Long Game

In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report.

"Discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is intellectual malpractice" that "downplays the controversy" over teaching evolution in schools, says Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that has fought to keep creationism out of the science classroom. The story appears in this week's issue of Science.

Miller, the scientific literacy researcher, believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. "Nobody likes our infant death rate," he says by way of comparison, "but it doesn't go away if you quit talking about it."

Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction

Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. This can be seen in the Pew Survey report (PDF) on Millenials, entitled "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation.

if George W. Bush couldn't convince Americans to privatize the program in 2005, after a 25-year bull market when stocks were widely assumed to be lucrative and safe, I don't see how anybody who lived through the current crisis is going to come around.

acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

No living person knows even a billionth of the cultural information possessed by humanity. No reader of Seed could assemble a 747 from its parts, let alone tell how each part was manufactured, where, and from what.

The discourse would emphasize that our brilliant, dominant species has undermined its own life-support systems. It now faces a daunting array of self-generated threats, ones that the human family could cooperatively organize to fight and, with luck, overcome by avoiding the first collapse of a global civilization.

Modern evolutionary theory puts natural selection front and center, of course. It is precisely what those nineteenth century theologians most feared. On this point they were far closer in their thinking to modern creationists than they are to modern theistic evolutionists.

It is not that they cannot allow that evolution is the process of creation chosen by God, it is that they have considered evolution and find it wanting.

JZ defines “generativity” as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (p. 70)

the generativity of the iPhone and the iPad is — to use JZ’s word — seductive. Steve Berlin is right that they have unleashed a torrent of creativity. But it is creativity within bounds.

Today we will consider a model for replacing our current form of government with an insurance-based model.

For all practical purposes, the government is already a big insurance company. All I'm suggesting is that we become more efficient at it, and make some money in the process.

This week marks three related anniversaries. April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago today. April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago this week. April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago today.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s "successful failure".

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.

He’s referring to a new book, Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund.

The reference point is the general population. In fact, 72% of scientists hold to a non-theistic position. On the other hand, most are not militant atheists in the mould of Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins.

For the general public religious truths are both descriptive and prescriptive. That is, they describe the world’s past, and its present, as a factual matter, and, they prescribe a set of actions and norms. I think most scientists are thinking in prescriptive terms here, not descriptive. In other words, the religions of the world have integrated within their belief systems basic core human morality and ethics. Fundamental moral truths. I would myself agree that there are basic truths in many religions.

atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements.  That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain.  If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.

It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.

Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.

But there’s something bigger here: The disintegration of the  Bretton Woods consensus, built by the  G.I. (born 1901-1924), that formed the basis for global trade and power for 66 years, 1945 to 2011–that is, for three turnings.

a seismic shift in the geopolitical firmament.

To many Xers, the idea that America is “above all that” is a joke. Every since they were kids in the OPEC-stagflation ‘70s, they’ve been hearing that America is in crisis, has reached its last days, and is sliding into no-growth irrelevance and decadence (of which their generation btw is a prime example). For Xers, the hubris and complacency of the G.I. worldview has been replaced by survivalism and revanchism.

A video displayed by Japanese Kyodo News showed the Russian-built Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers Hangzhou (136) and Fuzhou (137), which are Soviet-designed and equipped with the SS-N-22 “Sunburn,” a supersonic anti-ship missile. These are two of China’s most capable and heavily armed surface combatants.

Because the United States is the world’s pre-eminent naval power, and because the U.S. Navy is far superior to the PLAN in terms of not only technology, but operational capability, sophistication and naval tradition, Beijing has a strong interest in attempting to establish a larger buffer than what is provided for by UNCLOS.

And if modern post-Nixon Republicanism has always had a thread of class resentment sustaining it, Palin concentrates it into a heady brew. If Nixon was cocaine for the resentful psyche, Palin is meth. 

a serviceable definition of fundamentalism--a system of beliefs that alleviates serious decision-making on the part of the believer.

A single language--English--was concealing a community of internally consistent belief systems that could be identified by taking note of how the words were being used. Fascinating.

life is a matter of tradeoffs. Some behaviors result in win-win situations, others in lose-lose, win-lose, or lose-win. If your view of the world doesn't include all four possibilities, you're not describing the real world.

serviceable definition of fundamentalism--a system of beliefs that alleviates serious decision-making on the part of the believer.

The Senate bill does not require employers to offer insurance, but it does impose taxes on employers if they don't offer insurance and their employees qualify for new health insurance tax credits.

regulate the exchanges so that insurance companies couldn't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, or charge wildly different amounts for similar coverage.

Insurers would have to cover preventive care, and they wouldn't be able to cut off coverage unfairly or set annual limits on benefits.

Armed with a sense that life may not be arbitrary, counterfactual thinkers are more motivated and analytical in organizational settings, the study suggests.

it is actually very functional in terms of helping people establish relationships and make sense of cause and effect

In 1995 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of 23 comparatively rigorous studies conducted between 1982 and 1994. These were your classic controlled double-blind affairs: two groups of kids, one fed a bunch of sugar, the other given a placebo (i.e., artificial sweetener), everyone kept sufficiently in the dark as to who'd gotten what, etc. The results? No discernible relationship between sugar ingested and how the kids acted. It didn't matter how old they were, how much sugar they got, what their diets were like otherwise — nothing. The JAMA authors stopped shy of drawing any definitive conclusions, but if there were a legitimate sugar-high effect out there, you'd like to see it turn up in the lab every so often.

I should stress we're not talking here about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is its own freestanding issue; studies have suggested there's some correlation between ADHD and diet, so maybe every so often you'll get a kid whose condition really is exacerbated by sugar. And there are plenty of other good reasons to limit children's consumption of sugar-laden food. But when a parent freaks out because a swig of soda has allegedly made his kid uncontrollable, it's quite possible he's not just seeing the behavior he expects to see, he's helping create it.

Mr Salam notes that Mr Auslin also "raises an important question, namely whether the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia 'free-rides' on American military power creates benefits that outweigh the costs."

China is heavily dependent on its export trade to sustain economic growth at home. It has no incentive to disrupt or “stress” trade flows or to embark on policies abroad that would lead to this.