Science Squared

While it's fun (for me at least, maybe I'm weird?) to try and identify cities on the nightime shots over various continents, and the electrical storms are impressive, I think, without a doubt, the highlights are the aurora.

A short clip that amused me.

As a note for those, perhaps outside the UK, who are unaware:-

Ben Goldacre describes himself as a "nerd evangelist". He's a medical doctor / science journalist / author, who has a particular bee in his bonnet about anyone and anything that misleads the public about science, whether ill-informed news headlines, the pseudoscience of the food supplement pill industry, or the misuse of evidence in the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Gillian McKieth PhD (or, as Goldacre says, "to give her full scientific title: Gillian McKeith") is a british tv presenter with qualifications in linguistics and international relations, a background in marketing and international business, and a PhD in "holistic nutrition" which she gained from a non-accredited (and now closed) distance-learning college in Alabama. She is also a member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, who's esteemed ranks also include Henrietta, Goldacre's deceased cat, on who's behalf he aquired, for the sum of $60, "certified professional membership".

Richard Dawkins seems to be seen, these days, mainly as someone who goes on TV championing the cause of atheism and telling religious people they're deluded; none of which I have a problem with.

It is, however, worth remembering from time to time that this isn't all he does.

This lecture on the "queerness" (by which he means "strangeness"...unfortunate the baggage that some words have come carry in the 21st century) of the universe.

In particular I found his comments on the nature of reality, and how our perception of it is an evolutionary result of the way our brains developed in order to better help us survive, to be very interesting.

“Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at.”

“"Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival, and because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of "really"s.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are.

A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal.

A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks.

A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customised for underground use.

I am not “Herself”, by which I mean the real owner of this blog. “Herself” is the one who posts a lot of the social science/religious studies stuff and talks about her thesis, I'm just a friend of hers who she lets stick sciencey stuff on here from time to time, when the urge takes me.

The reason I feel the need to mention this is that it's inevitable, when talking about science that, sooner or later, one is going to mention religion.

Here in the UK religion really isn't that big a deal. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we are officially a Christian nation, with an official state religion, the vast majority of people here simply don't spend a lot of time either talking about or pondering their religion. We do have religious people for sure, and these days, with issues about immigration and integration (or lack thereof) into British culture, it is becoming more common for religion to be raised, although I suspect more for racially motivated reasons than theological. But, on the whole, religion is not a particularly contentious issue for the majority of British people.

I am aware, however, that this is most certainly not the case in the USA.

In view of this, I have to make it clear that whenever I make mention of religion, I am stating my views, and these views should in no way be projected onto “Herself”.

Since she lives in a society in which, from the outside at least, religion appears to be a much more sensitive issue, I wouldn't want any comments I make to be a factor in the opinions people form about “Herself”.

I had a great talk with an instructor in my religious studies program, and he had some really useful feedback for me. Because my undergrad background is not just religious studies, but anthropology and history, why not incorporate those into my masters research? I honestly couldn't figure out where to go with that, but he had some suggestions that I think I can (and would like to) develop further.

The basis idea is to take some idea or another and look at it through the lens of a couple different religious traditions. Bonus points if they are communities in the Detroit area. This will appeal to my interests and what I already have researched, and will make me more employable for teaching lower level college courses like comparative religion, world religions, etc. 

One of the ideas that keeps sticking with me is looking at a few different religious groups and examining how individual worshippers use their sacred texts. For example, many Christians don't do any close or critical reading of the Bible, they know stories and passages that were taught to them. I'm curious if this is just a natural state to most religions, or if other traditions encourage more exploration into their traditions and texts. 

Another idea was the take the concept of "sin" (introduced way back in an earlier post on this same topic) and see what it means to a few religious groups- what does it mean to sin? Does what you do in this life affect what happens after you die? And so on.

Tony Biglan writes a great rebuttal to Gary Gutting's opinion that behavioral sciences aren't reliable or reproducible. This is a definite must-read for anyone interested in the human condition and how it's viewed by the public and people allocating funds in America.

In his new book, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, Colin Powell claims that the war on Iraq was a foregone conclusion and was never actually debated beyond the executive branch: 

An immensely entertaining and informative Q&A session with Neil deGrasse Tyson, shedding light on such scientific anomalies as how a mouse can own a dog and a bunch of more trivial stuff such as the nature of dark matter.

In this argument for the revival of the Documentary Hypothesis, Joel Baden advocates for a renewal of literary analysis of the Bible. As I am just learning about the divide between American and European theories on sources, this is a lot of new information for me. Baden's argument makes sense to me though; why would you assume that a particular word or phrase would have been used only by one source? The narratives do hold together when treated as coming from independent sources, and I agree that the redactor must have done a great job of retaining as much of the original material as possible. 

So in one class period, I have discovered that most of the research I've been exposed to so far is outdated. This means that all of the analysis I've done and papers I've written are junk - they are based on bad information.

Specifically, I have based a lot of my analysis on the work of Richard Elliott Friedman - who is apparently outdated. I know some of his theories have always been considered too "out there", and those aren't the ones I was focusing on. But it seems that his basic chronology of the writings from each source are also not really accepted any more. If things weren't written in the order I thought they were written in, then my ideas about how the prevailing traditions and now-historical goings-on in the area would have affected the authors is also...off.

I'm not sure what to make of this in terms of deciding my thesis topic. Do I bring myself up to date on the research, try to figure out what hasn't been asked, and synthesize all the new information? Or do I scrap it and just learn something entirely new?