Thursday, October 22

Christopher Hitchens on The Ten Commandments.

Wednesday, October 21

Plagiarism software finds new Shakespeare play.
I just love those Vancouver International Film Festival ads.
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard.
After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing.
A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper.
This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
[more]
Get up. Get on up. Get on the scene.
Circumcision, brain injuries and religious quests. All in one bizarre story.

Tuesday, October 20

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.
Sex, lies, and trafficking.
Original USB prankster.
Embrace the cliché - or wage war against it.
Even more exoplanets. So many other houses in the neighbourhood - and yet there's no one to play with.

Sunday, October 18

Hapax legomenon: a word which occurs only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text.
Every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists.
Michael Sandel on the role of morality in politics.
Sex and Gender: sometimes it's clearcut and sometimes it isn't.
The following film may contain scenes that disturb you.
Honestly, is Conservapedia for real?
Levitt:

"Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem. "

more here
Superfreakonomics should be out in a few days - and it appears they've made embarrassing errors about global warming. Even Paul Krugman had to weigh in (after reading just 5 pages of the global warming chapter).
"The illusion of retrospective determinism". I like the sound of that.
China: the recession's real winner.
How are paintings by the Old Masters named?

Saturday, October 17

The weekly Acoustic News.
Tracey Morgan is disturbingly like his on-screen persona.
Time slideshow: The State of the American Woman.
Has second wave feminism made women more miserable?
Check out No.17 on The Boston Globe's list of "Scariest Movies of All Time".
. . . and soon we shall see through Reality Filters darkly . . .
Interracial couple in Lousiana denied marriage license.
Americans are becoming less nomadic
The American Denial of Global Warming: video from the University of California's youtube channel.
Skeptics in movies always get what's coming to them.

Friday, October 16

"There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face". Or is there?

Thursday, October 15

It's not cold in here - you're just dying.
Real men of genius.
Life-long theists have fewer educational qualifications than life-long atheists but converts to atheism (at least in the UK) tend to be less educated than converts to theism. from The Guardian blogs
A talk with Thomas Metzinger on consciousness, lucid dreaming and out of body experiences.
This movie may contain scenes of sexuality.

Tuesday, October 13

Obviously crimes such as Polanski's are treated less leniently these days.
This week's Guardian Science podcast on the science of sex.