You can see a whole page of stupid: Bill Moyers has the complete list of climate change denialists in congress, complete with quotes from each one, organized by state. What yahoo is representing your state?
Last night, my twitter feed lit up with the news that Annie Lennox was singing on the Grammies. I love me some Lennox, but awards shows annoy me, so I didn’t tune in. But just to get Monday started, here’s a classic from Annie Lennox and David Bowie and Queen:
As long as we’re talking about brains this morning, here’s another topic that irritates me: the abuse of the term neuroplasticity.
Way, way back in the late 1970s, my first textbook in neuroscience was this one: Marcus Jacobson’s Developmental Neurobiology
Steven Novella makes an important point: memories are fluid. There’s no VCR in your head, and no tape recorder either, and memories are constructs. You remember the framework (sometimes very poorly) of a past event, and your brain builds a plausible set of details around it. When you picture Christmas at your grandmother’s house when you were 12, you don’t have a record in your head of how many logs were in the fireplace or a second by second recording of the flickering of the fire. You remember that Grandma had a fireplace, and sometimes she had logs burning in it, and maybe there was a fire that year, and your brain obligingly assembles an image for you.
I never watched Oprah, because she was a gullible woo-artist; I don’t watch Dr Oz, because he’s quack; and now all I can say is fuck Bill Maher, because he’s a crank on so many things. On his latest show, he surrounded himself with Marianne Williamson, a “spiritual teacher” and proponent of prayer, Amy Holmes, a news announcer for The Blaze (Glenn Beck’s spinoff), and some guy who didn’t say much, and he went off on a grand tour of kook talk, confident that his panelists wouldn’t disagree with him. Watch. Be embarrased for him.
This woman does 17 British accents (well, she cheats a bit and jumps over the Irish Sea a couple times). I’m an American, and a Yankee at that, so I’m a poor judge, but a few of them sounded a bit off. Also, I know she isn’t hitting all the variations: there were people all over the UK who’d say something to me in a particularly thick local speech variant, and it just sounded like Dutch being gargled through a misfiring diesel engine, to me, and that was just Alan Moore.
A study of students in Israel by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand has discovered a surprising result…or maybe not so surprising to you, but I was rather shocked. Math teachers score girls’ performance lower when they know their identities.
Once again, I am reminded that I’m in the wrong business to make money. Bjorn Lomborg is in the news again, and I learn that the man makes $775,000/year for running the Copenhagen Consensus Center…which is a drop box in Lowell, Massachusetts. I don’t think buying a mailbox is the secret, though — I think you also have to convince the Koch Brothers to deposit checks in it. Apparently the trick behind that is to lie persuasively about science in a way that allows very rich people to become more rich.
Oh, sure, it can tell you in a general way that there will be crossroads ahead, but it can’t tell you in advance which ones are dead ends, or where you’ll end up by following them.
Pope “Not in the face! Not in the face!” Francis has been offering advice on child-rearing, based on his deep experience with the process, I’m sure.
One time, I heard a father in a meeting with married couples say ‘I sometimes have to smack my children a bit, but never in the face so as to not humiliate them’,Francis said.
How beautiful.he added.He knows the sense of dignity! He has to punish them but does it justly and moves on.
