For me, the dancer is spinning clockwise.
Via Mark Bernstein, who has side by sides, which sometimes provides a peripheral shift, meaning that you may be able to adjust the spin direction of the figure. In the side by side, if I glance back and forth and hold, the figure will go counterclockwise. Come back and it’s back to right brain perception.
Chris Mooney asks some good questions
As a prerequisite, the next president must grasp how science flows into a democracy at all levels. Whoever wins the election—man or woman, Democrat or Republican—will face profound science-based challenges and questions. Will space become militarized, or remain a neutral zone of unfettered international access? Will we successfully protect our populations and cities from the threats of nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as from emerging pandemics? Can we bring the AIDS crisis in Africa under control? How can we foster continuing biomedical advancement without crossing moral lines?
Will there be enough jobs available to employ the nation’s scientists? If foreign researchers are better qualified for those jobs, will they receive visas so that US companies can benefit from their skills? And what of research in areas of pure science? As Europe’s Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva—the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—heads toward a slated May 2008 startup, will the US revisit the idea of building its own collider, and willingly take on that next phase of research into the very nature of matter? More important, will the next president understand the significance of such scientific questing? And if so, will he or she also know how to tell that story to the public?
An interesting link to a pdf article by Olle Häggström via The Panda’s Thumb. Scroll down to Uniform distribution is a model assumption with link-back to more context. Note that you have to read the whole paper and the context to grab the gist.
This is wonderful stuff. Susan Gibb on the dangers of do-it-yourself:
The grapes are in full galloping fermentation and while I’ve been elbow deep in it popping the grapes to get that done quickly, it keeps threatening to overflow its container and I’m afraid that it just might tonight. At midnight. Seep over and out and spill over the floor in a big sticky mess. Just managed by good luck to avoid an explosion this afternoon. Skimmed the top pulp that separates itself from the crabapple wine, wrapped it in a plastic bag to discourage fruit flies until I get it outside in the garbage and lo and behold! The stuff was still busy fermenting, putting out gas and the bag was blown up and ready to burst. That would’ve been a mess I’d have had to walk away from. Hop in the car and just drive.
P.S.
The grape jelly: a winner.
From Sharpebrains’ interview with Daniel Gopher via A Blog Around the Clock
What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations†are the most effective and efficient way to do so.
This is an important point, so let me emphasize it. What we have discovered is that a key factor for an effective transfer from training environment to reality is that the training program ensures “Cognitive Fidelityâ€, this is, it should faithfully represent the mental demands that happen in the real world. Traditional approaches focus instead on physical fidelity, which may seem more intuitive, but less effective and harder to achieve. They are also less efficient, given costs involved in creating expensive physical simulators that faithfully replicate, let’s say, a whole military helicopter or just a significant part of it.
Fidelity then goes to the issue of driving or controlling a horse with your thumb. You know, the console controller.
Martin Rundkvist reports on medieval kilns
The site is on land belonging to Boo manor, right by a heavily trafficked Medieval shipping thoroughfare toward Stockholm, where there was great demand for bricks from about 1250 onward. I guess that would be the lower limit of the kilns’ possible dates. There must have been many buildings at the site, not least living and working quarters, and I’d love to see it stripped down to the bone on a larger scale. Unfortunately this would a) be expensive and b) obliterate Jan Peder’s garden, and so is unlikely to happen.
These days it seems that politicians must choose a narrative and stick to it. I don’t think they want to do this, but, then again, they may. Here’s Sam Brownbeck explaining himself
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.
People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.
I disagree “wholeheartedly” with everything here and am, honestly speaking, stunned by the illogic. Brownbeck claims that “we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason.” He “believes” that “there cannot be any contradiction between the two.” This is pure nonsense. Reason doesn’t require that faith provide substantiation or, as Brownbeck puts it, supplement. He may “believe” that this is true, but reality doesn’t agree. If the color red appears to me on a tree in the form of an apple, I don’t have to believe in the color red to acknowledge the fact. Nor is reason, on the other hand (and this is where Brownbeck’s logic falls short), required as a supplement for faith in The Great Lettuce Head. This last point is what Brownbeck wants but will not say outright. Brownbeck wants science to support the intangible but he won’t say this because it would sound childish. Science and faith are not complimentary. Brownbeck sees this as critique of his faith. I don’t understand why. That an apple is not an orange does not diminish the taste or the essence of either.
Brownbeck claims that science cannot “help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.” This an absurd statement. Brownbeck supplies no examples of faith helping us to understand anything. Faith has been argued as its own kind of understanding. Here’s what Luther said on the issue
Instead, faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words.
Luther argues that faith is a state of being; it’s not something you can control; it’s an external force acting through the human medium. Others would argue that faith is more linked to trust. Others, just to close this, such as Saint Augustine, would argue, that faith is a “form of knowledge” whose authenticity derives from its independence from the observable.
Blest are they who have not seen and have believed
Human suffering can be understood in many ways, even via a method of reasoning, such as “opening one’s eyes” and connecting suffering to “action” like assisting communities in the revitalization of schools and providing care to those who cannot afford the cost of surgery.
To close, here’s Coyne on questions that require the raising of hands:
Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.
Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate. When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air—those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. Although I am a biologist who has found himself battling creationism frequently throughout his professional life, I was still mortified. Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed.
I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do). But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy. Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science. Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.
After making sure the owners could not influence their pets’ behavior, researchers tested three groups of dogs. The first 14, representing a variety of breeds, did not watch Guinness. When taught how to use the rod, about 85 percent pushed it with their mouth, confirming that is how dogs naturally like to do things.
The second group of 21 dogs watched Guinness repeatedly push the rod with her paw while holding a ball in her mouth. In that group, most of the dogs — about 80 percent — used their mouth, imitating the action but not the exact method Guinness had used. That suggested the dogs — like the children — decided Guinness was only using her paw because she had no choice.
I agree that the dogs were watching, but why does their reaction suggest a decision that Guinness “had no choice”?
Here’s the link to WaPo article.
These new discoveries are driving me crazy. We can’t get there, can’t see them. They tease from a distance, mock from their ambiguous now and notness.
“We’re learning to explore Europa by first exploring a Mexican cenote,” said John Rummel, a senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA.