MetaFilter posts tagged with culture and science

he of the weird al hair and santa claus beard

kliuless — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:14:25 -0800

R.Sapolsky on the uniqueness of humans in relation to the rest of the animal world (via)

"Greetings from Idiot America"

zarq — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:20:20 -0800

Charles Pierce, author of the 2005 essay "Greetings from Idiot America" decrying the rise of faith-based anti-intellectualism, has expanded his rant into a full length book: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. (via) Previously on MeFi. (link on that post is defunct) Anti-intellectualism has been around for ages, and has not been restricted to the US. But the American cultural divide was thrust further into the national spotlight during the last election cycle. Further reading: Susan Jacoby's book: The Age of American Unreason (interview on left-wing blog Alternet here,) and 1964's Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter. Pierce appears regularly on NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me!, and is a feature writer for Esquire, Slate, The American Prospect and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, usually on sports. He's also the author of several books, including Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story.

Nature Cause by Human Culture

netbros — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:12:41 -0800

Next Nature is the nature caused by human culture. The technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. Scientific research into nanotechnology, genetic manipulation, ambient intelligence, tissue engineering... all of these young research fields radically interfere with our sense of what is ‘natural’. Here's a visual introduction into next nature. Real nature is not green. There’s precious little nature left that has remained untouched by humans: perhaps a bit here and there on the ocean floor, the South Pole, or the moon. Old concepts like nature and culture, human and animal, and body and mind seem inadequate for understanding ourselves and the technological society we live in. Cloned babies, rainbow tulips, transgenic mice afflicted with chronic cancer to serve medical science: are they natural or cultural?

Culture & Barbarism

Dumsnill — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:25:40 -0800

Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism. (via)

How We Evolve

homunculus — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:16:29 -0800

How We Evolve: "A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change, making us — for the past 10,000 years or so — the inadvertent architects of our own future selves." Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution (previously). International HapMap Project (previously). The Genographic Project (previously).

half-baked food for thought

Rumple — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:13:46 -0800

Sushi Science and Hamburger Science: I had always regarded science as universal and believed there are no differences in science at all between countries. But I was wrong. People with different cultures think in different ways, and therefore their science also may well be different. In this essay, I will describe differences I have observed between Western science and Eastern science. Let me start with a parable......

Mmmmwah!

amyms — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:34:19 -0800

Affairs of the Lips. "We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses." But, why do we kiss?

"Leaving no trace [of our daily lives] is nearly impossible."

amyms — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:14:48 -0800

The Anonymity Experiment. Is it possible to hide in plain sight? Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.

A Genetic Basis for 'Race'

kliuless — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:40:09 -0800

'Race' graphically illustrated - "most Europeans" vs. Ashkenazim (previously; see also IQ & Gladwell, viz. ;) In the words of Ernest Gellner, however, I'd stress that:

...The variety of human societies is staggering. This diversity is not explicable genetically. The nature and extent of the contribution of genetic make-up to social forms is a contentious and unsettled issue, bedevilled by its political associations and implications. What is obvious, however, is that a very large part of the explanation of the form human societies assume must be social-historical and not genetic. This is obvious from the fact that populations which can be safely assumed to remain genetically identical, or very nearly so, can and do assume totally different social forms at different times. Very often, social change is simply far too rapid to be explicable by genetic change. To say all this is not to say that genetic constitution makes no contribution whatever to history. It is conceivable that some genetic constitutions have a greater predisposition to some social forms than others. The issue is difficult...

also see "Let 1,000 genomes bloom," cf. [and btw...] cheers!

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

bijou — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:46:58 -0800

COLOURlovers blog - science, design, art, culture, travel - you name it, they can relate it back to color. And yes, they spell it with a 'u.'

The Visual Image of Chemistry

homunculus — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:31:12 -0800

The Visual Image of Chemistry: Perspectives from the History of Art and Science. [Via homunculus (no relation)]

EverytEverything I Know-Bucky Fuller

Enron Hubbard — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 07:08:25 -0800

Everything I Know-Buckminster Fuller During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours (audio and text available) and examine in depth all of Fuller's major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics.

THINK!

bitmage — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:41:16 -0800

Welcome to Idiot America: "The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease."

Einstein strikes back!

all-seeing eye dog — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:20:40 -0800

Einstein Speaks from Beyond the Grave... To issue a vigorous challenge to the muddled claims coming from all sides about the inherent incompatibility of science and religion. (No secondary links to go with this, but in my opinion, this link is interesting enough to stand on its own.)

Metafilter: Best of the Web??

Gyan — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 06:16:11 -0800

Research by dumb, ignorant Yankees on national stereotypes.

Singularity

ttopher — Fri, 06 May 2005 11:48:38 -0800

According to the developmental spiral we are heading towards an unfathomable point in time known as singularity. Could the futurists and science fiction writers such as Vernon Vinge be right?

ReadSeed

srboisvert — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 04:53:38 -0800

Seed Magazine. Seed is a popular science magazine for our times aimed at smart, young, and curious men and women who are passionate about science and its fast-changing place in our culture.

scicult

hama7 — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 16:42:06 -0800

Scicult: bridging science & culture through contemporary art.

Scientific Instuments

plep — Sun, 17 Aug 2003 23:40:59 -0800

Health Physics Instrumentation Collection. A shoe-fitting fluoroscope, Geiger Mueller detectors, civil defence items, atomic movie posters, radioactive quack cures, radiation warning signs, etc.
Much more in the way of historical scientific instrumentation at the University of Toronto Museum of Scientific Instuments : exhibits on psychology, acoustics, and early electron microscopy; more in the collections.
American Artifacts has some interesting articles and illustrations on antique scientific and medical instruments, such as these quack eye massagers.

Orangutan culture

jdroth — Fri, 03 Jan 2003 10:53:13 -0800

Cultured Apes: According to a study published in today's issue of the journal Science, orangutans have been passing on a shared culture for generations (free registration required to view entire study). To what degree are animals intelligent? Are primates more intelligent than other animals? What about crows and ravens? (My favorite subject of animal intelligence studies is still Koko the gorilla.)