December, 2008

  1. Scientific American on How Human Beings Are Evolving

    Occasionally I’ll read articles in newspapers or magazines speculating that humans are no longer subject to natural selection and just have to shake my head. Fortunately, Scientific American has a nice overview of the current state of thinking about human evolution that dispels that “we’re no longer evolving nonsense.” In fact, it appears to be…

  2. Robert Reich on Legality of Auto Bailout

    I think the planned bailout of the automobile industry is an awful idea. Robert Reich thinks it is a good idea. But Reich is at least principled enough to worry that the way the Bush administration plans to handle the bailout — after Congress already rejected attempts to craft such a bailout — borders on…

  3. Reason on Arkansas’ Ridiculous Interior Designer Licensing

    Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote an excellent article for Reason back in November on Arkansas’ idiotic licensing scheme for, of all things, interior designers. In 22 states, including Arkansas, it is illegal to call yourself an interior designer without going through an arduous and expensive certification process. In Nevada, it’s illegal to do interior design without a…

  4. Atheism, Religion and Atrocities

    Robert at MakingMyWay has one of the best responses I’ve read to the accusation that atheism was primarily responsible for much of the state-sponsored mass murder of the 20th century, specifically in Marxist/Communist regimes (thought it should be pointed out that Imperial Japan was hardly a hotbed of secularism and yet managed to murder hundreds…

  5. Using the Kindle in Medical Education (And Why the Kindle Sucks)

    John Halamka, CIO for Harvard Medical School, has an interesting post about HMS’ support for the Amazon Kindle ebook reading device, We’ve recently implemented Kindle support for all our 20,000 educational resources at HMS. Our integration on the Mycourses educational website enables any Word or PDF document to be delivered to the Kindle wirelessly. There…