Creepiest item on Amazon

I don’t want one. It’s an Infant Circumcision Trainer, and what it is is a plastic baby torso, with a collection of little disposable rubber baby penises that you can plug into it and practice snipping bits off.

No, don’t click the link. It will haunt you, and the FBI will put you on a list, and Satan will appear in your living room and make an offer on your soul. As another curse, every time you visit Amazon you’ll get offered the strangest stuff. Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Nicolas Cage Pillowcase Covers, Sperm in Testis of a Rat Peel and Stick Wall Decal, and Look And Feel Canadian Breath Spray.

But hey, if you’re in the market for the kind of tchotchke that will scare all the neighbors away and make them whisper warnings to their children about you, it’s only $192.

We shall find reconciliation

olympicpeninsula

For those of you who are concerned about my wife’s apostasy, we shall overcome. We have booked flights to Seattle for mid-August! We’re going to take an actual vacation!

So we’ll spend a few days with friends and family in the Seattle area, and then we’re going to vanish into the Olympic Peninsula. Mountains! Oceans!

A few sea stacks and tide pools might be just the thing to allow me to forgive the abomination of a Windows 8 computer.

Changing lanes while black

I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. It’s powerful — I woke up in the middle of the night last night, and had to read a bit more, and then I had a tough time getting back to sleep afterwards. There’s this bit where he’s talking about the terror he felt on being pulled over by the police in PG County, and the dread he felt at the arbitrary abuse by police of black people at traffic stops, and his friend who was gunned down by a policeman, and I am marveling at this strange world I’ve never had to experience. When I’ve been pulled over, what I feel is annoyance, and a bit of self-blaming, and concern that I might get a ticket, nothing more. Driving while white is easy.

Then this morning I get up and the first news I see is that the dash-cam video of Sandra Bland’s arrest has been released.

[Read more…]

Trust no one

Al_Seckel

Jim Lippard brings up an example of a difficult phenomenon we’ve all encountered with increasing frequency in recent years, as atheism/skepticism have become ‘cool’ and more people jump on the bandwagon…but the problem has been here for a long time.

This is, I think, a good case study in how the problem of “affiliate fraud”–being taken in by deception by a member of a group you self-identify with–can be possible for skeptics, scientists, and other educated people, just as it is for the more commonly publicized cases of affiliate fraud within religious organizations.

The case is the story of Al Seckel, self-proclaimed physicist, molecular biologist, cognitive neuroscientist, research associate, colleague of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and Murray Gell-Mann, and who was none of those things, but managed to schmooze his way into persuading the skeptic community that he was all of them.

He sounds like a very interesting person, but not at all trustworthy. In the words of his second wife (maybe his current wife…it seems he’s always been a bit dodgy about these marriage and divorce things, too):

“And he was really sweet, and I enjoyed talking with him a lot. He’s really intelligent. He’s just a liar.”

Well worth a read, as a warning to us all.

It’s good to have your identity shaken up now and then

Remember Rust, the video game that randomly assigned a skin color to players? Some people found that horribly objectionable.

Now the game is provoking people more: it also randomly assigns a sex. As you might guess, once again, some refuse to play.

As a further twist, the player avatars are anatomically correct, and they randomize penis size. This is going to be an interesting experiment in human psychology!

Everywhere and nowhere

airplane

I travel a fair bit…a bit more than I can enjoy, actually. To me, an airplane represents a period of tedious antiseptic confinement, and a hotel room is a closet with a bed that I’ll use for sleeping, nothing more. So this story of a subculture that games the airlines to get constant free travel and hotel rooms is a horror story to me. They fly around pointlessly, land in exotic places and never leave the airport, just waiting to board the next leg of their circuit.

I guess it is a kind of game, and these people are masters of it. I just don’t see the point.