Owen Watching Cars
A short video of Owen’s commentary while watching Pixar’s Cars movie. He’s really keen.
The danger in all this is not just a corruption of science but also an emasculation of politics. The key debates about climate change are political, not scientific. How much resource should we put into mitigating emissions and how much into adapting to a warmer world? How do you deal with the fact that slower economic growth may produce less CO2 but may also make it harder for people in developing countries to climb out of poverty? How do we weigh the moral good of cheaper travel with the moral good of reduced emissions? And so on. These are debates about political principles and ethical values that no amount of scientific data can resolve. The trouble is, the more we insist that ‘the science tells us what to do’, the less we are able to engage in the kinds of debates necessary to resolve such issues.
Kenan Malik’s essay on the science and politics of climate change
When a party, like an individual, is guided by fear, then courage is banished, convictions are buried, and politicians will talk but not say much. Or, to be more charitable, the party of fear will offer alternatives to the government, but they will be timid and at the margin of difference, the theory being that governments defeat themselves rather than opposition parties winning by the force of their ideas.
There was a time when the Liberals stood for something via @globeandmail
In the end, though, the rules do matter - it’s just that obeying them doesn’t. They need to be there to create a tension between conservatism and innovation. If the innovation continued unchecked, unmonitored by Susie Dent, then the language would fragment into thousands of mutually incomprehensible dialects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/03/david-mitchell-english-language-grammar/print
In Our Time - History of the Royal Society
A great series on the history and influence of the Royal Society.
To Bee or Not to Bee : The Nature of Things
An interesting discussion of bees with excellent footage. The documentary makes a good case for the importance of bees and describes the many challenges they face.
Fun to see some old colleagues too.
Christmas Excitement
Good candidates for elimination from political language http://tgam.ca/GA7 (via @globeandmail)
Top song of 2009 in the Routley household? Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas. Clearly the kids have too much control over the music. #fb
Canada deserves both a government willing to stand up and defend their decisions and a functioning parliament with mature debate.
Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.
Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com (via Instapaper)
International human rights, it seems, are something the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stands ready to impose on others, but not on ourselves.
Getting Away with Torture - The New York Review of Books (via Instapaper)
Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.
The case for building green has rarely been made more clearly.
“It’s very simple,” explains Stuart Bowden, senior vice president of software company SAS: “We doubled our square footage, but halved our costs.”
thestar.com iPhone : Hume: Going green brings unexpected savings (via Instapaper)
History has exploded from the least likely corners; spurious events unsettled our surest expectations. The 2010s will be volatile, unpredictable, dangerous – but not what we hope, and not what we fear.
Ten years that shook, rattled, rolled and helped repair the world - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it’s shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I’ve seen these kind of claims before, they always turn out to be wrong, and it’s not worth my time to look into it?
Good overview of the consequences of the Climatic Research Unit emails for climate policy http://instapaper.com/zWfgti9R (via @globeandmail)
When Bureaucrats (are) Attack(ed): Richard Colvin and the end of Responsible Government - Gargoyle: the BlogBack in the good old days when the bargain was firmly in place, it would have been highly inappropriate for a bureaucrat to do as Richard Colvin did in his testimony before the special committee on Afghanistan, and effectively blow the whistle on the government from his safe perch in the embassy in Washington. If he gave advice and was ignored, he should have resigned or kept quiet. And if asked by a parliamentary committee to testify, his answer would have been something like, “if you want to know what advice I gave the minister, ask the minister.”
Interesting discussion with philosophy professor Mark Rowlands. The first third on the differences between humans, dogs, and wolves, and the last third on perceptions of time are particularly good.
Four good questions regarding Afghan detainees http://tgam.ca/EO4 (via @globeandmail)