“Carl Zimmer”:http://www.corante.com/loom has a good discussion of the discovery that the embryonic stem-cell lines approved by the Bush administration appear to be “contaminated”:http://corante.com/loom/archives/of_stem_cells_and_neanderthals.php with sugars from the substrate they were originally grown in. He has a nice angle on whether the Intelligent Design types who disagree with stem cell research will try to rely on the paper describing the discovery, which demonstrates the problem with the the cell lines by drawing on evidence about molecular evolution.

Tony Judt illustrating the centrality of coffee as a metaphor (or maybe synecdoche) for civilisation. (thanks to Glenn Condell for the link)

I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, which is one of the most profoundly annoying books that I’ve read in the last few years. There’s nothing more frustrating than to read a book by someone who shares several of your pet aversions (trickle down economics, Deepak Chopra, obscurantist literary theory), but who isn’t bright enough to say anything interesting or non-trivial about them. It’s a rambling, shallow book which aspires to, and occasionally even attains, the intellectual level of a middling Sunday-supplement broadside.

There’s one unintentionally hilarious bit, where Wheen vigorously excoriates literary theorists for having been taken in by the “Sokal hoax”:http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ and then goes on a few pages later to deliver an extended harrumph attacking Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Wheen cites a passage where Feyerabend attacks the teaching of science in schools as a form of tyranny (in Wheen’s reading, Feyerabend is saying that we shouldn’t be teaching children that the earth moves around the sun; we should be teaching them that _some people believe_ that the earth moves around the sun). What makes this delicious is that Wheen, like the literary theorists whom he’s been fulminating against a few pages previously, has been taken in by a provocation. If he’d bothered to read the preface of _Against Method_ properly, he’d know that Feyerabend is deliberately and consciously putting forward as outrageous a set of examples as he can in support of a serious argument. The essay was originally planned as one half of a twofer, in which Imre Lakatos would try to top Feyerabend with an equally vigorous set of arguments on behalf of a somewhat more orthodox account of the sources of scientific progress. Sadly, Lakatos died before the project could be completed. Unlike the postmodernists (Irigaray, Kristeva) whom Wheen lumps him in with, Feyerabend was a trained scientist who knew what he was talking about, and was engaged in a very serious debate about the scientific method and its merits as a process of generating new discoveries. As an aside, Feyerabend also wrote one of the most entertaining autobiographies, Killing Time that I’ve ever read.

The latest Prospect has “a nice piece on Durkheim”:http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6704 by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

bq. Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of “Desperate Housewives”:http://abc.go.com/primetime/desperate/ . It went something like this:

bq. He: So why did you marry Carlos?

bq. She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

bq. He: And did he?

bq. She: Yes.

bq. He: So why aren’t you happy?

bq. She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

Basically, you’re a razor, and you have to run through a number of
increasingly weird 3D levels, chasing cats, and shaving their balls.
The cats get increasingly hard to find, and there are an amazing number
of them. There are tabbies, tortoise-shells, Siamese, and cougars. As
you complete levels the razor gets more powerful and you have to be
careful not to hurt the cats or neuter them. When you succeed in
shaving a cat’s balls, it spits up a diamond that you can collect.

Link

Next time I teach Grice on conversational implicature and the Cooperative Principle, I think I’ll use this sentence as an example of how not to be maximally relevant:

In Trier, Germany, birthplace of Karl Marx, the prosecutor’s
office has been investigating the claim of a woman that babies were
being cut up and eaten in Satanist rituals.

Link via Jonathan Goodwin, who reliably bursts with timely and topical quotations. Such as this:

Philosophical works among [the Solipsists] are more or less of this
sort: “Does the scarab roll dung into a ball paradigmatically?” “If a
mouse urinates in the sea, is there a risk of shipwreck?” “Are
mathematical points receptacles for spirits?” “Is a belch an exhalation
of the soul?” “Does the barking of a dog make the moon spotted?” and
many other arguments of this kind, which are stated and discussed with
equal contentiousness. Their Theological works are: “Whether navigation
can be established in imaginary space.” “Whether the intelligence known
as Burach has the power to digest iron.” “Whether the souls of the Gods
have color.” “Whether the excretions of Demons are protective to humans
in the eighth degree.” “Whether drums covered with the hide of an ass
delight the intellect.”

Discuss. In strict accordance with Grice’s Cooperative Principle. That is, "make your conversational contribution [concerning the protective puissance of demon excretions, etc.] such as is
required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."

“Josh Chafetz”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_16_oxblog_archive.html#110641393348933333 says:

bq. NEW HAVEN IS FORECAST for 10-15 inches of snow tonight.

Is this a colloquial construction I’m unfamiliar with, or just backwards?

Spotted in “Whole Foods” while shopping this afternoon.

!https://www.crookedtimber.org/images/batard.jpg!

“P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sexist_calvinism/ saves me a great deal of trouble by writing the post I had in mind about Larry Summers’ under-informed views about the gender division of labor. I’m particularly glad he takes the time to deal with Steven Pinker’s “much quoted”:http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article505366.html line that “Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.” As Myers says, “If people started walking out on presentations of fact-free, unsupported hypotheses, Pinker wouldn’t have a career.”

In the spirit of adding a bit of empirical data to the discussion, have a read of Erin Leahey and Guang Go’s paper “Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories” which reviews a lot of evidence about the gender gap in math and analyzes some big data sets to find that it’s not nearly as large as you might think. (Erin is a colleague of mine at Arizona, by the way.) And to echo one of Myers’ points, the relationship between the distribution of measurable properties like math scores and the “phenomenology of attainment within the social structure”:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.so.21.080195.000555 is (a) a very difficult question, and (b) something you might want to read up on, if you’re inclined to throw hypotheses around innate differences between women and men.

I saw Clint Eastwood’s _Million Dollar Baby_ last night – an extraordinary, savage little film – but there was one element that left me puzzled. When I read the Washington Post’s “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55030-2005Jan6.html of the film a couple of weeks ago, I’d been amused by the reviewer’s description of Eastwood’s character, Frankie, as someone with ‘hidden depths,’ who “reads Yeats in Gaelic.” I’d assumed that this was a mistake made by the reviewer – Yeats didn’t write in the Irish language, and if my memory is correct, his ability even to read in the language was scanty to non-existent (unlike his friend, Lady Gregory, whose translations of Irish myths Yeats relied upon). But the reviewer was correct – the film does depict Frankie as reading what seems to be an Irish language book of poetry, including Yeat’s “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree.” The film leaves the viewer with the very strong impression that the Irish language version of the poem is the original – Frankie starts reading it in Irish, and then gives the English language version for the benefit of his non Irish speaking audience. I’d put this down to traditional Hollywood ignorance except that Eastwood is a careful film maker, and the meaning of another Irish phrase is at the heart of the film. So what’s going on? A little bit of dramatic license (the most probable explanation – but a bit disappointing)? Or is Frankie a little bit of a fraud (certainly when he reads the Irish language aloud, it’s almost unrecognizable – he doesn’t know how to pronounce it at all)? Or is there something else going on entirely?

Update: some spoilers in the comments thread below.

I know it’s considered poor sport to shoot fish in a barrel, but what on earth is David Brooks talking about?

With that speech [i.e., the inaugural offering], President Bush’s foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades – support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990’s we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

I mean, I love Austin as much as the next girl (well, OK, a lot more than the next girl), but it has always been my distinct impression that the scope of things you can do with words has been, hmm, let’s say, overstated by his would-be popularizers. Naming ships? Hell yeah. Transforming U.S. foriegn policy by shaking democracy-supporting fairy dust on everything? Not so much. Or maybe we’re on a 40’s crooner tip, with the classic “Wishing Will Make It So“? Seriously, though, does Bobo believe this, or what?
Note to outraged defenders of liberty: I think it would be great if the U.S. stopped coddling dictators in the name of stability or anti-terrorist bona fides, but that’s because I’m a silly, utopian leftist. What’s your excuse?

UPDATE: from the Washington Post, “Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say; Address Said to Clarify ‘The Values We Cherish'” Right.

Friday’s Australian Financial ReView section (subscription only) runs my review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book. CT readers won’t be surprised to find a lot of criticisms of the Copenhagen Consensus project that produced the book. But I found a fair bit to praise as well. The review, pretty lengthy, is over the fold. Comments appreciated.

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“Mark Dery”:http://www.markdery.com/archives/media_burn/000032.html on the political blogosphere:

bq. But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit’s post about The Daily Kos’s post about Little Green Footballs’s post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy’s latest act of high treason. It’s the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.

You’ve been hired as the program director at a new satellite radio station. You’ll be playing songs that should have been huge hits, but weren’t. You’re looking for songs from any period that you liked the first time you heard them, songs that are immediately catchy and pleasurable, songs that would please your coworkers rather than the clerk at the local independent record store. The artists could be obscure or famous, but the songs should not be in regular rotation on terrestrial radio stations.

There are a lot of buried “Hey Ya!”s, “Tainted Love”s, “Gin and Juice”s, and “You Shook Me All Night Long”s out there. Help your station find them. Bonus points if you can help us understand why you like your obscure song by connecting it to a more popular song that shares its appeal.

I’ve invited some of my favorite mp3 bloggers to play along, and I’ll update this post with their responses as they come in.

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