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"Since 1955, The Journal of Irreproducible Results has offered "spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons and satires" about life in the laboratory. Among its greatest hits: "Acoustic Oscillations in Jell-O, With and Without Fruit, Subjected to Varying Levels of Stress" and "Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity." The good-natured jibes are a backhanded celebration of science. What really goes on in the lab is, by implication, of a loftier, more serious nature."

Since 1955, The Journal of Irreproducible Results has offered "spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons and satires" about life in the laboratory. Among its greatest hits: "Acoustic Oscillations in Jell-O, With and Without Fruit, Subjected to Varying Levels of Stress" and "Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity." The good-natured jibes are a backhanded celebration of science. What really goes on in the lab is, by implication, of a loftier, more serious nature.

In the last few years, it's become increasingly clear that food companies engineer hyperprocessed foods in ways precisely geared to most appeal to our tastes. This technologically advanced engineering is done, of course, with the goal of maximizing profits, regardless of the effects of the resulting foods on consumer health, natural resources, the environment or anything else. But the issues go way beyond food, as the City University of New York professor Nicholas Freudenberg discusses in his new book, "Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health." Freudenberg's case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls "the corporate consumption complex," an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.

"Keep practicing, and you might become an expert. Or maybe you won't. Who knows? Not the experts, suggests a raging debate. Made famous by Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, the 2008 book's "10,000-hour rule"-the number of  hours of practice needed to acquire mastery of a skill-looks increasingly beleaguered. Underlying arguments over whether winners are made or born, or over nature versus nurture, the disagreement points to deep uncertainty about who should receive expert instruction and how best to teach people to excel. "No one disputes that practice is important," says psychologist David Zachary Hambrick of Michigan State University in East Lansing. "Through practice, people get better. The question is whether that is all there is to it.""

This entry addresses the nature and epistemological role of intuition by considering the following questions: (1) What are intuitions?, (2) What roles do they serve in philosophical (and other "armchair") inquiry?, (3) Ought they serve such roles?, (4) What are the implications of the empirical investigation of intuitions for their proper roles?, and (in the supplement document titled The Logical Structure of the Method of Cases) (5) What is the content of intuitions prompted by the consideration of hypothetical cases?

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone's condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology

"Platonists believe that there is a universal truth underlying all of mathematics. Formalists believe all of mathematics can be defined by a set of predefined rules. Ever wonder about the deeper significance of these two critical mathematical philosophies? Using thought experiments like the Allegory of the Cave and the Barber's Paradox, the great mathematics popularizer and author of Is God a Mathematician?, Mario Livio, untangles these two didactic ways of viewing the world and the very nature of human knowledge."

"Epistemology is the study of the nature, source, limits, and validity of knowledge.  It is especially interested in developing criteria for evaluating claims people make that they "know" something.  In particular, it considers questions such as: What is knowledge?  What is the difference between knowledge and opinion or belief?  If you know something, does that mean that you are certain about it?  Is knowledge really possible?"

"The guiding idea behind formalism is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an abstract sector of reality but is much more akin to a game, bringing with it no more commitment to an ontology of objects or properties than ludo or chess. This idea has some intuitive plausibility: consider the tyro toiling at multiplication tables or the student using a standard algorithm for differentiating or integrating a function. It also corresponds to some aspects of the practice of advanced mathematicians in some periods-for example, the treatment of imaginary numbers for some time after Bombelli's introduction of them, and perhaps the attitude of some contemporary mathematicians towards the higher flights of set theory. Finally, it is often the position to which philosophically naïve respondents will gesture towards, when pestered by questions as to the nature of mathematics."

"This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.""

It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.

Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these - sensation - tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other - reflection - tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

Why parallel universes may exist - great podcast/content for #ibtok http://ow.ly/1s78tH #naturalscience #math #senseperception

"Scientists and biotechnology companies are developing what could become the next powerful weapon in the war on pests - one that harnesses a Nobel Prize-winning discovery to kill insects and pathogens by disabling their genes."

"In delivering aid to drought-stricken California last week, President Obama and his aides cited the state as an example of what could be in store for much of the rest of the country as human-caused climate change intensifies. But in doing so, they were pushing at the boundaries of scientific knowledge about the relationship between climate change and drought. While a trend of increasing drought that may be linked to global warming has been documented in some regions, including parts of the Mediterranean and in the Southwestern United States, there is no scientific consensus yet that it is a worldwide phenomenon. Nor is there definitive evidence that it is causing California's problems."