Weekly Quotations: Graduation Edition

I missed the Start of the Week Quotations on Monday because I was busy showing my mom and grandfather around the University of Toronto in the morning, and then graduating that evening (so it was a busy day). However, U of T is doing a weird reshuffling of their fall semester, so today is "virtual Monday" according to the University. Thus, in some manner, this still counts as Start of the Week Quotations. If you don't buy that, Midweek Quotations will have to serve just as well.

"Fidel Castro is right. You do not quieten your enemy by talking with him like a priest, but by burning him." - Nicolae Ceausescu, first President of the Socialist Republic of Romania from 1974-89, 1918-89

"Nothing to be done without a bribe I find, in love as well as law." - Susannah Centlivre, English actress and dramatist, c. 1669-1723

"Morals and manners will rise or decline with our attention to grammar." - Jason Chamberlain, American clergyman, fl. 1811

"In politics, there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight." - Joseph Chamberlain, British Liberal politician and father of Neville Chamberlain, 1836-1914

TWOTI: Neuroskeptic on the Nutt sack and NeuroLogica on dystonia (or lack thereof)

This Week on the Internet:

Neuroskeptic had an informative overview of the dismissal of Professor David Nutt from his post as the British government's chief advisor on illegal drugs. While the case itself is interesting based on Nutt's medical and scientific statements, and the subsequent reasons given for dismissal, I was most struck by Neuroskeptic's comments on academic criticism:

Nutt has said that he was surprised to learn that he had been sacked. I'm sure this surprise was genuine because Nutt is an academic, and in academia, Nutt's "criticisms" would hardly even be considered as such. Here by contrast is an extract from a peer review comment I got a couple of days ago regarding a scientific paper I wrote:

The manuscript falls short of its goals in several respects: The basic phenomenon ... is barely presented... The style and language of the review leave a lot to be desired... The citations and reference list are appalling.

I thought that was an astute point, and indicative of the frustration I commonly feel about politics. Debate usually requires pointing out that some ideas are wrong, and while it can be uncomfortable to be told that about one's own ideas, that alone is not grounds for outrage or dismissal.

Steve Novella, meanwhile over at NeuroLogica, has provided a series of posts on the case of Desiree Jennings. His discussion starts here, continues here, and was most recently added to here. While I enjoyed his ruminations as much as ever, I think his most recent addition does a very admirable job of striking back at the underhanded tactics of the anti-vaccination group Generation Rescue. He pretty adequately sums the whole thing up with the following paragraph:

Despicably, Generation Rescue (GR) and the anti-vaccine movement were quick to jump on this case and exploit it for their own propaganda. They immediately portrayed themselves as “experts” – apparently able to make and treat such neurological diagnoses. However, after push back from the dystonia community, GR took down their web page they had put up to support Jennings. But then after a few days they had apparently made the calculation that, despite the fact that this was likely not a case of genuine dystonia or vaccine injury, the propaganda value was too treat to ignore, and they could just attack the physicians who felt obliged to properly analyze this case.

The whole thing is worth a read, though, particularly if you have inklings of doubt in whether or not there is something to the claims of the anti-vaccination crowd.

Note: I apologize for the title, but I just couldn't help myself. His last name is Nutt, he is British, and he got fired. Anyway, I'm not the only one to use such phrasing.

Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

I just finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything yesterday, and I have to say that it was an excellent book. It is a pretty substantial text, but Bryson does a good job of keeping it engaging, informative, and understandable even without background knowledge in the areas he addresses. I highly recommend it (as does Sarah, who recommended it to me in the first place).

The book, as the title suggests, covers quite a sweep of subjects. What Bryson is essentially attempting to do is explain the history of the Earth and life on it, but to do so he attempts to relate how and why we believe it. In doing so, he humanizes science through a series of fascinating historical anecdotes about scientists both famous and obscure. The devotion that Bryson lends to tracing the development of ideas is, I think, the greatest strength of the book. By examining how we know what we know, he successfully elucidates the nature of the scientific manner in an engaging and colourful manner. I wish this sort of book were presented more often in a middle school science class, as I think it helps bring to life the scientific mindset much more effectively than memorizing the (usually misrepresented) structure of hypothesis, data collection, conclusion.

Of course, with such a sweeping book there are bound to be a few errors. The only one I can remember was he accidentally listed Parkinson's Disease as being caused by a single genetic defect, which is not actually true (the origins of Parkinson's Disease are not currently known). That is a very minor quibble, though, and does not at all detract from the overall message of the book.

Title Change, New Blog, and Twitter

There are some rather profound upheavals of my internet presence tonight. I have launched a new wordpress blog: Computing Intelligence. There I will try to put up a post a week discussing some aspect of my research and educational life that I have either been working on or thinking a lot about. Since one cannot have two blogs with the same name, this blog has been renamed to Computing Ignorance. Here I will continue to haphazardly (and, most likely, much more often) post on all the other topics that you are used to reading about (politics, weekly quotations, puzzles, and that sort of thing).

Additionally, I am also making an effort to use Twitter (where you can find me as CaldenWloka).

Monday Morning Quotations

"Everything's got a moral, if you can only find it." - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked." - Through the Looking-Glass
"What I tell you three times is true." - The Hunting of the Snark
- Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), English writer and logician, 1832-98

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."
"If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs respectably married, then Ms means nudge, nudge, wink, wink."
- Angela Carter, English novelist, 1940-92

"I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that's what keeps you alive." - Barbara Castle, British Labour politician, 1910-2002

"I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his." - attributed to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762, 1729-96

Is More Information Always Better?

Regular readers know my opinion of the Fox News corporation. Over the past few weeks, Obama's administration and Fox News have gotten into a couple of real and contrived wars of words. One of the main talking points for the defenders of Fox is this (pulled fromRob's comment #34 from one of PZ Myer's posts as a representation of echoed sentiment elsewhere):

Freedom of the Press is important and the more we have of it the better. Its your freedom to choose which to regard as truth and which to regard as bias. If you have less to refer to, how will you know if you are making the right choices?

It is actually kind of amazing how closely this parallels the arguments espoused by "teach the controversy" advocates for intelligent design/creationism instruction the biology classes. Freedom of the press is important, but so is journalistic ethics. What freedom of the press means is that the government does not mandate what can and cannot be reported. There are already many issues with this in the United States, but the problem here is not that the White House team is trying to silence Fox News (because they are not), just that they are calling them on being biased and playing to an agenda. While I recognize that true journalistic neutrality is impossible to achieve, it is still what one must strive for to be a good journalist. Presenting incredibly biased or blatantly false claims does not help people "make the right choice". After all, how is one supposed to decide "which to regard as truth and which to regard as bias"? Based on which news network has the most attractive reporters or greatest emotional appeal to their rhetoric? When a news organization has no legal obligation to the truth and spends money and time organizing and fomenting the dissent that they plan to cover, it ceases to be a legitimate source of news and ceases to bring useful information into public discourse. At this point, Fox News is no better than the Discovery Institute. Likewise, Fox's emotionally charged defenders' false dichotomy of either treating Fox News uncritically or being against freedom of the press is no better than the "teach the controversy in the name of academic freedom" nonsense the Discovery Institute spouts.

Start of the Week Quotations

"What millions died - that Caesar might be great!" - Thomas Campbell, Scottish poet, 1777-1844

(the following Albert Camus quotations are translations from French)
"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself"
"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
"Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic."
- Albert Camus, French novelist and dramatist, 1913-60.

"We must recall that the Church is always 'one generation away from exctinction.'" - George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, 1935-

"If Jesus Christ were to come to-day, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it." - Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian and political philosopher, 1795-1881.