Continuing my attempt to write something about every book I read. Even though this book's fairly short, this post goes on a bit as I try to get to grips with the most important parts.

The dramatic subtitle of Kuhn vs Popper by Steve Fuller is: The struggle for the soul of science. I don't know much about Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper. What I was ( Read more... )

Nick complains his girlfriend washes up like a cargo cult. She's seen people put dirty dishes into water and they come out clean, but she doesn't understand the principles. So when she washes up she follows the superficial form, without really understanding how cleaning works, and the dishes stay dirty.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which ( Read more... )

Alternatively, How Life on Earth is like an OvenJames Lovelock's look at life on earth is not new any more, in fact it's thirty years old this year. I found it a rather frustrating book. However I'm not sure how much of that is because it's out of its original context and I know little about the disciplines the book is intended to inform ( Read more... )

I think all animal places should be run by Christians.
The Darwinian view offers a different framework. It assumes that this complexity accumulated gradually and accidentally, with each step representing a miraculous combination of mutations along a path extending all the way from bacteria to human beings. Bacteria 'somehow' became eukaryotes. ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Point:
You know experimental program evaluation has become a craze when even the Imams want it."
"Wait a minute," interrupts the Imam, "Are you talking about a randomized control trial?"

Counterpoint:
Parents Pick Prayer Over Docs; Girl Dies
"We are remaining strong for our children," Leilani Neumann said. "Only our faith in God is giving us ( Read more... )

Richard Dawkins: why can't we all be more like scientists?

My list of jobs that would actually be pretty cool to do is very small, but futurist is one of the entries. You get to think about technology and science all the time, and all you have to do is make your predictions sound interesting because by the time they fail to happen no-one cares any more.

Via both slashdot and techcrunch, What will life be ( Read more... )

Or the more ambitious subtitle 'a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years'.

This book is an attempt by Jared Diamond, a biologist by training, to scientifically answer the familiar question: why did europe come to 'discover', defeat, massacre, and colonise the people of other continents? Why not the other way round?

( lesson one: cows are dangerous )