Saturday/Sunday, August 21-22, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN Weekend Edition (Saturday/Sunday, August 21-22, 2010)
(1)- SOCIAL SCIENCE IGNORANCE – Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study.

(2)- WHY? -- Philosophers know an adequate moral theory needs explain the fact that human beings are capable of almost unthinkable cruelty towards each other on both the individual and the social level and show how to oppose evil.

(3)- HEADACHE TRIGGER -- The sugar substitute aspartame lurks in diet soda, yogurts, and the tabletop sweeteners Equal and Nutrasweet. The FDA reports complaints about aspartame-induced headaches, dizziness and other maladies.

(4)- BEAUTY CAN HARM -- While many see no downside to being beautiful, research shows attractive women face discrimination when it comes to landing certain kinds of jobs, a study in the Journal of Social Psychology says.

(5)- ANCIENT BLOB DISCOVERED -- A unique blob-like creature that lived in the ocean approximately 425 million years ago is revealed in a 3D computer model in research published this month in the journal Biology Letters.

(6)- THE EARTH – Our planet is a recycling scheme running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms.

(7)- LAST RITES -- As audiences shrink, budgets tighten, and jobs disappear, dance faces a dark future. The American dance culture isn’t just struggling. To some observers, its diagnosis seems to be especially grim, perhaps even terminal.

(8)- POETRY SCANDAL -- The Oxford Professor of Poetry is required to give three lectures a year on subjects of his or her own choosing: a dignified operation all round and, for that reason, subject to slight scrutiny. Now comes scandal.

(9)- OF BOOKS AND THEFT -- Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, a book possession obsession, was first recognized as a disease at the end of the 18th Century.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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