General Science

How Would A Biologist Fix A Radio?

An interesting, and amusing, disquisition on different scientific approaches:

I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it. Because a majority
of biologists pay little attention to physics, I had to assume that all we would know about the radio is that it is a box that is supposed to play music.

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Fig. 2, see color insert). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

War Commentary

A Very Strange Poll Question

I’m not sure what the point of this poll question is:

Forty-nine percent (49%) of Americans say that President Bush is more responsible for starting the War with Iraq than Saddam Hussein. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 44% take the opposite view and believe Hussein shoulders most of the responsibility.

First of all, Saddam started the “War with Iraq” fifteen years ago, way back in August 1990, when he invaded Kuwait. That war didn’t end until March, 2003, when he was deposed, because there was never a peace treaty from the first Gulf War, and he was in continuous violation of almost all of the UN resolutions that were put in place as conditions of the truce.

Now certainly, the president does have responsibility for taking action to finally end (not start) the war with Saddam. But I don’t really know what it means to say that someone started a war, or what value it has in assessing whether or not they were right to do so. Technically, one could say that Israel started the 1967 war, because they had to preempt what would otherwise have been a devastating attack by Arab forces massed on her borders.

So what?

Why is Rasmmussen even asking this question? The issue is not who “started the war,” but whether the war was just, and necessary for the purposes of national security. Talk about “who started it” is the mentality of the playground, which seems to be where the minds of many of our so-called opinion leaders reside these days.

Social Commentary

Still Uptight

(Democrat) Victor Davis Hanson reviews the book “South Park Republicans,” and notes that the new puritans are on the left:

Dour, humorless, self-righteous, eager to use the coercive power of the state to impose ideological orthodoxy, so-called “liberals” and “progressives” had become enemies of freedom. These days the humorless, repressed enforcers of rigid standards of behavior are the politically correct professors and media pundits, the dour feminists (“That’s not funny!”), the race-tribunes, and the identity-politics hacks that monitor the media and popular culture for any deviations from the party line of liberal dogma, multiculturalism, and victim-politics.

He’s correct, in my opinion. It’s not just coincidence that Massachusetts is one of the bluest of the blue states. Modern (il)liberal nannyism is a direct descendant of the Puritan strain in American history, brought there by the East Anglians who settled that region, as described by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. It continues to echo down the generations.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Someone notes that I didn’t read carefully–it’s on VDH’s web site, but the review is actually by Bruce Thornton.

Political Commentary

Chilling

Kerry Country points out one of the potential effects of the SCOTUS ruling:

This has to be a godsend for towns and cities that have been stymied so far in their attempts to shut-down any businesses, corporations, or private groups of which they disapprove. Private gun ranges, airfields, RV tracts, hunting preserves, fishing resources, minority religious congregations, newspapers — all are now fair targets for seizure and closure “for the economic benefit of the people.”

I think they’re right. To hell with stare decisis (particularly in a 5-4 vote). This is a ruling that should be overturned, or at least narrowly restricted, as soon as we can replace at least one of the justices who voted in favor.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!