Archive for the 'Science'

Here’s one. Mark Zuckerberg is pushing for more oil drilling and pipelines. Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge. The Zuckerberg group publicly says its top priority is immigration reform. But through two subsidiary organizations it has quietly spent millions on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes. The ads were created in support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mark Begich (D-AK), and although neither ad mentions the issue, both support immigration reform. I can understand the importance of political compromise and coalition building, but sleeping with the devil is just going too far.

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At first glance, I thought it was an epiploon or omentum, but no, it’s a lovely octopus mother tending her brood. Go hug your mom right now, or if she’s not nearby, hug a mollusc instead.

Gary Marcus, the psychologist who wrote that most excellent book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, has written a nice essay that tears into that most annoying concept that some skeptics and atheists love: that without a proof, we’re incapable of dismissing certain especially vague ideas. It’s a mindset that effectively promotes foundation-free ideas — by providing an escape hatch from criticism, it allows kooks and delusional thinkers, who are not necessarily stupid at all, to shape their claims to specifically avoid that limited version of scientific inquiry. Marcus goes after two representatives of this fuzzy-thinking concept. Schmidhuber is an acolyte of Kurzweil who argues for a “computational theology” that claims that there is no evidence against his idea, therefore the universe could be a giant software engine written by a great god-programmer. Eagleman is a neuroscientist who has gotten some press for Possibilianism, the idea that because the universe is so vast, we should acknowledge that there could be all kinds of weird possibilities out there — even god-like beings. “Could be” is not a synonym for “is”, however, and science actually demands a little more rigor. Some people love to claim that an absence of a single definitive test against an idea means that it is perfectly reasonable to continue believing in it. Marcus will have none of that. In particular, Eagleman, who drapes himself in science by declaring to “have devoted my life to scientific pursuit,” might think of each extant religion as an experiment. Followers of many religions have looked for direct evidence of their beliefs, but (by Eagleman’s own assessment) systematically come up dry. And, crucially, statisticians have shown decisively that a collection of failed efforts weighs more heavily than any single failed effort on its own. The same thing happened, of course, when scientists looked for...
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My version of science is puttering around quietly in an air-conditioned lab. Peter Ward’s version involves travel to exotic oceans, pirates, death, and crippling risks to life and limbs. And cephalopods. Excuse me, I have to go curl up quietly in a dark corner and feel inadequate for a while.