U-Haul, or not to haul
Over the past 7 years, I have lived in 15 separate residences. Despite my sensitivity for the insignificance of this figure when considering the greater context of class stratification -- there are certainly plenty of women and men in the adjourning cities that I frequent whose residential addresses approach ∞ or an infinitesimal, depending on how you look at it -- this has felt like quite a few times to move all of my middle-classly belongings! Although I've streamlined and compacted many of the artifacts of these moves, including turning the bottom drawer of my nightstand into a fully-functioning recording studio and keeping a spare backpack filled with intra-move necessities ready at all times, I have expired a weary sigh an average of 2.14 times each year when facing the prospect of moving my entire bookshelf again, an endeavor that in the early days took at minimum two full Toyota Corolla wagon loads to transfer, and now still requires many trips to the corner of a U-Haul truck and maybe a couple Advils for my back.
Why Wikileaks is important
Several years ago, I read an Octavia Butler sci-fi novel about, among other topics, breeding telepaths. In Mind of my Mind, Butler imagined the delicate process of creating a race of humans with psychic powers: every time two telepaths are put into the same room to mate, they end up reading each other's thoughts and killing each other in disgust!
Such fear of this plausible consequence of transparent knowledge seems to incite the primary argument against the three1 major Wikileaks document releases this year (the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and now the Diplomatic Cables release): the frail equilibrium of global peace could not possibly be sustained if everyone knew what was actually being thought and said by our leaders.
Publishers, get your act together
When will book publishers get their act together to streamline the availability of electronic textbooks for the ipad? I am ready to buy ANY ebook reader that can hold both my physics and my organic chemistry books without needing an internet connection. Is that so difficult?
Creative liberty
For creative people, one of the most frightening applications of a wandering mind is the nightmare of losing credit for one's own work (a reality that Harry Chapin must experience daily due to his hit "Cat's in the Craddle" being so widely and wrongly attributed to Cat Stevens). And when you make a living off of the creative works that you produce, copyright law becomes an indespensible protection offered by the government. It may be difficult, then, for today's practitioners of creativity to understand why we should consider scaling back the scope of the protections awarded to copyright holders in the United States. Yet the history of our progress in science, art, and politics indicates that our growth in these areas depends on the preservation of one of the most important artifacts of democracy: the ease to use, access, and create information collaboratively.
Generating responsibility from transparency
A few days ago I complained about the rampant mediocrity of science news headlines and how their repugnance detracts from the actual content of the articles that they introduce. As a person who frequently scrutinizes scientific journalism as a topic for my own blog entries, clearly I think that it is important enough to scrutinize. And on the broader level, journalism of all kinds is important to read and critique, because the perfusion of information is the pneuma of empowerment for communities both globally and locally--at least, for those who so choose to use it as such. But the proliferation of information also raises at least one significant ethical question: what exactly are we obligated to do once we know about something terrible happening in the world?
Another Mismeasurement
An article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, How Birth Order Affects Your Personality, discusses current research that ostensibly examines how a person's family position--whether you are a firstborn or a middle child, for example--may directly affect her intelligence and personality. Articles like these are why I rarely read Scientific American Mind. The "birth order theory" is yet another residual splinter from the dried shrub of pseudoscientific drivel claiming that one's intelligence can be understood by manipulating a single independent variable, in this case, birth order.
The real answers you want
It was nice to read an article from the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science yesterday about one of my journalistic raisons d'être: the definition of "health" and how it is ontologically distinguished from disease. Although it is convenient to avoid dealing with this lofty issue, it is becoming increasingly important to understand as we continue to stack gargantuan policies on top of the house of cards that is our philosophical understanding of disease.
Who holds the patent for YOUR BRCA1?
Here is a link to a recent Ben Goldacre article that has sat dormant in my bookmarks folder all month. In it, he applauds the overturning of several patents for a gene related to breast cancer, which had previously been awarded to a company called Myriad. This is a particularly good piece because it concisely and precisely articulates some of the major problems with granting patents for artifacts of life. Instead of approaching the issue as a metaethical opposition to patents on life in general, he takes aim at the practice by providing three specific arguments for why it is ridiculous to grant a patent for the BRCA1 gene (often pronounced "brack-ah-one" when spoken by scientists). Yet through this example, we can infer other cases when it might be a bad idea to grant patents for life processes (a practice we have permitted since 1980's notorious Diamond v. Chakrabarty Supreme Court ruling).
Statistical literacy in medicine
I just read a fantastic editorial published in 2008 for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Vol. 8, issue 2, the link is a pdf of the article) that succinctly articulates the the consequences of the public's statistical illiteracy. I'm in the middle of studying for midterms right now and don't have time to write a longer response, but I highly recommend it (since my observation of this exact problem is one of the reasons why I started FogMag!).
I hope this title is good enough for my own standards
I recently came across this archetypal bad science news headline: "Drinking Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Daily Linked to Diabetes." Although science news outlets like ScienceDaily intend to provide scientific pabulum to amateurs and non-scientists interested in current scientific discourse, the sensationalizing voice that many of their contributers take when reporting research findings can leave the masses intellectually anemic and perhaps more ignorant about what science is really like than before they started reading these articles.
