There’s a lot more to it than the amygdala.
And there’s a lot more to the human mind than we can even now imagine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of which, is our sense of smell driven by vibrational modes? If they can figure this one out, smellovision can’t be far behind.
With Google Earth and Kim Komando. I wasn’t aware of the 5000-year-old impact crater. Or any of the other things, really.
The first live footage.
The curious physics of domino chain reactions.
These are all interesting stories, but articles like this contribute to public confusion about what is science and what is not. Curiosity landing on Mars was a great technological achievement, but it wasn’t science, though it may (in fact will, and already has) produce some. Even less science are the Dragon flights to the ISS — again, this is about engineering, not science. And ending invasive research on chimps is a moral breakthrough, perhaps, but it’s not science. In some sense, in fact, it’s anti-science, if one removes ethics from the definition of science.
Well, this sucks. It’s behaving almost exactly as expected.
Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses
But I disagree with this:
So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.
Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.
…with immature jokes for names. Hardy har har.
[Via who you’d expect]
A very interesting demonstration of coupled oscillations.
It was what’s for dinner in pre-historic Britain.