I recently had a seven-part series titled ‘On Insults’ and the first one dealt with the question of what constitutes an insult and who gets to decide whether something is a slur or not. It is not an easy question to answer. Are insults and slurs inherent in the words themselves? Does it depend on the intent of the person using those words? Or does it depend on the perception of the person at the receiving end? [Read more…]
Apparently it is not uncommon for Russian car owners to mount cameras on their dashboards to record everything as they drive along. This makes for some remarkable videos and someone has made an interesting compilation.
It struck me that such videos of what an accident actually looks like might make good viewing at driver training schools, and be quite persuasive about the importance of defensive driving.
Via Jerry Coyne, I learned of this website that has created a list of words commonly used by Chopra in his tweets and connects them randomly to get sentences that sound like they are saying something deep when it is pure nonsense. In other words, they are Chopraesque. [Read more…]
Just two days after my post on the variations on the Nigerian 419 scam, I got the following comment that gave me the good news that the criminal syndicates behind this fraud have been captured and that I am now eligible to get $50,000.00 to compensate me for my trouble..
Here’s the comment that I dispatched to the spam folder: [Read more…]
As most readers of this blog likely know, the two groups known as ‘accommodationists’ and ‘new atheists’ take different approaches with respect to their relationship to religion.
Accommodationists are those who believe that either:
(a) science and religion are compatible; or
(b) science and religion are incompatible but that it is strategically advisable to not say so openly.
The reason given for the latter position is that by asserting incompatibility, new atheists are forcing the religious to choose between science and religion and that, given the strong hold religion has on people, most of them will abandon science in favor of religion. They worry that this will result in a reduction in the public acceptance of science in general and evolution in particular and undermine its teaching in schools. [Read more…]
Take a look at this photograph published in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. (You can see a larger photo by clicking on the link.) It show the asymmetric skin damage on the face of a 69-year old truck driver due to the many hours driving with just the left side of his face exposed to sunlight.
Those of us who grew up in the tropics avoided staying out in the sun if we possibly could. We sought the shade and I still find it strange when at the first sign of warm weather in the spring, people here in the US rush to lie out in the sun in skimpy clothing. [Read more…]
I find science amazing. But sometimes it is easy to forget the incredible things that engineers are able to do using basic science discoveries. Here engineer Bill Hammack explains how accelerometers work and how the miniature ones inside these devices are made.
The Boy Scouts of America is similar to the Catholic Church in its homophobia and its attempts to cover up sexual abuse within the organization. But the Oregon Supreme court recently ruled that 20,000 pages of secret ‘perversion files’ kept by them on suspected child abusers must be released to the public. [Read more…]
We are now less than five months away from the elections and well into the political rah-rah season when people are expected to choose sides and where the goal becomes to help your candidate win. As a result, there will be an intense focus on increasingly marginal issues in order to create the illusion that the candidates differ widely and that it is therefore essential that the opposing candidate not be successful because dire consequences will ensue. [Read more…]
Joseph Smith explains to Mr. Deity, Lucy, and John the Baptist how to make Mormon proselytization cost-effective.
(Via Machines Like Us)