For those of you who don’t read ‘ journal (you should), here’s a pointer to an excellent article from the Arkansas Times about the role of religion in politics in the past few years. Short and well-written.
Ethics of a copied cat
There’s a big ethical debate storming over the recent cloning of a pet cat. One line that caught my eye in this was from David Magnus, of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford: “It’s morally problematic and a little reprehensible… for $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays.”
This argument seems specious to me. For $50,000, she could also have provided homes for humans; does that also make the action reprehensible? Would it be less so had she spent it on a car? For that matter, a number of people persist in having biological children, even though there are plenty still available for adoption. Is he arguing that that’s morally problematic as well?
It seems to me that if there are ethical issues involved in this, the ones being discussed right now aren’t them – but I’m a bit surprised to see so many scientists and ethicists jumping on this bandwagon. Is it just me, or is some deep fear of “cloning” – not a fear of the actual procedure, but of something subconsciously associated therewith – taking over the discussion?
Does someone have a sense of what the actual underlying fears are?
Principles of salesmanship
A good rule of thumb when trying to sell things: If you think a potential customer may not have much money, and you’re especially polite to them anyway, that’s a good thing. If you think they may not have much money and you’re rude to them, that’s a bad thing. These two effects are magnified if you guess wrong: especial politeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them happy. Especial rudeness to a customer who turns out to have money will make them take their money elsewhere.
On a completely unrelated note, if you’re ever buying a car, you may want to give Stevens Creek Acura in San Jose a miss.
Busy couple of weeks…
…actually, busy couple of months. I just finished reading “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes, and I can’t recommend it highly enough; it’s an amazingly engaging bit of history, well-researched and exceptionally written. And, of course, rather creepy to read.
It’s also got me thinking about an idea for a sophomore or junior-level physics course in nuclear physics, that would try to combine serious theory, engineering, experiment, and history; essentially following the early development of the subject, actually doing all of the major experiments (it’s one of the few fields of physics where that’s possible in a classroom setting), and getting the students up to the point where they understand both the technical and ethical issues associated with their field. I suspect it could be a great way to both really draw in the very serious students and to give them a much-needed parallelism of experiment and theory in a class.
(I remember that I didn’t get my first really interesting experimental physics class until my senior year. That was the year I got thrown in a lab with a bunch of spare parts and told to measure things. I remember building a gamma spectrometer and spending hour after hour looking for interesting things I could examine with it… and had I had a class like that a few years earlier, my life might have turned out very differently. Oh well… thus the urge to teach it to others.)
Also: It looks confirmed, my cousin Sharon is getting married in early June, so I’m going back to Israel for a few weeks. (Finally!) And my grandmother promised to teach me the basics of wood sculpture while I’m there. (And if it weren’t for the wedding being in June, I would probably go much sooner… dammit, I need a trip. Right now a few weeks in Israel and a few days on the side in Paris sounds really, really appealing)
Science update
A new report on substantial progress in treating spinal injuries with embryonic stem cells, from UC Irvine. They managed to cause the cells to grow into new myelin sheaths for neurons.
(Side note, which the article doesn’t mention: This couldn’t have been done with adult stem cells; working on neurons more or less requires totipotent cells, and thus embryonic research. Let the politics begin…)
Friday night…
…and I’m sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and trying to understand K-theory. It’s probably a sign that I’m a geek, that this seems to be one of the most wonderful ways possible to spend a Friday night.
Incidentally, since I know there are other geeks out there: Does anyone happen to have a good intuition for Bott periodicity, in any context whatsoever? (Topological K-theory, algebraic K-theory, cohomology, something else…) I’m feeling very stuck in not having a good intuition for why it works.
This is just neat.
Google just launched Google Scholar, a search engine specifically for technical publications, books, and so on. It’s incredibly cool, and I didn’t work on this so I’m not personally biased. I’m mentioning this in a locked post since, even though we did publicly launch, I’m always a bit nervous about publicly discussing things.
But… try this out. It’s not just hard sciences and medicine; the social sciences are in there, too.
Powell Says…
Iran is trying to build and weaponize a bomb.
It’s really too bad that Powell had to waste so much of his international credibility on justifying the administration’s WMD red herring; that should give Europe the perfect excuse to ignore this statement. (Which, thanks to what I’ll politely call a combination of pusillanimity and financial considerations, they would very much like to do)
But the best I can say for this is “no shit?” I mean, did someone not get the hint from their (a) developing longer-range missiles, (b) developing more advanced missile guidance systems, and (c) pushing their isotope enrichment program into high gear? Does the rest of the world need an engraved invitation to an A-test?
What galls me most about this is that we encouraged it so strongly. The run-up to the Iraq war and our subsequent dealing with North Korea made it very clear to everyone in the world that someone who’s about to get major weapons is likely to get invaded by the US, but someone who already has them is permanently sacrosanct. Then we left them to their own devices and stopped all engagement with even the moderates, and turned a blind eye to their programs and their deals with NK for several years. I really do not want to have to deal with even a regional nuclear war because of high-level official fuck-ups…
Your duty is to do whatever your President tells you
Ashcroft condemns judges who question Bush.
Really, the headline is a pretty good summary of the content.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 