Archive for October, 2008
Friday, October 31st, 2008
Weekly Whack: Ray Kurzweil and “The Singularity”
I love jawing with smart people with whacky beliefs. Like Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism, string theory. I thus had lots of fun last weekend at the Singularity Summit, held at an incongruously funky old theater in sleek hi-tech San Jose. What better venue than the heart of Silicon Valley for a powow of brainiacs who believe [...]
15 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, October 27th, 2008
Why Politics Makes People Nuts
In last Saturday’s Bloggingheads.tv, George Johnson and I talk about the fascinating field of political psychology, which delves into, among other things, cognitive differences between liberals and conservatives. I also have a column on political psychology in this week’s issue of the Stute, the Stevens school paper. The column mentions that a leading light of [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Weekly Whack: Jeffery Schwartz and the Cult of “Non-Material Neuroscience”
Rejoice! In case you were bored, there’s now a new front in the war on science: the mind. Apparently, creationists are no longer satisfied by throwing tantrums in front of Darwin’s grave; they’d rather throw flowers on Descartes’.
This story in New Scientist talks about a new movement in creationism called “non-material neuroscience.” Basically, these guys [...]
15 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
LittleBigPlanet of Apocalyptic Manichean Cataclysm
I consider myself a recovering video game addict. I lived off the stuff in the mid ’90s but I kicked the habit a few years ago. In fact, until pretty recently, I hadn’t really touched a new video game in about four or five years. But a few months ago I went on a Blu-Ray [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Students Still Pessimistic About War
I recently gave students in my “War and Human Nature” class at Stevens this assignment: “Ask at least 10 other students to respond to the following questions: Do you think humanity will ever stop fighting wars once and for all time? Why or why not? Get at least a one-sentence response to why-or-why-not question. Record [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, October 20th, 2008
Sustainability through Immersion
Here at the CSW we’ve been trying to expand our horizons beyond rabid diatribes and cranky cynicism and the obligatory once a week “the world ain’t so bad” post. Lucky for us, there are a few people out there interested enough to want to contribute to our site. Steve Koch is a sophomore here at [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Friday, October 17th, 2008
Weekly Whack: John Gray’s Dystopian Vision
Call it a pathetic attempt to impose order on a hopelessly chaotic world. But beginning today, and henceforth every Friday, “The Scientific Curmudgeon”—that is, I or my colleague Suhas Sreedhar–will whack something, someone. That is, we will criticize, castigate, mock, diss, because that is what curmudgeons do. And because progress—yes progress! (emphasis to be explained [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, October 13th, 2008
War Games Versus Real War
Four or five years ago my son Mac, now 15, took up paintball. He and his friends donned Darth Vader headgear (you don’t want a paintball in the eye) and spent hours in the woods around our house shooting each other. A couple of years ago Mac switched to Airsoft, which substitutes plastic BBs for [...]
9 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Why Freud Still Isn’t Dead
Ever since Freud invented psychoanalysis a century ago, critics have viciously attacked it as pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine–“the treatment of the id by the odd,” as one wag put it. But in spite of the current dominance of genetic, neural and pharmacological approaches to the mind and its disorders, psychoanalysis refuses to fade away. A recent [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, October 6th, 2008
Nobel Prize Renders Judgement on Discovery of AIDS Virus
Who discovered the virus that causes AIDS?
For more than two decades, this seemingly straightforward question has been investigated by various national and international courts, agencies and journalists. In the early 1980s both Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, virologists at prominent state-sponsored laboratories in the U.S. and France, respectively, claimed to have independently discovered the virus [...]