"Life begins at ejaculation" - Ejaculating outside of a woman's vagina would be illegal →
globalpost.com
World of Warcraft responsible for largest genocide on record.
Also, this person holds an elected office.
February 2012
35 posts
Police, military coup deposes president of the Maldives
The US State Department’s reaction is ambivalent. President Mohamed Nasheed was a strong advocate for action on climate change and won the presidency in the first truly democratic elections after former president Maumoon Abdule Gayoom’s 30-year reign. Via DemocracyNow!
“Thinking for oneself is based on a particular kind of courage in which you hold truth, wisdom, and honesty in high esteem. When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself. If you’re unwilling to muster the courage to think critically, then someone will do the thinking for you, offering double-think and doubletalk relief.”
—Dr. Cornel West (via Facebook)
Thanks Sam Harris for crushing a cherished belief...
Just in case you needed some practice accepting uncomfortable new modifications to your worldview.
“The harassment has ramped up in recent years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University, whose book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, due to be published by Columbia University Press in early March, includes a retelling of his own ongoing experiences with harassment. “Political intimidation, character attacks, what appear to be orchestrated phone and email campaigns, nasty and thinly veiled threats, not just to us but to our families, are what it means in modern American life to be a climate scientist,” says Mann. Even this magazine, after publishing last October articles on the science of climate change—about its being under fire and about communicating that science to the public—received an abundance of letters with the tenor, “How could PHYSICS TODAY print such a one-sided portrayal of climate science when many reputable scientists disagree?”
Fossil-fuel interests, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA, “have adopted a shoot-the-messenger approach. It’s been a very successful strategy. They have created a chilling effect, so other [scientists] won’t say what they think and the conversation in public stays bereft of anyone who knows what they are talking about.” Schmidt cofounded RealClimate.org, a forum for climate scientists to “provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a vocal opponent to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, is suing NASA for the release of Schmidt’s personal emails.” —
Fossil-fuel interests, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA, “have adopted a shoot-the-messenger approach. It’s been a very successful strategy. They have created a chilling effect, so other [scientists] won’t say what they think and the conversation in public stays bereft of anyone who knows what they are talking about.” Schmidt cofounded RealClimate.org, a forum for climate scientists to “provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a vocal opponent to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, is suing NASA for the release of Schmidt’s personal emails.” —
Toni Feder, Physics Today
Pretty chilling stuff. Not sure what constitutes felony intimidation, but hopefully some of these people see some repercussions for terrorizing climatologists.
January 2012
15 posts
What shape is a point?
The question by itself is invalid of course.
Points are infinitesimal and have no spatial extent - that is they have no area or length, just a set of coordinates that determines their position in space.
But we have to represent a point with something and most people represent them with a little circle. Earlier today I was thinking to myself, “Why not another shape?” Maybe a square or a star or anything. It occurred to me though that points and circles have something in common: they are rotationally symmetric. If you draw a circle on piece of paper, you can spin it around as much and in any direction you want and it will still look the same. The same is true for any single point.
It might be a trivial point (get it?), but it made me grin a little bit when I realized that a little circle probably is the best representation for a point.
Dungeon Masters →
hulu.com
Just got done watching this interesting documentary about the lives of three committed D&D gamers. Escapism and early lives that were rough or unconventional seem to be themes common to each of the film’s subjects. All three are in the lower or middle rungs of the economy. This correlates fairly well with D&D people I have known personally.
As a young adult I have really mixed feelings about D&D and it’s various pen-and-paper offspring. On the one hand I still take pleasure from reading the fiction and the scenarios, and even some of the rules in D&D books. On the other hand, games that are not in a lose-win-draw format don’t have as big of an appeal for me as they used to. I like games like Warhammer 40k and Hordes where there is winner and a loser. If I win, cool. If I lose, what can I learn from the loss to play a better game.
The dungeon master can always kill the players no matter what. An angry god can just destroy the continent that the players are on and *woop* you lose. Most dungeon masters don’t do that or else the players won’t be very interested in playing. At the same time being invincible is no fun either. It isn’t a drama if the hero always wins. So to me D&D doesn’t feel as much like a game, more like mediated social interaction; telling a group story. There isn’t anything wrong with that, it just doesn’t fulfill the same desire that a game of 40k or few rounds of Team Fortress 2 does.
Thoughts and comments welcome.
"Nationwide 'Occupy' strike paralyzes Nigeria" →
usatoday.com
Hopefully, things go peacefully for them.
“One of the more delusional aspects of capitalism is the idea that if one pursues the acquisition of private wealth with abandon, that this is somehow automatically “good” for human society. The laissez-faire advocate and novelist Ayn Rand wrote that if one does not support this notion that greed is good and pursuing “enlightened self-interest,” (as Adam Smith characterized it), is the highest virtue, then one defaults to supporting a centralized oppressive regime that allows no personal freedom and no private wealth whatsoever. One supports living in darkness and despair or, in a word, Hell. This Manichean thinking is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition dating back to the Indus Valley divide between the Vedic traditions and the Zoroastrian belief system of ancient Persia. The notion that the world is characterized by an ongoing “war” between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is at the base of much of so-called western thought.”
—
Doug Harvey (via azspot)
A fairly accurate summary.
