Listics

“…the Vatican’s verification process for miracles is very strict and scientifically-investigated.”

I read it in the Wikipedia.

(With a little hat-tip and a hey nonni-nonni.)

Zo links to Taylor’s talk at TED.  Amazing stuff!  Shakes some positive reality into the discussion of the bicameral mind of the individual.  Not at all like the cultural anthropology of Jaynes’ pop-science that provided a hook on which to hang the classic, “Sects and Death.”

Had a bout of tachycardia today, but I didn’t know what it was when it came on. Seemed pretty obvious I was having heart trouble though. Beth drove me to the University Hospital Emergency Room. I presented as a 63 old, overweight, male, lightheaded, experiencing dizziness, shortness of breath, clamminess, chest discomfort.

They were kind enough to skip most of the intake paperwork and take me down to the examining room, shove an IV in my arm, and take my vitals: Pulse rate about 170, blood pressure way high. They hooked me up to the EKG machine and ran a few tests. The doc came back and prescribed an adenosine treatment. They shoved a dose of that down the IV efectively shutting down the electrical activity in my heart.

Within maybe ten seconds, my heart picked up with a normal heart beat, all the ER staff let out the breath they were holding, my blood pressure started down, and over the next few hours lying about watching the Disney channel, my heartbeat returned to my normal 68, and my blood pressure returned to the usual 120/78 or so.

Didn’t see any white light, but felt an uncomfortable pressure, first in the carotid arteries, then in the femoral, and my whole body felt flushed. Felt somehow cheated to have remained conscious while my heart was re-booted. But, the worst discomfort I experienced was the removal of all the tape and electrodes. Carla, the ER nurse, was quick, but enough hair came off with each tug that I was more than glad when it was over.

Technorati Tags: heart stopping excitement, benign rapid heart rate, I’m okay really I am, more bananas, less coffee

Out by the barn lives a woodchuck named Chuck. “Woodchuck” and “groundhog” are names for the same furry creature: “Marmota monax,” or as he has been miscellaneously tagged in these post Linnnaen days: furry, cute, rodent, and/or pest. Based on today’s overcast conditions, there is no way he will see his shadow when he emerges for a Groundhog’s Day mid-hibernation look-around.

However, he is likely to see a dog, which would cast a shadow on your typical groundhog’s day. I’m not sure how this affects the validity of his predictions. But the choice seems to be, do we have an early spring (sees no shadow) or will there be six more weeks of winter (sees his shadow). This makes Chuck the woodchuck about as useful as the TV weather folks for long range predictions, since an early spring around here would begin around the middle of March, which would be, oh… about six weeks from now.

Technorati Tags: rabid creature, killer marmot, place in the sun, how much wood

Last summer Jon Lebkowsky interviewed Cliff Figallo, author of Climate Frog, at WorldChanging. It was a two part interview. Part one is here. It brings focus to Cliff’s lengthy experience in intentional communities, from The Farm to The WELL.

Part two is here. It focuses on “…climate change, denial, and the possibility of mitigation and adaptation.” Regarding denial, Figallo refers to a letter in Newsweek which I had a hard enough time finding that I reproduce it here in its entirety:

Kaneohe, Hawaii

Sharon Begley’s article about “The Denial Machine,” as frightening as it was, misses a crucial aspect of the problem. It is not just that well-heeled corporations are buying up politicians or promoting science-as-they-want-it-to-be. It is that our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in knowledge itself. Begley decries the tactic of making the scientists appear divided, but the corporations didn’t have to invent this tactic. It is built into our carefully balanced political “debates,” into our news shows with equal time given to pundits from each side and into the “fairness” we try to teach in our schools. We need not be surprised that people have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish between the two equally questionable sides of every story. Neither global warming nor any other serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful ignorance with freedom of thought.

Bernard Dov Cooperman
Dept. of History, University of Maryland

Cliff Figallo believes in the power of networked communications and particularly blogging to help get the word out on this most crucial problem that faces us all. His blog, Climate Frog, collects reports of local climate change impacts and responses from around the world. What have you done to reduce your carbon emissions today?

Technorati Tags: jon lebkowsky, cliff figallo, climate frog

I was reading an Edge interview with Dr. Helena Cronin of the London School of Economics and I ran across the following passage. It so eloquently spoke my own mind, that I had to capture it here. The more often that rationalists and humanists have the courage to speak these truths, the sooner we will return to a middle path of open inquiry:

EDGE: Obviously you’re controversial?

CRONIN: Yes. But I shouldn’t be. I’m just doing standard science.

In fact, it should be the other way round. It’s people who are prepared to talk about policy and society without knowing the first thing about human nature that should be considered controversial.

EDGE: How do you deal with relativism?

CRONIN: Post-modernism and its stable-mates — they’re obviously all complete balderdash, not to be taken seriously intellectually. But as a social scourge they have to be taken very seriously. Apart from the sciences, which have built-in immunity, they’ve taken a frightening hold on academia — on people who are influential and who are teaching future generations of influential people. It’s the resulting attitudes to science that I most deplore — the view that there are no universal standards by which to judge truth or falsity or even logical validity; that science doesn’t make progress; that there’s nothing distinctive about scientific knowledge; and so on. One of the reasons why so much logic-free, fact-free, statistics-free criticism of Darwinism has been able to find an audience is this attitude that science is just another view so I’m free to adopt my view, any view.

EDGE: There’s a lot of scientists and science writers out there communicating with the public and there’s no central canon of science. When you use the word science in public discourse aren’t you trying to beat somebody over the head?

CRONIN: No, absolutely not. First, there is a central canon — a very robust one. The disagreements — especially those that attract public attention — are rarely to do with core theories. They’re usually about the elaboration of those theories — healthy disagreements about a core that’s fundamentally agreed on. But second, and more important, the canon of science, what gives it authority, is above all its method. So, when scientists have those disagreements, there are objective ways of deciding between them. Theories must be testable and then must pass the tests. On a day-to-day basis things won’t always be clear-cut; it’s not an instant process. Neither, of course, is it infallible. But it’s by far the best we’ve got and it’s done a breath-takingly impressive job so far. As for “trying to beat somebody over the head” … It’s not individual scientists being authoritarian. It’s science being an authority — and rightly so because it is indeed authoritative. So, once people understand that there’s a vast distinction between science and non-science, and the distinction lies in scientific method, they’ll understand the status of current disagreements and how to assess them.

“Post-modernism” obviously has a place in the critical disciplines surrounding arts and literature. It exists as a break-point to help describe technical and creative shifts in western arts and letters occurring since the mid-twentieth century, following the period conbveniently called “modernism,” which was preceded by a “romantic” period and so forth. By the seventies it had bled over into philosophy and the social sciences, influencing all of those “soft ” areas where rigorous applications of scientific method had not proven productive in advancing knowledge and understanding. Over the last ten years or more a movement has been building to reclaim academia as the seat of serious inquiry from the post-modern punsters averring “differances,” the epistemological relativists, and the metaphysicians who somehow found a foothold there and poisoned the well with their loquacity, their lack of rigor, and their self-serving assertions regarding truth and knowledge and language.

I could be wrong, but I doubt Dr. Cronin is in error.

Unfortunately costs to heat my house each winter are going up faster than the temperature:

Teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design in the public schools constitutes child abuse. These lies frame the myth of a jealous and vengeful god, a heaven for believers and a horror story of hell for non-believers. Fundamentalists who pervert their childrens’ understanding by bringing their bizarre beliefs into the public eye have been tolerated long enough. Let their myths, their infantile belief systems, and their power structures be held up to public scrutiny. Let the half crazed minority of believers in these matters withdraw unto themselves and leave the rest of us alone to enjoy peaceful progress and a humane understanding of the universe as an environment not without challenges, but a rational place lit by our own love and not threatened by awful prophecies of Armageddon, not inclusive of eternal damnation and a fiery hell for people who believe dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years before humans appeared.

The State of Texas science curriculum is in the process of being perverted by these child abusers, these people who would strike such fear into the hearts of children that they are unable to behave rationally and with love. Here is an NPR interview with the recently fired Director of Science at the Texas Education Agency. More information here at the New York Times, here at the Houston Chronicle, and here at the Austin Statesman.

The Scopes “Monkey Trial” was held over 80 years ago. The fundamentalist christians lost. Evolution is simply a fact. It was a fact before the trial, and a jury confirmed it was common sense and that christian fundamentalism had no place in the science classroom. How can we convince these child abusers to leave us alone? How can we exclude people who believe the end times are upon us from public policy positions? How can we get their fingers off the triggers?