Here’s a thing. Japanese surgeon Dr Norihiko Ishikawa demonstrates the precision of the da Vinci Surgical System by using its remote-control robotic arms to indulge in a spot of origami. The object he’s making – a crane – is about the size of a penny.
Via Pink Tentacle.
Related rather tenuously to yesterday’s comments:
A panoramic tour of the International Space Station. I can’t seem to find the sofa. Or the bar.
And because I know you like quizzes,
How long could you survive in the vacuum of space?
Here’s the third episode of the excellent BBC documentary series, The Planets. Titled Giants, the film follows the ingenuity and serendipity of the 1977 Voyager mission and its “grand tour” of the outer planets.
A happy alignment. Slingshot. Magnetic Jupiter. 3 million amps. Rings and ghosts.
Fearsome weather. Saturn’s other side. Shattered. Perfect timing. Still listening.
Other episodes can be viewed here.
Further to Dr Abd al-Baset al-Sayyed’s call for the global adoption of “Mecca Time” - and the shocking discovery that “in Mecca there is no magnetic force” - here’s another nugget. In this clip from Saudi Arabia’s al-Majd TV, first broadcast in January 2005, Dr al-Sayyed shares the extraordinary news that people living in Mecca are “less affected by gravity.” No less remarkable is the claim that NASA discovered “short wave radiation” emanating from Mecca – a discovery hastily concealed from the world at large. However, Dr al-Sayyed is sure this sacred Mecca radiation is “infinite” and extends well past the planet Mars.
Related: The Earth is flat and larger than the Sun, which is also flat. It’s Qur’anic science.
Update:
For some reason I’m reminded of this.
(h/t, The Thin Man.)
Sweet sandals of Allah! Someone is mocking Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
Will riots ensue? (Via Heathen TV.)
From the diary of Arthur C Clarke, on the writing of 2001:A Space Odyssey.
August 1, 1964.
Ranger VII impacts on Moon. Stay up late to watch the first TV close-ups. Stanley [Kubrick] starts to worry about the forthcoming Mars probes. Suppose they show something that shoots down our story line? [Later he approached Lloyd’s of London to see if he could insure himself against this eventuality].
Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.
Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…
When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women - but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…
[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”
Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.
Please, read it all.
Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma - could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.
More Dalrymple, via NER, from an interview in the American Spectator:
Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant. My opinion of the parasitic diseases of polar bears is not worth having for the simple reason that I know nothing about them, though I have a right to an opinion in the sense that I should not receive a knock on the door from the secret police if I express such a worthless opinion. The right to an opinion is often confused (no doubt for reasons of misplaced democratic sentiment) for the validity of an opinion, just as the validity of an argument is often mistaken for the truth of a conclusion.
The “democratic sentiment” behind this flattening of truth claims is sometimes made explicit, as when Frederique Apffel Marglin railed against smallpox vaccination – and “science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge” - while romanticising the Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, as an equally valid “narrative”. Or when Madeleine Bunting sprang to the defence of Islamic theology and confidently informed her readers, “We are profoundly irrational and… rationality is a social construction.” Bunting is, it seems, happy to conflate knowledge and fairness, and can be counted on to do so on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, such pretensions are not uncommon and are typically expressed as a belief that no one epistemological position – at least not a “Western” one - can be “privileged” above another, especially one deemed more colourful and “authentic”, supposedly in the interests of resisting “cultural imperialism.” This kind of epistemic egalitarianism may seem quite thrilling to a subset of leftist ideologues, particularly those who resent the functional pre-eminence of Western societies and who feel it is somehow wrong that so-called “Western ways of knowing” are also pre-eminent in their accuracy and effectiveness.
As I wrote in one of my first posts,
Cultural equivalence underlies the current fashion for religious protectionism, whereby reason and scientific methodology are depicted as equivalent to faith and merely a matter of lifestyle choice, as if logical enquiry had no attributes that set it apart from religious ideology and a priori belief. But to equate these very different phenomena requires one to flatten values and empty the mind in the ostensible interest of ‘fairness’ - perhaps to spare the blushes of the less capable among us.
In one recent discussion I was told that, “science is based on assumptions; an assumption is essentially a belief, so science is based on belief.” But the scientific method is based on the testing of formal hypotheses, as opposed to beliefs, which are not the same thing at all. Strictly speaking, a scientific hypothesis must be self-consistent, must explain existing observations and must predict new ones. These formal obligations and restraints are not comparable with the unquestioning acceptance of unverifiable assumptions as a priori truth, which is the signature of religion. There is a profound epistemological difference.
The scientific method is one of the best practical lessons in intellectual humility and one can only wish a few clerics - and a few Guardian columnists - would avail themselves of this tool. As the mathematician Ian Stewart pointed out: “Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.” And the willingness to defer to evidence – as opposed to one’s own wishes and beliefs – is the antithesis of fundamentalism…
Curiously, the person who so adamantly equated science with belief also maintained that the theories of relativity (the details of which escaped him) are “beliefs” and thus in no way “vulnerable to the scientific method.” When I drew attention to evidence to the contrary, the subject was swiftly changed and other things were asserted with even greater adamance. This is one of the incidental rewards of cultural equivalence; it blunts the critical senses and levels all values until people who know nothing about any given subject feel entitled to assert things about that subject with great confidence and a whiff of righteousness. One can, as Ian Stewart warned, believe whatever one wants.
Busy today, but you may want to play with this.
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