Media Moment

I have updated the list of news stories on the Moment of Silence webpage to include those related to the recent oral arguments hearing. I also posted some corrections to errors in the original story which were repeated by other media.

To the supernaturalists who sent us numerous e-mail, voice mail, snail mail, and blog comment messages recently, I respond by recommending the very short book Letter to a Christian Nation by neuroscience doctoral student Sam Harris. It reminded me of Age of Reason by founding father Thomas Paine.

Debate Transcripts

A judge will hear oral arguments for the Texas Moment of Silence case on July 20th. Tonight I uploaded the transcripts of the 2003 legislative debates. One of my purposes in having these debates transcribed was to show that this new law is really about mandating organized silent prayer in the public schools.

Peer Screwed

Today I heard a story about how some scientists deliberately planted an error in a draft paper to throw off the research of competing scientists who they knew would steal the information during the peer review publication process. In reading the history of science, I know of a number of famous cases where proper credit was not given where due for ideas taken from papers blocked or delayed for publication. I recently conceived of a pithy saying for this which I wanted to share with you:

Peer Reviewed is Peer Screwed.

The peer review system is flawed in that your peers are your jealous competitors, not fair and impartial judges of scientific merit. Instead of publishing, consider patenting. Patents permit you to publish your knowledge to the world with the patent agent serving as the unbiased reviewer to determine whether the invention is actually novel, useful, and nonobvious.

If your idea does not qualify as an invention, you can always self-publish it to your personal website. I am proud enough of the above non-invention to have added it to my webpage of quotes.

Update 2010 Oct 08 Fri

I just learned of a new trend toward Open Peer Review which might fix some of the problems in the peer review process as traditionally practiced.

Nerve Endings

In my previous entry about the book In Search of Memory, I wrote "one of the best ways to learn a science is to learn the history of that science". I recently finished reading another book in that category, Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse by Dr. Richard Rapport. Like In Search of Memory, Nerve Endings is a biographical work about the life and scientific contributions of a Nobel prizing winning neuroscientist. The author documents the 19th century debate about the existence and purpose of the synapse and the personal rivalry between Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Dr. Camillo Golgi.

The following excerpt reminded me how much I have enjoyed participating in reading and discussion groups over the years:

He delighted in his work, as always, and enthusiastically returned to an intellectual cafe society with other scientists, philosophers, writers, and politicians. Associations of friends who meet regularly to debate are called tertulia, a Spanish word without a direct English translation but a common feature of Spanish intellectual life. [p152]

Resveratrol

I had been drinking pinot noir to get my daily dose of resveratrol but recently I switched to taking it in 100 milligram (mg) capsules. I ordered my supply from the Life Extension Foundation. I made this decision after watching The Science of Living Longer: Part Three of the Charlie Rose Science Series.

Oral Arguments

It has been quiet for awhile but there has been a new development in the Moment of Silence case which we initiated a little more than a year ago. The judge has asked for oral arguments to be presented on June 1st.

I hope the judge strikes this down pretty quick as moment of silence bills have been popping up in additional states such as Illinois. To have millions of public school children waste a minute of education each day for a practice that has no secular purpose seems to me like a great sin.

The God Delusion

In my recent blog entry In the Absence of God, I recommended the NPR interview of Julia Sweeney on the subject of her atheism. I just finished listening to another worthwhile interview published today from the same source, Richard Dawkins Explains 'The God Delusion'.

I found particularly interesting his thoughts on the evolution of morality. My religion Optihumanism, including what I am calling "genetic egoism", has been substantially influenced by my reading of earlier books by Dr. Dawkins. I ordered a copy of his latest today.

Word Clouds

My sister-in-law Heather wrote a blog entry introducing us to SnapShirts word clouds. My wife Shannon ran it on our website CroftPress and I ran it on my blog and CroftSoft. Here is what it generated.

Shermer Interview

I enjoyed reading an interview of Michael Shermer recently by the neo-Objectivist organization The Atlas Society in its magazine "The New Individualist" (TNI). Shermer and the interviewer cover topics on libertarianism versus Objectivism, neo-Objectivism versus orthodox Objectivism, socialist Humanism versus libertarian Humanism, and a little bit of what I have labeled "genetic egoism". In reading this article, you might see why I felt I had to come up with a new term, Optihumanism, to describe the set of beliefs that I hold at the intersection of libertarianism, Objectivism, and Humanism.

Vongo

If you are a Blockbuster Total Access or a Netflix subscriber, consider Vongo instead. I have used Vongo for a few weeks now and I am a satisfied customer. It lets you download movies off of their website to watch on your computer for a flat fee of $9.99 per month. I have been waiting for something like this for years. Things just keep getting better and better.

Optimist Manifesto

I first learned of the book Life, Liberty, and Happiness: An Optimist Manifesto by Frank S. Robinson from an e-mail from the author himself. I am not certain how I came to be on his list of e-mail addresses but he correctly identified me as being within his target market. Being fond of the Humanist Manifesto and having named my own religion Optihumanism, the subtitle immediately caught my eye. I was further intrigued by the fact that he originally started out to write a letter to his daughter about life, something I have considered doing for my own children.

I have described my Optihumanism as a blend of Religious Humanism,
Neo-Objectivism, and Libertarian Transhumanism. Being at the tiny overlapping intersection of what are small minority beliefs to begin with, I suspected I was alone. You can imagine how pleased I was, then, to read in his introduction that his book "reflects elements of libertarianism, humanism, objectivism, and so forth". I even found a footnote in his chapter "The Meaning of Life" that leans toward Transhumanism.

The more I read, the more astonished I became that this book could so closely mirror my own beliefs while simultaneously covering so many different topics. It was not until I reached one of the last chapters where I finally found one issue, capital punishment, where I was not in substantial agreement with the author. It made me wonder how was it that we thought so much alike.

One possibility is that it is because we are reading many of the same books. A criticism I do have of this work is that it perhaps leans too heavily on repeating historical examples I have already read in other places. I can forgive this, however, if I consider that the author might have had a different target audience in mind where these core examples are still novel.

My other criticism is what I perceive to be his overuse of footnotes for parenthetical side comments. This seems to me to distract from the flow of reading his main text. I wonder if this comes from his twenty years of service as a judge in which footnotes in legal opinions frequently do convey significant information yet are considered subsidiary.

I started heartily recommending this book long before I finished reading it. Now that I have completed the text in its entirety and I am assured that there is nothing in it to which I have any strong objections, I am pleased to say that I am adding this title to both my top ten books list and my Optihumanist reading list. I plan to purchase a number of copies for my friends. I look forward to reading additional publications from this author in the future.

The table of contents follows:
Introduction
The Meaning of Life
Reason, Science, and Human Values
Living a Good Life
Happiness is a Choice
Satisfaction
Consciousness, Thought, and Personal Responsibility
Always Question
Relativism and Nonjudgmentalism
The Mystery of Creation
Freedom from Fear
Love, Marriage, and Sex
Political Vocabulary
The Social Contract
Individualism and Society
Government is the Problem
The Forced March to Paradise
The Era of Big Government
But What About the Truly Needy?
Wrongful Rights
America the Beautiful
The Morality of Free-Market Capitalism
Globalization and World Poverty
Why Corporations are Not Totally Evil Scum
Territoriality and Tribalism
Why the Gloom and Doom Crowd is Wrong
Man, Technology, and Nature
History and Its Lessons
Freedom of Expression
Race
Pro-Life and Pro-Choice
Animal Rights
Crime and Punishment
Homosexuality
The War with Islamic Extremism
Coda
Index

In Search of Memory

I have finished a number of books recently, some good, some not as good. One that I can recommend is In Search of Memory by Eric R. Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in neuroscience. It is part autobiography and part history of neuroscience with a layman target audience. From reading this, I have concluded that one of the best ways to learn a science is to learn the history of that science. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the philosophy of mind from a reductionist viewpoint.