I have been given permission to ogle!

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By Science!

In a letter to Science Careers, a post-doc asks what she should do about an advisor who’s frequently trying to peek down her shirt. The answer is a boon to men in positions of power everywhere.

As long as your adviser does not move on to other advances, I suggest you put up with it, with good humor if you can. Just make sure that he is listening to you and your ideas, taking in the results you are presenting, and taking your science seriously. His attention on your chest may be unwelcome, but you need his attention on your science and his best advice.

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Free Taslima

TaslimaNasrin

We’ve been waiting for this. After the murders of multiple secular bloggers in Bangladesh, there has been a mad behind-the-scenes (because no one wanted to alert the murderers) scramble to get our very own Taslima Nasrin, who was on the execution list for these Islamist fanatics, to a place of safety. She’s out! She’s currently in the US!

Now comes the hard part, though. She needs a long-term commitment to her safety, and CFI is setting up an emergency fund to support her and other threatened secularists. That last bit is important; Taslima is not the only one trying to survive under a death sentence.

If you want to help out, donate to the Freethought Emergency Fund.

Required reading for scientists

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Nicole Gugliucci has a fine post up about a common discussion-killer: “Stick to the science!” Debates about ethics and social issues can be deftly silenced by declaring that they’re out-of-bounds for science, because as we all know, science is objective and cold and uncaring.

I always want to ask, when I encounter those attitudes, whether they’ve read Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values. Because they should. It’s one of those books that gives equal weight to poetry and physics, and quotes Coleridge and Goethe alongside Faraday and Newton, and his entire point is that science is a human enterprise driven by human values, just as much as literature is.

The subject of this book is the evolution of contemporary values. My theme is that the values which we accept today as permanent and often as self-evident have grown out of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. The arts and the sciences have changed the values of the Middle Ages; and this change has been an enrichment, moving towards what makes us more deeply human.

This theme plainly outrages a widely held view of what science does. If, as many science only compiles an endless dictionary of facts, then it must be neutral (and neuter) as a machine is, any more than literature is; both are served by, they do not serve, the makers of their dictionaries.

It always baffles me when human beings pretend to have a god-like perspective on the absolute truth, which allows them to ignore the petty concerns of other human beings. Religion has mastered that property, but science can run a pretty close second, often.

We can do better than church

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Molly Worthen attended Sunday Assembly, the church for atheists, and came away with the wrong idea, and a few right ones.

Is this what secular humanism — the naturalist worldview that many nonbelievers embrace and religious conservatives fear — looks like in practice? In one sense, secular humanism is a style of fellowship intended to fill the church-shaped void, but it is also a strand of the liberal intellectual tradition that attempts to answer the canard that godlessness means immorality.

There is no “church-shaped void”. I also don’t have a Jesus-shaped hole in my heart. I don’t even believe that most Christians feel that way — people aren’t sitting around pining for an opportunity to sit on a bench and go through a boring ritual for an hour or three on Sunday morning. People like connecting with other people more generally, and church has been the opportunity and obligation for that. It’s a mistake to confuse the substance of human interaction for the trappings of a particular and peculiar institution.

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The hero was the one with the coolest name: Imperator Furiosa!

We just got back from Mad Max: Fury Road.

I was disappointed. Everyone kept telling me it was some kind of crazy feminist movie. I kept waiting for the castrations, the misandry, the “I HATE ALL MEN” shrieks, the long didactic lectures about the superiority of women, and the goddess worship, and it didn’t deliver. Instead, we got a lively action movie with non-stop pacing, and an ensemble of men and women working together as equals, and being equally human…

Oh. Hang on a sec.

I guess that makes it a radical feminist movie. It was pretty good, I recommend it. Just go in expecting what it is, a vivid rapid fire thrill ride that manages to avoid tired tropes, using women as props for men to be manly around, or being patronizing.

Chocolate ethics

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I’ve been arguing with myself again. I really liked that phony chocolate study because it so effectively demonstrated a couple of problems I tell my students about, so it’s a spectacular way to illustrate p-hacking and the unreliability of peer review. But as I was thinking about it, and how to present it to a class, it started to sink in that it also raises brand new problems that make it very difficult to use as an example. And then I started reading some other articles that emphasize the ethical concerns in this study.

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Beyond parody

Now we know why Colbert retired. There was no way he could ever adequately satirize reality.

This is an actual, genuine, real ad from America’s Liberty PAC, a pro-Rand Paul SuperPAC. I lost it with the opening scene of fire-breathing bald eagles, dubbed in with the screech of the red-tailed hawk, as is traditional…and then the explosions. Explosions everywhere.

Please, international readers, close your eyes and pretend American politics isn’t happening. We’re embarrassed enough.

Institutionalized reluctance to question

NY Magazine has the best summary of the LaCour affair. This is the recent case of a study published by a graduate student that showed the effectiveness of gay & lesbian survey-takers of persuading people to support marriage equality…which has since been found to consist of falsified data. The article summarizes how the study was exposed, and there were grounds for suspicion long before the news broke. Reading the protocols and doing a little math, for instance, revealed that this graduate student had apparently paid out about a million dollars for this survey. And it just unraveled from there.

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Goodbye, UW Madison

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Many years ago, when I first hit the job market after completing a post-doc, I applied for positions at many universities…but my top choice was UW Madison. I didn’t think I had a chance, so I was thrilled when I actually got as far as landing an interview there. I didn’t get the job obviously, but I was happy to just get a shot at it (maybe too happy: I was so wound up, my interview went dismally).

If I were back in that same position today, though, the last place I’d apply to would be UW Madison. It’s still a great university, but I wonder for how much longer — the state seems committed to gutting it.

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