I haven’t seen a lot worth reporting since the wireless came back up, but I did run across this piece, in the “bears use the woods as a toilet” category, which claims–hold on to your hats, now–that men influenced by attractive women don’t always make great decisions:

“We all think we are rational beings, but our research suggests … that people with high testosterone levels are very vulnerable to sexual cues. If there are no cues around, they behave normally, but if they see sexual images they become impulsive…”

What would we do without researchers?

Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.

Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.

Here’s an interesting article on perceptions of bias. It turns out (not surprisingly) that we underestimate our own, and overestimate others’.

From Paul Hsieh, on global warming.

I don’t expect this one blog post to immediately change many minds on this contentious issue. For now, I’d be satisfied with making the point that the issue is not the simple slam-dunk as is typically portrayed in the usual news media. Nor are the opponents of global warming hypothesis/Kyoto treaty necessarily stupid or corrupt.

It doesn’t look like it. Cathy Young writes about religious zealots on both the left and the right, attempting to pervert science to their own ends.

Via John Rennie (who seems to be blogging at Scientific American now) comes this sad story about “Dr. Dino” (aka Kent Hovind) and his dinosaur Bible park:

Escambia County authorities this week locked up a museum building at the theme park on North Palafox Street in Pensacola after Circuit Judge Michael Allen ruled the owners were in contempt of court.

Owners of the park, which shows how dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth just a few thousand years ago, did not obtain a building permit before constructing the building in 2002. They have argued in and out of court that it violates their “deeply held” religious beliefs, and that the church-run facility does not have to obtain permits.

Did I say sad? I meant hilarious. What a bunch of scam artists.

Well, actually a swan in the wild. It was found dead of avian flu, in Scotland.

A spokesman for the Scottish Executive said that if H5N1 was confirmed, ministers would have to make an immediate decision on whether all farm birds across the United Kingdom would be brought indoors.

A decision would also be made on whether restrictions would be imposed on the movement of goods from poultry to eggs.

Not good news for the UK, or the world.

This guy thinks it’s possible, in this century. He takes all the fun out of it, though:

…Mallett

Here’s a study that says that children are natural scientists:

Apparently it takes a concerted effort on the part of many so-called science teachers in the public schools to slowly beat it out of them, over the course of several years.

But I wonder if anyone pondered the implications of this?

Schulz said she believes this is the first study that looks at how probabilistic evidence affects children’s reasoning about unobserved causes. The researchers found that children are conservative about unobserved causes (they don’t always think mysterious things are happening) but would rather accept unobserved causes than accept that things happen at random.

This probably explains the appeal of ID (partly because evolution isn’t properly explained). If one believes that evolution is “random” (which is how it’s too often explained), then there will be a natural tendency to look for the man behind the curtain.

But of course, it’s not. What’s random is the mutations themselves, not how they’re selected. One sees many fallacies related to this in critiques of evolution, in which people figure out the probability of a monkey typing a sonnet, by assuming that each monkey starts anew with each try, and showing that it’s astronomically improbable. With that assumption, of course, the creation of the sonnet is quite unlikely.

But if a monkey gets the first word right, and that’s the starting point for the next monkey, then the result will out, and in a surprisingly short time, because the process isn’t random. It’s directed by an evolutionary force (in this particular case, the desire to have something that looks like a sonnet).

In the natural case, of course, it’s driven by the fact that things that don’t look like sonnets (that is, that have traits that cause their phenotypes to die before reproducing) don’t go on to the next generation.