This is just a casual, rambling observation, inspired by far too many of my experiences, but the skeptic in me forces the admission that none of this has been empirically tested or statistically supported. Yeah, you get that way when you spend too much time on such forums…
Much is made about the “connected” nature of our society anymore, and by that I mean, the ability by a noticeable
So, here’s a thought I had the other day about the nature of good and evil, which theologians and philosophers call theodicy I’m pretty sure philosophers have a name for those little lint balls that you get in your navel. And theologians have some kind of explanation that they’re god’s plan – just not how or why.
Anyway, genesis tells us that everything was hunky-dory
North Carolina winters are usually not too dire, and we can count on some good outdoor weather pretty much throughout, but this doesn’t mean that good photo subjects will be as readily available, so I’m resigned (albeit reluctantly) to the arrival of the slow season. This little gallery is my minor act of defiance.
Above, a photo that’s harder to capture than you might imagine.
At the moment (at least as I type this,) two prominent atheists are tossing forth and back about the old question of what would, or could, constitute evidence for god. Michael Shermer at Skepticblog and Jerry Coyne at
We all have experience with missing something right under our noses, or someone speaking to us who remains totally unheard because we’re concentrating on something else. The proper term for this is inattention blindness, and lots of videos and examples can be found online (Richard Wiseman, over there in the sidebar links, deals with this trait from time to time.) It is something that
The last post was one from my numbered series, and unfortunately I have three more from other series in the pipes, so you’re going to see a lot of sequels – I’m going to try and space them out as much as possible. And hopefully, I’ll do a better job than Hollywood sequels. At least mine are all by the original director…
A few years ago, a friend of mine told me about his young son, then three years old. It turns out the sprog was not only playing games on his folks’ computer, he had figured out how to install new ones on his own. This was not a child prodigy, and he wasn’t reading at the time – he’d learned it intuitively, by watching what his parents did and noticing how user interfaces
This is an extension of a much earlier post on meaning, or the universe’s apparent lack thereof, as well as Sean Carroll’s presentation from The Amaz!ng Meeting 2012. Both of those are virtual prerequisites for making the most out of this post, primarily because I don’t feel like reiterating a bunch of stuff.
So, given that there is no meaning to life, the universe, & everything
Courtesy of Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True, I want to alert people that Donald Prothero’s book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters is now on sale at Amazon, in e-book format. Normally $23.99, for month of November it is just $3.99!
In addition, one of Coyne’s readers, James (yes, the same James we all know and love) is throwing in an extra bonus:
In honor of the day, I present to you an image from a few weeks ago, while I was trying to get decent photographs of a tiny thread-legged assassin bug, Stenolemus lanipes. I thought the pattern on the abdomen could be considered appropriate.
Though I admit, now that The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog pointed out the ‘horns’ to me, which I’d missed at first, I now can’t help
