Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:
I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that’s how you can tell if you’re dreaming, if you touch the clouds and they feel like empty space.
The child hasn’t read Descartes yet, but we’ve got all summer.
Since we kicked off the drive yesterday morning:
In case you’d like another look at the array of fabulous prizes, I’ve reproduced the list below the fold.
Younger offspring did not, to my knowledge, watch of listen to the State of the Union address wherein President Bush called for legislation prohibiting the creation of human-animal hybrids. Indeed, it’s not even clear that this wee beastie has any human DNA in it. (With recessive traits, it can be hard to tell.) Yet it’s hard not to think this specimen is treading on ethically dangerous ground:
Younger offspring’s explanation of this image, plus an image from Elder offspring that calls out for your interpretation, below the fold.
Dr. Free-Ride: So, I found a little café table for the back yard.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: A good one, or one that’s going to fall apart?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I made a point of getting a cast-iron one rather than one made of elemental sodium; those aren’t so weather-proof.
Elder offspring: You know, you still have to figure out a sprog blog for tomorrow.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll start asking you questions in a moment.
Just a quick update on the progress of the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon:
You folks are the best!
(The full list of participating bloggers, and links to their challenges, after the jump.)
From The New York Times:
A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.
The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory.
It’s a problem if published experiments are not reproducible — but what kind of problem it is might not be clear yet.
The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you’re reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school — teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids.
DonorsChoose.org gives us a way to help teachers get the job done. A bunch of us at ScienceBlogs have set up Bloggers Challenges which will let us (and that includes you) contribute to worthy school projects in need of financial assistance. We’ll be able to track our progress right on the DonorsChoose site. And — because we like a little friendly competition — we’ll be updating you periodically as to which blogger’s readers are getting his or her challenge closest to its goal.
You don’t need to give a barrel of money to help the kids — as little as $10 can help. You’re joining forces with a bunch of other people, and all together, your small contributions can make a big difference.
Who’s In:
Here are the ScienceBlogs bloggers who are participating with Bloggers Challenges:
A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
Adventures in Ethics and Science (challenge here)
Aetiology (challenge here)
Afarensis (challenge here)
Cognitive Daily (challenge here)
Evolgen (challenge here)
Gene Expression (challenge here)
Good Math, Bad Math (challenge here)
Island of Doubt (challenge here)
Mike the Mad Biologist (challenge here)
Neurotopia, version 2.0 (challenge here)
Pharyngula (challenge here)
Pure Pedantry (challenge here)
The Questionable Authority (challenge here)
The Scientific Activist (challenge here)
Stranger Fruit (challenge here)
Terra Sigillata (challenge here)
Uncertain Principles (challenge here)
The World’s Fair (challenge here)
How It Works
I’m not sure I realized it while I was writing it, but my last post (on whether scientific knowledge about the benefits of breast-feeding imposes any particular obligations) has me thinking about another kind of case where scientific knowledge might — or might not — bring ethical consequences.
That case? Global warming.
My big question, thinking about these two instances where scientific knowledge, individual decisions, and public policy all coalesce, is what the relevant differences are.
There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote breast-feeding. Proponents of breast-feeding point to quite a lot of science that supports advantages — for child and mother — of breast-milk over formula. But there’s also a real question about what we (i.e., individual families making choices, DHHS, employers, and society as a whole) ought to be doing in light of this information.
From the New York Times article:
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention’s heartening attention to matters scientific: