When God is watching – a good summary article on the effects of religion on morality. Also, clean smells improve outlook.
A Christian physicist declares the end of Intelligent Design, and the comments are predictable
Are mobile phones actually good for you?
What does “Opinion” mean in science journals?
The Freshwater case in the Guardian.
On fallacies and argument forms
Late addition: French philosopher taken in by literary hoax.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creationism and Intelligent Design · General Science · Logic and philosophy · Philosophy · Religion · Science · Technology
Eric Scerri has written the definitive history of Mendele’ev’s periodic table and how it came to be formulated. He also has a paper in which he proposes a new formulation, based on historical considerations of what it was that Mendele’ev was trying to do, and on more theoretical considerations of atomic number, not weight. Sciencebase discusses it here.
And of course, no post on the periodic table is complete without a link to Tom Lehrer’s “Elements” song. Here’s a fantastic version from YouTube:
[Hat tip: David Bradley]
→ 11 CommentsCategories: Basic Concepts · General Science
I am glad to see I am not the only person who finds this unconscionable… I hope the Grauniad won’t sue me for reposting their piece below the fold.
→ 26 CommentsCategories: Freedom · Politics · Religion
I haven’t had a rant/sermon in a while.
My parents’ generation went through the second world war, fighting tyrants and ideologies that sought to control our everyday lives; for which reason they are sometimes called “the best generation”. Their parents’ generation fought world war one and went through the Depression. The generation I am the tail end of, the Baby Boomers, fought in Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. Despite all this threat and challenge, liberty increased – by the early 1970s, there was an assumption that one had the right to behave in any way that didn’t harm another person, and that the law would eventually catch up. The right to free speech in countries that didn’t have it was increasingly taken, not asked for, and in countries that did, it was applied in ways that broke the comfortable conventions of the past.
What happened? In the past 30 years we have watched rights disappear under fear – fear of communism, fear of “moral decay”, fear of drugs, and now fear of terrorism. Our ersatz wars against these fearsome things has slowly eroded our rights – we are surveilled everywhere we go, we are prohibited from certain kinds of speech, and we are now inhibited in our movement across borders. In effect, as the old Soviet republics have become more open, the open world has become more Soviet. “Think of the children” justifies any restriction that makes the effects of these fears look trivial by comparison.
It’s about time we manned up. If our forebears can cope with risk and danger, and still be free, why can’t we? One in a hundred million are harmed by terrorist attacks, and we do exactly what the terrorists would like, and retreat from the modernism of free society and religious and political and economic choice across the board. Now we have democratic societies with warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detention without charge or legal redress, and my own country is about to implement censorship of the internet, without any oversight by judicial or public scrutiny! And both major parties accept this!
→ 16 CommentsCategories: Censorship · Freedom · Media · Politics · Race and politics · Religion · Sermon · Social evolution
Tagged: Social reform
This is why I haven’t yet acted on my desire to have Linnaeus’ definition of Homo tattooed on my chest (that, and you’d never see the thing under all that fur)…
→ 4 CommentsCategories: Humor
A nice roundup from New Zealand; note the case of the baby with meningitis. The case is a coroner’s case.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Science
Tagged: antiscience, medicine
The UK government has banned the purchase of a dowsing device that is supposed to “detect” bombs in Afghanistan. Even the Afghans know this doesn’t work. [H/T Russell McPhee]
→ 14 CommentsCategories: Science
Tagged: culture, Pop
… the only strong evidence we have that Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe isn’t a clown is that his car isn’t small enough.
→ 9 CommentsCategories: Politics
Tagged: Pop culture
My disclaimer/policy on comments here has occasioned a bit of discussion on the tubes. Isis reckons that those who say it is a bad thing to piss on the rug will do it anyway when things get heated. Golden Thoughts compares this to the Civil Rights movement, and that those who say “don’t piss on the rug” are comparable to the people who arrested Rosa Parks for sitting on a bus. I have to say that I can’t see it, myself. But it raises an interesting issue: when is it right to be nasty in debate?
Because, sometimes, it is, and everyone agrees that it is. What we are arguing about now are the circumstances. More below the fold.
→ 48 CommentsCategories: Logic and philosophy · Philosophy · Truisms
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