The Catholic Church has recently found itself smack in the middle of the same controversy that we've all unfortunately become accustomed to hearing about over the past few years: perverted priests have been molesting children, and as usual, instead of publicly condemning these pedophiles and turning them over to the proper authorities, the church's response has been to reassign these monsters to new parishes and unleash them on unsuspecting communities full of pre-pubescent ass ripe for the tapping.
As we've seen before in the Light Fantastic documentary series, light presents some of the greatest mysteries in all of science. The following clip (from the horrendous movie What the Bleep Do We Know) does a surprisingly good job of explaining in simple terms the classic work on the single and double slit experiments involving photons, which led to the utterly strange conclusion that light can behave like particles and waves, depending on what you're looking for. This idea is appropriately referred to as particle-wave duality.
An Iranian Islamic cleric recently shocked the world of science by pointing out the mechanism responsible for earthquakes, and it turns out women are at fault... fault, get it? :) Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes. What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes.As far as I can tell, the only geological effect resulting from cleavage and sexiness is a volcanic eruption... in my pants! :)
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Boobquake Day Causes Earthquake | ||||
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I recently posted a facetious Onion story about concerned parents demanding that arsenic be removed from the periodic table of elements. Sadly, these hilarious stories are inspired by developments taking place in the real world :(
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Don't Mess With Textbooks | ||||
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| I's on Edjukashun - Texas School Board | ||||
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I don't know if you've noticed, but when previously lucid and perfectly respectable and reasonable people become parents, the brain systems responsible for rational thought seem to be taken over by a sense of protection bordering on paranoia and lunacy, as The Onion reports in this hilarious piece:
I don't get how people can just willfully make up their own facts, believe their own inventions, and subsequently completely forget/ignore the fact that they fabricated the whole thing, but that's probably why I'm not a preacher or a politician...
Whenever I have a question about how the world works, I usually either hit the books or try to investigate the question for myself, always assuming that there must be some natural explanation for the phenomenon raising my curiosity.
The roots of the idea of a free market can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment, but perhaps no scholar has done more to promulgate the Utopian dream of a free capitalistic society than the late and influential 20th century economist from the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman.
The ideal of a truly free market is one that should give us pause, not necessarily because it is wrong or ill-conceived but because so much depends on it, and because the unintended consequences of such a doctrine in the real world are so difficult to foresee. Any absolutist position on this issue is likely to be premature and ill-informed.
Educated and moderate Christians know better than to interpret the Bible literally. To do so, they rightly understand, would entail the rejection of virtually all good science. It would take lots of twisted logic (and an unabashed sense of denial) to reject the massive amounts of empirical evidence produced by independent branches of science over the past four centuries, all of which seem to suggest that the claims about the universe found in the Holy Book are just false.
Most of us tend to assume that our will is free, and that we are in control of our choices... except when things take a wrong turn, in which case we are quick to blame circumstances, environment, upbringing, invisible forces, etc. It's all very convenient...
It's easy to get used to the world of our experience, and to expect future innovations to resemble previous ones. If we want a bridge capable of withstanding tremendous amounts of weight, we might be inclined to think that the bridge itself must be massive; or if we want to perform more delicate surgeries, we might develop more precise tools for doctors to do their job, but never question the idea that a doctor must be directly involved.
There is an epidemic of growing proportions afflicting ever-increasing numbers of unsuspecting victims: poor, alarmist, fluffy and discombobulated thinking. We are drowning in a sea of logical fallacies, strangling each other with accusations of guilt by association, beating each other with ad hominem accusations, deluding ourselves into thinking that we can make our points through non-sequitur tangents, and living under the false assumption that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a universal and infallible causal principle.
God has got to have the best get-out-of-jail-free card ever!
If you've been working in an office for a while, getting fat off the corporate hog, chances are you've let yourself go. Sure, the paycheck may be nice, but at this point it looks more like you're just desperately compensating for the lack of energy and good looks you once had... yes, that time of your life when you could get chicks without having to flaunt your sports car or your power suit.
I've always liked Craig Ferguson. He strikes me not only as a funny dude but also as a decent human being, and my admiration for him has just grown since he decided to invite to his show a professional philosopher, Jonathan Dancy, to discuss the nature of morality. Dancy holds an interesting place in contemporary moral theory for his defense of moral particularism, the view that moral principles neither explain the nature of morality nor do they help us understand whether particular actions are right or wrong.
Among the pre-Socratics, it was Pythagoras who hypothesized that the most basic constituent of the universe wasn't some material substance but rather numbers. The idea must have seemed strange to most of his contemporaries, but over two thousands years of research have led to the inescapable conclusion that the book of the universe really seems to be written in the language of mathematics.
One of the most famous and intriguing mathematical patterns found throughout nature is phi (also known as the golden ratio). The idea is simple: two numbers are said to be in this ratio if the sum of the two numbers to the larger of the two is equal to the ratio of the larger to the smaller (like in the rectangles above). You can also converge on this fraction by taking the ratio between any two consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence (or in the Lucas series).
Growing up in poverty, I remember, with some strange and inexplicable sense of nostalgia, times when my family and I would have to skip meals because we couldn't afford to eat three times a day... or even every day sometimes. It must have killed my parents not to be able to feed their children, and I can't imagine the exasperation my father must have endured when I would ask why we had no food, not even noddles. With what I now understand to be that inexhaustible well of fatherly patience, his usual response was "because spaghetti doesn't grow on trees."
