The host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” will file papers late Wednesday or early Thursday to put his name on South Carolina’s Democratic primary ballot, a source familiar with the comedian’s strategy said. The South Carolina native will not file papers as a Republican because the $35,000 required to get on the GOP ballot is apparently too high a threshold. Link to CNN.com article.
A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals in the belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. Link to breaking news article at CNN.com
So, I’m very slowly reading Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (slowly because it’s very low on my list of priorities, during job market season and dissertation crunch time). I read this passage the other day and had to go back and re-read it, incredulous:
“The failure of the Federalists to defeat Jefferson by linking him with atheism is attributable in part to the high personal esteem in which the author of the Declaration of Independence continued to be held and in part to other political issues, among them the assualt on the First Amendment represented by the Alien and Sedition Acts. Another vital factor in Jefferson’s election was the support of evangelical Christians, who had been his stauch allies since the debate over Virginia’s religious freedom act in the mid-1780s. Although evangelicals, many of whom believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, were far removed from Jefferson’s deist views, they were nevertheless profoundly offended by the Federalist attempt to turn the candidate’s private religious beliefs into a public issue.”
-Susan Jacoby, p. 45
Wow.
I mean, just wow.
Could you imagine this being the issue today?
I’m really enjoying this book so far, and might make it my Family Newtonmas Book this year. (It’s possible my interest in American history has only been enhanced by the fact that a friend loaned me the entire run of the West Wing on DVD and I’ve been slowly watching through it, having never seen it before. It’s nice to have intellectually stimulating pleasure reading AND pleasure watching, when I get so little of each!)
Of all the pseudo-sciences on offer, homeopathy is the most obviously spurious. Devised by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 18th century, it holds that the smaller the dose of a mineral or herb the more potent it is. Thus, if you go into a chemist and buy a homeopathic sulphur remedy marked 30C, the proportion of sulphur to inert packaging in a pill is 1 to 100,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A glass of water is more likely to cure you… Link to article in The Guardian
Well, it’s only taken 20 years or so, but some of the GOFAI folks are finally creeping back into the public eye, willing to admit that AI isn’t going so well. I know a lot of people are positive we’ll have superintelligent AI taking over the world in the next 20 years, and nothing I can say about bodies seems to stop their science fiction fantasies, but hey, at least Marvin Minsky is finally admitting the failures of the traditional AI program:
Marvin Minsky is worried that after making great strides in its infancy, AI has lost its way, getting bogged down in different theories of machine learning. Researchers “have tried to invent single techniques that could deal with all problems, but each method works only in certain domains.” Minsky believes we’re facing an AI emergency, since soon there won’t be enough human workers to perform the necessary tasks for our rapidly aging population.
So while we have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case. For “a machine to have common sense, it must know 50 million such things,” and like a human, activate different kinds of expertise in different realms of thought, says Minsky.
“It’s almost un-American at this point to say you don’t want children, especially from an image perspective,” said Ms. Min, who spoke to The Observer the day her magazine broke the news of Jennifer Lopez’s pregnancy. “It’s almost like saying you’re a communist.” Link to article in the New York Observer about the overturning of a woman’s choice between pregnancy and career – now it has to be both.
I went to an IACAP conference last year, and they put on a damn fine show. I’d certainly look into going to this one, assuming I’m not saddled with all those pesky job interviews that are possible around that time.
The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (http://ia-cap.org) is pleased to announce this first call for papers for its 2008 North American Conference to be held July 10th – 12th at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
This year’s conference theme addresses the limits of computation. As such, individual sessions will ask questions that range over several problem domains where computers and computation are having an impact. Possible questions include: Are there limits to automatic programming? Is quantum computing subject to the same limits as Turing machine computation? Is it possible to build an ethical machine? How do computers facilitate learning? To what extent is the computational metaphor helpful or harmful for describing cognition? How might the capacity of computers to create elaborate visualization techniques enhance cognition? What are the implications of experiments run in virtual worlds like Second Life? Can a musical or literary composition written by a computer be considered a work of art? To what extent, does computer networking enhance or impede the achievement of democratic ideals? What is the overall impact of social networking on our interpersonal relationships and social practices?
The conference isn’t listed on their website yet, but it will probably be there soon. If anyone plans to attend, let me know. I’d like to either be there or at least live vicariously!
About 2 weeks ago, I had intended to drive up to Seattle to see James Watson speak at the Pacific Science Center.
It wound up being terrible timing, happening on the day I was returning from the East Coast for a wedding, so I missed it.
Now it turns out he’s saying crazy things, and I’m sort of glad I skipped it (although I would’ve liked to have been there to remind myself that some of the things philosophers say about scientists are, actually, true.)
A British museum has canceled a lecture by Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, after he claimed black people are less intelligent than whites in a recent newspaper interview.
The eminent biologist told the British newspaper he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
In the newspaper interview, he said there was no reason to think that races which had grown up in separate geographical locations should have evolved identically. He went on to say that although he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
There are so many obvious logical flaws in what he’s saying that I wouldn’t even know where to start. It’s truly sobering.
Edited to add a link to Greg Laden’s spectacular deconstruction of Watson’s outrageous claims.
Edited again: Watson has apologized.
“I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said,” Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London.
“I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have.”
“To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” he said.
From the “Duh” Department:
MIT scientists propose that blood may help us think, in addition to its well-known role as the conveyor of fuel and oxygen to brain cells.
“We hypothesize that blood actively modulates how neurons process information,” Christopher Moore, a principal investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, explained in an invited review in the October issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. “Many lines of evidence suggest that blood does something more interesting than just delivering supplies. If it does modulate how neurons relay signals, that changes how we think the brain works.”
The fact that this might even be news is pretty shocking. We’ve long known that decreased or increased blood flow to the brain affects our various abilities to concentrate and think, our attention, etc. A fully embodied theory of mind would take for granted that this would matter to how the brain works. That blood itself modulates more than just oxygen levels really should have been considered much earlier than this. But given the slow start that embodied cognition has gotten across disciplines, it really doesn’t surprise me that this is being taken as revolutionary in neuroscience.
We’re running out of memory. I don’t mean computer memory. That stuff’s half-price at Costco these days. No, I’m talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we’re remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days. Link to article at Wired.com