The ideal of certainty in mathematical proof is crumbling, says Brian Hayes. I tend to agree, but then again, I'm a weirdo left-wing postmodernist.

This article is long, but I think it's worth reading. The opening sentence - "I was a teenage angle trisector" - is genius.

Jim Henley on torture and hypothetical scenarios:

What if the suspect demands you fix the World Series and this was your team’s best chance at a championship in 50 years? What if he says he’ll tell you where the bomb is if someone will explain the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, in words he can understand? What if he’ll make sure the bomb doesn’t go off in exchange for a ride on the space shuttle? Hey—it could happen.

A reader (incidentally also a cartoonist) points me to this article about the Canadian with no pulse. In some sense this is my field of research bearing fruit. They've been using these left-ventricular assist devices for a while; what's new is that here it's pretty much a complete heart replacement rather than just an assist device. The group I work with a little is trying to make a right-ventricular assist device. There are limitations to these things, which is why I have a job, but it's still pretty amazing stuff.

Tax carbon emissions, sell permits so that polluters can buy and sell carbon credits, or do nothing. Ronald Bailey discusses three approaches to dealing with global warming.

What your waiter thinks of you when you order your martini shaken, not stirred.

It's that time of year, so Daniel Solove is offering all of us in academia a detailed guide, complete with figures, of how to grade exams. I'm not a TA this term, but when I was, this was pretty much the method I used.

Muhammad Yunus gives himself a pat on the back for microcredit. If anybody deserves it, it's him.

Seed gets on the "shared space", make streets more dangerous to make them safer, bandwagon:

Researchers replaced road signs and white lane dividers with a variety of urban design elements: red bricks were used to make the road narrower, and trees, shrubs and street furniture were placed directly in the right of way.

I'd be curious to see what street furniture placed "directly in the right of way" looks like, exactly. I've mentioned this kind of thing before, and I am becoming even more convinced.

Virginia Postrel has an interesting piece in the Atlantic about chain stores and what it means to have local color:

Chains make a large range of choices available in more places. They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain.

Richard Cohen says that algebra has no value. He obviously hasn't read this paper, which applies game theory to discuss the efficiency and equilibrium of various toilet seat strategies.

John Derbyshire (a mathematician, incidentally) is yelling about how stupid educational theory is. His rant ranges from the offensive

Girls are encouraged to act like boys by taking up advanced science, math, and strenuous sports, which few of them have any liking or aptitude for.

to the possibly offensive but also thought-provoking

American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.

The New Scientist has a feature where a bunch of "brilliant minds" try to predict the future. I haven't read many of the contributors, and there are a lot, so let me know if any of them are particularly worth reading.

At the risk of angering a commenter again, I want to point out this interview with Bjorn Lomborg:

So if we stand back, as Al Gore asks us to do, and look at it from the coming generation's point of view, they are going to ask 'what were they thinking?' They tried to do a tiny little bit about climate change at a fairly high cost, but have done very little good, whereas there are many other problems that they could have tackled that would have left a much better world behind.

I'm firmly in Lomborg's camp here. Sure, people should do whatever they're passionate about to reduce human suffering. But some things are more effective than others, and pointing that out does not amount to discouraging people from acting at all.

Conservatives give more to charity than liberals, says Arthur C. Brooks:

In essence, for many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks.

You think of technology these days as super high-tech satellites and billion-dollar fusion reactors. So it's refreshing to hear about a guy who invented a new nail. Sounds like it's a pretty good nail, too.

This week's wrong definition of faith comes from Steven Pinker, who says faith is "believing something without good reasons to do so."

Jeeves and W. The funniest thing I've read in a while.

Emily Oster has what she thinks are three earth-shattering, controversial ideas about HIV/AIDS. I'm not so sure they're that different, but I'll let you decide.

Another article about autism, this one offering the very plausible but perhaps not very exciting "assortative mating" theory: partly-autistic John meets partly-autistic Mary and they have fully-autistic Junior.

I've written about autism several times before. Why am I so interested? Well, I see a little bit of it in myself. I scored a 32 on this quiz, which is allegedly the borderline score.

Slate is doing a series on philanthropy. So far my favorite is Sebastian Mallaby's advice about how to make sure your giving actually makes a difference. You know, just in case you have a spare billion you want to give away.

I hate roundabouts, but, well, this counterintuitive approach - removing all traffic lights - almost has me convinced:

It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

This sort-of vaccine-like approach to fighting AIDS looks exciting.

Bjorn Lomborg argues that global warming is not our most pressing concern:

Faced with such alarmist suggestions, spending just 1% of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions seems on the surface like a sound investment. In fact, it is one of the least attractive options. Spending just a fraction of this figure--$75 billion--the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world's major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now. Is that not better?

Dan Gilbert talks about why we're not afraid of global warming:

First, global warming lacks a mustache.

Bruce Schneier has related thoughts about the difference in how we perceive threats and how threatening they actually are.

Kurt Kleiner writes in defense of naps:

A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.

The genomes of breast and colon cancer have been sequenced.

For-profit charities could be a good idea.

Wired is running a piece by Gary Wolf about what he calls the New Atheism:

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil.

In interviews with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, the author is clearly sympathetic to their ideas but still manages to portray them as a little bit foolish, as embodying some of what they ridicule in others:

Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists.

I heard Sam Harris speak here in Boulder two weeks ago, and I tend to agree. He is intelligent, and his arguments are good, but they are not new and they aren't really his strength. What makes his books popular and his arguments gain traction is that he has the zeal of a true believer.

Lucy is coming to the United States. My distinction as one of few Americans to have seen the fossil in person is about to evaporate. Oh well.

The New Yorker takes a look at microfinance:

When people visit the worst kinds of slums—even worse than anyone can imagine—and they walk around and meet people in their little businesses and little homes, almost always, their first comment is ‘Why are they so happy?’ They are smiling, proud, with dignity, showing what they have achieved. And I say, ‘It’s because they have something today which they didn’t have a month ago, and they have a plan and dream of something they’re going to have in a month’s time that they don’t have today.’

Jorge Buendía reports on a comparison of American attitudes toward Mexican immigrants and Mexican attitudes toward Cental American immigrants [my rough translation from the Spanish]:

Generally, Mexicans reject immigrants as much or more than Americans. For example, only 5% of the population support increasing the immigration of Central Americans to our country (in the United States 17% support more immigration).

The majority of Mexicans, 51%, favor reducing immigration from Central America. In the United States the corresponding percentage is 39.

Mirror neurons and salience landscapes: the latest steps to understanding autism.

Think you hang out in an intellectually diverse group who have differing ideas and beliefs? Think again.

Gregg Easterbrook reports on a study that links autism to watching television. Steven Levitt is not convinced.

Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank have won the Nobel peace prize for their work in microfinance. I've heard only good things about microfinance; it seems to really work.

Geoff Pullum has a radical idea about government regulation of expression.

Josh Rosenau writes in defense of development:

The solution to deforestation cannot simply be to demand that people stop cutting down trees. Too often, that is the only way people can survive at all, and no calculus can justify allowing them to starve in order to preserve a few acres of forest.

An assessment of Harry Potter:

He's a glory hog who unfairly receives credit for the accomplishments of others and who skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections.

Elephants are causing traffic snarls in Mumbai. The solution, clearly, is to implant microchips in the elephants' ears.

Epidemic coming. Limited amount of vaccine:

Last year, scientists showed in a model that if you vaccinate about 60% of U.S. schoolchildren, flu deaths among the elderly would fall to 6,600 from the typical 34,000. "It's not necessarily true that the best way to protect someone is to vaccinate that person," says Ira Longini of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. "In the case of the elderly, flu vaccine doesn't protect them very well, so breaking the chain of transmission provides greater protection."

There are lots of tricky ethical questions here, about who to vaccinate and why.

Richard Louv says our society is suffering from nature-deficit disorder:

ADHD may be a set of symptoms initiated or aggravated by lack of exposure to nature. By this line of thinking, many children may benefit from medications, but the real disorder lies in the society that has disengaged children from nature and imposed on them an artificial environment for which they have not evolved.

A kind commenter on this previous post prompted me to look around for something by Louv; the above is a bit old but definitely worth reading.

Changing military strategy in Iraq: "The more force used, the less effective it is," "Tactical success guarantees nothing," "The more you protect your force, the less secure you are." It sounds almost Zen.

If you have six extra hours to read a ridiculously long article, I highly recommend this one by Matthew B. Crawford:

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

His argument throughout is that manual labor and skilled craft connect us intellectually and socially to the world and to our neighbors in a way that the so-called knowledge economy does not. I think he's on to something; the article made me want to quit graduate school and become a plumber.

Making academic journal articles free.

We should have courses in comparative genocide, says Carlin Romano, reviewing a book with the creepy title, Why Not Kill Them All:

"Mass killing is neither irrational nor in any sense 'crazy.'" Genocide is a largely "rational" policy decision that can, in principle, be combated and blocked by counter measures.

The New Yorker has a good article about the state of physics and string theory that touches on some of the bigger issues, like what defines science, the role of beauty in that definition, and the role of authority in shaping the discipline.

One way to fight global warming is to bury carbon.

Plug-in hybrids are good, but not perfect:

For a plug-in owner in California, where most electricity on the grid is generated by low-pollution facilities, driving a PHEV might cut emissions of carbon dioxide by one-third compared with driving a regular hybrid.

But if the same PHEV were charged in the Midwest, where coal-fired power plants supply the electricity, reduction of CO2 emissions would be nil. Nitrous-oxide emissions (which form smog) would fall slightly, but sulfur-dioxide emissions (which contribute to acid rain) would quadruple.

George Johnson briefly and dismissively reviews a pair of books that try to harmonize science and religion.

Anne Applebaum has this to say about the Pope's remarks about Islam and the Muslim world's reaction:

Nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

John Krenson agrees:

We accept immoral expressions of outrage by Muslims across the world and yet fail to have any of our own justified moral indignation at their actions. Instead we apologize for causing their reactions. Perhaps I should apologize to my four year old for his little temper tantrum this morning and for the time he slugged his sister in the face with a toy.

But he's Catholic, so obviously he's biased. So here's Sam Harris, who's clearly no fan of the pope:

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Religious left versus religious right: Jim Wallis opens, Ralph Reed responds, and Wallis gets (so far) the last word.

Should elementary school kids have homework?

The right decision, made too late: WHO endorses the use of DDT to fight malaria.

Popular Mechanics has a debate about the merits of nuclear power.

William Saletan discusses vegetative states and brain scans:

The analysis in Science concludes that she has a "rich mental life" but may not be "conscious." What in God's name does that mean? Would you pull the plug on a 24-year-old relative with a rich and responsive but unconscious mental life? Go ahead, raise your hand. Or just think about raising it, and we'll record your vote by brain scan.

Technology Review is running a list of young innovators. My favorites are Christina Galitsky, designing efficient stoves and water filtering methods; Utkan Demirci, diagnosing HIV/AIDS cheaply; and Michael Raab, making the ethanol manufacturing process more efficient.

Paul Marshall on religion in the media:

The significance of this forced conversion has been downplayed in the media. The New York Times and the Washington Post even pronounced the two "unharmed" on release. This judgment is perverse. If Muslim prisoners in American custody were forced to convert to Christianity on pain of death or as a condition of release, the press would denounce it as virtual torture, and rightly so: No sane person would say the prisoners had suffered no harm.

Aquaculture can save the oceans, revitalize the inner city, and feed the world, all in one package.

The American education system is broken. Our learning system, on the other hand:

It provides second chances. It tries to teach people when they're motivated to learn -- which isn't always when they're in high school or starting college.

Multi-drug resistant TB is bad enough. Now there's extreme drug resistant TB.

Seed takes a look at some of our weapons in the battle against malaria.

Ronald Bailey: "Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history?"

Genetically modifying your immune cells can help you fight off skin cancer.

The cartoonist from my hometown pokes fun at the media frenzy in the town where I live now.

The distinction between past and future is just a consequence of the peculiar part of the universe we inhabit, not a necessary physical law:

The very beginning of time found our universe in an extremely unnatural and highly organized low-entropy state. It is the process by which it is inevitably relaxing into a more naturally disordered and messy configuration that imprints the unmistakable difference between past and future that we perceive.

This idea is fascinating; it remind me of some of what Roger Penrose says in The Emperor's New Mind. But I'm not sure I buy it.

Trying to keep religion from interfering with politics means that the government has to monitor, and in some ways censor, religious expression.

It's too easy to make fun of rich liberals for being hypocrites. This article looks at Al Gore's inconvenient carbon footprint, and this review turns a sarcastic eye on one writer's "year without shopping." It's too easy, but it's still fun; the second link in particular is an enjoyable hatchet job.

As humanity becomes more mature, the superstition of religion will fade away into enlightened secularism. Or not:

The belief that outbreaks of politicized religion are temporary detours on the road to secularization was plausible in 1976, 1986, or even 1996. Today, the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound. God is winning in global politics. And modernization, democratization, and globalization have only made him stronger.

After all, even this atheist philosopher sounds like he's becoming a pagan.

Can't remember the new planets? My Very Excellent Mother Could Just Send Us Nine Cheerleaders Playing Xylophones, courtesy of Language Log.

The Field Medal winners have been announced.

While you're deciding who to vote for in November, take a look at your representatives' Darfur scores.

Grigory Perelman has proven the Poincare Conjecture but doesn't want the million dollar prize. This article seems to confuse the Fields Medal and the Millenium Prizes, but it's still interesting.

Filling your car with ethanol makes your chicken dinner more expensive.

Seed is running a series of articles about HIV/AIDS on its grim 25th anniversary - I linked part of it earlier but there is much more. There's also this (shorter) retrospective from Reason.

The days of female computers:

Respected mathematicians would blithely approximate the problem-solving horsepower of computing machines in “girl-years” and describe a unit of machine labor as equal to one “kilo-girl.”

André Glucksmann has an interesting article that offers more questions than answers. The questions are very good, though:

Why do the 200,000 slaughtered Muslims of Darfur not arouse even half a quarter of the fury caused by 200-times fewer dead in Lebanon?

and

Have our sages gone crazy? Do they really believe that sans Israeli-Palestinian conflict nothing bad would have happened, neither the deadly Khomeini Revolution, nor the bloody Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq, nor the decade of Islamic terrorism in Algeria, nor the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor the angry warriors of God the world over?

Fossil fuels are going away. Technology is the solution:

If there is anything to be learned from history, it's that we need to face the harsh reality of fossil fuel scarcity and begin something like a Manhattan project to develop clean, economical and preferably sustainable new sources of energy. Just as important, we need to innovate on the side of conservation and efficiency.

A short look at 25 years of AIDS.

"It's not my fault, officer, I'm infected with toxoplasma gondii." There's evidence that this bug may make people more aggressive; and not just individuals, maybe entire cultures.

The United States no longer cares about international development.

Air-conditioning is taking over - and destroying - the earth:

Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.

While the spread of air-conditioning may be a bad thing for the environment, Eskimos using it says more about society and economics than it does about the climate.

Also on the climate change beat, Andrew Sullivan says environmentalism is an inherently conservative cause:

The earth is something none of us can own or control. It is something far older than our limited minds can even imagine. Our task is therefore a modest one: of stewardship, the quintessential conservative occupation.

An interesting article about how to exercise your willpower - and how to give it sufficient rest.

Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The "moral muscle", as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

If you're good-looking, you're more likely to have a daughter; if you're a mathematician, you're more likely to have a son. Since I'm a good-looking mathematician, I figure it's a wash.

New York City has proved that the key to lowering crime is not social programs, but old-fashioned, intensive, police work:

Left-wing academics deny that law-abiding inner-city residents desire an orderly environment as fiercely as the wealthy. Enforcing loitering ordinances or open-container rules in minority neighborhoods, they charge, is simply a racist attack on the oppressed. Many such academics have obviously spoken to very few poor people, so as not to disrupt their fantasy of a revolutionary vanguard ready to attack bourgeois conventions.

Relax, Wal-Mart is not taking over the world.

Analogy is the key to understanding - well, everything.

The tale of an economist's come from behind victory over a world-class poker player in a hotly contested game of rock-paper-scissors.

Genius comes from hard work and practice.

Bush's vision for space exploration points NASA in the right direction.

James Carroll is confused, as many people are, about the relationship of faith to reason:

The scientific method prizes experience (investigation and observation) over ideology. Reason over faith. The starting point of experience is not God's existence ("In the beginning, God"), but the person's ("I think, therefore I am"). How do I know I exist? Not because God tells me ("God said ..."), but because I can experience myself asking the question. The self- awareness of the thinking being is the start of sure knowledge, which is why close attention to such awareness (observation, investigation, experiment) is the absolute value of science.

He seems to think that if a president wants to veto a bill for moral reasons, she must first be like Descartes and reconstruct all of human knowledge from first principles. That, after all, is what scientists do, isn't it?

Some related thoughts from First Things.

Jack Shafer says the best writers at the New York Times are the movie capsule reviewers, and they're the best because they are limited to 20 words or less.

A cure for Alzheimers?

Daniel Gilbert writes what may be the rarest kind of Middle-East commentary: it is both insightful and fun to read. Excerpt:

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd- numbered punch that preceded it.

My other Hummer is a Prius, and other strange political bumper stickers.

Among other bold claims, Shikha Dalmia says that a Prius is worse for the environment than a Hummer. But to me her most interesting point is this:

One of the most perverse things about U.S. consumers buying hybrids is that while this might reduce air pollution in their own cities, they increase pollution – and energy consumption -- in Japan and other Asian countries where these cars are predominantly manufactured. "In effect, they are exporting pollution and energy consumption," Spinella says.

Earlier I mentioned that people are donating their unused computer power to the wrong thing. Now you have the opportunity to use them for the right thing, namely, fighting malaria.

When you get a group of PhD scientists together, do they talk about science? No, they talk about money. And that can be a problem.

The BBC casts doubt on the six degrees of separation theory:

If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this?

It is not a surprise that letter-passing experiments designed to test the six degrees of separation idea don't work. Since no one has a God's-eye view of the global social network, no one has any idea how to reach someone who is more than one degree away from them. That doesn't mean that the small-world network is a bad model; it may be a good model for the objective structure of the social network but not take into account an individual's limited knowledge of that network.

This, on the other hand, is definitely a good point:

What is more important is not the number of links, but the quality.

So we can enrich the theory by weighting the edges of the connectivity graph, which may very well reveal that social networks are more clique-ish and less well-connected than we thought.

Mark Noll writes about "the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed . . . the most democratic book in the world" in the Wall Street Journal:

Hundreds of phrases (clear as crystal, powers that be, root of the matter, a perfect Babel, two-edged sword) and thousands of words (arguments, city, conflict, humanity, legacy, network, voiceless, zeal) were in the common speech because they had first been in this translation.

Rules about how to use language aren't worth the effort:

If great writers break a rule frequently and naturally in writing, everyone else follows suit in speech, and doing so creates no confusion, that rule is a waste of everyone's time.

Jordan Ellenberg reviews two books about symmetry.

So you're a paleontologist struggling in obscurity. Your field is not dinosaurs, so no one cares. What do you do? Refer to your finds as a "demon duck of doom" and a "killer kangaroo". Then the BBC is sure to notice you.

Mexico can teach us how to run a fair election.

Want to save the world? Get rich.

If you have a good education, you shouldn't just consider getting rich. Creating and amassing wealth is an outright moral obligation.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an op-ed supporting "advanced market commitments" for the funding of vaccine research:

Under this proposal, wealthy nations would make markets for vaccines by committing to purchase a specific number of doses at a specific price. For example, they might commit to buy 200 million doses of a malaria vaccine at $15 per dose, with developing countries contributing a modest co-pay.

This is a terrific idea, and long overdue. It is a great way to use capitalism to spur those evil greedy pharmaceutical companies to help the poor. But when you're arguing for a campaign to help the needy, try to stay away from this kind of statement:

Economists and public-health experts have estimated that such a commitment would save lives at a mere $15 per life-year, an extraordinarily cost-effective way to improve the human condition.

Sounds just a little bit cold and heartless. $15 per life-year, huh? Obviously, if it was $150 per life-year it wouldn't be worth doing, but since it's a "cost-effective" way to save lives...

Michael Shermer discusses an interesting study about confirmation bias and its implications.

Patent number 6,368,227: A method for swinging. You know, on a playground.

In articles published on consecutive days, Slate finds "cracks" in the religious right and "fault lines" in the religious left. There's nothing new here; were these movements somehow unified and single-minded before?

Millions of computers sit idle for most of the time, doing nothing. Harvesting that processing power is a great idea. Too bad we're using it for the wrong thing.

Paul Bloom says fMRI studies aren't all they're cracked up to be. If you're at all interested in how we think, Bloom's book, Descartes' Baby, is well worth reading.

Warren Buffett's strategy in philanthropy mimics his strategy in investment.

Genetic selection is upon us:

About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique - pre-implantation genetic haplotyping - will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions.

We can do it. For Minette Marrin this means that we should, obviously:

What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy babies. This is the best news I have heard for years.

That is a case that can be made, and it may even be a strong case. But she doesn't make it. Instead she makes the common mistake of assuming that technological change is completely uncontrollable and cannot be shaped by ethical concerns; that ethics is ultimately irrelevant to science.

Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy.

Not really. Science is nature amplified; it can be astonishingly cruel. It can also be the instrument of mercy. And knowing which it will be in a particular case is not always simple.

The future of space travel is privately funded; even NASA thinks so.

Traditional media still has some life:

Network newscasts "are going to be dying for a long time, and dying quite profitably," [...] The same applies to most newspapers, so save your tears.

In a slightly related note, Alan Jacobs says blogs are bad for reasoned discourse about complex topics. Which is not really a surprise.

At Language Log, John McWhorter tells you why you shouldn't worry about grammar.

The ink-spot theory at work in Afghanistan:

The commanders pick an area, send in troops to clear it of insurgents, and keep it secure—at which point government representatives and foreign aid workers come in and build roads, schools, whatever's needed or wanted. The example of this success spreads to other areas, where the sequence is duplicated, until gradually the country prospers, the insurgents lose favor with the population, and the central government—which has been taking credit for these successes—gains legitimacy.

Maybe it works. Maybe not. The article is a pretty balanced description of the promise and the problems with the idea.

3,145 miles per gallon? That's nothing compared to what I get. I will admit, though, that their car is cooler looking than my bike.

First they used the American Idol model to recruit politicians in Russia. Now they're using it for scientists in the UK.

Peter Beaumont, in a review of Failed States, has questions for Noam Chomsky:

Is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.

You know someone's taking soccer too seriously when they can say this:

If the above data leads us to conclude that communism does not produce a superior soccer society, fascism has far more to recommend itself.

A report about mathematicians trying to be funny. The results, as you might expect, are not pretty.

Shuji Nakamura has won the Millenium Prize "for a technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life":

Nakamura's invention of a blue laser also can be used to purify water, benefiting developing countries, Alvesalo said. "You give bacteria in water real sunburn with the laser. You kill them."

Maybe we should apply the American Idol method to get young people interested in politics. Russia is trying it.

The symbiosis of terrorists and journalists:

More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church is going on this week. It's a mess. The best and most even-handed explanation of why it's a mess and what's going on was in The New Yorker a little while back; you can read it here. Ruth Gledhill is usually good, and her take is here; for the local angle, look at the Denver Post's article about the Colorado deputation.

Ronald Bailey urges you to vote for gridlock.

A possible vaccine for Alzheimer's.

Dave Eggers's piece about the peculiar American attitude toward soccer is funny, as you might expect. But what I noticed was that the picture, captioned "A German goal at the World Cup," is clearly a screen shot from a video game. Is this intentional?

String theory is so worthless that it's not even wrong.

In time for the World Cup, you can read about how Beckham actually bends it.

You actually don't have to show ID to fly on a plane.

Today I'm going to offer you a window into my blogging mind, all the difficult decisions I make in my daily effort to bring you the very best.

I often have to decide between an important boring article and a trivial fun article. For example, this takes a look at East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and talks about the difficulty of nation-building, which is an important and relevant topic; the article is terribly boring. This "underpants manifesto", on the other hand, discusses the somewhat less important question of what kind of underwear men should wear; it is funny and easy to read.

I like math. I would like to link to good popular articles on math. I usually link to Keith Devlin's monthly column. The problem is, June's column about the beauty of calculus and the definition of the derivative is pretty bad. He's trying. He's trying really, really hard. And that may be the problem.

I have linked to several reviews of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, probably too many. Today there is a really excellent and thoughtful review by Freeman Dyson, which pulls in topics like kamikaze pilots that you wouldn't think are relevant but turn out to fit. But for some reason I have been reluctant to link this other response (pdf) to Dennett despite the fact - maybe because of the fact - that it's written by one of my heroes, Alister McGrath. At some point I should read the book myself; I've found the discussion about it fascinating.

Apparently a judge in Orlando got so fed up with two lawyers bickering that he ordered them to settle a dispute by playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors."

Auditing media predictions:

We find that the media not only fail to weed out bad ideas, but that they often favor bad ideas, especially when the truth is too messy to be packaged neatly.

GE has a cheaper way to make hydrogen.

A though-provoking op-ed from Peter Beinart:

What Truman understood — and Bush does not — is that for the United States to change the world, it must also change itself. For Cold War liberals, the struggle against communism and the struggle for civil rights were intertwined — because only by overcoming injustice at home could the U.S. inspire others to do so abroad.

Forget mosques; gyms are the real breeding ground for terror:

Today's gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission.

Fuel cells for your laptop.

Karl Zinsmeister defends urban sprawl and Wal-Mart, saying that both are examples of ordinary choices by ordinary people:

Economists calculate that because of its soaring efficiency, Wal-Mart singlehandedly reduced the overall cost of living in the U.S. by 3.1 percent. That amounts, on average, to $2,329 of extra cash available to every American family, every year.

Got an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection? Go to Tbilisi, where they will cook up a custom virus to eat your infection.

55:16. That's not a spectacular time, but I'm pleased with it. It was my first race ever, after all.

Withdrawal from heroin isn't as big a deal as people say:

When, unbeknown to them, I have observed addicts before they entered my office, they were cheerful; in my office, they doubled up in pain and claimed never to have experienced suffering like it, threatening suicide unless I gave them what they wanted. When refused, they often turned abusive, but a few laughed and confessed that it had been worth a try.

They've found what's probably the ancestor to HIV in chimps. Even better news: the chimps don't seem to get AIDS from the virus.

A negative, but thoughtful, review of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Medically induced happiness. Why am I okay (mostly) with Prozac, but electrodes in the brain give me the creeps?

Tipping is a dumb tradition.

Happiness; it's all about the small stuff:

He has found that small pleasures like coming home to a house no worse than the neighbour's is more likely to yield long-term joy than inheriting $1 million, getting a big promotion or being elected president.

"It's the frequency and not the intensity of positive events in your life that leads to happiness, like comfortable shoes or single malt scotch," he says.

Gattaca comes to life:

Clinics take sperm and eggs, make embryos in lab dishes, and screen them for genetic flaws. Embryos without flaws are implanted in the mother's womb. Those with flaws are frozen or discarded.

A step toward making fusion efficient.

Michael Barone thinks the world is actually a pretty good place to live, and maybe even getting better.

The Truman Show comes to life:

The project started recording nine months ago when Professor Roy's newborn son left hospital. Since then a "big brother" network of 14 microphones and 11 omni-directional cameras has been recording his son's waking hours.

The idea is to figure out how babies acquire language. I have to say that calling it the Human Speechome Project seems just a bit over the top.

You can learn to control pain by watching a fMRI brain scan.

Andrew Sullivan seems more upset about the hate hotline in Boulder than I am, and it's not his taxes that are paying for it.

Ha.

Sex selection will lead to the next big war:

The spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these "surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder.

Independent bookstores:

Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. There are similar phenomena in the world of indie music fans ("Top 40 has to be bad") and indie cinema, which rebels against stars and big-budget special effects. In each case the indie label is a deliberate marketing ploy to segregate, often artificially, one part of the market from the rest.

High gas prices are not changing people's behavior, in terms of how much they drive or how fast:

The federal government says that every five miles per hour you drive above 60 miles per hour is like paying an extra 20 cents a gallon for gasoline. Yet people aren't slowing down, at least in any broad sense.

Ronald Bailey talks about some of the problems with using ethanol or other biofuels. In particular:

Burning food for fuel raises some interesting moral questions in world in which 800 million people are still malnourished.

Of course, you could say the same about spending money on hybrid cars or ice cream or anything.

But don't worry, because nuclear power will solve all our energy problems.

Michael Kinsley discusses authority, obedience and defiance, and which of those is really heroic.

The chart of the day.

Andrew Sullivan defines Christianism, in analogy with Islamism. He doesn't like it:

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left.

Ramesh Ponnuru has this reply to Sullivan, of which you should skip the first two paragraphs.

You can take the bureaucrat out of the corrupt country, but you can't take the corruption out of the bureaucrat.

When I was your age, kids had respect, and we didn't have anybody to protect us from soda and ice cream. No sir, we had to walk to school through six foot snow drifts and deal with the ice cream man.

MSG may not be so bad, after all. How else are you going to be able to experience the fifth taste?

Talent, hard work, and why soccer players are born in January:

The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born.

Americans live in an "increasingly mobile society," everyone agrees. Too bad everyone is wrong:

In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved—the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948.

Again:

Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it.

Jeff Jacoby writes about Lech Walesa, one of the heroes of the cold war.

Americans are unhealthy.

Keith Devlin talks about why it takes so long to board an airplane.

I hear only good things about microfinance programs. They may be the best tool we have in fighting global poverty.

Time has come out with their list of a hundred people who shape the world. I'll draw your attention to Mike Brown, professional planet discoverer; Nancy Cox, saving us from bird flu; Jim Yong Kim, saving us from drug-resistant tuberculosis; Jan Egeland, "the world's conscience"; Geoffrey West, the closest thing to a mathematician on the list; and Peter Akinola, the archbishop of Nigeria who

personifies the epochal change in the Christian church, namely that the leadership, influence, growth and center of gravity in Christianity is shifting from the northern hemisphere to the southern.

I just got back from the Darfur rally in front of the Boulder County Courthouse. I feel like we had a pretty decent crowd, probably a couple hundred; more than the unicycle guy, at least.

A history of pizza:

The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting.

Popular Mechanics takes a look at alternative fuels.

We need to do something in Darfur, but I'm not sure privatizing warfare is the answer.

Saving the world from malaria isn't going so well, since the people trying to do it are cheating and lying. Saving the world from pollution and high oil prices may be going a little better. But high oil prices don't usually kill people.

Bird flu wouldn't scare us quite so much if we were better at making vaccines.

Global warming is happening, but don't exaggerate it.

Boredom may not be bad for you:

Where people have written about being bored, they describe just sitting about more. You withdraw from things, so maybe there's an energy-conservation function going on. But at the same time, it is still unpleasant, and the unpleasantness could be a protection against your withdrawing completely.

This comic is funny. Maybe because it hits a little close to home.

It's supposed to be a public statement, so I might as well be public about it: yesterday I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

When I was your age, kids had respect, and constants were really constant.

The Jasons, a secretive group of scientists more or less in the service of government. I'd never heard of this before.

Shaving with a straight razor:

There are two ways to look at this moment. You can say that no one in his right mind should wield a double-edged razor half-asleep. Or you can say that no one in his right mind can stay half-asleep when he picks up a double-edged razor.

Long, but worth reading.

Women get better tips than men. Therefore, tipping is illegal:

Tipping as it is currently practiced is probably unlawful. It is against the law to discriminate on the basis of sex and skin color. The Civil Rights Act states that any time race, sex or age has a dispirited impact on the employee, the job is unlawful. If I was the owner of a large restaurant, I would be afraid of a class action suit.

This is probably not a surprise:

Catching sight of a pretty woman really is enough to throw a man's decision-making skills into disarray.

But this is:

The researchers are conducting similar tests with women. But so far, they have failed to find a visual stimulus which will affect their behaviour.

I'm not sure if I believe it. Maybe the problem is the "visual" bit.

Richard Harries, bishop of Oxford, writes about science and faith.

If he had taken more math, he might still be a free man:

The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago.

Hybrids: maybe not as great as you think. (Hat tip to the sunny day tracker.)

A greenpeace founder supports nuclear power:

Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster.

A fairly interesting article about mathematical biology at Oxford; also Keith Devlin discusses the Abel Prize. I'm shooting for the Fields Medal, myself, but I wouldn't turn down an Abel Prize.

Women are the future.

When he was eight, Carl Friedrich Gauss figured out a clever way of adding the numbers from 1 to 100. Or did he start at 81,297? And how did his less clever classmates do it? Brian Hayes explains.

Inventing diseases. This says more about the evils of advertising than it does about the evils of the pharmaceutical industry.

Garry Wills:

There is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian.

He also makes fun of the "what would Jesus do" catchphrase. This is the best piece on politics and religion that I've read in a long time.

It's the lawyers' fault:

If America now routinely has a shortage of vaccines, it is in part the long-term consequence of the Cutter Incident.

Seymour Hersh writes a piece in the New Yorker bringing up the possibility of a US nuclear strike against Iran. The BBC thinks a nuclear strike is highly unlikely but does not say the same for conventional bombing. And Jeff Sharlet sees a theological angle to the story.

Quirky, socially responsible independent companies selling out to soulless multinationals:

Unfortunately, we have seen little evidence of this sweet organic cream rising to the top of the global milkshake.

Helping the blind to see.

A primer on the religious left, a little reductionist but still interesting.

You can start a band in your garage, or make a movie. How about designing a space elevator?

Biofuel may not be such a great idea, says Peter Huber.

Scientists are having trouble making artificial bacteria. Apparently they're a bit more complex than we thought.

Alan Jacobs, one of my professors in undergrad, writes about Christian education in First Things.

William Easterly says foreign aid isn't working:

This is the tragedy in which the West already spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families.

I read a little bit of his book in the Boulder Bookstore the other day, and it seems quite interesting. But I'm not sure preaching about "accountability" really counts as having a concrete plan for fighting poverty. Then there's this:

Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets.

But how do you turn Ethiopia into India?

If you don't want to read the long articles on French employment I linked to yesterday, take a look at this cartoon. Worth a thousand words, as they say.

This makes sense:

Soccer referees in Nigeria can take bribes from clubs but should not allow them to influence their decisions on the field, a football official said on Friday.

Theodore Dalrymple thinks French students are being dumb. Andrew Sullivan agrees.

Neutrinos have mass.

Charles Murray has a plan, which he is humble enough to call The Plan: scrap welfare and social security and just give everyone ten thousand dollars a year.

The chief defect of the welfare state from this perspective is not that it is ineffectual in making good on its promises (though it is), nor even that it often exacerbates the very problems it is supposed to solve (though it does). The welfare state is pernicious ultimately because it drains too much of the life from life.

The Economist wastes an opportunity to review this idea and instead blathers about public intellectuals in the United States and Europe.

Two items in the "funny world leaders" department. Jacques Chirac walking out of a meeting because someone was talking English; and Muammar Gaddafi saying this:

There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet.

Should a father have any choice about whether or not to support an unwanted child? Cathy Young says yes; Jeff Jacoby says no.

Ridiculous patents have a lighter side. And a darker one:

Wright also encounters an abundance of patents geared for the poultry and livestock industries. These patents -- which bear names like "spinal cord removal tool with adjustable blades," and "animal sorting and grading system using MRI to predict maximum value" -- offer a rather striking contrast to the soft and cuddly pet genre.

Getting test subjects for medical trials from India.

Cue the Constant Gardener theme music.

The news from a free and democratic Afghanistan:

"If he doesn't regret his conversion, the punishment will be enforced on him," the judge said. "And the punishment is death."

Since I'm not left-handed, I'll probably get eaten by a crab. At least I've been warned.

Your tax dollars at work:

In 2004, the Air Force Office of Science Research decided to get real-life researchers to develop film scripts.

Running out of options against salmonella:

Maybe we can’t just invent our way out antibiotic-resistance crisis after all.

Michael Crichton thinks you shouldn't be able to patent facts.

Some thoughts about Sharon's wall.

Another step for nanotechnology.

On urban sprawl:

Sprawl is messy, chaotic, and sometimes annoying. In short, it is everything one expects from a free and democratic society. Leave the neat and clean societies for totalitarian regimes.

Gareth Edwards-Jones on food:

My personal advice would be to do what ever best satisfies your conscience, but don't kid yourself that by so doing you are saving the world.

This is good science writing; not breathless, not alarmist, but carefully reasoned and appropriately uncertain.

The promised rant has finally arrived, and since the post that inspired it has fallen off the main page I thought I should link to it.

It's old, but these instructions on how to care for your introvert are brilliant and funny.

The New York Times agrees with me about the immigration bill. That makes me nervous.

A partial victory for Google, and for the rest of us.

Tim Harford writes a long but interesting explanation of why poor countries remain so poor. In a nutshell, it's bad government and corrupt institutions:

It is not news that corruption and perverse incentives matter. But perhaps it is news that the problem of twisted rules and institutions explains not just a little bit of the gap between Cameroon and rich countries but almost all of the gap.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes this about the Church's stance on immigration, an issue I have mentioned before:

The Christian right says it has other issues at the moment, such as the battle against same-sex marriage.

Now if this is true it is tragic. But "the Christian right" is not an organization that has a spokesperson, or that issues press releases; who exactly is MacDonald citing here? If it's the American Family Association or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, he should say so. But I think the reporter's just making it up because it goes along with the story he wants to tell.

I doubt the so-called Center for Reason is a completely objective group, but I wouldn't be surprised if their report was true.

Nerve regeneration: today it's hamsters, tomorrow, who knows.

Islamic Calvinism.

Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst argue that relativism is the cause of fundamentalism and that together they give Bush and Blair moral authority, causing the war in Iraq:

Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all.

On the other hand, Robert Jensen offers a sort of confessions of a Christian atheist in which he claims that the more relativism we have in religion, the better

The task of Christians -- and, I would argue, all religions -- is to make themselves more relevant in the short term by being a site of such political and moral engagement, with the goal of ensuring their ultimate irrelevance.

What it's like to stop buying things for a year.

Successful insertion into orbit around Mars.

Education would be better if we could just go back to the days when college admission was based on essay tests in Latin.

Good news about measles.

Forwarded to me as a joke, this article is well worth reading. Allow me to cherry pick two quotes; this one

Mr. Henderson asked Mr. Mehta to score the priest, on a scale of one for boring to 10 for "off the charts." Mr. Mehta gave him a three. "More stories" in the sermon, Mr. Mehta suggested -- and less liturgy.

and this one

Mr. Henderson, who was a member of the Association of Vineyard Churches, a nondenominational ministry, says he preached for 25 years, but says he grew disenchanted because many of his peers were obsessed with gathering more believers and increasing their budgets.

So Henderson dislikes the idea of church marketing, but is using Mehta as a kind of focus group to rate the church experience and describe how it could be improved.

Cubicles, "the Fidel Castro of office furniture." I have one now, and I have to say, it's not as bad as I expected.

If you didn't already think fair-trade shade-grown organic coffee was just a little ridiculous, here's a thirty page article to persuade you. Maybe weddings are a better target if you want to encourage socially responsibile behavior.

The best science books of 2005, nominated for some prestigious prize I've never heard of. I haven't read any of them but they almost all look interesting.

Now we can recycle styrofoam.

The problem with American education:

The reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers — but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

It's articles like this that make me think it's just not worth it.

Another reason to encrypt your email.

Don't believe movie reviews. Especially if they're written by Earl Dittman.

Keith Devlin takes a shot at saying how we should teach math.

Steven Pinker discusses The Selfish Gene 30 years later.

Very disturbing news from France.

Phyllis Chesler:

I feel called upon to explain how many feminists — who should be the first among freedom- and democracy-loving people — have instead become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers.

It's worth reading.

Subverting tyranny by translating into Arabic.

The "broken windows" theory of law enforcement: maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

Cardinal Roger Mahony suggests civil disobedience; he says Catholics should ignore a proposed federal law that would make it a crime for churches to offer aid to illegal immigrants. Here in Colorado, Arthur Tafoya agrees.

This is an impressive move. In the tradition of the best civil disobedience, it forces opponents to play the role of the bad guy; it's hard to oppose charity without taking an us-vs-them attitude:

Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said Mahony isn't considering the costs of illegal immigration on low-wage American workers, local governments, public schools and the health care system.

Though the LA Times suggests the Catholic Church doesn't have the moral authority to pull this off in the wake of sex abuse scandals, I think this kind of action earns respect. And reminds us that the Church is not a national institution.

China's approaching problem: "Too few wenches."

Building space ships for fun and, more importantly, profit.

I'd like to see these results on the "spirituality" of university faculty compared with the results for the general population.

Don't worry so much about your weight.

Samuel Alito sends a form-letter thank you to James Dobson, and Max Blumenthal and Andrew Sullivan see a pact written in blood, a solemn vow to make the United States into a theocracy.

So James Dobson isn't my favorite person. But read the letter; I've read math papers that have more warmth.

Of course Salman Rushdie supports free speech. This interesting LA Times piece also approaches the issue from a different angle.

Patriarchy is inevitable. Running out of oil isn't.

Today is Ash Wednesday.

In the fight against global poverty, "the right plan is to have no plan."

The book review is balanced, so it's not as much fun as a hatchet job, but it's still worth a look.

Instapundit:

I'm afraid that it's going to come to open military action against Iran, sooner rather than later.

But I hope he's wrong and Barry R. Posen is right.

William Safire has a funny piece about political slogans.

Andrew Sullivan knows who can fix the crisis in Iraq.

I didn't think the existence and health of society was controversial, but Justin Webb apparently believes that with the Left out of power, no one believes that society exists. Note the past tense:

There was a belief that there was such a thing as society, and its ills could and should be tackled.

The article is worth reading for the bumper sticker quotes, though.

"Scholarship is politics by other means." I hope not. Are the comments of Larry Summers more offensive than the comments of Ward Churchill?

Robert Samuelson says the United States is not falling behind in science.

Big decision to make? Don't think about it.

I'm skeptical.

A step forward for the hydrogen economy.

Technology may not help you as much as you would like, either at home or at work.

I know who I'm not getting to do my taxes.

Apparently at least one Dutch politician is serious about using abortion to reduce crime. Not too long ago someone in the United States suggested something similar, but he was not serious, as the next words out of his mouth illustrate:

That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.

But he still got in a lot of trouble. Will Marianne van den Anker get in trouble?

Alan Dershowitz and William Bennett on the same byline? The apocalypse is upon us.

Josh Marshall asks a funny question.

Europe, it seems, is not as egalitarian as we thought.

Apparently waving your hands does help.

You get more nutritional value out of your food if you enjoy it. On the other hand, my colleague points out that corn syrup is unhealthy, even though I seem to enjoy it.

Another review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. This one gives the book a hammering.

Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.
[...]
All of Dennett's splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and ''generating further testable hypotheses'' notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.

For some reason I seem to have done quite a bit of previous writing about Dennett.

It may be true that we're experiencing more diseases these days, but Mark Woolhouse is being a little vague about it.

So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population.

"Something special," huh. Could you be more specific? What can we do about it?

From above, below, or beyond; where did life come from?

What's even more interesting than the content of this article is the fact that a PhD astronomer uses the word "bazillions".

Businesses are becoming more environmentally friendly.

Perhaps you too suspect that companies are making nice with greens only for the good P.R. And perhaps you suspect that they only make changes when there’s a profit to be made. If so, you are almost completely right.

Tony Long's column about technology causing the decline of English is at least fun to read, even if I hear echoes of stone age chisel scribes complaining that the speed and convenience of papyrus and ink makes writers sloppy.

From today's science beat: Private groups are smarter than Nasa, babies are smarter than we thought, you're smarter when you're asleep, and dropouts may end up smarter than the rest of us when we end up in nursing homes.

Men and women in science. On even-numbered days I believe this kind of "innate difference" stuff and on odd-numbered days I resist it.

Wiretapping in Europe.

I saw Al Sharpton speak last night. I'll restrict myself to one comment.

Sharpton criticized George Bush Senior's remarks at the funeral of Coretta Scott King; apparently Bush said that he had never experienced anything like that service. Sharpton commented that it was remarkable for a former president of the United States to be so out of touch with minorities that he had never been to a black church service.

The University of Colorado crowd clapped and cheered when Sharpton made this comment. How many of those who cheered have ever been to a black church service? Ten percent? Maybe twenty?