Bits and pieces

Hmmm… cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.

1. The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy’s face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
2. Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
3. David White argues that intelligent design restricts God’s sovereignty over chance, which is an… odd… take on the matter.
4. Chris Nedin has a great piece on the evolution of the Ediacaran fauna at, you guessed, Ediacaran.
5. Cognition and Culture links to and discusses a paper that I really ought to do more on, but can’t, in which they argue that humans are not, contrary to the received view taught to generations of philosophy of mind students, substance dualists by nature. I have thought this ever since I discovered that most of the Old Testament prophets were materialists with respect to human beings.
6. Ether Wave has a nice guest article by Michael Gordin on the biographies of Mendeleev. I count him as the founder of etiological classification in physics.
7. A new article in Nature by researchers from my current employer have found that Wolbachia infection (an intracellular parasite that often causes sterility of insect and arachnids with uninfected conspecifics) can confer resistance to RNA viral infections.