This particular enthusiast for all things speedy, simultaneous and multi-tasking, anything that flashed and bleeped and interfaced, appeared to have no interest whatsoever in what I in my quaintness still call knowledge and learning. He was a representative of that new and potent ideology which claims that it is not the internalisation of knowledge that should be the aim of education, simply the acquisition of techniques for effectively accessing it. In other words, the skills do not have to be ‘learnt’, simply located, downloaded, then stored for future use. As long as a student can find where the knowledge lies, and process it for the task presently in hand, then that, it would appear, is acceptable. This is cant, and dangerous cant too. I would like to explain why.

For a good follow-up, read some Paul Virilio (1, 2, 3, 4).

A Defence of the Book

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Click through for the second and third heresies. I'll just say there's a wealth here, and leave you with this tidbit about Francis Crick:

The six best years of his life, squandered on naval intelligence, lost and gone forever.

After this, revisit Advice for a Young Investigator.

Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society | Freeman Dyson

For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers (*) for both questions.

...

The basis of Dr. Clark’s work is his recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.

'Germs' Debunked? Not Yet, But Another Wrinkle Emerges

The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker’s book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.

The Stuff Of Thought, by Steven Pinker

Humans are highly social, but we don't get pally with just anybody. Before forming relationships with other people, we normally size them up to see how trustworthy they are. A new study suggests that this behavior stems from an evolutionary reorganization in a part of the brain responsible for detecting other people's emotions.

A Mind for Sociability

It's as if they had to humanize her before they did things to her that would be taboo, criminal even, without the saving grace of medical training.

"The skin of the chest pulls back easily after we have made the incisions, and the body opens like a book."

"The body is staggeringly complex, and to understand it with any degree of completeness demands dealing with the thing itself -- picking up and holding the heart, tracing the path of an artery by threading a pipe cleaner through its lumen."

"[We] removed her heart and lungs from her body, tying them in a brown-black garbage bag. ... Her rib cage falls to the table as we turn her, and one of her removed breasts lies out to the side of her, facing the ceiling as she lies facedown."

This book earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab

Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?

...

In the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, the Easter display was a collection of dazed live rabbits and chicks corralled by a low white wicker fence. At an outdoor bar, the city’s diplomatic classes gave each other long-lasting handshakes while their children raced around a deep, square swimming pool. I sat with Gottfried Hohmann; we had hiked out of Lui Kotal together the day before. As we left the half-light of the forest to reach the first golden patch of savanna, and the first open sky, it had been hard not to feel evolutionary stirrings, to feel oneself speeding through an “Ascent of Man” illustration, knuckles lifting from the ground.

By the pool, Hohmann talked about a Bavarian childhood collecting lizards and reading Konrad Lorenz. He was glad to be going home. He has none of the fondness for Congo that he once had for India. Still, he will keep returning until retirement. He said that in Germany, when he eats dinner with friends who work on faster-breeding, more conveniently placed animals, “I think, Oh, they live in a different world! People say, ‘You’re still . . . ?’ I say, ‘Yes. Still.’ This big picture of the bonobo is a puzzle, with a few pieces filled, and these big white patches. This is still something that attracts me. This piece fits, this doesn’t fit, turning things around, trying to close things.”

Swingers | The New Yorker

Steven Pinker has a new book on 9/11.

Bestselling Harvard psychology professor Pinker (The Blank Slate) investigates what the words we use tell us about the way we think. Language, he concludes, reflects our brain structure, which itself is innate. Similarly, the way we talk about things is rooted in, but not identical to, physical reality: human beings take the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them and package their experience into objects and events. Examining how we do this, the author summarizes and rejects such linguistic theories as extreme nativism and radical pragmatism as he tosses around terms like content-locative and semantic reconstrual that may seem daunting to general readers. But Pinker, a masterful popularizer, illuminates this specialized material with homely illustrations. The difference between drinking from a glass of beer and drinking a glass of beer, for example, shows that the mind has the power to frame a single situation in very different ways. Separate chapters explore concepts of causality, naming, swearing and politeness as the tools with which we organize the flow of raw information. Metaphor in particular, he asserts, helps us entertain new ideas and new ways of managing our affairs. His vivid prose and down-to-earth attitude will once again attract an enthusiastic audience outside academia.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

This book is due out in October.

The bioconservatives are in retreat. Harris has now set the agenda for the future of humankind. This will be the locus classicus for the enhancement debate.

John Harris can be depended on to sharply challenge conventional thinking in bioethics, especially when that thinking takes a conservative cast. He does not disappoint here. Harris shows how deep-seated a part of human history enhancement is and how weak most objections to it are; indeed, he makes a persuasive case that it is not only generally morally permissible, but often morally required.

Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People

This is the same Carl Woese that Freeman Dyson has been urging you to take seriously.

The Third Domain is the untold story of how the discovery of a new form of life first ridiculed, then ignored for the past thirty years by mainstream scientists is revolutionizing science, industry, and even our search for extraterrestrial life.

Classification is a serious issue for science: if you don't know what you're looking at, how can you interpret what you see? Starting with Carolus Linnaeus in the 17th century, scientists have long struggled to order and categorize the many forms of life on Earth. But by the early 20th century the tree of life seemed to have stabilized, with two main domains of life at its roots: single-celled and multi-celled organisms. All creatures fit into one of these two groups.

Or so we thought. But in 1977, a lone scientist named Carl Woese determined that archaea -- biochemically and genetically unique organisms that live and thrive in some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth -- were a distinct form of life, unlike anything seen on Earth before. This shocking discovery was entirely incompatible with the long-standing classification of life as we know it. But as it turned out, archaea were not life as we know it, and the tree of life had to be uprooted once again.

Now, archaea are being hailed as one of the most important scientific revelations of the 20th century. The Third Domain tells the story of their strange potential and investigates their incredible history to provide a riveting account of an astonishing discovery.

The Third Domain