Turtles all the way down

Boo!

Deep-seated political differences aren’t simply moral and intellectual: They’re also biological.

In reflex tests of 46 political partisans, psychologists found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be shocked by sudden threats.

Accompanying the physiological differences were deep differences on hot-button political issues: military expansion, the Iraq war, gun control, capital punishment, the Patriot act, warrantless searches, foreign aid, abortion rights, gay marriage, premarital sex and pornography.

Except that it’s hard to convince the conservatives that don’t believe in biology that this is true.

From Science Daily:

It appears that records related to carbonate platforms which are often used throughout the early history of the Earth are not good recorders of the 13C/12C ratio in the open oceans. Hence, the work presented suggests that assumptions made previously about changes in the 13C/12C ratios of carbonate sediments in the geological record are incorrect.

**Twiddling thumbs waiting for someone to inevitably conclude that all carbon dating is inaccurate and therefore the world is only 6000 years old…**

Sad news in the passing of Edward Lorenz:

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.

A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere–or a model of the atmosphere–could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

Twenty years ago I read James Gleick’s book, chaos and little did I know it would influence some of my own research in Internet traffic patterns a few years later.

From the New York Times:

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. free internet casinoonline gambling casino,best online casino gambling,gambling casino onlinevideo poker gratuitsjeu roulette casinojeu video poker,jeu video de poker,jeu video poker a telecharger gratuitesjeux casino gratuijeu en ligne gratuitesjeu flash casinojeux de casino roulettenouveau casino avec bonusbonus casino 770jeu jack blackbonus pour casino 770jack black school ofplay slotswww jeux casinoblack game jack onlinecraps comjeu flash roulettevideo poker onlinegagner ? la roulette en ligneles jeux du casinocasino tropez comcasino avec bonus sans depotmeilleurs casino en lignejeu keno en lignewww casino vacances frjeux casino bonuscasino machine a sous gratuitescasino bonus sans depotpoker en ligne bruelpoker texas gratuitespoker gratuites sans telechargeraprendre a jouer au pokerjeux 7 card stud gratuitest?l?charger texas holdem en lignepoker en ligne argent virtueljeu au pokertelecharger poker holdem gratuites7 card stud gratuitesjouer au poker argentpoker telechargement gratuitespoker tracker gratuitesdes r?gles pokerpoker en ligne francepoker pc gratuitespoker machine gratuitesjouer poker tour gratuitesregle du jeu poker texaspoker en ligne sans argent He was 90.

I’ve often joked that people who don’t accept evolution should also not bother with modern medicine. This chart explains what would happen if that were the case. Hmm…

For years I’ve heard that the US schools are behind in teaching math, science and engineering, and here it is again.

U.S. grade school students continue to lag behind other developed countries in science and math, although fourth and eighth grade U.S. students showed steady gains in math since 1990. Only fourth graders showed gains in science compared to 1996.

But:

The U.S. is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world supplying an estimated $340 billion for R&D in 2006, a record high.

One theory is that these surveys and tests report the progress of the average student, but it’s mostly the top students who go into math, science and engineering as a career. Thus, being average at teaching the average kids is ok as long as we’re doing well at teaching the kids who are interested in a science or engineering career path.

Or, there is so little motivation for top graduates of math, science and engineering universities to become teachers, that those who are best positioned to teach the material don’t. In other words, teaching salaries cannot compete with corporate and industry salaries.

Ok, but once again the survey must have missed everyone I know.

But what is the engineer’s mindset?

The authors call it a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.

A past survey in the United States has already shown that the proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than any other disciplinary groups–such as economists, doctors, scientists, and those in the humanities and social sciences.

111 years ago, the Indiana legislature tried to define pi. But they picked the wrong value.

1897: Egged on by an amateur mathematician, the Indiana General Assembly almost passes a bill adopting 3.2 as the exact value of pi (or π). Only the intervention of a Purdue University mathematician who happens to be visiting the legislature prevents the bill from becoming law, saving the most acute political embarrassment.

What became known as the Indiana pi bill was sponsored by Rep. T.I. Record at the behest of Edwin J. Goodwin, a physician and math dilettante who claimed to have figured out how to square circles.

House Bill 246, proposed as “an act introducing a new mathematical truth,” went through three reads before being passed unanimously by the House, presumably to avoid having to endure a fourth.

Well, it’s official - some people are genetically predisposed not to learn from their mistakes.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors. The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation, which reduces the amount of dopamine D2 receptors in the brain, are less successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry this genetic mutation. This finding has the potential to improve our understanding of the causes of addictive and compulsive behaviors.

And we’re all saying to ourselves, “That explains a lot!”

This is a topic I’ve often thought about, with the goal of trying to figure if success is something that is more inherent in some of us, what we all can do to improve our chances of success (probable answer: just plain old hard work).

But this discovery has interesting implications in the fields of criminal punishment, where at least in the US, rehabilitation is out of vogue. It also is a possible factor that could be used in genetic determinism…, “Bob is A1, so he’ll never learn.” But only if we let it.

Entreprenaur and technologist Stewart Brand finds that the Good Old Stuff sucks. On the other hand, he writes, “New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.” I hope I can be as open minded when I’m 69.