Signal boost

Vibenna has put up his annual post. It’s about bureaucracy vs private business, exemplified by NASA and space exploration. Bureaucracy

My prediction – governments will be left behind. There will be private a moonbase by 2020. And the US will roar back into global pre-eminence.

Click through and read the whole thing.

It just shows that he is presently failing in his duty of making me another cup of coffee.

Another beautiful cephalopod from Pharyngula

Take a look.

There’s also some, ah, interesting information about octopus reproduction further down the page.

Friday features

Or maybe that’s Friday fetishes.

I thought that ‘Friday Feminist’ would be fun – somewhere to showcase a little of what I am interested in. At some stage, I might move on to a ‘Friday Political Philosopher’ but there’s plenty of scope yet in feminists.

I’m not the only person who runs a Friday feature. PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, runs a fabulous blog called Pharyngula. It’s a mix of biology, evolutionary biology, atheism, and political commentary. I recommend it. And he runs a Friday feature, the ‘Friday Cephalopod’. Go take a look at this week’s Friday Cephalopod; as Professor Myers says, it’s a jewel.

Any other Friday fetishes out there?

Diverse diversity

Sometimes diversity is good, and sometimes it’s bad. At least, that’s what Robert Putnam’s most recent work shows, according to this article in the Boston Globe, which I found through both Butterflies and Wheels and Arts and Letters Daily. (The Boston Globe website might make you click through a commercial before you read the article.)

I first came across Robert Putnam when I was writing an Honours dissertation in Philosophy, in a book where he talks about the value of civic engagement. Societies where people join choirs, service clubs, sports clubs, whatever, seem to be stronger societies, because people participate. By stronger, I mean that the institutions of government are stronger. The checks and balances work. His claims are all backed up by data. …

I can justify anything. So can you.

My two favourite portal sites, Butterflies and Wheels and Science and Technology Daily linked to the same article today, a review of Mistakes were made (but not by me).

The book tries to explain why we sometimes fail to be good, to do the right thing, to live up to our own ethical ideals. In essence: …