Snow White and the Huntsman: All worth seeing was shown in the trailer

This weekend I went to the cinema to see the long expected Snow White and the Huntsman movie, and I have to say that I feel a bit conned. I’ve heard many excuses for why the movie stinks: that it is a fairytale so people went to see the movie with the wrong expectations, but I simply do not agree.

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Fairness and Empathy in Animals: TED talk by Frans de Waal

This talk does not inform about something very new, but I really love the videos of monkeys (and apes) from the experiments.

What has science ever done for us?

Witty and simply excellent chalk talk by Richard Taverne was broadcast here on Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.

 

New episode of Rationally Speaking Podcast is out!

New Q & A episode of Rationally Speaking Podcast is out, and it is as good as always! There was one extremely interesting piece of information mentioned this time. Apparently, WWII and consequent Cold War had a huge influence on the surprisingly low interest in Bayesian stats in academia during the recent past. It was due to the fact that statisticians were using this approach for dealing with confidential government assignments, and hence these applications couldn’t be published…

People do not go to the cinema because of piracy?

This is a sentence that gets repeated (at least in Czech) media on a daily basis: “In times when people do not go to the cinema due to the prevalence of internet piracy, movie producers have to…”. To me, this statement is very problematic from at least two reasons.

Karel Čapek

When I was listening to the the new episode of SGU, I was pleasantly surprised by Rebecca’s choice for the “This day in skepticism” segment. She picked the following event:

Feb 11, 1938     BBC Television produces the world’s first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Capek play R.U.R., that coined the term “robot”.

Here I would like to mention few inaccuracies. First of all, the name of the Czech author is originally spelled as Karel Čapek, hence the name is pronounced as /Chappeck/ rather than /Kappeck/ (you can check the correct pronunciation at Wikipedia). Second imperfection is connected to the etymology of the word “robot”. Rebecca said that it is a Czech expression for a slave, which is quite close, but I will still allow myself to be a bit more nerdy about it. The word “robot” comes from “robota”, an old Slavonic term for a hard manual labor, which more specifically referred to the forced labor all subjects had to do for their lord. So no slaves, but subjects. Further, even though Karel Čapek was the first who used “robot” in his play, he actually is not the author of the term. In fact, it was his brother, Josef, who suggested this neologism, as an alternative to Karel’s original “labor”.

Scientists contra Opinion-makers in the Great Climate Change Debate

Quite recently, I had an argument with one old friend. He is right-wing oriented (he really digs Ayn Rand), which can be an explosive factor sometimes, but since I like to see myself as a pragmatist when it comes to politics, it is not always that hot. What triggered this disagreement was actually the global change of climate. Unfortunately, at that time we both had some drinks already so it was rather a shouting match, and I have to say I have a strong feeling of disappointment for my side of the argument because I was not able to keep myself calm and rational. Anyway, the argument was followed by an email conversation, which gave us more space for calm articulation of our arguments, but to my surprise the results were not much better.

Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism Wars

I have finally managed to update my google reader subscriptions by adding RSS of some of my favorite journals, and I have to say this move already yields its results. This time I chanced upon an article about an issue that I was systematically encountering, but since I consider it rather a political topic, it always ended up right bellow the radar of my interest. It is about the (I think it’s fair to call it tense) relations between feminism and evolutionary psychology¹.

How to use bad stats to justify calling conservatives stupid…

Today in the morning I opened this popular Czech online political blog/magazine that is mostly left-wing oriented. What caught my attention were two articles claiming that some scientists found that conservatism and right wing orientation are a result of – guess what – lower intelligence in childhood. What a coincidence, isn’t it?

Denialist newspeak

Today, I encountered a very neat way of how to define a skeptic: “an establishment science apologist and propagandist”. A cool idea for t-shirt, isn’t it?!