Winter’s Haven

Ars Techina reports:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented a paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain [...]

Firstly, Ars Technica brings us the news that gyroscopes are the new training wheels. Every physics major in the world is undoubtedly kicking themselves for not having invented this sooner. I certainly am.
Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign [...]

Dartmouth researchers have discovered that “A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state.“.
Well, actually no. Rather, this is an example of the sort of ridiculous result you can obtain if you’re not properly attentive to the possibility of false positives when separating noise from signal in fMRI scans. And it’s a nice example [...]

Matt Nisbet, of Framing Science infamy, has posted a draft chapter of his book. Here’s my favorite section:
Dawkins, for example, argues as a scientist that religion is comparable to a mental virus or “meme” that can be explained through evolution, that religious believers are delusional, and that in contrast, atheists are representative of a healthy, [...]

On the Wired science blog, Brandon Keim argues that Bush’s stem cell policy was neither anti-science nor crassly political, but rather followed from a legitimate ethical dispute.
Keim says that “there are plenty of examples of the Bush administration skewing scientific facts for political ends, the ban on stem cell funding wasn’t one of them.”, from [...]

I’ve been meaning to lay out my views on this question for a long time, but now Will Wilkinson has done it for me, and probably done a better job of it than I would have.
His post is a bit long, however, so let me summarize. Some very real market failures lead to underinvestment [...]

You have a radical idea about how the world works. The stodgy scientific orthodoxy rejects your idea. At this point, you naturally ask yourself: am I the next Galileo?
Figuring out who is right and who is wrong can be difficult and complicated. I can, however, suggest a starting point. If you have to fabricate data [...]

Kellogg Drops Phelps
Would you want YOUR KIDS to become pot-smoking Olympic gold medalists?!?

[Tim Minchin performs his poem "Storm".]

Hat tip to Rebecca Watson.

The Cato@Liberty blog quotes from a previous Cato piece by Neal McCluskey:
Ultimately, the problem in Texas isn’t whether or not the theory of evolution has weaknesses, or whether pointing to such weakness is religiously or scientifically motivated. The problem is that the public schooling system requires everyone in the state to fund schools that take [...]