2018

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›

It’s a good thing that we don’t need bridges and buildings to be stable: Professional engineers are expressing befuddlement over unsubstantiated scholarly accusations that the field’s licensure exam is biased against women. Women are 11.6% less likely to pass. The agency that administers the exam—the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES)—also pushed back against the suggestion that the exam may be biased against women. NCEES Director of Exams Tim Miller told Campus Reform that it seems highly unlikely that the exam itself is biased against women, insofar as NCEES has been reviewing the test specifically for gender bias for nearly two decades. “Since the early 2000s, the exam items have been reviewed annually to make them gender-neutral Read More ›

Making nonsense meaningful: In such a large and diverse city, it is no surprise that the Craft is fairly accessible, if you know where to look. Nearly 80 covens and pagan organizations operate in the New York Metropolitan area, according to the pagan networking site The Witches’ Voice. Exact numbers of witches in the city are hard to come by, as there are many solitary practitioners, but coven and community leaders estimate that as many as 10,000 witches live and practice in New York. Nationally, about 734,000 Americans identify as pagan or Wiccan, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. Nancy Guzman, a board member of New York City Pagan Pride, which stages an annual Pagan Pride Day festival Read More ›

While discussing cultural conflicts generally, foreign policy analyst Michael Dran mentioned something that intrigued one of our readers: The most important is the divide between Protestant modernists and fundamentalists, which developed in the early part of the twentieth century. It is my contention that the modernist-fundamentalist controversy did not come and go in the course of the twentieth century. It was an earthquake along a tectonic fault that continues to divide our world today. He cites the Scopes Trial, evoking a variety of culture myths about what happened at Dayton in 1925 that convinced dim and ignorant elitists that Darwin must be right about everything. Clearly, the Scopes trial was about more than the teaching of evolution. The conflict pitted Read More ›

There has been a lot of talk lately about the impending demise of liberal democracy and if anything can be done to save it.  Yes, things look bleak, and men of good will everywhere must act before it is too late.  But what should we do?  To answer that question we must first know what we are up against; for we can fight effectively only if we know what we are fighting against.  Michael Anton provides the answer.  He writes in the latest edition of the Claremont Review of Books that absent cataclysm or conquest, all regimes: are felled by the inevitable radicalization of their core principle.  Democracy, then, falls when its core principles of liberty and equality are perverted Read More ›

The old Gaia asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Some scientists believe that this “Gaian system” self-regulates global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors in an “automatic” manner. Earth’s living system appears to keep conditions on our planet just right for life to persist! The Gaia Theory has already inspired ideas and practical applications for economic systems, policy, scientific inquiry, and other valuable work. The future holds more of the same. More. The new Gaia is leaner, greener, and meaner. She has discovered the “selfish gene”: Doolittle has recently proposed that Gaia could have arisen through ‘selection by Read More ›

 A turtle fancier wonders: About a week ago, as I went to feed my 10-year-old pet turtle Grover a bunch of dried turtle pellets, I looked deep into his eyes and wondered: “Does he even know who I am?” “Does he trust me?” Or even, dare I ask, “Does he love me?” Obviously he gave me no indication of his affection, or lack thereof: He just chomped on those pellets without any regard for my feelings whatsoever. It was weird to think that I’ve had my reptilian friend for more than a decade now, and yet, I have no idea whatsoever how he views me. Van Hooker decided to ask animal behaviorists and came up with a Top Ten list, Read More ›

Most people think we are more than just live bodies but what is the “more”? Frank Turek explains, Here are some types of dualism: 2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2.1 Predicate dualism 2.2 Property Dualism 2.3 Substance Dualism 3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3.1 Interactionism 3.2 Epiphenomenalism 3.3 Parallelism (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) More. If you don’t think you are 99.44% chimpanzee nd that consciousness is an illusion, you might want to consider what sort of dualism you are. Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: Alternatives to dualism: Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself and From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”

The ID issue has long been a focal point for intense, often deeply polarised debate on our origins and world roots as informed by science. Science, being a major source of knowledge and understanding about our world, which also energises technological innovation and economic growth. Science is often treated as though it is the grounds for seeing evolutionary materialism as effectively self evidently true but crucially depends on our being responsibly and rationally sufficiently free to think logically, establish mathematics as a domain of rationally grounded truth about abstract structures and quantities that are necessary for any possible world, and more. Such already deeply challenges the world-picture painted by the magisterium of lab coat-clad atheists. That is only a gateway Read More ›

The physicist who answers is Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) and she responds, saying (among other things) If you want every elementary particle to each have a universe inside, you need to explain why we only know 25 different elementary particles. Why aren’t there billions of them? An even bigger problem is that elementary particles are quantum objects: They get constantly created and destroyed and they can be in several places at once. How would structure formation ever work in such a universe? It is also a generally the case in quantum theories that the more variants there are of a particle, the more of them you produce. So why don’t we produce Read More ›

Not any time soon, according to an analyst at Bloomberg: It’s important to note that machine learning hasn’t yet made its mark on the economy — to paraphrase economist Robert Solow, you can see the machine learning age everywhere but in the economic statistics. Employment levels have returned to healthy levels, and there’s no evidence that machines are taking many of our jobs yet. … The authors generally don’t envision a world of full automation, with machines replacing humans at every step of the production process. Instead, they see machine learning being deployed selectively at some nodes of the value chain where data is plentiful, leaving human judgment to focus on the rest. Though “judgment” is a fuzzy word, Agrawal Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees. UM Professor Diana Six made the discovery after studying mature whitebark and lodgepole trees that were the age and size that mountain pine beetle prefer, but had somehow escaped attack during the recent outbreak. After DNA screening, survivor trees all contained a similar genetic makeup that was distinctly different from the general population that were mostly susceptible to the beetle. “Our findings suggest that survivorship is genetically based and, thus, heritable,” Six said, “which is what gives us hope.” In western North America, whitebark pine, a high elevation keystone species Read More ›

Amber is, in some ways, like a very-slow motion vid. From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants are well known for their special relationship to the insects and other animals that serve as their pollinators. But, before the rise of angiosperms, another group of unusual evergreen gymnosperms, known as cycads, may have been the first insect-pollinated plants. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have uncovered the earliest definitive fossil evidence of that intimate relationship between cycads and insects. The discovery came in the form of an ancient boganiid beetle preserved in Burmese amber for an estimated 99 million years along with grains of cycad pollen. The beetle also shows special adaptations, including mandibular patches, for the transport of Read More ›

That seems counterintuitive, but consider: Retractions can be a way of sweeping misconduct under the rug, when a thorough investigation is really what is needed. The retracted paper is co-authored by researchers who used to collaborate with Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased bone researcher who has accrued dozens of retractions. But investigation tends to stop with the retraction, which mean that the problems may continue. In a recently published paper, Grey and his team reported that after they contacted a dozen journals that had published nearly two dozen clinical trials co-authored by Sato that had been flagged as potentially problematic, they didn’t receive a single useful response. (You can read more about our thoughts on how journals shy away from discussing Read More ›

Human lifespans have not changed over the millennia: People in the past were not all dead by 30. Ancient documents confirm this. In the 24th century B.C., the Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age. The ancient Greeks classed old age among the divine curses, and their tombstones attest to survival well past 80 years. Ancient artworks and figurines also depict elderly people: stooped, flabby, wrinkled. Hunter-gatherers today have a normal lifespan of about 70 years too, of course, but hardships reduce the likelihood that a given person will reach that age. The maximum human lifespan (approximately 125 years) has barely changed since we arrived. It is estimated that if the three main causes of death Read More ›