Ed’s corner of the web

Nine West and Footwear News have collaborated to create Shoe Star, a Project Runway-esque competition revolving around the design of fashion footwear. As it turns out, our very own Lana Klemeyer has been selected as one of the seven finalists! You can find out more about the contest at the official website. Go Lana!

CIA chief Michael Hayden admitted today that interrogators used waterboarding on terror detainees. I guess this comes as a big non-surprise, especially after Hayden admitted that CIA interrogation videotapes were destroyed. I think we’re still only just scratching the surface of what the CIA has perpetrated in recent years. I’m not looking forward to seeing what else there is.

Link to the BBC article here. (Side note: why the heck isn’t this on the CNN frontpage? There’s a link about Britney spears, of course, but to read news about my own country’s intelligence service, I have to ask the Brits.)

Just got back from Turks and Caicos a couple days ago (more on that later). While I was down there, I had the opportunity to read this little tidbit in Wired by Thomas Hayden:

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.

Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.

Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.

In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

I liked this little snippet a lot - the content as well as the sentiment. Science doesn’t suck - far from it. But unfortunately, far too many of us fail to appreciate science because our brains aren’t quite wired that way. Ironically, science has taught us enough to know why science sucks for so many, but that just highlights the enormity of the struggle of enlightening the masses. Great.

Link to the original article is here. (If you read the comments there, be sure to ignore the first commenter, who has no idea what he’s talking about.)