Category Archives: Uncategorized

I thought Eurovision was weird enough already. But in addition to the usual fun mix of kitschy pop and Cold War legacy nationalism in its telephone voting politics, this year will see Finland’s satanic band Lordi: HELSINKI, Finland — They … Continue reading →

What do the newly enriched Chinese bourgeois spend their money on? Vacations to visit Marx’s home in Trier, of course!

Great Microsoft Research report (from a workshop they held?): 2020 Science where they argue that computer science will become part and parcel of science in general. For example, computation theory will be important to understand biological organisms as information processing … Continue reading →

Where is social science? Where should it go? How should it get there? My answer, in a nutshell, is that social science is headed for an alliance with cognitive science. Mark Turner, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education

The best bit from a paper by Paul Rubin on evolution and politics: libertarianism could be unpopular today because libertarian societies would get destroyed in competition with egalitarian militaristic tribes back in the hunter-gatherer days. The paper has some great … Continue reading →

Interesting aricle on Slate about the risks and rewards of academic blogging. I’ve added John Hawks‘ interesting anthropology weblog to the of ones to read…

An two-step explanation for distrust of science: (1) journalists write up poor science or take out the evidence and information from a scientific study, then (2) people read that and criticize science for being unfounded, arbitrary, etc. Link. Some fun … Continue reading →

Bush job approval ratings by different polling houses. Link. Does aggregation across different polls make sense like this? Interesting general trend as well…

Ray Kurzweil interviewed on his new book, The Singularity Is Near. Good points on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, nanotech and the like. But man, I thought Age of Spiritual Machines was a bit wacky… Complete model of the human brain by … Continue reading →

Rational choice has been a huge imperialistic success, growing in popularity and being applied to more and more fields. Why is this? It’s not because the rational choice model of decision-making is particularly realistic. Rather, it’s because rational choice is … Continue reading →