Fighting with abstracts

This one’s going to be a little bit weird. I mean, more so than usual. It started as just an offhand comment, but grew into a strange bit of philosophical inspection.

I recently read, yet again, the journalistic cliché about someone “beating the odds.” Which is complete nonsense. No one ever beats the odds, though they might fall right in line with the odds in a favorable way – read more

Repost: You don’t look a day over eighty

This is cheating, I know, and especially lazy when the posts have been so thin lately. I could have just linked to it while providing new content, but I find the original from last year to be pretty complete. Plus I’m not sure who actually follows links…

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So not only is today the summer solstice, but also World Humanist Day – which is, admittedly, an odd read more

Other ways of getting the results you want

Every once in a while, you will get to hear the phrase, “other ways of knowing” – almost invariably, it will be in defense of some topic that is sorely lacking in demonstrable evidence or repeatable results. But this doesn’t matter, because science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, since there are other ways of knowing. While, not surprisingly, read more

Mucking out the stall

Anyone who’s ever dealt with livestock housed in a barn knows about the wicked unbalance of energy involved: it takes a lot more effort to remove the shit than it did to deposit it. This is an apt analogy for addressing theology.

Jerry Coyne and the various commenters at Why Evolution Is True had a read more

Lest we forget

I’m not very big on tradition – in fact, I find it pointless, likely a peculiar artifact of our evolutionary past – but I savor the opportunity to repost this, so consider me a hypocrite if you like. Either way, take this little quiz yourself, or past it along to all those you know who want to pompously remind you of the True™ meaning of Easter. Or is it Eostre?

8. read more

Blame it on the environment

This is partially an extension of a previous post about the amount of lying that is found within religion, and partially thoughts sparked by a post elsewhere on cults. While a lot of people feel there is a distinctive dividing line between religion and cult (most especially, no one feels they are read more

Too cool, part 22: Your Inner Fish on PBS

Damn, this is what comes from being out of the loop as much as I am. While I never hear about what every chuzzlewit celebrity is up to (which is a major plus,) I also don’t hear about promising new programs in time to give adequate notice. Case in point: Your Inner Fish, airing tonight on PBS.

That name should sound familiar, considering that I reviewed the read more

Man against nature

There’s nothing particularly deep about this one (and I hear you wondering how that makes it different from my other posts, and I’m ignoring you,) but it’s just a perspective that, it seems, too many people fail to grasp.

There is a surprisingly common concept of “man against nature” that keeps popping up, not just from asinine reality shows, but routinely in outdoorsy read more

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