The Obama administration plans to reverse a regulation from late in the Bush administration allowing health-care workers to refuse to provide services based on moral objections, an official said Friday. The Provider Refusal Rule was proposed by the Bush White House in August and enacted on January 20, the day President Barack Obama took office. Link to article at CNN.com
Have been following discussions of this film for a few weeks, and really wish I was in SF so I could get an early glimpse:
San Francisco Film Society presents
SFFS Screen: Examined Life
Opens Friday, March 6 at the Sundance Kabuki CinemasPlato tells us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The eight contemporary philosophers profiled in Astra Taylor’s lively and
engaging documentary no doubt would agree. Director Taylor winningly transcends the typical “talking heads” portrait by bringing her subjects out into the world — on walks, in rowboats or right beside a garbage dump — where their engagement with present-day existence can be seen, heard and felt. Bay Area residents will particularly appreciate the stroll taken by UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler and disabled artist and writer Sunaura “Sunny” Taylor as they interrogate the very notion of taking a walk on the streets and in the shops of San Francisco’s colorful Mission District. Astra and Sunaura Taylor are expected to be in attendance at the screenings on Friday, March 6 and Sunday, March 8.
Emphasis mine. My understanding is that this moment in the film examines our metaphorical use of the language of embodiment, even for non-typical versions of embodiment (even in a wheelchair, the phrase remains “taking a walk”.) My interests in this should be obvious – I wrote my dissertation on this very problem.
The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s like science fiction come to life. Plus, I can’t stop listening to the researcher say “siphonophore.”
In what is becoming a yearly series, I once again find myself asking how philosophical papers and arguments are supposed to be presented as posters. I tend to turn down any conferences that want me to present in poster form instead of lecture form, because, quite frankly, I have no frigging clue how (for example) a paper on the questions of synthetic phenomenology could conceivably be given in poster form and still convey useful information. Cognitive science papers have quantitative data and can often be distilled down to a poster (I assume – I’ve always declined to take up this challenge), but I’m faced with this question once again and would really love an answer. Normally I would just turn down poster presentations, but I’m going to be in China in June anyway for another conference, so I’m actually considering the offer of a poster presentation at Towards a Science of Consciousness this year. I can’t figure out why they always want me in poster form instead of lecture form, but I can’t determine if it’s worth the trip for a poster (except that it gives me a chance to go from Beijing, where I’ll already be, to Hong Kong, a trip I’m unlikely to get a chance to make in any forseeable future otherwise.)
So, seriously – what does a philosophical poster presentation look like and how are ordinary language arguments supposed to be represented beyond ordinary language?
Wow. Having the month and year on my masthead when I’ve been utterly slack about updating it just went from “annoying” to “embarassing.” 6 months is a bit too far. I guess my site redesign didn’t really happen as planned! I’ll wipe that layer and leave the current masthead up sans date when I get home from teaching today.
Because nothing says “cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence” like a close-up of my violin.
“Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; pit vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01degree Centigrade at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have microseismometers on their legs so they can detect in pitch darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away…” Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan at Amazon.com
For the first four days of our year-long celebration of all things Lincoln, general admission is just one penny per person. Bring the whole family and enjoy the Everybody’s Lincoln photo booth. Link to blurb at Chicago History Museum website.
“I would like to invite you to participate in a worldwide celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12, 2009.
On that date, or within the next few weeks, people all over the world who love science and reason will shoot video of themselves reading from the last pages of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s revolutionary book describing evolution.
Darwin Aloud seeks video from the people of all nations as they stand in front of well-known landmarks in their countries. We will collect all this video and assemble a short film honoring the father of evolution and his accomplishments.”
Link to CFI’s Darwin Aloud page. I don’t think we have landmarks in my part of the country. I’ll need to travel for this! (No one better steal Joshua’s idea: to have me using iChat on the mac and reading on the moon.)
The NY Times today is reporting on a technique by which artificial limbs are wired through the nervous system in a relatively new way so that control of the limb feels completely intentional. I actually found a lot of reports on this technique while I was writing the neural plasticity chapter of my dissertation, but this article says it was invented in 2001, which is much more recent than I had believed.
Ms. Kitts, 40, does this all with a new kind of artificial arm that moves more easily than other devices and that she can control by using only her thoughts.
“I’m able to move my hand, wrist and elbow all at the same time,” she said. “You think, and then your muscles move.”
Her turnaround is the result of a new procedure that is attracting increasing attention because it allows people to move prosthetic arms more automatically than ever before, simply by using rewired nerves and their brains.
The technique, called targeted muscle reinnervation, involves taking the nerves that remain after an arm is amputated and connecting them to another muscle in the body, often in the chest. Electrodes are placed over the chest muscles, acting as antennae. When the person wants to move the arm, the brain sends signals that first contract the chest muscles, which send an electrical signal to the prosthetic arm, instructing it to move. The process requires no more conscious effort than it would for a person who has a natural arm.
Apparently, this technique has only been done about 30 times, which is significantly fewer than I had previously believed, but anyone familiar with the work of Stelarc’s 3rd arm can imagine this as an evolution of that work, where other muscles and nerves were used externally to control a different body part. Here, there is a direct wiring of the nerves into a new place in order to generate intentional control. (I feel certain I’ve blogged about this technique before, but my archives don’t work properly and I don’t have time to dig through them now.)
I think this technique remains my favorite example of the ability of our bodies, brains, and minds (or our body-brain-mind) to demonstrate beautiful flexibility and remind us that average bodies are not the same as “normal” bodies, because the latter is a myth. (In spite of the relatively dumb claim that ends the article.)
Link to NY times article (login required), courtesy of one of my students who sent me the link.
“I actually am optimistic about technological progress, and I think some of the things he talks about (nanotechnology, AI, etc.) will come to pass. But I do not believe in the Singularity at all.” PZ Myers at Pharyngula rocks my fucking world in every possible way. AND he likes Amanda Palmer. He must be running for Atheist Sainthood.