RSSquote #186
Jan 30
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein (attrib.)
29-1-07 Links
Jan 29
- Long discussion of fascism and militiarism in Starship Troopers
- Charlie Brooker: ‘I read a magazine yesterday and suddenly truly understood in my bones that human civilisation will die screaming in our lifetime’
- Search The British Library Catalogue online
- www.pinchofsalt.org
- Egotistic link to The Guardian Letters page for 17 January 2007
- ‘I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqis express that.’ (GW Bush). Now be terrified
- Architectures of Control: Control using feedback
- Online activism?
- Words Aloud Slam poetry night in Sheffield, UK
- ‘I suspect that the worthwhile meanings of a religious text only reveal themselves through a sort of inner conversation which arises after you have tried to act as if they were true’
- Picture of Tom Stafford ‘a hunchback (and alleged hemophiliac) who took a lot of uppers and downers, wrote pop songs, and aspired to make it in the recording industry’ from Moving Places: A Life at the Movies by Jonathan Rosenbaum (1995)
- Sheffield’s Peace In The Park festival on MySpace
- How to Record & Save BBC Radio Shows as MP3 Audio Files
- Dialectical Sex and Gender is at the heart of successful communism (apparently)
- Jiang et al (2006)
A gender- and sexual orientation-dependent spatial attentional effect of invisible images - Wikipedia: Strip Search Prank Call Scam
- Nature: ‘A population-genetic model indicates that if there is a gene responsible for homosexual behaviour it can readily spread in populations. The model also predicts widespread bisexuality in humans.
- XKCD: We’re grown ups now and its our turn to decide what that means
do facts exists? Facts do exist
Jan 24
Discussing philosophical skepticism in his new book, Freedom & Neurobiology, John Searle:
Go to any university bookstore and look at the section on, for example, molecular biology or mechanical engineering, and you will find an accumulation of knowledge, the sheer volume of which would have taken Descartes� breath away. It is hard to send men to the moon and bring them back and then take seriously the problem, for example, whether the external world really exists. This is not to say that there is no room for skeptical epistemology in philosophy, but I regard the epistemic puzzles as I regard Zeno’s paradoxes about space and time. It is an interesting paradox how it is possible for me to move across the room. First I have to go half way, and then prior to that, half of that half, and prior to that half of that half, and so on. And similarly, it is an interesting puzzle how I can have certain, objective, and universal knowledge given the various skeptical possibilities that one can raise. But, all the same, we do not seriously think that Zeno’s paradoxes show that space and time do not exist, nor do most of us suppose that the skeptical paradoxes cast any doubt on the existence of knowledge.
there is no war on terror
Jan 24
London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.
Director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, as quoted in the Guardian
2007-01-13 Links
Jan 13
- Ben Goldacre: ‘Don’t trust me, I write for the papers. Have a look for yourself’ Now that’s a healthy starting point for any view of the world
- Early Day Motion (EDM) database at parliament.uk
- 21st Century Warning Signs
- December 26th 2006: U.S. military deaths in Iraq pass 9/11 toll
- Juan Cole: top ten myths about Iraq 2006
- Against All Enemies (Washington Post article about the problems Iraq is distracting the US from)
- Summary of the concept of Aristotelian Tragedy (from the Poetics)
- Andrew Brown lucidly explains why religion can’t be explained by psychology alone
- ‘This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago’
- Wikipedia: Russell’s Teapot
- If you send hate mail to the head of the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster, it ends up here
Unspeak, by Steven Poole
Jan 11
I have just finished Steven Poole’s Unspeak, which is an excellent, impassioned, bitingly funny review of the way words are used to promote particular views of the world.
“Words have consequences in the world”, argues Poole in the epilogue, “…Unspeak itself does violence to meaning. It seeks to annihilate distinctions”. He explicitly distances himself from Lakoff’s ‘language frames’ view, where “the framing of the debate determines who will win the debate” (Howard Dean) and the only defense is prmote an alternate frame (to reframe). This, says Poole, will only lead to a clash of Unspeaks, rather than fostering any kind of sober dialogue. Poole quotes Ranko Bugarski: “What is needed [is the] judicious use of normal language, allowing for fine-grained selection and discrimination, for urbanity and finesse”. An admirable aim in hysterical times!
truth in science
Jan 09
The British Centre for Science Education is a single issue pressure group dedicated solely to keeping creationism and intelligent design out of the science classroom in publicly-funded schools in the United Kingdom.
Truth is Science is a Creationist front that recently sent power point presentations and DVDs to every secondary school in the country, in attempt to promote teaching Creationism as part of the national science curriculum.
Richard Buggs, of Truth in Science, had a piece in today’s Guardian saying that Intelligent Design (i.e Creationism) is science. He is wrong, and the online comments to the article here explain why
real virtue
Jan 09
real virtue lies not in heroically saving poor orphans from burning buildings but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings have decent fire codes.
donate to wikipedia
Jan 02
For those who know me:
On thursday I am going to work out how to donate some money to wikipedia (it may have to be in dollars) and then i’m going to bung them some cash. If you’ve got an urge to donate, all you have to do it let me know how much you’d like to donate and i’ll add it to what i send them and you can owe me
Update: This morning i gave wikipedia
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