Science and technology links
Great wallpaper against PowerPoint™. The essay on why PowerPoint™ is evil (or, at least, a disastrous way to present technical data).
Best article ever about Wikipedia™:
Crackpottery is to Wikipedia what self-interest is to capitalism - a human failing that, yolked in the right way, can turn ill into benefit for all. Before Wikipedia, what would we get from a film nerd or a punctuation nazi? A video store with a snooty manager, maybe, or a few nutty, typed letters to newspapers, if we were lucky. Now we can have lovingly written articles on Quentin Tarantino or the semicolon from people who don't get any loving. For the first time in history, history is being written by the losers.
What the Planck telescope is putting together about our universe.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is dissolving much more quickly than expected.
About the man who designed and built a replica trireme.
About altruism in chimpanzees: studies of adoptions among wild chimpanzees.
The depressing news about how many calories are (pdf) in standard drinks.
Studying readers’ reactions to books, iPad’s, Kindle and PC’s. They hate reading on PC’s.
Some seriously striking research about a cat parasite.
Evidence suggests that activism makes people happier.
In the US, the death rates and incidence rates of cancer continue to fall.
About the use of various treatments to screen out foetuses that might be “non-traditionally” female. About that.
Paper finds evidence suggesting high rates of infection tend to lower average IQ. More.
About Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats.
Differences in the distribution of male and female IQ.
Finding Jewish genes in an African tribe.
The Obama Administration has made links to Bush Administration documents inoperative.
About how chimps confront death.
About online “tone of voice”.
About whole eggs being fine, really.
The Oz government has partially retreated in its plans to build the Great Firewall of Oz.
Apparently making nice with Muslims is now a major objective of NASA: space travel doesn’t even make the top three objectives. This is technological endeavour as social work. Charles Krauthhammer says it:
This is a new level of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of ‘feel good about your past’ scientific achievements is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy.
Go on Charles, tell us what you really think …
The contraceptive pill was a case of technology with unintended consequences:
In one of America and the Pill's most interesting chapters, May asks whether men would tolerate the sorts of side effects that women have regularly experienced. The prospect of a male pill has appeared on the horizon various times over the last 50 years, but the issue of side effects scuttled every effort. Scientists, May reports, "actually discovered an effective vaccine that completely stopped the production of sperm without interfering with sex drive." But it also made users' testicles shrink by a third, so the researchers abandoned it, concluding, "The psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome."
Yet for all this, as May demonstrates, the pill has been a tremendous boon for women, transforming sex and reproduction so thoroughly that it's hard for many to imagine what life was like before it. …
After all, the pill is widely available in Saudi Arabia, but it hasn't made a dent in that country's brutal patriarchy. Part of the problem with America and the Pill, though, is that it doesn't take the time to delve into the social maelstroms that made the pill so significant. The millions of women who, like Loretta Lynn's narrator, have used the pill to slip the bonds of biology, turning childbearing from an obligation into an option, have utterly reshaped our ideas about sex, marriage, and family.
The collapse of church attendance in much of the West is directly connected: women had tend to support a religiously-based moral structure which controlled reproduction by social control of sex. Once women could control their own fertility unilaterally, being preached at by men that they were not supposed to control their own bodies lost appeal, hence church attendance dropped dramatically. About that. (In Lois McMaster Bujold terms, we changed from Barrayar to Beta.)
Best article ever about Wikipedia™:
Crackpottery is to Wikipedia what self-interest is to capitalism - a human failing that, yolked in the right way, can turn ill into benefit for all. Before Wikipedia, what would we get from a film nerd or a punctuation nazi? A video store with a snooty manager, maybe, or a few nutty, typed letters to newspapers, if we were lucky. Now we can have lovingly written articles on Quentin Tarantino or the semicolon from people who don't get any loving. For the first time in history, history is being written by the losers.
What the Planck telescope is putting together about our universe.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is dissolving much more quickly than expected.
About the man who designed and built a replica trireme.
About altruism in chimpanzees: studies of adoptions among wild chimpanzees.
The depressing news about how many calories are (pdf) in standard drinks.
Studying readers’ reactions to books, iPad’s, Kindle and PC’s. They hate reading on PC’s.
Some seriously striking research about a cat parasite.
Evidence suggests that activism makes people happier.
In the US, the death rates and incidence rates of cancer continue to fall.
About the use of various treatments to screen out foetuses that might be “non-traditionally” female. About that.
Paper finds evidence suggesting high rates of infection tend to lower average IQ. More.
About Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats.
Differences in the distribution of male and female IQ.
Finding Jewish genes in an African tribe.
The Obama Administration has made links to Bush Administration documents inoperative.
About how chimps confront death.
About online “tone of voice”.
About whole eggs being fine, really.
The Oz government has partially retreated in its plans to build the Great Firewall of Oz.
Apparently making nice with Muslims is now a major objective of NASA: space travel doesn’t even make the top three objectives. This is technological endeavour as social work. Charles Krauthhammer says it:
This is a new level of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of ‘feel good about your past’ scientific achievements is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy.
Go on Charles, tell us what you really think …
The contraceptive pill was a case of technology with unintended consequences:
In one of America and the Pill's most interesting chapters, May asks whether men would tolerate the sorts of side effects that women have regularly experienced. The prospect of a male pill has appeared on the horizon various times over the last 50 years, but the issue of side effects scuttled every effort. Scientists, May reports, "actually discovered an effective vaccine that completely stopped the production of sperm without interfering with sex drive." But it also made users' testicles shrink by a third, so the researchers abandoned it, concluding, "The psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome."
Yet for all this, as May demonstrates, the pill has been a tremendous boon for women, transforming sex and reproduction so thoroughly that it's hard for many to imagine what life was like before it. …
After all, the pill is widely available in Saudi Arabia, but it hasn't made a dent in that country's brutal patriarchy. Part of the problem with America and the Pill, though, is that it doesn't take the time to delve into the social maelstroms that made the pill so significant. The millions of women who, like Loretta Lynn's narrator, have used the pill to slip the bonds of biology, turning childbearing from an obligation into an option, have utterly reshaped our ideas about sex, marriage, and family.
The collapse of church attendance in much of the West is directly connected: women had tend to support a religiously-based moral structure which controlled reproduction by social control of sex. Once women could control their own fertility unilaterally, being preached at by men that they were not supposed to control their own bodies lost appeal, hence church attendance dropped dramatically. About that. (In Lois McMaster Bujold terms, we changed from Barrayar to Beta.)