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Apr 20, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 10:18:26
How Not to Prevent AIDS (Crisis 4-20-12)
In July the U.S.will host the International AIDS Conference and there is promising news. The experts are now convinced that treatment is prevention. If those who are infected are identified quickly, treated so that their viral load is lowered, not only do they have a good chance of remaining relatively healthy longer, the risk that they will pass the virus on to others is greatly diminished. There has already been a dramatic drop in mother-to-child infection. Transmission among all risk groups—except men who have sex with men (MSM)—has dropped. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “MSM account for just 2% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 61% of all new HIV infections in 2009.” There were 28,800 new HIV infections among MSM in 2009, and “a 10% increase in the number of HIV diagnoses among persons aged 15-19 years and a 33% increase among persons aged 20-24 years.”
Why is this happening when HIV is a totally preventable infection?
Mar 30, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 8:56:4
The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of—Amalie Noether (NY Times 3-26-12)
Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether's theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein's theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today's vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.
Mar 27, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 15:0:19
THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO REALITY by Alex Rosenberg—review by Philip Kitcher (NY Times 3-23-12)
The book expands the campaign of militant modern atheism, the offensive launched against religion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rosenberg's broadsides attack a wider horizon. Since atheism is thought to be territory already secured, the targets now in view are the Big Questions, questions about morality, purpose and consciousness that puzzle softheaded people who muddle over them. Science brings good news. The answers are now all in. This conviction that science can resolve all questions is known as “scientism”—a label typically used pejoratively (as by Wieseltier), but one Rosenberg seizes as a badge of honor.
The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist's Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.
The conclusions are premature.
By David Brown | Posted at 11:47:43
'A Universe From Nothing,' by Lawrence M. Krauss (NY Times 3-23-12)
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong—or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everyÂÂthing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't, but it had to do with important things—it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world—and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one's head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb.
Feb 17, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 11:9:55
“Galileo's Credo”: http://www.thenation.com/article/166261/galileos-credo (The Nation 2-14-12)
The publication of two recent biographies of Galileo, by John Heilbron and David Wootton, coincided with the 400th anniversary of the publication of Starry Messenger (1610), the treatise in which Galileo reported the astronomical observations he had made with the instrument not yet called the telescope. Heilbron, a distinguished historian of physics and mathematics, has spent many years studying the relations between science and religion, including how the Roman Catholic Church stimulated and materially supported a research program of Catholic astronomy. Wootton has previously written on the history of atheism and unbelief, and about Galileo's controversial Venetian friend Paolo Sarpi-a theologian and tireless critic of the papacy. In Venice there is a statue of Fra Paolo in Campo Santa Fosca commemorating his survival of a botched assassination attempt in October 1607. The cutthroats were sheltered and paid by Rome, yet Sarpi continued to defend freedom of thought and belief, both in conversation and in print, and to discuss science with Galileo. In Heilbron's account, Galileo is a versatile connoisseur and critic; in Wootton's, he is all but a modern scientist without faith.
Feb 16, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 9:14:19
The occult obsessions of Britain's greatest scientist Sir Isaac Newton (UK Daily Mail 2-16-12)
He laid the foundations of classical physics and is considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time.
But Sir Isaac Newton was also deeply interested in the occult and applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture and Jewish mysticism.
Now Israel's national library, which contains a vast trove of Newton's esoteric writings, has digitised his occult collection and posted it online.
Jan 26, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 15:3:21
Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker (Prospect 12-14-11)
Freud's ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud's thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.
Jan 25, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 14:27:59
A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond (NY Times 1-19-12)
IN 1905, at age 55, Sir William Osler, the most influential physician of his era, decided to retire from the medical faculty of Johns Hopkins. In a farewell speech, Osler talked about the link between age and accomplishment: The “effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of 25 and 40—these 15 golden years of plenty.”
In comparison, he noted, “men above 40 years of age” are useless. As for those over 60, there would be an “incalculable benefit” in “commercial, political and professional life, if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.”
Jan 17, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 8:53:12
The cyborgs are coming! Living brains implanted with electronic chips to replace 'faulty' parts (UK Daily Mail 1-17-12)
Faulty parts of living brains have been replaced by electronic chips, in an astonishing and controversial scientific breakthrough.
It's a move that has been anticipated many times in science fiction, with creatures such as The Terminator, a 'cyborg' hybrid of flesh and machinery.
But now, researchers at Tel Aviv University have successfully created circuits that can replace motor functions - such as blinking - and implanted them into brains.
By David Brown | Posted at 8:45:14
“What if humans could be made twice as intelligent?”: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45998325/ns/technology_and_science-science/ (MSNBC 1-14-12)
According to Earl Hunt, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington and president of the International Society for Intelligence Research, approximately one person in 10 billion would have an IQ of 200. With a current world population of 7 billion, there may or may not be one such person alive today, and in any case, his or her identity is unknown. However, the 17th-century genius Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity, calculus and more, is sometimes estimated to have had an IQ of 200 (though he never took an IQ test).
Using him as an archetype, what if we were all a bunch of Newtons? Would the world be much more advanced than it is today?
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