I’m in the middle of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. He talks about experiments in which subjects are shown letters in random orientations, and have to figure out whether the letters are mirror-flipped or not. What was found was that people have to mentally rotate the letters they see, so that they’re right-side-up, at […]
GMAFB: DUNDEE UNIVERSITY has been accused of “antagonising Christians” with a forthcoming Christmas lecture that challenges one of the central tenets of the faith. Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians. The article […]
Over at the “playground” section of the Expelled site, there’s a video of a can-can where the dancers’ heads have been replaced by those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Sam Harris, and Charles Darwin. This was made with a tool at JibJab that allows you to replace people’s heads in videos they provide. As […]
Hey Joe, Jimi Hendrix Hey Jude, The Beatles Hey You, Pink Floyd Hey Ah, Laurie Anderson Hey! Hey!, Cabaret Voltaire Hey Ho!, Lords of Acid Hey Bulldog, The Beatles Hey Man Nice Shot, Filter Hey Hey What Can I Do, Led Zeppelin Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal, They Might Be Giants Hey Citizen!, ABC
CNN has a story about an experiment that suggests that 6- to 10-month-old infants have at least some innate social skills: The infants watched a googly eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were […]
Remember Conservapædia, the neocon alternative to Wikipedia’s liberal bias? Here’s a snapshot of today’s list of today’s top ten most viewed pages. See if you can notice a pattern. (HT Wonkette.)
Have you ever upgraded a machine, only to find that during the upgrade, your device names got rearranged, so that your filesystems aren’t where they used to be, and you can’t mount anything? This happened to us at work: we upgraded a fileserver with a hundred or so filesystems on a SAN. The driver software silently […]
According to News.com.au, Nov. 11: SANTAS working in shopping centres across Australia have been banned from bellowing “ho ho ho” because it might frighten children.[…] “The reason behind that is we find that in some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ‘ho, ho, hos’ and we ask them to be […]
On Monday, Phillip Johnson appeared on the ID the Future podcast, and talked about being interviewed for Judgment Day, the Nova episode about Intelligent Design and the Dover trial. He said that while the producer and crew were pleasant enough, but expressed concern that the interview would be mangled in editing, possibly to make it sound […]
