Philosophy & Ethics

They start bad but they improve with time. I cannot say I like Pope Benedikt XVI yet, but I have the feeling that he is getting better as he ages, pretty much like Pope Johannes Paul II, Karol Woytila. Woytila started his adventure as a Pope by playing the head of state, flying overseas to shake hands with dictators, spelling pages over pages of reactionary speeches -and then he improved. He become, so to speak, more human: a strange feat for a man whose mandate was to impersonate the link between Man and God. I sincerely hope that Pope Benedikt XVI will show the same trend. At first he did…

Voting blocs are an emergent property of representative democracies wherein each new voting issue carries with it an automatic right for each representative to vote. In other words, when votes are treated like a continually renewable resource, there becomes incentive for each representative to give away votes on issues they care less about in exchange for something of greater value. When that thing of greater value is money we call it corruption. When the thing of greater value is a promise of future support from an outside agency, we call it lobbying. And when groups of representatives agree…

A Linguistic Paradox In science and law, we try to use words in a very precise fashion.  Accordingly, we define our terms as precisely as possible.  This gives rise to a paradox: each new definition of a word is added to the list of its existing definitions.  Our efforts to reduce the ambiguity of a word serve only to increase its ambiguity. The more widespread the use of a word, the more groups of people there are who may claim the word for their own specialist use.  It follows that the most common words will have the greatest spectrum of meanings.  Unfortunately, it…

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, according to a bold statement published in a BMJ press release.    The press release is about a paper called 'Retractions in the scientific literature:  do authors deliberately commit research fraud?' in the Journal of Medical Ethics.   How did he arrive at that conclusion?   Language and apparently poor understanding of statistics. The author is Grant Steen, president of Medical Communications Consultants, a company that sells medical writing services.   That will…

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago.   On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and documents, many his correspondence, were released to the public. Many stressed that those messages were stolen(1), as if the process vindicated the content (would it do so if damning emails had been from Exxon or BP?) but that was small solace because climate science was already suffering backlash and climate science detractors had a field day alleging the entire process was tainted. In his emails,…

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why: Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes. Replication is a…

Once I heard a remark from a would be father in most prosperous nation in the eastern hemisphere a leader in car industry, that "We don’t see smile on face of our children though they have everything under the sun at their disposal" Smile on the face of our children is the part of the package of happiness . Happiness does not come alone. One can not be happy if his family is unhappy, or his society is unhappy or his country is not happy. Peace , prosperity are forerunners of happiness. Money cant provide children happiness but a united family can. From nuclear family to single family system…

Blogging really only became a communications whirlwind when President George W. Bush was in the White House so, for the most part, science blogger outrage focused on his actions as President, and those of the Republican Congress. Criticisms of Bush were so prevalent it seemed like Republicans must be anti-science because so many Democratic science bloggers said so (and there were no Republicans in science blogging to dispute it), with charges of reports being edited and various unpopular (and later, it turned out, not evidence-based) restrictions on areas like human embryonic stem cell…

The Scientology ad is still there (see below, right), a few days after I complained about it. I understand that it is quite hard to get rid of a single ad in a bundle, and I understand that it would cost money to give google back the whole bundle with the third finger pointed upwards. But that not-too-little glowing blue box on the right seriously impairs my belief that by writing for this site I am doing something positive for the diffusion and popularization of science. Now: sorting out the matter may be hard, but it must be done, because this site diffuses science, not science fiction,…

A systematic review says there is a link between information provided to physicians by pharmaceutical companies and higher prescription frequency but what does that mean?   Are companies with new drugs marketing them more or are they better than previous drugs and thus get prescribed more?  The authors analyze and describe the findings of 58 studies examining the relationship between exposure of physicians to information from pharmaceutical companies and subsequent prescribing behavior.   All but one of the studies suggested that (a) no association was detected or (b…