By the time you read this, the United States will be learning the outcomes of midterm elections. Obviously I don’t know the results to comment. Regardless of the outcome, though, I think it is likely we will continue to hear about the partisan divide or variations thereof. And that is a topic which science can offer some insight into, specifically the impact of social media on polarization–specifically, our increased sorting into homogeneous groups with little in common between them. If you suspect social media isn’t helping, you are likely right–but maybe not for the reason you think.
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complexity
Science Book Review: Complexity – A Guided Tour
When I reviewed Underbug a couple of weeks ago, I supposed many readers would enjoy the storytelling skill of author and journalist Lisa Margonelli even though I was hoping for more science. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell has plenty of math and science, which is fine by me yet may not be to everyone’s taste. As it happens, the subjects of both books overlap; the complexity of termite mounds is one stop on Mitchell’s tour. Notably, neither book offers a compelling conclusion to the search for unifying principles that generate complexity; just defining the term in a quantifiably useful way continues to elude complexity scientists. Margonelli and Mitchell agree that we are still waiting for Carnot.
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Science in Review: The Open and Closed Case of Steve v Steve
Exhibit A: During a beach vacation with my extended family, I repeatedly heard my mom, my sister and my wife discussing the complexities of food shopping. These are three intelligent women, each with a Masters’ degree in their respective field, each with a minimum of 10 years’ experience buying and preparing food for themselves and at least some experience doing so for a family, and yet all three find this basic task increasingly overwhelming. Optimizing for sustainability, personal cost, global resource consumption, individual dietary needs, and overall nutrition and health in the presence of uncertainty about the relative and absolute merits of different foods and diets is a nontrivial problem. The space of possible foods over which to perform that optimization is expanding. Then, throw in questions like “Could you figure out which food(s) is causing our family’s eczema?” And by the way, serve it with appealing presentation and make it taste good to a wide assortment of palates, will you?
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Science Corner: I Can’t Believe I Ate That Whole Thing
Eating well in academia can be challenging. On any given day there’s probably pizza or donuts or cookies somewhere on campus. When either your time or your money (or both) are limited—and for students and faculty alike they often are—it’s hard to beat “free” and “right here.” But even with unlimited funds to buy whatever you wish and unlimited time for shopping and preparation, eating well still poses a challenge. There is an educational component as well; you have to learn or be taught what choices to make. And as this New York Times survey illustrates, sharing that knowledge is an imperfect and incomplete process.
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Book Review: True Paradox
Summary: David Skeel argues that far from being a problem for Christians, the complexity of the world is in fact something best explained by the Christian faith. This book is helpful both for the person considering whether it makes sense to become a Christian as well as for Christians looking for ways to articulate how Christian faith makes sense of life’s deepest questions.
Many people consider that Christians are “simple minded†and that anything that is complex or poses intellectual challenges is problematic to the Christian believer. David Skeel takes an approach that is different from the very logical appeals of many apologists who appeal to cosmological arguments and arguments from design to demonstrate the case for Christian faith. Skeel argues that Christianity’s explanatory power to deal with the intangibles and paradoxes of the world as we actually experience it is greater than the materialist explanations that are the major alternative on offer. [Read more…] about Book Review: True Paradox