Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Wow! I was this close to taking the bait. Some misanthrope has been phishing with Monster.
The sender got the e-mail past Norton’s spam filter - not a terrific feat in itself, but a good first step. The e-mail was formatted perfectly with the familiar logo and style scheme. Got my first and [...]

It turns out that the short-term cooling reported last year in the oceans was error from bad equipment.
Carl Zimmer discusses vegetation farts, how the initial paper that reported excess CH4 was reported widely in the popular news, how the follow-up experiment, which failed to confirm the original result, was not reported in the popular news, [...]

At the risk of appearing obsessed with RedState, I have to comment on this. On the obsession - I have read RedState for a long time now - it’s just that lately (meaning the last few weeks) there has been a lot more going on there that is interesting. And, frankly, [...]

Google Earth Maps Darfur Crisis. (Doesn’t work with Google Maps - you have to download Google Earth.

Something everyone should understand. Proof is not for the real world. An excellent post from Sean at Cosmic Variance pounds this point home quite well.
So well, in fact, that I have little to add. But the discussion can continue from where Sean leaves it. After we’ve established that we don’t believe [...]

For those of you not following, that was John Kerry and Newt Gingrich… after “debating” global warming. Exploding heads here.
I first heard about this debate on RedState, too. The comments from before the debate, and those from after… well, let’s just say they reflect a different view of Newt, if nothing else.
Ok… So [...]

The new AMS blog talks about how to avoid a simple heresey. Those with more time on their hands can listen to an orthodox priestess drone on for a full half hour on the esoteric practice of the coolest religion. I highly recommend the latter for clergy and laypersons alike.

The Feds censor their scientists
Please read the above link and next time somebody complains that climate scientists “silence” or “censor” the contrarian voices (which are a small fraction of scientists, but nearly 50% of popular news sources), just remember it. Ask yourself if and when climate scientists did anything comparable to it.

Dan Harper briefly addresses what I think is among the more pivotal points about religion in the context of debate about its value, here… namely, that religion doesn’t necessarily mean “belief” (about God, the supernatural, etc… or about objective reality at all, per se).
In fact, I think that one of the tasks religion is most [...]

NYT on primate’s moral building blocks.
Very interesting stuff about what amounts to a relatively new field of research in biology - and one that may have strong implications for philosophy. Fun stuff. I’ll try to come back & update this post with some interesting excerpts & maybe even a comment. (Update: the [...]