Links With Your Coffee - Wednesday
- Clive Thompson: Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law
- Does the U.S. Have a Nuclear Double Standard? -
- denialism blog : Criminal Profilers and Cold Readers
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in this week's New Yorker concerning criminal profilers, individuals who try to determine who a criminal is based on characteristics of the crime. The idea of criminal profiling has become very popular, with many television shows and movies based on the idea that a psychologist could divine the identity and motives of a killer. Gladwell explores whether these profilers really predict anything well, and in the process, compares the basic tricks used by psychics to criminal profilers:
- FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - Why dad’s not as clever as you
A more precise, if less exciting, title for this book might have been What is Intelligence Testing? since that is what it is mainly about. But don’t let that put you off. This is a mystery story – and an intriguing one.
In the early 1980s, the author, a US-born psychologist now living in New Zealand, made the startling discovery that, over the course of the 20th century and across the developed world, IQ test scores had shown big gains from one generation to the next. This phenomenon, which became known as “the Flynn effect”, had previously gone unnoticed because test scores were continually normalised to keep the mean at 100.
Picking up the story in this book, James Flynn notes that the phenomenon throws up several paradoxes. If people really are becoming more intelligent, why are we not struck by the extraordinary cleverness of our children or the stupidity of our parents? If, by present-day norms, the average IQ score in 1900 was between 50 and 70, are we to accept that most of our ancestors were, literally, mentally retarded? - Ali G, Noam Chomsky, Posh Spice, and the Great Extinction » Listics
- WRITERS’ STRIKE SPREADS TO WHITE HOUSE: BUSH RECYCLES ‘IRAQ SCRIPT’ FOR IRAN
- Your Creation Museum Report
"Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls- out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just
(tip to Chris)
sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals
from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look." - Greg Laden's Blog : Judgment Day: Post Game
- Pharyngula: Judgment Day liveblogging
Comments
Hum... Law of Evolution Law of Climate Change Law of ...
Eh, sounds good to me. I'm going to use Law of Evolution from now on. I don't see any reason not to.
Aaahh... the US Nuclear double standard, I gotta admit that from abroad everyone looks at the US like "are they serious?!"
We have here the country with the most nuclear weapons in the world, the one that has actually used them against civilians, the one that against non-proliferation agreements continues to develop and use them, spreads them all over the world through military bases and nuclear submarines, the only country that VETOED Syria's UN proposal for a Nuclear-free Middle East, just to protect Israel's nuclear program, and who then extends the "nuclear goodwill" to other dictatorial regimes in the region, such as Pakistan and Egypt... I mean, isn't it crystal clear to Americans that the world's most serious nuclear problem is the U.S.?!
In the last 200 years alone the US has been involved in over 164 international military conflicts, while during the same period, those Iranian "violent loonies" have been in... 1! The Iraq/Iran war, initiated by Iraq at the bequest of the US... go figure..
Remember that often repeated post-911 question "Why do they hate us?" Duh
Very funny stuff in that Scalzi piece, evocative of Mark Morford, in fact--and that's very high praise to me.
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but the U.S. is inviolation of Article VI of the NNPF which requires nuclear weapons countries to honestly work towards the elimination of such weapons.
PZ Myers & others oppose Clive Thompson's suggestion on the grounds that playing semantical games with creationists is a bad idea.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/jebusnowhatamiserable_idea.php
I prefer the notion of simply teaching people what "theory" really means. If we had an educated populace, creationists wouldn't be able to resort to cheap semantic tricks to make their point. But then you can start lots of sentences with "if we had an educated populace."
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