ethics. To a significant extent morality is not a self-contained system with its own proprietary vocabulary and problems: it is inextricably tangled with our normative and evaluative thought and talk in general, which extends to reasons, rationality, aesthetics, etiquette, and much else besides. Concerns about the status of morality soon spread like spilled ink: if there’s no room for ethics in a disenchanted nature, most of our distinctively human form of life is also excluded.… Alex Byrne gives us the history of ethical thought in just a few short pages at the Boston Review.
Posted in Digital Culture, Extended, literature
May 25, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Thanks to Wayne this morning for the link, and then again via Warren Ellis later:
On Monday, Publishers Weekly reported that Bookspan, acquired just six weeks ago by Bertelsmann, will cut 280 positions and close some of its book clubs, which include Book-of-the-Month, Doubleday and The Literary Guild. It looks as if the 54-year-old Science Fiction Book Club, which offers a selection of graphic novels and comic novelizations, will be among the casualties.
Horrible day. I adore my SFBC editions. I just went through and bought all of the Garrett, PI novels in hardcover anthology, even though I already have them all in original pulps. They’re more valuable for the special editions they release than the ease of ordering via book club format. But it’s truly a sad, sad day when we over-digitize, or over-romanticize the digital, to such a degree that we lose the value of printed media entirely.
Tragic.
Link to Newsarama post.
Posted in Books, Media, Philosophy, ethics
May 23, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Therefore, to will myself is to will my epoch. I cannot will to suppress War. The conditions for such a thing are not given and, moreover, the freedom of my descendants may bring it back again. But I can will to suppress this war… This means that there is no a priori principle of ethical universality in whose name we can judge any event of an epoch (which would be to introduce the judgment of the past or of the future)… Jean-Paul Sartre… at Powells.com
Posted in Blurb, Evolution, Science
May 23, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Female hammerhead sharks can reproduce without having sex, scientists confirm. The evidence comes from a shark at Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska which gave birth to a pup in 2001 despite having had no contact with a male. Genetic tests by a team from Belfast, Nebraska and Florida prove conclusively the young animal possessed no paternal DNA, Biology Letters journal reports… Link to BBC News
Posted in Atheism, Democracy, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science
May 21, 2007 at 10:53 am
If you’re in the Kentucky area, you might be interested in this:
People from all over the country are invited to join outside of the gates of “Answers in Genesis” (AiG) in Northern Kentucky to let the world know that many rational Americans do not share the primitive world view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, as presented by the 27 million dollar plus “Creation Museum” opening Memorial Day, May 28, 2007.Various groups, representing both religious and secular orientations, will join together to protest this destructive world view.
I would love to be there to support this, but it would also mean being in Kentucky. I can only hope that anyone nearby really does turn out to protest this ridiculous “museum” – call it an amusement park or a carnival and I’d be a lot happier.
Link to Rally for Reason
Posted in Atheism, Democracy, Evolution, Extended, Science
May 19, 2007 at 7:42 pm
From the New York Times:
The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.
Scientists who have been active in the nation’s evolution debate say they want to thwart his candidacy, but it is not clear if they can.
Just fantastic.
Link to article at the Statesman.com
Posted in Atheism, Blurb
May 18, 2007 at 8:01 pm
“Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.” Review of the current batch of anti-religion books at The New Yorker.
Posted in Democracy, Extended, Feminism, Technology, ethics
May 14, 2007 at 10:00 am
Not sure what to make of this:
Women are driving miles to Dr. Justin Salerno’s office in Vacaville to receive a shot of collagen that patients said helps them reach climax faster.
“It’s a form of human collagen we inject into the vaginal tissues where the G-spot is,” Salerno said.
Salerno is one of the only doctors in the nation offering the procedure, known as the G-Shot.
“Way more quickly, and multiple, not just one or two, but four or five, which made it a lot better,” said a patient who did not want to be identified.
I’m all for technology making our lives better, and this certainly sounds like it has that potential. I’m just a bit worried about the “way more quickly” aspect. Husbands, are your wives taking too long enjoying themselves? Speed it up and get to sleep! Bring them in for the G-Shot!
Read more here.