Physicists Confirm They Found and Killed the 'God Particle'

Virtually since the inception of its moniker, many atheists have hated the fact that the Higgs Boson, a theoretical subatomic particle thought to be responsible for attributing mass to matter, has been referred to as the "God Particle."

But as The Onion reports, they may finally have reason to celebrate, as news have been revealed that physicists have finally found, and then killed, that goddamn particle...

But if you actually want to get an idea of what the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field are, you can check out the LHC tag, or just watch this short clip with the awesome Sean Carroll:

"To This Day" ... for the Bullied and Beautiful

The saying goes that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me... I've broken my bones before, a couple of ribs, but there are forms of pain that are orders of magnitude worse, and which leave scars that last much longer, but that no one can see because they are not branded in your body; they are branded in your memory and soul...

Despite the amazing things that we have in this world, and despite the amazing things people do to help and inspire each other, there is still a very large amount of cruelty inflicted on people, especially the ones least able to cope with it. And even when we're not directly cruel, we are often indifferent, apathetic, and we blind ourselves to the cries of help that people who are drowning are barely able to make audible.

This poem, by Shane Koyczan, is dedicated to those people:

Sometimes, when the pain is too much, people jump off the cliff... but sometimes they fall because they've been brought to the brink and got pushed off by cruelty and indifference...

Do your part to bring light and laughter to people's lives...

Wealth Inequality in America

If you consider the difference between what people think is the distribution of wealth in America vs what they consider the ideal distribution vs the actual distribution... you'd be flabbergasted...

The Occupy Wall Street movement tried to raise awareness about the fact that the bottom 99% of Americans have to live under the oppression, greed and corruption of the top 1%.

If you need to visualize these ratios in order to get a better sense of what's going on in the US, the following animation will be an eye-opener.

Go share...

Porn Stars and Beauty Queens

Any lovers of irony or fans of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 out there? If so, I have a story for you...

So it turns out that Melissa King, a girl who did some porn to be able to make the money necessary to enter a beauty pageant, ended up losing her Miss Delaware crown for having been in said porn... oh irony of ironies...

Before my rant, because I do have a couple of things to say, here's the story:

Obviously, given the puritanical attitude our society has toward sexuality and how quick we are to condemn stuff that we privately can't live without, that wasn't the smartest choice on her part, but the real problem is the hypocrisy and double standards created by beauty pageants: on the one hand, they don't want their contestants to engage in public displays of sexuality, and punish them when they do; on the other hand, beauty pageants are in the business of objectifying women and exploiting their sexuality. Sure, they pretend that it's about etiquette, sophistication, intelligence, grace, talent and so on, but you know the kind of debacle you get when you actually ask these girls even simple questions whose answers are not as simple as "world peace."

Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against shallow physical attraction, or even against using our bodies to achieve certain ends, provided no one gets hurt or exploited in the process. I have no objection to the "beauty" aspect of beauty pageants, and I have absolutely no problem with the sexiness of non-exploitative porn (those assholes that try to degrade girls in their videos really are douchebags, though, and should be castrated).

If we think that it's okay to employ someone based on their intellectual abilities, it strikes me as hypocritical that we couldn't do the same for physical attributes. In fact, we do! That's what professional sports are about. It's only when it comes to sex that everyone gets bent out of shape. But here's the thing, as a person, you are both a mind and a body. To focus only on one of these to the exclusion of the other is to really objectify you, to ignore the totality of who and what you are, and to focus only on the part of you, whatever it may be, that turns you into some kind of object. Given this basic reality, it is probably impossible not to objectify people.

My problem with beauty pageants is the farce, the hypocrisy, the claim that you can't use your own body to express your sexuality unless they get to use your body for their purposes, the idea that displaying your body in their parade is okay, but that displaying it in a video somewhere else is not. You might say that beauty pageants want to set a good example for younger girls, and porn doesn't do that for obvious reasons, but here's the thing: neither do beauty pageants. Beauty pageants teach young, impressionable girls that the most important thing in the world is to be beautiful, not smart, not educated, not curious, not interesting... beautiful above all else. When was the last time you saw a fat or ugly chick win one of these pageants, no matter how interesting, articulate or intelligent she may have been? Hell, have you even seen them participate, let alone win? And worse, because beauty pageants are deemed as socially acceptable, they are more pernicious than porn. Most little girls don't want to grow up to be a porn star, but lots of them do want to be princesses and beauty pageant queens.... and we wonder why we have a problem of female under-representation in academically challenging subjects...

And another thing that's been bothering me for a while now is the number of people whose professional careers are ruined because of personal choices they've made in the past (or concurrently), and that have absolutely nothing to do with their jobs. Why are we punishing people for living their own lives? If you are a doctor during the week, and then make sexy videos on Saturdays, and you don't botch up your surgeries, what business is it of anyone else's to tell you you can no longer work for a particular hospital because of what you do on your own time?

If I go to the doctor, what matters is her ability to treat whatever is ailing me, not her personal choices (at least not if they will not affect my physical health); if I go to a lawyer, his weird foot fetish has absolutely no relevance to my corporate merger; if I attend a lecture, the professor's pole dancing skills at the strip club last weekend has nothing to do with her lesson on epigenetics; if I get arrested by a police officer, I don't get to resist on the grounds that I've seen videos of her naked online...

I may pass personal judgment on any of these people, or not, but why should they lose their jobs because other people and their delicate sensibilities are offended?

And the saddest thing in this story, having seen her video by now, is that this poor girl doesn't even have a future in porn: she kinda sucks... She really got screwed  :(

The TEDTalks Woo-Woo Speech - The Science Delusion

When they first became publicly available, I instantly fell in love with TEDTalks (as you can tell from all the presentations I've posted in this blog). Having leading thinkers condense their various ideas and deliver them in powerful 18-minute presentations was a great way to introduce and inspire the general public with a vision of education, empowerment and cross-disciplinary cooperation from which everyone could benefit.

Unfortunately, since greatness and true innovation are limited resources, the day would come when TED would run out of the best and most interesting speakers, and would have to content itself with more questionable characters willing to deliver shoddy presentations that sacrifice truth and the discoveries of rigorous research for the sake of wanting to sound revolutionary, controversial or intellectually daring and interesting. And so the past year or two has seen a steep decline in the quality of their presentations, and it's gotten to the point, apparently, that they are happy to showcase the nonsensical pseudo-scientific views of a man who, aided by a pretty awesome British accent, willfully mischaracterizes serious science and philosophy in order to peddle his quackery about telepathy and crystals having memory...

In short: "woo-woo must exist because I can't explain some things and because I don't really understand how science works... even though I should, since I'm a scientist..."

Now, that's not to say that one cannot challenge science... nothing should be immune from question. but while we recognize science is the best means we have of attaining knowledge of the world, we also need to be aware of its limits precisely so that we can protect it from misuse and abuse by unscrupulous parties who demand of it that it do things outside of its proper domain. The consequence should be obvious: if we ask science to do things outside of its proper field of application, and science fails to get us those results, we are likely to make the mistake of assuming that such a failure is somehow science's fault. But this is a ridiculous position to adopt. It's as if you ask your plumber to perform brain surgery, the plumber botches the operation, and you think that obviously plumbing is useless...

It's one thing to criticize science, but it's quite another to mischaracterize it with straw man arguments in order to pretend to have beaten it into submission, and it's yet another to think you can replace it with pseudo-scientific bullshit simply because it doesn't conform to your woo-woo nonsense beliefs...

It would be awesome to see a real intellectual respond to Sheldrake in just the same way that Daniel Dennett took Rick Warren to task for his vacuous-driven talk... Can we rely on TED to deliver such a goodie?


Update: It looks like the folks at TED have listened to criticisms similar to mine, apparently from lots of people, and they have decided to pull Rupert's talk and one by Graham Hancock on consciousness. Let that be a lesson to anyone wanting to present: make sure you have done your homework, or be prepared to be ridiculed in the eternal land of the interwebs...

What Is Philosophy?

Believe it or not, the question of what philosophy is, while itself a philosophical question, is actually kind of difficult to answer. You could say that philosophy is what philosophers do, but when you ask what philosophers do, you'd realize the first answer was pretty circular... and yet it's not so off the mark as one might expect...

Anyway, the folks at Philosophy Bites decided to ask this question to a good number of leading philosophers, and here are their answers:

And if my own take is at all worth your time, I would probably say that philosophy, broadly speaking, is the recursive activity of working out the right way to think about any particular subject. And in case you're confused, this meta aspect of philosophy (thinking correctly about the correct way to think) refers to the investigation of the conditions under which a particular way of thinking is appropriate or inappropriate, and why.