Sourav: Blog

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

from the unabashedly conservative American magazine.

My view: Do as much as affordable to encourage retention of female scientists (e.g., blind tenure reviews, childcare services) but do not discourage male scientists (e.g., quotas). Trying to apply Title IX is all wrong.

Is it any wonder a theistic apologist's twin intellectual pillars are wishful thinking and a poor understanding of natural law?

The article reports that Zacharias converted to Christianity after a suicide attempt at age 17. I wonder if there is a psychoneurological make-up (for example) that demands a Great Cosmic Silverback to make everything alright, and whether he was born with it.

Michael Shermer gives examples and demos of cognitive bias, with an ending that warms the cockles of my physics-y heart --

Yet another inspiring TED talk, about a new liberal arts college in Ghana designed to encourage critical thought and service among the country's next generation of leaders. The founder argues that mindlessness and entitlement lead to corruption, and he is using his American education and work experience to change things in his home country.

This makes sense, but isn't there tension between critical thought and service? Ultimately, critical thought must come first, and this is why the individual must be cherished even if we exhort him to help others. If it's the other way around, critical thought is the first thing to go.

TED website

I prefer to watch the talks on YouTube, here.

If only TV were this good; if only these YouTube vids had more than 1% the views of the usual YouTube crap.

The 40th anniversary remastered episodes of The Original Series are on UPN on Saturday nights.

"The Bliss We Can't Buy" by Robert Samuelson

Samuelson argues correctly that once economic prosperity is attained, family and meaningful work enhance happiness more effectively than increasing wealth, and also that the persuasion of novelists and philosophers is preferable to engineering by social scientists. He does not, however, propose how to solve the obstacles to meaningful work, such as commodification of labor and decreased job tenure.

The (classically) liberal solution is best, of course: understand what is valuable to you and leave money on the table if necessary. We are at an interesting time, somewhere between working to survive and post-scarcity.

The question is, where would this leave the publicly traded corporation, whose bottom line is shareholder value? Do they have to adopt Google-like practices to attract and motivate employees, and offer more than stock options? Is this possible for a firm that does less interesting work which will be largely automated or obviated in the future?

The End of Poverty

An interesting look at the metrics of welfare, productivity, and carbon output -- shows the positive power (and climate risk) of globalization.

(WARNING: the talk goes completely off the rails at 17:30.)

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Journey to the Center of the Earth ... and Beyond

An inspiring talk on the innovations required to open the gates to the space frontier and to finding alien life -- in our lifetimes.

"Darwin's God" in the New York Times magazine.

I found it illuminating, between adaptations and spandrels, individual and group fitness; it's somewhat more detailed than the previous article I posted. However, I found the penultimate paragraph a little piquing:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

Indeed, this makes a poetic closure to the article, as the introduction discusses Atran's juvenile desperation on the existence of a god. However, I was a born atheist -- rationalism has always come naturally to me, and most of the atheists I know are the same way. Perhaps that's worth study as well.

From the abstract:

[...] Here we show that observing other women with smiling (i.e. positive) expressions looking at male faces increased women’s preferences for those men to a greater extent than did observing women with neutral (i.e. relatively negative) expressions looking at male faces. By contrast, the reverse was true for male participants (i.e. observing women with neutral expressions looking at male faces increased male participant’s preferences for those men to a greater extent than did observing women smiling at male faces). [...]

I'm falling asleep to a PBS Frontline episode on the Unknown Rebel and the continuing oppression in China -- watch it online.

Even if the Chinese regime did not fall, it was probably the most powerful symbolic act of the 20th century. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet communist regimes soon did fall. (More here.)

Whenever I need an infusion of balls, I think of him.

Published in New York Times' Play magazine (free for a few more days; may require NYT reg):

What Keeps Bill Parcells Awake at Night

A close study in the spartan existence of an older man who says he isn't happy, whose wife finally divorced him after 40 years, but needs to feed the addiction of performing under pressure.

Great article:

Filming the Unfilmable: The challenge of the genocide movie


In his review of Schindler's List, Roger Ebert paraphrases a wholly apropos quote by Flaubert:

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

I saw the Borat movie at the sold-out opening last night.

One might argue that all stories are catharsis -- the purging of the self through empathy. Tragedies drive us to appreciate life, uplifting tales generate hope, and comedy allows us to feel power over the inequities and insults of life. Borat Sagdiyev, by being the most oafish man imaginable, explodes every anxiety you could possibly have, and takes bigots and ignoramuses he interviews along for the ride.

The result: 82 minutes of howling and sometimes painful laughter. Borat is the funniest movie I've ever seen, period. Somewhere around the 1 hour mark comes the funniest scene of the movie -- most of the audience was exhausted by then, and had to take a concentrated break in order to continue laughing without injury.

See it.


Related material:

* Central Asia scholar blogs about Kazakhstan's reaction to Borat; some interesting comments as well

* Borat holds a press conference in DC, and responds to the negative propaganda of his movie from Uzbek impostors.

* Borat does a country western sing-along in Tuscon, and inspires people to fix a "problem."

"What I want for Christmas is...an anti-religion rant":

A BOOK that rejects religion and argues for the non- existence of God is heading to be the No 1 bestseller for Christmas.

Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is at the top of the bestseller chart of the online bookseller Amazon, and is climbing up The Times bestseller chart.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hardline Islamicist President of Iran, has a blog.

Let us reflect, and note that there is an RSS feed.

According to BBC, the poll on the left asks whether or not the US and Israel are trying to trigger a new world war.

Related to me by Terry Anonymous,

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

From nekrenas (and sunshine__girl):

Wafa Sultan

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

This applies just as well to a rather expansive view of religion.