Letters Remain

  • Iran’s Sexual Revolution

    Taking the lead from Pardis Mahdavi’s latest book, Passionate Uprisings, The Nation looks at Iran’s ‘sexual revolution’ in these days of political dissent and upheaval.

    Somehow, one suspects that the grassroots push to change sexual mores cannot be totally divorced from the effort, on the part of feminist activists but also some reformist parliamentarians and even liberal-minded clerics, to improve the status of Iranian women under the law. But the women in Mahdavi’s study seem to occupy a wholly perplexing historical moment, or a palimpsest of historical moments. They live in a theocracy with a premodern, religious legal code, and they are undergoing, all at once, what we in the West would recognize as a 1960s-style sexual revolution, 1970s-style second-wave feminism and the contemporary postfeminist embrace of female sexuality, with all its complexities. The messages these women receive are mixed, to say the least.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Carbon Footprint of Various Meats

    From an article discussing the effect farm emissions have on the environment: a graph depicting the different amounts of carbon dioxide produced from rearing various animals for consumption.

    It’s interesting to see how various foodstuffs compare, but I’d really like to see another comparing pounds of CO2 to pounds of protein (rather than just raw product).

    via Link Banana

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Debating Cryonics

    Cryonics: the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future.

    When one discusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futurology, medicine, technology and philosophy are debated. A few weeks ago a number of high–profile bloggers, headed by the excellent Overcoming Bias, have been doing just that. Here are a few posts in the conversation:

    We Agree: Get Froze (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

    Even with modern anti-freezes, freezing does lots of damage, perhaps more than whatever else was going to kill you. But bodies frozen that cold basically won’t change for millennia. […] Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death victims today could live on as (one or more) future ems. And if future folks learn to repair freezing damage plus whatever was killing victims, victims might live on as ordinary humans.

    Cold Spouses (Bryan Caplan, Library of Economics and Liberty)

    One unpleasant issue in cryonics is the “hostile wife” phenomenon. The authors of this article know of a number of high profile cryonicists who need to hide their cryonics activities from their wives and ex-high profile cryonicists who had to choose between cryonics and their relationship. We also know of men who would like to make cryonics arrangements but have not been able to do so because of resistance from their wives or girlfriends… As a result, these men face certain death as a consequence of their partner’s hostility.

    You Only Live Twice (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Overcoming Bias)

    Hated Because It Might Work (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

    The Best Sentence I Read Yesterday (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution)

    [On cryonics] my current view is this: one’s attention is extremely scarce and limited, as are one’s affiliations.  Insofar as you have the luxury of thinking “bigger thoughts,” those thoughts should be directed at helping others, not at helping oneself. […] Furthermore the universe (or multiverse) may be infinite, so in expected value terms it seems my copies and near-copies are already enjoying a kind of collective immortality. […] What probability of future torture would cause us to wish to die forever rather than be resurrected?  And should I therefore be scared by the idea of an infinite universe?  Do Darwinian selection pressures — defined in the broadest possible way — suggest it is worth spending energy on making entities happy?  Or do most entities end up as suffering slaves?

    Tyler on Cryonics (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Importance of Teasing

    Outlawing teasing as a form of bullying is a step too far, says psychologist Dacher Keltner in The New York Times, as current research shows that teasing is “a form of social play […] essential for learning to manage complex social interactions”.

    The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • (Bad) Science Review, 2008

    The third annual ‘celebrity audit’ from the charity Sense About Science has been released, and it makes for amusing—and depressing—reading. The campaign, targeting celebrities who promote theories, therapies and campaigns that make little or no scientific sense, this year takes a swipe at Tom Cruise, Jim Carey, Barack Obama and Demi Moore, among others.

    In similar fashion, Ben Goldacre compiles his end-of-year list of Bad Science. This quote sums it up nicely:

    It’s only when you line these jokers up side by side that you realise what a vast and unwinnable fight we face. […] In a world where rigorous evidence from scientific research languishes unpublicised, the media continued to churn out bogus wacky science stories.

    As Andrew commented yesterday, books such as Goldacre’s Bad Science should be compulsory reading in schools.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Atheist Demographic Disadvantage

    There may be a number of reasons why theist people have more children than non-believers, as Anthony Gottlieb–former executive editor of The Economist and author of The Dream of Reason–suggests in this article from Intelligent Life.

    Like other demographers, Eric Kaufmann expects western Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st century, as a result of the relatively low fertility of unbelievers and immigration from more pious places. Not only do denominations with traditionalist values tend to have higher birth rates than their more liberal co-religionists, but countries that are relatively secularised usually reproduce more slowly than countries that are more religious. According to the World Bank, the nations with the largest proportions of unbelievers had an average annual population growth rate of just 0.7% in the period 1975-97, while the populations of the most religious countries grew three times as fast.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Improving the Public’s Perception of Science

    Prof. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles highlights a number of ways we can all help to improve the public’s perception of science.

    • Buy and promote science books
    • Demand science from the media
    • Support science education across the board
    • Train and/or support science teachers
    • Encourage science students in other careers
    • Encourage good commuicators
    • Reward outreach

    Written primarily for professional scientists, I feel these points apply to everyone with an interest in science and education.

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Seven Tactics for Selling a Home

    Redfin, a U.S.–based real estate brokerage, recommends seven tactics for selling a home:

    1. Don’t overprice your property
    2. Set your price to show up in web searches
    3. Debut on Friday
    4. Stay engaged
    5. Market the property online
    6. When selling your home, stay put
    7. If you can, wait to list your property until neighbouring foreclosures are off the market

    Some of these may seem obvious, but if you peruse the full report (pdf) you will see that these recommendations come from some in–depth academic research (which is nice to see).

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Making Donations Easy

    Each year, in late December, I make a charity donation. Over the years I’ve chosen a charity in many different ways, but one thing has always been constant: I always choose projects that aim to improve science education.

    However, one thing has been constantly improving: the ease of actually choosing, and this year it couldn’t have been easier thanks to two websites I would like to bring to your attention:

    • The Big Give: a well–designed site connecting over 5,000 charities worldwide with donors. You can filter by location, benefactor, sector, and project size (via Intelligent Life).
    • Donors Choose: specialising in U.S. education, this site connects donors directly with the classroom requiring help.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Future of Food Policy

    Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, discusses the future of U.S. food policy.

    Michael Pollan: A lot of people talk about the elitism of the food movement. And they think about Whole Foods and people shopping at upscale farmers markets. But there is another face to this food movement. There is a real crisis in the inner city with access to fresh produce. And we know, distance from a source of fresh produce is a predictor of health.

    Bill Moyers: What do you mean, crisis?

    Michael Pollan: Crisis because, West Oakland, a neighborhood sort of like this, is an area that has about 26 convenience stores, liquor stores, that sell processed food, and not a single supermarket. No source of fresh produce. You might get some onions and potatoes in that convenience store, but that is it. Yet, it’s full of fast food outlets. So you have, a fresh food desert, in effect. And that is one of the reasons that people in the inner city have such higher rates of diabetes. There is a demand for fresh and healthier food that’s not being served.

    via Seed

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    Lloyd Morgan