Lewis Lapham served as editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until his retirement in from those duties in 2006. But he has continued on in his writing. In the January 2007 "Notebook" he bristles at the suggestions of Nancy Pelosi and others that impeachment hearings are "off the table." Lapham…
My family and I just returned from a wonderful trip to Chicago. My wife and I have two daughters, aged 6 and 8. All of us learned many new things at Chicago’s spectacular museums. For instance, the Field Museum
has a terrific exhibit, called Evolving Planet, which examines the evolution of life forms on Earth from 4 ½ billion years ago up to modern humans, combining displays regarding genetics with numerous awe-inspiring fossils. There’s no sign that the museum has given in to the creationist crowd. It’s mainstream science all the way. In fact, the website for Evolving Planet takes misconceptions regarding evolution head on. Here’s a refreshing sample:
Misconception: Evolution is just a theory, just as intelligent design and creationism are theories.
Answer: False. Evolution is a scientific theory based on the scientific method, which involves systematic data collection of observable phenomena and scientific experiments that can be accurately replicated. Intelligent design and creationism are faith-based belief systems—not testable scientific theories—that offer non-scientific explanations for life’s origins and the diversity of life forms.
Top off a visit to Evolving Planet with a visit to the Shedd Aquarium where you can see evidence of transitional forms like the Australian lungfish.
[I realize some of these photos are grainy–the aquarium prohibits flash photography.]
Or view this exquisitely camouflaged leafy sea dragon. God designed each and every fake leaf, even though He engaged in conscious deception by doing this (very unbecoming of omnipotence and omniscience).
Travel note: Chicago hotel rooms …
I’m in the middle of reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a delightful work by Daniel J. Levitin. I plan to write about this book when I’m finished reading it, but one thing he wrote in his introduction especially intrigued me. Levitin writes…
I didn't know much about Dan Burton until I read today's story with this headline: "House Bans Lobbyist Gifts, Business-Sponsored Travel." Now I know that he's morally obtuse. Here's the gist of the article: The U.S. House of Representatives, after installing its new Democratic leadership, voted to ban lawmakers from flying…
About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory. It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.
One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material. He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.
That phrase stuck with me ever since. It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks. It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy. That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines. There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.
That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school. If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful. An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore. In law school, …