20 March 2011

14 mile walk; slow (3:38); I did the above course plus a 3 mile out and back. The last uphill bit (2.6 miles?) took 38:57. Yeah, I was slow, but at first I was really worried that this was only 13 miles; then I realized that I added a Springdale loop. It was breezy to windy and I started right after the rain ended.

Posts

Japan
Here is a stirring video of some personal rescues in Japan.

Nuclear technology and “economic locks”: sometimes a technology can get locked in economically even though there might be some technically better alternatives out there. Note that the US Navy went with the light water reactor design due to size.

Evolution: Punctuated Equilibria (via Sandwalk, where Professor Moran is responding to comments)

Economics Paul Krugman says that Elizabeth Warren is right; so the Obama administration ought not to distance itself from her. Though he picked her to set up the new Consumer Protection agency Republicans are attacking her. But so what? When have the Republicans been right about anything?

Religion and Science
New atheists are like the tea-party?

Because, of course, the New Atheists are philosophically unsophisticated:

Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

No, we don’t have to show that Kuhn and Foucault are wrong about the nature of science. All we have to show—and have shown—is that religion and science use different and incompatible ways to “understand” the universe, and that the religious way isn’t really a way of understanding at all. All we have to show is that there is only one science, which is practiced by researchers of all creeds and nationalities, but that there are elebenty gazillion religions, all of which disagree about their “truths.” All we have to show is that religious “truths”, like resurrection and parthenogenetic humans, violate scientific ones. All we have to show is that we know a lot more about physics and biology than we did 200 years ago, but don’t know a jot and tittle more about the nature of supposed gods. And all we have to show is that faith is considered a virtue in religion, but a vice in science. We’ve already shown these forms of incompatibility. QED.

Right on, Jerry Coyne! My guess is that people like this want their “word salad gods” to be taking seriously. There is really no need. What these people don’t understand is that we need only consider gods that interact with the universe.

And yes, there are religious scientists. But that does NOT mean that science and religion are compatible; after all, there are clergy that are pedophiles, and I don’t see pedophilia being compatible with religion either. Yes, I think that the shot taken at Francis Collins is unfair; he is a top notch scientist who happens to hold some strange beliefs.