under the guise of religion, science or reason

Um senhor chamado Chris Hedges adicionou um ponto importantíssimo ao que eu aflorava (muito levemente) aqui:

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists. It comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

O maior perigo que enfrentamos nao vem dos crentes ou dos ateístas. Vem dos que, sob o disfarce da religiao, da ciencia ou da razao, imaginam que nos podemos libertar das limitaçoes da natureza humana e aperfeiçoar a espécie humana.

Ignorância histórica

Porque é que aprendemos história? A resposta padrão é de que é para prevenir os erros do passado. Pessoalmente, do que me lembro do meu percurso escolar, parece-me que era mais a intenção de nos inculcar nostalgia pelos tempos de ouro da nossa pátria. Levei com os descobrimentos e com os Lusíadas duas vezes.  Mas devo estar a ser injusta, devia ser por causa do ensino obrigatório, tinha que se dar estas necessárias lições muito cedo para os que iam ficar-se, e depois outra vez, supostamente mais profundamente quando já podiamos entender melhor. Os meus colegas de humanísticas levaram uma terceira vez, talvez de outro ângulo. Achei os descobrimentos uma seca, acho que me senti mais patriótica na leitura da crónica de Fernão Lopes sobre o povo a levantar-se em favor do seu rei. Gostei sempre muito quando o povo se resolveu a decidir, se bem que agora tenho um certo temor do poder irracional da turba. Mas enfim, em termos históricos aquilo correu bem. Mas se realmente há que aprender com a história, o patriotismo parece-me coisa a desaprender. A história também é para percebermos o presente e parece-me que este deve ser o enfoque. Em vez de maldizer o povo português na sua mesquinhez consumista, mais vale olhar as privações que passou e esperar que esta maleita lhe passe. O mais interessante para mim é a história em termos científicos e pensei nisto na área da vacinação. A vacinação é uma medida médica social. Os riscos para o indivíduo, que ao longo das décadas têm vindo a reduzir-se drasticamente, mas não era tanto assim no início, versus a protecção da saúde da comunidade. Morria-se muito de doenças que hoje só se lê na caderneta de vacinas e talvez muito de vez em quando talvez se leia nos media, ainda matar muitos em países com menos meios. As pessoas esquecem isto e em países com uma cultura individualista grande surgem focos anti-vacinação, o que visto em termos históricos é absurdo. Os médicos pôem as culpas à iliteracia científica, mas, nos países ricos é também ignorância histórica. Seria salutar ensinar em história de que se morria antes e explicar porque hoje se morre de outras coisas. Duas aulas e não se teria tanto disparate mortal. Mas isto é mais coisa de americanos e anglo-saxónicos com a mania de que sozinhos prevalecem. Uns já estão numa ilha, era fazer o mesmo aos outros.

the sting of poverty

IMAGINE GETTING A bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University.

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.

Elogio aos modelos matemáticos

Tanta poesia na Science é raro. Eu confesso que me emocionei. Até tenho outro amor ao meu modelinho....

My world embraces and celebrates them all. All manner of models, to be chosen (like a set of tools) to suit the particular task. Lay stakeholders in the here and now, doing what they do best (imagining their worst fears and best hopes for the future) with their mental models, fuzzy calculus, or belief network models. Webs of tentative cause-effect couples fed, perhaps, by bizarre boundary and initial conditions, hence to deduce a rich heterogeneity of future patterns of environmental behavior--some radically different from what we have come to know and love. Quantitative modelers (engineers indeed) doing what they do best: mobilizing the current science base (uncertainties, warts, and all) into a computational model; thus to assess the plausibility of the imagined futures, under gross uncertainty; thus to identify what we would most like to understand much better, in the here and now, about the uncertainties (be they elements of the science, the policies, or the technologies) that are crucial to discriminating between the reachability of our worst fears or our greatest hopes. Nothing stands still: not images of the future, nor our qualitative models, nor our quantitative models. Call this living in a "recursive predictive world" [as I have labeled it elsewhere (4)], a collective form of adaptive community learning. We condition the step we take today on contemplation of where we might be several steps hence and revisit such conditioning and contemplation each and every day. No hint here of forecasting the state of nature at some point on the globe at some instant in the future.

M. Bruce Beck in Science 13 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5822, pp. 202 - 203 DOI: 10.1126/science.1140778

Evidentemente

Na minha modesta opinião (que, não obstante, é muito evidentemente a correcta), as pessoas
do De Rerum Natura, em vez de andarem a brincar com os criacionistas e as revistas espíritas, deviam dizer-me o que acham que sabem, e como sabem o que acham que sabem, o melhor que conseguirem.

Eu sabia que havia algo que me chateava, mas ainda não tinha desacelerado para pensar. Sou um Cristiano, não um Rooney:

Há uma virgindade em cada toque de bola do Wayne Rooney que não vejo no Ronaldo, um jogador que só desacelera uma corrida para acelerar depois ainda mais. Wayne Rooney não!, que é um "homem com ó grande": se abranda é para pensar. Acresce que quando festeja os grandes golos que marca comemora-os com os colegas de equipa, em vez de fazer uma festa privada entre o seu peito e os adeptos, como faz o incivilizado Cristiano.

Só que quando se baseia o lustre do Rooney e do Cristiano em pantomineirices futebolísticas então o que vai desampatar serão pormenores tão singelos quanto os do Rooney ser feio, trombudo e parecer um tijolo.

Tenho boas e más notícias

fonte.

Se tiverem perguntas nao me importo de responder

Eu só nao faço isto mais amigo, porque me dá seca explicar tudo muito explicadinho. Prefiro dialogar e aí dá-me gozo. Assim, ou perguntam ou eu nao digo mais nada. Eu tenho aqui mais uns postes com gajos, por isso...

Adenda: na verdade, se tiverem perguntas adorarei responder. :-)

As más notícias:

CO2 + H2O + CaCO3 (s) -> Ca2+ + 2*HCO3-

CO2 + H2O + CO3 2- -> 2*HCO3-

Comecemos pelas boas notícias

O mar é nosso amigo.

Pois, um grupo de cientistas de Kiel andou pelo Mar do Norte e dizem que detectaram CO2 emitido pelo Homem a profundidades de até 4000 metros. Se o que eles acharam puder ser extrapolado para todos os sete oceanos, entao estes situar-se-ao na gama optimista do que poderao sugar da atmosfera.

Fim do mundo em cuecas

Tenho boas notícias e tenho más notícias

As calças de Pandora

Sobre o livro "Pandora's breeches. Women, science and power in the Enlightenment" de Patricia Fara.

Ranging from astronomy in Germany and Poland to botany in Britain, Pandora's Breeches tells the story of women's contribution to science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [...]

Paradoxically, perhaps, before professionalization moved science out of the home and into universities and industrial laboratories, there was more scope for active involvement from women who had no wish to see a radical reorganization of society. By and large, Enlightenment women did not wish to do the same things as men. They had houses to run and, usually, families to tend. Fara's book is, for the most part, the story of publicly unrecognized workers; a world not of masculine genius and heroism, but of quotidian rounds in which women worked alongside men, forming intellectual networks with international scholars, and with each other.

Enlightenment science emerges, for the first time, as a family affair: the story of men and women whose lives were entwined in scientific enterprise.

Sisters who waited for their brothers to return from university in the vacations so they could talk about science; wives who assisted their husbands with scientific experiments in the domestic space of the home, and also acted as translators and educators, lab technicians, illustrators and editors. Some women actively sought stimulating alliances: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, advised women frustrated by their conventional education to marry the right man, as she had: from the privacy of her dining room she was able to participate in the scholarly debate she desired. Others had experimental science thrust on them. Charles Lyell made his wife, Mary, study geology during their engagement; she read and translated German for him, illustrated and edited his books, taught her maid to kill snails for scientific study, and became more expert than him in conchology. In the 1850s, Charles Darwin took over a kitchen shelf as a laboratory, used his children and pets for scientific study and probed the mothers of his extended family for information on their babies. His wife and her friends, also married to scientists, found themselves an unacknowledged editorial team as they read and discussed his work.

Pandora's Breeches reveals the extent to which such scientific giants as Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Herschel, Lavoisier and Linnaeus were dependent on the patronage, support, or intellectual guidance of women whose contribution has been excluded by individualistic models of scientific discovery, with eureka moments -Newton, the apple and gravity being one perfect demonstration. [...]

Warning against refashioning neglected women as martyrs, Patricia Fara neither overstates nor undervalues their contributions, allowing them to remain embedded in the social and domestic structures and beliefs of their time. Her subjects are so diverse that no single narrative model suffices to tell their story; some are lone scholars, some reluctant wives, others aristocratic, erudite and sociable; and national differences presented different opportunities. But what she brings home is the domestic origins of experimental science: understanding how science started must involve looking at how families accommodated new investigations of the natural world. Pandora's Breeches is vital reading for anyone interested in the rapid growth of Enlightenment science, and the varied ways in which women indisputably affected the course of Western philosophy.

Cuidado com os dogmas a que poem o selo ciencia

Revela a apropriação intelectualmente desonesta que o seu autor quer fazer da ciência e dos cientistas. É contra a ciência, mas invoca a ciência. Chegou ao ponto de vestir a pele do fundador da ciência experimental para fazer passar posições que não podem ser apoiadas pelo actual saber experimental. É o que acontece, por exemplo, com o dogma de que a vida começa no momento da concepção. A ciência diz que antes dessa forma de vida já há outras formas de vida, que de resto vão prosseguir. E é também o que acontece com o dogma que a pessoa está no DNA do óvulo fecundado. A ciência diz que há uma grande distância entre uma molécula que contém o código da vida e uma vida humana plenamente desenvolvida. Defender a «vida» e a «pessoa» sem mais nada é não dizer nada! Mas quem é que não defende a «vida» e a «pessoa»?

Carlos Fiolhais, físico

Sim, que este pessoal a usar a palavra ciencia nas suas hipocrisias poe-me fora de mim.

Consensus: science is friggin' hard

Oh random, para ti:

The National Science Foundation's annual symposium concluded Monday, with the 1,500 scientists in attendance reaching the consensus that science is hard.

"For centuries, we have embraced the pursuit of scientific knowledge as one of the noblest and worthiest of human endeavors, one leading to the enrichment of mankind both today and for future generations," said keynote speaker and NSF chairman Louis Farian. "However, a breakthrough discovery is challenging our long-held perceptions about our discipline—the discovery that science is really, really hard."

"My area of expertise is the totally impossible science of particle physics," Farian continued, "but, indeed, this newly discovered 'Law of Difficulty' holds true for all branches of science, from astronomy to molecular biology and everything in between."

The science-is-hard theorem, first posited by a team of MIT professors in 1990, was slow to gain acceptance within the science community. It gathered momentum following the 1997 publication of physicist Stephen Hawking's breakthrough paper, "Lorentz Variation And Gravitation Is Just About The Hardest Friggin' Thing In The Known Universe."

This weekend's conference, featuring symposia on how hard the Earth sciences are, how confusing medical science is, and how ridiculously un-gettable quantum physics is, represented a major step forward for the science-is-hard theorem.

"We now believe that the theorem is 99.999% likely to be true, after applying these incredibly complex statistical techniques that gave me a splitting headache," Farian said. "A theorem is like a theory, but, I don't know, it's different."

Members of the scientific establishment were quick to affirm the NSF discovery.

"To be a scientist, you have to learn all this weird stuff, like how many molecules are in a proton," University of Chicago physicist Dr. Erno Heidegger said. "While it is true that I have become an acclaimed physicist and reaped great rewards from my career, one must not lose sight of the fact that these blessings came only after studying all of this completely impossible, egghead stuff for years."

Dr. Ahmed Zewail, a Caltech chemist whose spectroscopic studies of the transition states of chemical reactions earned him the Nobel Prize in 1999, explained in layman's terms just how hard the discipline of chemistry is, using the periodic table of the elements as a model.

"Take the element of tungsten and work to memorize its place in the periodic table, its atomic symbol, its atomic number and weight, what it looks like, where it's found, and its uses to humanity, if any," Zewail said. "Now, imagine memorizing the other 100-plus elements making up the periodic table. You'd have to be, like, some kind of total brain to do that."

As hard as chemistry and other traditional sciences may be, scientists say such newer disciplines as quantum physics are even more difficult.

"Quantum physics has always been a particularly tough branch of science," UCLA physicist Dr. Hideki Watanabe said. "But in addition to being some of the smartest Einstein-y stuff around, it is undeniably a really stupid, pointless thing to study, something you could never actually use in the real world. This paradoxical dual state may one day lead to a new understanding of physics as a way to confuse and bore people."

"I guess there's cool stuff about science," Watanabe continued, "like space travel and bombs. But that stuff is so hard, it's honestly not even worth the effort."

P.S.: penso que desisti de assassinar este blogue. So' se eu simplesmente deixar de vir ver o que o resto da malta escreve. Uma despedida tao linda... {que vergonha... suspiro}

Reabertura temporaria...

... para perguntar ao sr. Pitta qual e' o seu espanto?

O facto de em Portugal nao haver a carreira de cientista? O facto do trabalho cientifico em Portugal ser feito todo por bolseiros, sem direito a subsidio de ferias, decimo terceiro, baixa medica, subsidio de desemprego, de maternidade (para simplificar, recebe-se a seco o que se recebe e trabalha-se e mai nada) e ate' ha' poucos anos nem possibilidade de descontar para a seguranca social? Sabe quanto recebe um bolseiro? Sabe o que e' andar assim ate' se desistir de ciencia? Ou acha que oito mil pessoas a trabalhar em ciencia e' um desperdicio? E' o jogo seguinte na blogosfera? Nomear profissoes que porque nao percebemos achamos que nao prestam? E' democratico. Todos podemos entrar na ignorancia e jogar.

O ferreiro sabe que sabe que o espeto é pra espetar

Não peçam a um advogado que defina justiça.
Não peçam a uma pintora que defina arte.
Não peçam a um padre que defina santidade.
Não peçam a uma modelo que defina beleza.
Não peçam a um coveiro que defina morte.
Não peçam a um cientista que defina ciência.

Mathematical Surfaces

Clicar para aumentar.

To most of us, a surface is something we can touch and attribute a shape to--the spherical surface of a ball or the toroidal surface of a doughnut. But there are innumerable surfaces that we cannot touch, or see, or even know of, because they are representations of mathematical functions. Mathematicians have long relied on their own powers of imagination to picture these abstract surfaces. Now, mathematicians such as Richard Palais of the University of California, Irvine, and graphic artists such as Luc Benard are exploiting the magic of computer graphics to recreate these abstract mathematical surfaces in familiar yet intriguing settings.

This illustration presents five well-known mathematical surfaces, rendered as glass objects in a highly realistic "Still Life." To create their chosen surfaces, Benard relied on the computer program 3D-XplorMath, developed by Palais for visualizing many of the most famous mathematical surfaces. He then exported these surfaces into a 3D-rendering program, using it to give the objects a glassy texture and place them on a virtual glass-covered wooden tabletop.

ILLUSTRATION: FIRST PLACE
Still Life: Five Glass Surfaces on a Tabletop
Richard Palais* and Luc Benard
*University of California, Irvine, USA

Muito mais, varios instrumentos e formas de visualizacao que permitem compreender melhor o que se aprendeu: a pintura da Mona Lisa, o uso do Homem Vitruviano de Leonardo Da Vinci para o estudo da anatomia humana, visualizacao das maiores montanhas do mundo no Hawaii, etc. aqui-> 2006 Visualization Challenge Winners

Darfur: assim a olho, 50 000 mortos e a contar

[...] The U.N. generates humanitarian profiles of people counted in the camps and people surrounding the camps who together constitute conflict-affected people who are also in need of assistance. These counts are important to the United Nations as the basis of planning and support. The United Nations does not ask specific questions about violence, but the numbers generated are essential in calculating the population at risk, which we used to estimate the actual numbers of deaths in West Darfur. West Darfur refugees in Chad are not included in these profiles. We used a State Department survey and U.N. refugee camp counts to complete the estimate of the West Darfur population at risk. [...]


[...] We conservatively estimate 19 months of mortality in West Darfur as 49,288 (with a range from 40,850 to 67,598) by summing the means for estimated deaths between the high and low monthly figures in the right side of the figure. When the right tail of this distribution is extended to May 2006, the total number of deaths is 65,296 in West Darfur alone, with a range from 57,506 to 85,346. This estimate covers 31 months of conflict that, as of August 2006, has been under way for 43 months. If the further 12 months of conflict were well estimated, and/or if all or most missing or disappeared persons were presumed dead, the death estimate would be much higher. [...]

Hagan & Palloni, Death in Darfur. Science 313, n.5793, 1578-1579, 15 September 2006.

O que há de poesia no meu trabalho

Frost flowers on sea ice covering a lead: Stellar

dendrites of about 1 to 2 cm height on young sea ice
(From Stefan Kern, University of Hamburg).

O caso do boicote ***

*** Emenda e adiçao a este meu poste (é o que dá fazer postes 'as altas da madrugada e andar a cair pelos cantos de sono). A tal carta postada no Blasfemias foi publicada a 4 de Agosto de 2006 em resposta a continuados esforços pelo boicote. O Joao Miranda enviou-me a notícia seguinte, que é de Junho deste ano:

ACADEMIC POLITICS:
Over Protests, U.K. Union Endorses Boycott of Israeli Academics
Eliot Marshall

Rejecting the advice of its own executive officer, Britain's largest university union endorsed a motion this week calling on its members "to consider the appropriateness of a boycott" of individuals and institutions "that do not publicly dissociate themselves" from Israel's policies toward Palestinians. Scientific leaders around the world strongly condemned the union's action.

The resolution, which denounces Israel's "apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall," may not carry much formal weight: The 67,000-strong National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), which approved it at its annual meeting on 29 May, was scheduled to go out of business on 1 June after merging into a new organization, the University and College Lecturers' Union. The boycott resolution will only be "advisory" to the new organization, according to a spokesperson. But critics are concerned that it may encourage a "gray boycott." Warns Jonathan Rynhold of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, which was targeted by an earlier boycott attempt, academics could be judged not on merit but "according to their nationality and political opinions."

Even before it passed, the proposal drew heavy criticism from within the union and outside. NATFHE General Secretary Paul Mackney, although a supporter of the Palestinian cause, urged members not to endorse the boycott because it had not been vetted within the union, a NATFHE spokesperson says. Several thousand U.S. and Israeli academics made public their objections in May, as did several Nobel Prize winners, including physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin. The board of AAAS (publisher of Science) last week called the NATFHE proposal "antithetical to the role of free scientific inquiry" and asked that it be withdrawn.

After the vote, astronomer Martin Rees, president of the U.K.'s Royal Society, issued a statement deploring the action, saying that "NATFHE members … should remember that boycotts of scientists at Israeli universities grossly violate the principles set out by the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies." Those guidelines rule out attempts to block the free expression of ideas and opinions. Scientific leaders drafted the policy 4 years ago in response to an earlier boycott petition--a move that failed. Last year, the U.K. Association of University Teachers, a smaller union, endorsed a boycott but rescinded it when faced with legal objections.

Bem e mais tarde eu escrevo mais qualquer coisa...