by Carl Howard | Jan 10, 2014 | Charity and Philanthropy, History, Medicine, Race, Resources, Food and Environment
First, consider a question you probably don’t think about often and might consider indelicate: how you clean your bum after you do a poo? Hold the thought, it’ll come in handy in a sec later. TED talks. While they might have been an exciting new thing when they first...
by Carl Howard | Dec 16, 2013 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, History, Race, Society
A very common political trope in western liberal democracies is for more conservative people to call candidates/policies by less conservative people/parties as communist or socialist or a similar pejorative term. This happens during elections but also during the day...
by Carl Howard | Dec 12, 2013 | Blog Topics, Language, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
A while ago, I saw a full page ad for Rosetta Stone (a language learning software company) in the Scientific American in an Istanbul hostel. I had to take a photo because I was so shocked at the content. (Transcript is on this page.) I’ll ignore the wordiness. It...
by Carl Howard | Dec 4, 2013 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Ethics, History, Race, Science and Skepticism, Society
It’s common to hear lamentations about the stupidity of the general voting public. “And these people vote!” is a common ending to a story about stupidity as you can see in the image above. It’s not as combative as “And these people breed!” (which I might cover later)...
by Carl Howard | Nov 28, 2013 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, History, Race
There’s been some news coverage about the Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. As part if the annual Feast of St Nicholas celebrations, Santa is accompanied by a servant (whose appearance is of pagan origin). Basically lots of people put on blackface. ...
by Carl Howard | Nov 14, 2013 | Charity and Philanthropy, History, Interesting Stuff, Resources, Food and Environment, Science and Skepticism, Society
Every year, Edge.org publishes responses of about 100-150 scientists, philosophers, public intellectuals (and alas some, cranks) to a single question. It’s generally an interesting read, previous posts are about the 2011 question (What is the most important invention...
