Cloned Meat and Social Paranoia

What is Sickle Cell Anemia?

According to a post at Scientific Blogging, based on a Northwestern University study, what you fear determines your preference in the "liberal vs. conservative" realm.  Perhaps they've misread their what their "study" says.  (And yes, the quotation marks around study reflect my mathematical/statistical bias against the "experiments" of social scientists.)

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, says a new Northwestern University study in the Journal of Research in Personality, you're motivated by fear.

Political conservatives worry about fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness, they say.

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Creationism was everywhere last week. Sarah Palin’s fundamentalism, a furore at the Royal Society and then the news that Richard Dawkins’ website has been blocked in Turkey by a creationist (the same one who apparently got wordpress blocked there last year – so he won’t be reading this then).

It’s the Royal Society story that interests me. According to the Guardian, Professor of Education Michael Reiss relinquished his role as the R. Soc.’s educational director as a consequence of unintentionally damaging the society’s reputation. The Guardian reported him as saying that “creationism had no scientific basis” but that teachers “risked alienating pupils who believed in the idea by dismissing it out of hand. "They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis"”.

Today, Prof. David Fergusson of Edinburgh's School of Divinity delivered a lecture entitled, "The New Atheism: A Rejoinder." For those not 'in the know' about such things, this so-called 'New Atheism' (NA) denotes a recent influx of atheist apologetics showing up in bookstores across the US, UK and Europe (and I'm sure elsewhere), all penned by various (namely Western) intellectuals. This phenomenon has attracted my attention over the last two years, so I was eager to hear the perspective of a theologian and philosopher on the matter. What follows are some general reflections of mine in light of Prof. Fergusson's critique. 

The oh-so-entertaining drinking bird is an engine that converts heat into motion. Have you ever wondered why the drinking bird has to drink water? The fact is that this novelty toy wouldn't work if wasn't able to dip its head into a liquid, like water. Water has a high latent heat capacity. This means that it takes a lot of energy to increase the temperature of water. Consequently when water evaporates it takes with it a large amount of energy.

Jonah Lehrer of Mind Matters has an interesting interview with Chen-Bo Zhong over at Scientific American.  Zhong is an assistant professor at University of Toronto's school of management.  He's been studying metaphors for psychological states.  What this has to do with the school of management is unknown.

The other day I posted a long, detailed musing on the price of gasoline and whether the recent price increases would have a long-term impact on our domestic demand. I drew extensively upon the work of Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, formerly of MIT, now of Duke. I enthusiastically recommend his book Predictably Irrational, a quick and enjoyable read. Even if you don't have an interest in economics or books, you'll find the following presentation, in which he reprises the major concepts of that book, incredibly illuminating:

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Converting Methane Gas From Manure Into Electricity - NYTimes.com

Cow's waste is converted into Bio Gas which then is used to generate electricity. Sounds slightly familiar to me coming from India. So this means we will have to end up mass manufacturing Cows which can eat a lot of food(Hopefully not ours) and excrete a lot of waste to supply us with Power.

If not properly managed, we will have too many cows for electricity, too little for beef, which inturn will mean people substituting Chicken and veggies for beef, which inturn means rice is food prices. Gridlocked whichever way we go.