Has King David’s palace been found?

As usual (on this subject, that is), I agree with John Derbyshire:

Malraux (I think it was) said that there are two reasons to be a socialist: You may love the poor, or you may hate the rich. There are similarly two reasons to get worked up about I.D.: You may love science, or you may hate religion.

My entire and sole motivation in writing against I.D. has been love of, and reverence for, science, and indignation that people should claim a place for their theory at science’s table when they have done no science whatsoever to back it up, and plainly have no intention of doing any, and when their fundamental premises are not merely unscientific, but willfully anti-scientific.

Alzheimer’s may be a third form of diabetes.

“Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer’s disease. And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer’s, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signaling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes,” says researcher Suzanne M. de la Monte, professor of pathology at Brown Medical School, in a news release.

If so, that might provide some clues to treating it.

<VOICE=”Homer Simpson”>Global warming. Is there anything it can’t do?</VOICE>:

Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” emissions.

How long do we have to wait to fire up our SUVs? When the ice in Chicago is higher than the Sears Tower?

Carl Zimmer writes about the discovery of powerful new antibiotics from frogs. The best thing about them is that they may be impervious to the development of resistance on the part of bacteria.

I’m watching (in the background) The Wizard of Oz. I just noticed that when the wizard hands out the diploma to the scarecrow to give him a brain, the scarecrow says (apparently as evidence of his newfound knowledge) that “…the sum of the squares of the sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the other one.”

The problem being, of course, that it’s not true, at least not in Euclidean geometry. Pythagoras’ Theorem applies to right triangles, not isosceles triangles (triangles with two equal sides).

But then, perhaps the movie was making a subtle statement that having a diploma and spouting intelligent-sounding nonsense is all that constitutes smarts…

I wish that more people could be this honest.

(And yes, before you email or comment, I am aware that The Onion is satire, thanks.)

Yesterday was kind of depressing, from an electoral standpoint, particularly in California, but there was one bright spot, for those who value science education.

And not just for Barbie. This article says that math problems are getting too big for our brains.

Well, that’s one of the thing that transhumanism is for. This part bothers me, though:

Math has been the only sure form of knowledge since the ancient Greeks, 2,500 years ago.

You can’t prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can prove two plus two equals four, always and everywhere.

This begs the definition of the words “knowledge” and “prove.” Two plus two can be proven, I suppose (inductively from one plus one equals two), but only within the confines of the mathematics that you’re using. It’s not “sure” or “knowledge” in any absolute sense.

What they really mean is that some of the tougher mathematical problems are not amenable to classic deductive analytical proofs, but are more reliant on brute-force computations, possible now because we have machines that can perform them in a useful amount of time.

Michael Crichton testified before the Senate last week on the politicization of scientific research.