In the early parts of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" he spends a great deal of time outlining how both art history (no, really) and his particular brand of religious revisionism are legitimate ... but repressed by Big Religion.In science, we see that all of the time; X says he can invent perpetual motion or has overturned some aspect of medicine or biology and "dogma" keeps it hidden. It's the...
read moreWhen most people think 'green' in America, they think of liberal Democrats. It's a carefully crafted image. Conservatives who deny global warming conserve energy just as much as liberals who accept it but that gets little attention. Sociologists in a new paper instead found that the idea of the 'green' Christian is the environmental trope they need to spend their time debunking. read...
read moreThe social sciences must be a gold mine for single men, right? It’s not as disreputable as the humanities but still has over 70% women-to-men ratios, a solid 2:1 improvement over something like physics, where it’s a big sausage-fest of weird-haired guys yelling about Monte Carlo analyses. If you are a young undergraduate, you are […]
read moreJared Diamond is not impressed by modern social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, because of the need to try and make claims about human nature by doing surveys or visiting a place and then framing the results through their own - not to invoke the most overused cliché of 2012 but just this once it fits - motivated reasoning.The reaction from the social sciences and the mainstream media...
read moreMedieval clerics did not like the prospect of giving up sex - heck, every man getting getting married dreads the part about giving up sex - so even when they had to do so by Papal decree there was resistance to it. You think changing from a Latin to local language Mass was controversial? Genitalia are a lot more personal. Priests, of course, used to be married but that changed hundreds...
read moreIf you want to find out what people really think of your culture, present or past, you need only go to Facebook. That’s what ScienceNordic’s Danish partner site, videnskab.dk, did to find out from the audience what the Vikings were like. And a small Danish site is not polling Americans, it is mostly Danish people. It [...]
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