Philosophy & Ethics
Speak Out : Silence is the Enemy.
Injustice promotes unrest. Unrest promotes war.War promotes injustice.
It is not possible to have a productive and stable society in which there is widespread injustice.
Injustice is not just unethical - it's irrational.
Don't be irrational - Read Josh Witten's article: Silence is the Enemy.
Do you have a blog? Join the Silence is the Enemy blog coalition (e-mail Sheril).
All of my blog revenues up to 30th June 2009 will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.
Every click on a page in The Chatter Box will help.
You may even enjoy what…
Random Noise #15 : Noises In Noyes's Poetry.
What is a noise, that it annoys us so?Noise is, in a given situation, any sound or sounds which one or more listeners consider to be any of: irrelevant, unwanted, intrusive, distracting, irrelevant or annoying. By analogy, dots, blots, graininess and such may be considered to be visual noise.
Noise is a barrier to communication: whether it be the babble of the market-place or the hiss in an old recording, most of us would rather filter it out.
The human brain is wonderfully efficient at filtering sounds. If not for that fact,…
African-Americans are significantly more likely to be sanctioned by the United States welfare system than Caucasians, according to research published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, but is there bias? Welfare sanctions in response to rules violations should be applied, in both law and principle, according to behavior and not characteristics like race, yet Sanford F. Schram, a professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, says that is exactly what happens.
"This study provides powerful evidence that…
The catholic church has long lost its race against islamism for the religious institution with more adepts. And they ache for it: you can tell from their resentful remarks on the matter. Bishops and spokespersons of the Vatican have been recently reported to say that the data need to be verified, that the number of muslims is inflated, that there is no clear record... The fact is, the data come from the World Christian Database, a US institute which is hard to refute. In 2007 it already estimated muslims to beat catholics 1.322 to 1.115 billions.
Here is what I reported on the matter two…
How common is scientific misconduct? It's a tough question to answer. Scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's faked stem-cell lines or Jon Sudbø's made-up cancer trials have demonstrated that fraudulent research is easy to publish, even in the most prestigious print journals, but are they deviations of a few "bad apples" or evidence that a great deal more is never discovered? The actual numbers are a matter of dispute.
In a PLoS ONE meta-analysis of surveys questioning scientists about their misbehaviors, Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh, a PhD in the behavior and…
The Moving Finger WritesI cannot agree that much of what is, these days, called poetry, is in fact poetry.I base that assessment on a simple rule: If it isn't memorable, it isn't poetry, q.e.d. If I read something, and an hour later can remember only that it is something to do with, say, a roof, then it is not poetry.
The traditional poetic device of memorably melodic metaphor marching through the mind reinforces recall. Recall of rhyme recalls the time sublime of childhood play with blocks and bricks of wooden words.
Such is the power of poetry.
The Moving Finger writes; and…
Digging Beneath the Surface of Grammar
How does language work?
This article describes my own theoretical approach to the problem of how language works. I speculate that language is the means by which a communicating mind's labels for a set of mental models related by concept C are transmitted, received and analysed so that a second mind can recover concept C. In the second mind, the labels, or their equivalents, are used to recall the matching mental models, and thus construct a set of models such as to produce, in the second mind, an awareness of their relatedness, and thus…
A Journey to the Centre of the Universe
There has been debate for millenia amongst philosophers as to where the centre of the universe lies.
There is a possibility that I may have found it. Please note the classic use of hedging. There is a reason for this. If the media should get the wrong idea, they might want photographs of the exact location. For reasons which should become self-evident, we would all find an intrusion by the paparazzi extremely problematic.
Mental Models.A model is merely a representation of a reality. A model can be physical. Indeed in…
Hank |
70% of you, man or woman, will have an HPV infection at some point in your life. There is no cure for HPV, just as there is no cure for the common cold and in most people, an HPV infection will clear up on its own, like the common cold. It can also be passed on to other people during the infection period, like the common cold.
There are claims of more than 100 types of HPV, identified by number, though only 70 have been described so far - sure, that sounds confusing but if people can believe in 11 dimensional string theory with a straight face, over 30% of HPV viruses…
Ethics, Expertise and LawDear reader: please excuse the style of this article. I am dealing here with observations in law. I have chosen a legalese style so that any student of law stumbling upon this article may more easily perform a web search for authoritative legal sources. I have studied legalese out of a linguistic interest in its attempted logical use of language. I have studied the history of British law for its impact on the history of the English language. But nothing I say here should be relied on as a statement of law. I am not a lawyer!…