A little more light reading. The piece is by Christine Rosen writing at the Claremont Institute’s online Review of Books “What (Most) Women Want“, a book review of “Taking Sex Differences Seriously” by Steven E. Rhoads.
A web piece on a related topic, from The Edge, with streaming media, slides, or text, a nature-nurture debate about women in the sciences in University faculties. The debaters are Steven Pinker and and Elizabeth Spelke.
For a laugh
Since this is from The Onion, I guess it’s satire. It’s an unfortunately believable story about cults and postmodern ideas about making up the religion you want. It’s called “Scientology losing Ground to New Fictionology.”
Lady Di’s Heirs?
This is the opening part of one of the more flamboyant email spams I have received, another variation on the Nigerian or West African Bank fraud, I think.
Useless
The headline of the article read “Crystal Meth Crackdown Urged”. The story, from the Canadian Press, was that the Premiers of the four Western Provinces (and three northern Territories), meeting in Lloydminster, had issued a communique announcing a plan to deal with the growing popularity of the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetimine. There was a picture of the four premiers walking down the street, semi-casually attired. The plan: insist that Crown prosecutors demand higher sentences for trafficking. This announcement is entirely typical of Canadian politics. It pretends that the Premiers are taking action, but it does nothing to help addicted teens and young adults and their families, and nothing to help people to avoid fooling around with toxic and addictive mood-altering drugs.
IQ, Puzzle -solving and Video Games
For the video gamers, an article from Wired Magazine called “Dome Improvement” featured today at Arts & Letters Daily. Video games may be good practice for the problem-solving in modern IQ tests, and IQ tests measure skills in a cultural context.
Atheists, Darwinists
Here are links to two stories about the irony of dogma – specifically about atheist dogmas. Atheists reject religious dogmas and criticize dogmatic reasoning. However celebrity atheists, for instance the scientist and popular writer Richard Dawkins, can present themselves as dogmatic. There are two dimensions of the word dogmatic in popular usage. There is a social and psychological dimension involving the project of presenting one person’s ideas and criticizing other people’s ideas. This involves temperament, attitude and social skills. Conservative religious believers are rigid and intolerant in public discourse. In that way, the word dogmatic starts to apply to anyone who is firm about a belief. In this sense, it applies to atheists who are aggressively anti-religious. Their confidence in their insights into the world extends to serious criticism of religion and the people who have religious systems of belief. The other dimension of the term dogmatic involves a more formally intellectual examination of what a person believes to be true on the basis of confidence in a set of principles and assumptions.
Stylesheets
I spent several hours last week setting up the Sister Jane site, converting Word documents into text and marking up the text with html tags, and organizing the site and the pages. I decided to create a style sheet. The basic idea was to use the headers to break up text sections visually as well as logically. I used borders and background colours in the headers to turn them into visual bars. I applied a couple of levels of indentation to the text. After that, I took the same style sheet and applied it to the Sea of Flowers site with a different colour scheme. The results aren’t fancy but the sites seem to be more readable and slightly less generic.
The colour scheme on Sea of Flower site was inspired by the Dutch flags in the documentary on the Canadian Army’s fighting in Holland in 1944 and 1945 on Global last Saturday night. I like it and I have applied it to the blog too, as you can see.
Tough Week
The weather in the last week (from Sunday April 24 to Sunday May 1) has been cold, with sudden showers and snow flurries, which killed my interest in cycling. This week promises to be moderately warmer, with sunshine.
The preceding week was a bit warmer and that week I had a Sunday morning ride to St. Adolphe with Mike and Steve into a stiff breeze – and back with a howling gale at our backs. I also have evening rides Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with Steve or Mike or both, and a Saturday afternoon ride with Mike. Last Sunday, Claire and I drove to Portage and then on to Spruce Woods with my sister Joyce for a 10 k hike in the Carbery desert. It was warmer there than in Winnipeg – Carberry is closer to Brandon than Winnipeg. Then winter came back.
The Pope is Catholic
The election of Pope Benedict XVI has highlighted several things about the media. The news is presented as entertainment – simple stories, visuals, staged conflict, obsessed with celebrity. What passes for informed commentary is usually an ideological rant complaining that the Pope is conservative. Everyone knows that he wrote a lot of books, few seem to have read them. Everyone knows he wrote that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered”, few realize that this is a restatement of a traditional proposition of orthodox Catholic moral philosophy, not an anthropological or psychological claim. (Unfortunately the new Pope does want to limit the human rights claimed by homosexuals in Western societies).
Holy Comets
A Russian astrologer is suing NASA because a space mission, Deep Impact, is going to fire an explosive impactor into the Tempel-1 Comet. It’s against her religion. The story from SciAm Perspectives, the Web log of the editors of Scientific American, and from MosNews an English language Russian News service.