Apparently the whole thing wasn't real, it was a side effect of the end of slash and burn farming?

According to Krug and other researchers, the reason that many lakes went from hosting aquatic life to becoming relatively sterile was not the advent of acidic precipitation, but rather the way that people had used land in the lake watersheds over the centuries. During eras when land use involved slash-and-burn agriculture, the soil runoff was relatively alkaline, thus allowing the lakes to support life.

Labels: science

Just an interesting video from a couple of years ago about how the Consumer Products Safety Commission and the glorious glorious Washington Post went after Zen Magnets for marketing magnets to adults, while ignoring the hundreds of people and companies on Amazon and other platforms actually marketing them to children. Amazing.

Labels: politics, science

The solution to such academic pressure was obvious: abolish Step One grades. Since January 2022, Step One has been graded on a pass-fail basis. The fourth-year Yale student can now go back to his diversity activism, without worrying about what a graded exam might reveal. Whether his future patients will appreciate his chosen focus is unclear.

Lovely.

Labels: science

Imposing the DNR - something I have experienced firsthand. I have found that doctors and nurses basically lied to me about the my loved ones' mental state and capacities and forced a course of action on him while not letting me see him, and, when I arrived and realized they were full of it, it was too late.

A bunch of bullies.

Labels: New York, science

This is apparently a real thing!

Instead, metamathematics is a quest to be precise about what it is you already believe in, such that we can use ordinary mathematical reasoning about those principles to get to know interesting things about the limits of what one can hope to prove and how different choices of what to take on faith lead to different things you can prove. Or, in other words, the task is to use ordinary mathematical reasoning to build a mathematical model of ordinary mathematical reasoning itself, which we can use to study it.

Labels: math, science

They just makes people worse psychologically. Fascinating.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

Labels: science, trends

Chris Christie also senses this change in the wind, which is why he is in the news as well, irresponsibly giving aid and comfort to anti-vax woo woo in the middle of a growing measles epidemic. And this only a few months after he issued draconian quarantine orders to people with no evidence of ebola in order to placate the panic-stricken “execute ebola victims” right that, with Ann Coulter, saw no point in white people treating diseases suffered by Africans and urged instead that we treat rich Jews and convert them to get their money

Labels: science

Those damn Republicans, always thinking they know better than the scientists. Oh wait.

Prompted by controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents, the White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous.

Labels: politics, science

Or so it seems from listening to him talk. He also wants to put scientists who think certain vaccines are safe in jail, despite the fact that he's a lawyer, not a scientist. So if you're a scientist and you agree with him on an issue, you're a saint and everyone who disagrees with you should be put in jail. If you're a scientist who disagrees with him on an issue, you're a kook and should be put in jail. This we call having respect for science.

Labels: politics, science

Unless you like flies and roaches, I guess.

Labels: science

I just finished reading The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones, a British bioethicist. This book was published in 2004 and is "an enquiry into the status of the human embryo in the Christian tradition." The date of publication is significant because science has already changed so much in the past decade that some of the facts in the last couple chapters of the book are already out-dated. For example Jones states that only sperm can be frozen and not ova, that is no longer the case. He also contrasts Britains publicly funded abortion and healthcare system with America's private health care system. With the HHS Mandate and Obamacare, abortion coverage is increasingly funded publicly by tax-payer dollars as part of our new nationalized healthcare system. So this changes the landscape of the debate. But I digress, and these are minor details.

The scope of the book is not the most recent scientific developments, but rather it is to cover 2000 years of Christian perspective on the status of the embryo from a theological, philosophical, ethical, historical, and scientific perspective. So the history of our scientific understanding of the embryo is an important part of the puzzle, but it is only one aspect of this ambitious work.

Jones' summary is comprehensive and deals with topics that get at the heart of the human mystery:  Do we have a soul? What is the nature of the soul? Where do our souls come from? Where do they go when we die? As you can see, these are questions not necessarily answerable by science, and so much of the book delves into intricacies of historical philosophy and theology. It begins with characteristics of the pagan society and their treatment of abortion and infants. (It was not good, infanticide and infant-abandonment was widely practiced.) He also gives a brief outline of Jewish perspective in contrast to this, and then traces from Judaism the emergence of Christian attitudes toward the unborn in contrast to the pagan standard.

Jones gives philosophical and scientific understandings of embryos from non-Christian thinkers such as Hippocrates, Socrates, and Galen. Then with the advent of Christianity he goes into the earliest writings of topics such as abortion and miscarriage from the Didache to the church fathers. Contrary to what some people have told me, the earliest church always forbade abortion and treated all life as sacred. The notion of delayed ensoulment did come from the ancient Greeks and reemerged in Christian thought with the middle-ages. Some later Church fathers offered contrasting opinions or were frustratingly agnostic on the topic of the time of ensoulment (notably Augustine among them.) Thomas Aquinas favored a delayed ensoulment.

But part of the great disparity of opinion and confusion that emerged in later Christian thought it precisely because of a failure to understand the basic science of how an embryo is formed. Some thought that men alone provided the seed, sowing little homunculi into the fertile woman, who simple cooked and grew the new individual within her. Others thought it was a mixing of male and female fluids. Others favored the woman's role as dominant over the man's. Some people thought ensoulment didn't occur until "quickening" when the fetus's movements become detectable. This stems from the idea that rational thought is required to an ensouled being, and movement of limbs indicates the presence of a will and thus a soul. There was a long-held belief that baby boys were ensouled sooner than baby-girls. All of this is because of a poverty of scientific understanding.

It wasn't until the invention of the microscope that the female egg was discovered in other mammals, and eventually the human. My guess is that some of these great Christian thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, if they access to the modern medical understanding of how fertilization and embryo development takes place, might change their opinion.

As a scientist myself, I was a bit bored by historical overview of Christian views on the embryo, although I know this is important material, because I felt that so much was argued from the realm of ideas, and I do believe science must inform this discussion, but for the longest time, there was no idea of how conception took place, or how an embryo developed. The term "soul" at times equated to "life-force" and there could have been no understanding by the ancients of the molecular fabric (DNA) that underwrites and directs the destiny of each embryo to unfold into a unique being.

I was most interested in the final few chapters which did focus on the modern legislation and societal effects of abortion, IVF, artificial twinning, cloning, etc. and how these have impacted the Christian view of the embryo. These last few chapters seemed the most relevant to me, but sadly already need an update to keep up with the rapid changes in biotechnology that has already occurred in the past 10 years.

And yet, this is the most comprehensive book I have found on the topic, and so it is still worth a read by those seriously interested in the topic. Although the author is writing about the history of the Christian perspective, he does a great job of acknowledging secular views (which obviously shape Christian thought) and addressing the diversity of perspectives within modern Christian circles. For example he takes a serious look at the view of abortion as a compassionate option for women, which is a common view I encounter in others today.

Perhaps the book needs a sequel or update, but again it is one of the only books I have seen that even begins to address this issue so deeply, and it is still worthy of a read, especially for those interested in the historical Church views on abortion and the state of the souls of the unborn.

Labels: book, books, catholic, contraception, history, prolife, science, technology

I'm rather unpopular when I talk about ladies. But I'm rather unpopular anyway. So I'm going ahead. 4d's blog has this post which in short notes that while people are happy to view women as sex objects, they get grossed out if you mention such as the menstrual cycle. This drives me up a wall, and while it's not really my battle to fight, I think it's a sick culture that makes women (and men) deeply uncomfortable with the natural state of their bodies.

Labels: feminism, science

I'm not too familiar with Grist, but it seems, as NPR reports, that a dude at the site did an in depth study of GMO crops and concluded that there are pros and cons. He got to this conclusion by reviewing scientific literature. The response from some:

"I've got news for Johnson," Claire Robinson, from GM Watch. "Misleading the readers of an until-now respected publication like Grist doesn't make him exciting, creative or cool. It just makes him an unreliable source." Instead of being, as Grist's slogan promises, a "beacon in the smog," Robinson accused the site of "operating more like a smog machine."

Science - unreliable. Your preconceptions - reliable.

Labels: food, science, trends

On first learning about NFP, some might complain that it takes work, and there is a risk of being inaccurate. Isn't there an app or some sort of wrist-band you can strap on that just tells you if you are fertile or not? Isn't there some sort of easier way? Well technology is enhancing all areas of our lives, why not fertility awareness?

A couple of interesting products I have come across, but have not bought or tested, so this is no endorsement, but I simply wanted to point them out as worthy of notice.

1) OV-Watch Fertility Predictor
Website: http://www.ovwatch.com/

Labels: NFP, prolife, science

Labels: NFP, prolife, science

There is a side-effect mentioned in the novel as a negative. When these nanobots are introduced into a population the “problem” is that chemical contraception stops working. Vasectomies are healed as would other forms of surgical sterilization. Abortion also becomes much harder as the child heals faster than they can kill it. This is remarked rather off-handily in the novel and is really not part of the plot.

I need to sync my reading list with The Curt Jester's.

Labels: contraception, science, technology

The result is an accelerating paradox. Over the last five decades, millions of lives have been remade for the better. Yet within this brighter tomorrow, we suffer unprecedented despair. In a time defined by ever more social progress and astounding innovations, we have never been more burdened by sadness or more consumed by self-harm. And this may be only the beginning. If Joiner and others are right—and a landmark collection of studies suggests they are—we’ve reached the end of one order of human history and are at the beginning of a new order entirely, one beset by a whole lot of self-inflicted bloodshed, and a whole lot more to come.

Sadly true.

Labels: science

Just read a post advocating this. Survey says no.

Labels: religion, science

An excellent review of what is hopefully an excellent book.

Why does this straight-talking woman cause these men to cower? These sophisticates have no purpose in life other than pure research (the engineer uses the space technology he advances for low and hilarious purposes of personal gratification.) Their knowledge of science does not include any notion of final causes or purpose, teleology, and self-knowledge. And in this they reflect the blindness of the modern age generally.

The philosophic and theological premises of the modern age are explored by just-retired Georgetown University political theorist James V. Schall, S.J., in his latest book, The Modern Age.

Also includes references to the Big Bang Theory. A fine book review.

Labels: philosophy, religion, science

Sweet.

Labels: science, technology