Science & Society

People don't always see it , especially if social change does not move fast enough for their special interest, but the military has always been on the forefront of social issues.  A famous American general, John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, got that nickname because he proudly commanded the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry - the "Negro Cavalry" as Native Americans of the 19th century called them - and Pershing didn't want it any other way.  He wanted to win and that meant the best people. The American military was the first to integrate the 'races' and they didn't do it…

We are fortune here at Science20 to have come across an early work by Gaston Leroux.  This manuscript was dated to 1899, suggesting it was an early, discarded draft of the work that later came to be known as "The Phantom of the Opera".  Current speculation is Gaston changed the setting at the beheast of his editor.  Here, then, is the unabridged transcript of that early draft.  It is set in the historic 1899 Paris Academie des Sciences, and begins with the arrival of two new managers to this prosperous yet troubled place. [Secretary] "Welcome, new Branch Heads, to our…

WARS   Predicting that the human race has wars in its future requires no insight. We humans have never had a community that has built a lasting peace. The beliefs of Buddhism have come closest to achieving a path leading to the cessation of suffering. The Buddhists are particularly notable as the only major world religion to avoid fostering international war. Unfortunately despite examples of peaceful coexistence, humanity has not demonstrated much success at preventing armed revolution. The Brooking Institution’s new report, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty…

People like to live in important times. This is why you will see fairly silly statements like, 'politicial discourse is more acrimonious than ever' even though no one is caning anyone on the floor of Congress, like they did in the 19th century. 60 years ago it was culturally taboo for even different types of Protestants to marry each other but Democrats marry Republicans all of the time and have forever. If anything, politics is far less acrimonious that in the past, we just have a rapid communications medium that amplifies when things get weird. And then we have people who make money…

Yesterday morning, I wrote that the The Canary Party's Ginger Taylor broke the embargo(courtesy LBRB) and revealed the new 1 in 88 rate that the CDC released later that morning. Age of Autism has a piece on the Canary Party revealing the new number. Cue the outrage on one side about the numbers as proof that there's a horrible tsunami coming our way. And we need folks blaming the "bloated vaccine schedule." Oh, the Canary Party already did the second. I'm sure Anne Dachel will do the former. Then we need people writing that this is just improved counting, that…

“Here’s the story of the only truly awesome play I’ve ever made,” Jason Katz-Brown told me when I interviewed him for my book, Brain Trust. Katz-Brown is a former US #1-ranked Scrabble player, and co-creator with John O’Laughlin of the gold-standard wordplay site Quackle, so when he talks awesome plays, less-awesome players like me listen. “There were two tiles left in the bag and I was down by, like, a hundred points, holding E-G-I-N-S-Y-Blank,” says Katz-Brown. There are a lot of bingos he could’ve played from this bunch — words that use all seven tiles and thus score an additional fifty…

There was a time when people on the right trusted science far more than moderates and liberals. Distrust of scientists, including levels that verged on raging paranoia, was limited to the left side of the political spectrum. Now that is not so. Recent sociological surveys show that the right has become increasingly distrustful of science. Given yet another sociological study with delightful confirmation bias, you're going to read a whole lot of 'conservatives are anti-science' articles because science and science media is dominated by one side, the left. When I say 'left', I do not mean it in…

Dr. Heidi Ledford at Nature says physicists enjoy more generous funding, more commercial interest and more popular support than biologists.   Thousands of physicists in the United States stopped reading right there. While biology has an entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Johns Hopkins alone gets a $1 billion in research funding for the life sciences, physicists get...what again?  Even the Tevatron is closed. Brookhaven may be older than me. Yet because the physics community was able to disclose they had a better idea where the Higgs boson was not in December, and it got…

I do not usually shoot of little posts re-tweeting stuff I found, but the total destruction that is David Albert’s New York Times book review “On the Origin of Everything” reviewing “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” by Lawrence M. Krauss is not only totally spot on correct and well written but moreover makes an important point toward the end, one that I often also try to hammer into science cheerleaders' brains, for example with Mix Science and God correctly or Don't: If you do not really know extremely well what the hell you are talking about, if you do…

ECONOMICS   Many observers of human history have recognized cycles of behavior. Most of them have attempted to quantify these wave patterns of behavior hoping to be able to use them to predict the future. A recent interpreter of these cycles is John Casti who goes so far as to advance the science of Socionomics. He theorizes that cycles in human affairs are influenced more by social mood than specific events. In his book Mood Matters – From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers, John Casti argues the following postulates:   • The long-term global mood has…