Some random science bits and bobs to clear out a bunch of tabs.
Scientists have discovered the speed limit for quantum interactions, and it is much, much slower than the speed of light. It is a little faster than twice the speed of sound in the medium in question, in fact. Yes, apparently also for entangled particles. This effectively hamstrings any woo-peddlers’ attempts to suggest that quantum effects explain things like the imagined effect of the planets’ positions on a person’s fate (I’m looking at you, astrologers).
Proving once again that Christian evangelists with a camera have, historically, thought of nothing better to do with their faith and technology-on-hand than recording and selling a pop culture Five Minutes Hate, here’s some Canadian Christians slagging off Ninja Turtles for being “Hinduist humanist occult” something something.
Also, Michael Jackson chocolate bars, and Weylon Smithers gets made Homer Simpson’s secretary.
Theists have really gone overboard this time in labelling anyone who disagrees with them as being engaged in hate speech against them. With more specificity, the Delhi High Court has demanded that Facebook — the international social media site — remove all images the judge has deemed “hateful”: to wit, images of Hindu deities, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. Yes, the Muslim prophet Mohammed, a prophet who existed before cameras and thus whom nobody knows what he actually looks like. Meaning every image, of anything, that anyone claims is of Mohammed, is violating this ruling and must be removed.
Closing a tumultuous week of wide protest against PIPA and SOPA – two MPAA backed anti-piracy bills – Dodd threatened to stop the cash-flow to politicians who dare to take a stand against pro-Hollywood legislation. Clear bribery, the petition claims, and already thousands agree.
Via someone on Twitter sometime this past weekend (I swear, I noted it somewhere, but I can’t find the note now), this awesome resource would come in exceptionally handy the next time you’re perusing a science magazine at a doctor’s waiting room, or your work’s lunch room newspaper.
Okay. New plan for world domination. I’m going to make a lot of money… somehow… off of creating a digital version of this that we can stick onto certain media websites with penchants for posting terrible pseudoscience. Like Google Sidewiki only designed to eviscerate nonsense-peddlers.
(What? It’s no worse a plan than those underpants gnomes have, is it?)
Every damn conversation we’ve had over the past several years in our respective atheist/skeptic communities that even approaches the topic of feminism, or discusses women in any way, seems to attract the sort of person in our communities who demands that we prove that feminism — the idea that women are human beings and should be treated with basic human dignity — is skeptical. Who evidently believes that the natural overlap between skepticism and feminism is insufficient for the topic to be broached. That the feminists in the skepticism community are not turning a skeptical eye to their dogmatically held beliefs that women shouldn’t be systematically mistreated or disadvantaged by any social structure that we humans have built.
This is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. To put it less bluntly, it is a category error.
Skeptical Science has posted a thorough and comprehensive review of all the scientific literature, weighing all the various contributing variables leading to the present warming trend. We humans and our activities are, far and away, the number one contributing factor.
Well, what was left of him after Stephanie provided the science that shows that practicing hebephiles actually do, demonstrably, harm the children they victimize, anyway. (Yes, I’m late to this game too. The blogosphere is a busy place and, like I said recently, I’m playing catch-up right now.)
Jesse Bering of Bering In Mind made several mistakes in tackling the subject of hebephilia as presented by a reader. He took a number of things at face value, and did not delve deeper into the quandry presented regarding sexual “moral panics” and whether there’s any good reason to excoriate this writer despite his seeming attempt at honest discourse. There were many red flags in the original letter, and Bering missed them and did not take the opportunity to interrogate those red flags, and for that he got raked over the proverbial coals by the blogosphere. Bering wrote an addendum, which did much to provide us with a mea culpa and put the focus back on the letter-writer and the topic at hand. Which is good, because there were many, MANY loose threads in said letter left by Bering in his original coverage, which really needed to be tugged at. And Bering’s addendum, too, needed further interrogation.
Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.
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January 27, 2012 at 11:15 am 
Jason Thibeault 
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