So this mailing list I’m on is caught up in one of its repeating discussion-obsessions. The Mac fanatics are arguing the points of the Mac. The Windows users are responding, mostly in terms of how much better Windows is for gaming. I am reading it on my little Linux machine. Outside my window, I can hear one of those bloody trucks that drives around selling stuff. You don’t have these in most countries. I really wish someone would make it illegal to disturb the peace that way… driving around the back roads and side streets with a loudspeaker attached to …
Tag: Science & Technology
Ms. Dewey
Ms. Dewey is a really weird search engine… but, I think, is probably a decent model for the kind of thing we’ll be seeing as bandwidth pipes get wider and wider. But I hope they get a little more intelligent, so they’re not pestering me to enter new searches while I’m reading the results from the last one. And I hope the interface is a little more workable. I am vaguely impressed, even if it is an M$ product. (via Hypersonic Beams)
Wartime Rape, Seen Scientifically
I’ve been researching the Comfort Women issue (most recently, having completed George Hicks’ book on the subject), and ever since I read Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, and more recently, since I got into a discussion about rape in the comments section of this post, I’ve been thinking a lot about rape in terms of it being a human behaviour. It’s the theme of a story I’m slowly reworking these days, called “The Crystal Methuselah,” as well as one of my Clarion stories which I’d like to rework and send out in the next little while, a horror tale called …
Weird Medical Fact of the Day
Yes, another that I realized I hadn’t posted yesterday. In the course of explaining her feeling that anyone considering plastic surgery should be required to see a surgery, be present for one and really experience how gross it is to cut open a human body and fiddle with it, Lime mentioned a weird fact to me… it surprised me, but of course, I know rather little about the practicalities of the practice of modern medicine. Anyway… apparently during operations, it stinks. It stinks something awful. You know what it stinks like? Cooking meat. See, in some operations, they use these …
Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?
After reading Deepak Chopra’s discussion of Dawkin’s The God Delusion all I can conclude is that he’s an idiot who knows jack shit about science. OR, he’s a liar who is purposefully twisting the facts. On some level, I sometimes feel like the biggest war going on right now is one that has been going on, constantly, for ages: between reason and superstition. Don’t get me wrong: I can respect and care about religious people. But it comes back to me, from the television program “Root of All Evil”, that some religionists are so quick to say to atheists, “Don’t …
Goodbye, Cavendish Banana?
Oh, no, not again.
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Viewers fooled by ‘Belgium split’
Adrian at mssv posted a link to an interesting piece about a hoaxed new report of political secession in Belgium.
The Religious Gender Gap
Here’s an interesting article on the Religious Gender Gap. Not sure what I think about the explanation given here, but it’s not so far-fetched to me that basic differences in cognition, and consideration of the effects of social pressure on men in traditional societies… none of that is so highly objectionable. Though the bit about women accepting religious ideas “because they sound nice” is unfortunately put.
Scientific Creativity, East and West
Malcolm at waka waka waka links to (and discusses) a fascinating debate about Scientific Creativity, East and West. Personally, I think there are factors in some East Asian societies that do play negatively on things like creativity, but it’s my limited experience and I don’t think it’s necessarily irremediable. Cutting out a lot of the rote learning that everyone agrees factors too largely in East Asian education systems would go a long way to changing things. When Kanazawa says “Asians can’t think”, he’s really saying something more like, “Asians aren’t really commonly equipped or rewarded by their culture and education …
The Sonic Hedgehog Gene. No Kidding.
There is a gene called the Sonic Hedgehog Gene. I’m not kidding. It’s kind of sad. For more information, go see the post at Mssv.