July 09, 2008
Economics and Fundamentalism
Simon Jenkins has an outstanding and (at least for me long-overdue) essay about the failures of the economics profession. No modern discipline has promised so much and delivered so little: Economic managers have always claimed credit for past successes. They have espoused quantifiable outputs, targets, and delivery indicators. They invented the celebrity consultant and the maxim that only what measures...
April 30, 2008
Moldova = Wal-Mart — smiley-face
The distance to the Moon is 253-thousand Moldovans, laid end-to-end.
March 26, 2008
Misdirection
Getting tobacco company money for a study of early lung cancer detection via CT scanning shouldn't count as a scandal. Publishing research purporting to support the practice while not mentioning that you've licensed your patent on the process to GE should count as a scandal. But guess which issue made the front page of the New York Times, and which got buried in the 15th graf?
March 23, 2008
Inference and belief
Douglas Kmiec is a law professor at Pepperdine with resume entries in the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations and a spell as dean of the Catholic University Law School. He has just endorsed Obama on Slate. So far so good. But this post is not about the politics of an endorsement that has a lot of benefit for Obama, nor...
March 06, 2008
March 05, 2008
Math is hard
Two dispatches this week from the “is our girls and women learning?” wars. Elizabeth Weil writes about the nascent movement for single-sex education in public schools, and Christina Hoff Sommers takes on efforts to socially engineer the equal representation of women in science and engineering PhD programs. (Charlotte Allen’s “Women are dumb” doesn’t make the cut.) These arguments over the...
February 23, 2008
Health and Habits
As the health policy debate cranks up, attention is properly paid to all the ways we can be healthier that aren't medical and surgical treatment of illness. Most of these are well-known (cut down on the salt, get some exercise, stop smoking, and all that good stuff on the Kaiser ads). Some dangerous recreation is obviously bad for you, like...
February 18, 2008
Knowing and learning
Jonathan's reaction to Susan Jacoby's outburst is carefully arch about Holmes' theory of mind. (I need to point out quickly that this is not about being stupid, but being ignorant, as Jacoby recognizes, though whether wilful ignorance is itself stupid or ignorant or both is more complicated: see below.) Holmes' logic is seductive in the same way as Calvin's Dad's,...
February 17, 2008
February 11, 2008
A really bad day for biofuels
This is a really big deal. (The original articles are here, behind the AAAS paywall.)There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products. The insight of the papers discussed in the article, and work by...
January 16, 2008
December 31, 2007
Tear down that IRB!
Protecting human subjects is necessary. The current human-subjects proection process is a travesty.
October 04, 2007
July 20, 2007
Theories and truth
In his debate with Myers, Mark uses as an illustration an orbiting billiard-ball theory of an atom that he judges false. This gives me an excuse to plug my favorite contemporary philosopher, Nelson Goodman. Boy, is Goodman a smart cookie. I've never opened to a page he wrote that didn't leave me smarter, engaged, and curious. In Languages of Art,...
June 21, 2007
On the fallibility of memory
My favorite George Carlin line ("Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too much money") is actually Chevy Chase's line; he got it from Lorne Michaels. That's so even though I clearly "remember" watching Carlin say it on TV. We send people to prison based on evidence no more reliable than that memory.
June 09, 2007
Silly season at the gas pump
Like most things, gasoline is bigger when warmer. Since the gas pump measures volume as you fill your car, you get less gasoline by weight, therefore less energy, when the gas is warm than when it's cold. So far so good, but here the failure of high school science and economics education starts to send the story into never-never land,...
June 06, 2007
January 22, 2007
Cell phones and cancer again
Last week I posted a note deploring sloppy and alarmist scientific journalism. My point was about the journalism, but along the way I indicated that the lack of a bump up in brain cancers while cell phone use has been exploding at least suggested a very minimal risk. The science on this is still contradictory and changing, with responsible scientists...
November 29, 2006
Bring back the OTA
As long as we're looking for good and relatively easy ideas for the 110th Congress, here's one of the easiest (and possibly one of the best); re-creation of the Office of Technology Assessment. Although the official history, this description from the OTA's website serves as an excellent description of its mission and accomplishments: The Office of Technology Assessment occupied a...
September 15, 2006
On (at last) reading Feyerarbend's "Against Method"
As a more-or-less loyal Popperian, I'd always thought of Paul Feyerabend as being more or less in league with Satan, or at least with Derrida. But I'm finally getting around to reading his Against Method, and it's a stunning accomplishment.
August 20, 2006
Pluto and interplanetary liberation
If anyone still thinks science is an objective exercise exempt from political struggle, the debate over the status of Pluto and some other orbiting rocks should put it to rest. Only a hegemonic power drunk with its own illusion of importance would claim the authority to name and categorize autonomous, foreign planets with its self-serving schema of subordination and hierarchy....
July 28, 2006
Are parachutes efficacious?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a medical intervention justified by observational data must be in want of verification through a randomised controlled trial.
