by Carl Howard | Feb 5, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
A year ago, I moved. The new apartment is in a building right behind a train station. There’s just a very small park between it and the station, maybe 25 metres across. The park has a playground and a table with benches and a roof. It’s a fairly quiet suburb and a...
by Carl Howard | Jan 30, 2014 | Blog Topics
So if you’re into that sorta thing (and enjoy reading the blog), I’d appreciate it if you liked it. Here’s the page: https://www.facebook.com/FailBlueDot. I’ll shortly return to our regularly-scheduled programming…
by Carl Howard | Jan 27, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Society
I saw a meme recently (captioned “He lost an arm. She had a double mastectomy. This is their Christmas card…”): Woman getting a bra as a Christmas present, man using hook to take out a present which is a glove for the hand he’s missing. Both look sheepish. This...
by Carl Howard | Jan 26, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, History, Race
You don’t need to do rocket surgery to see the above painting as a ridiculous farce, a racist mythology. The fact that Columbus Day is meant to actually celebrate a genocide should make us disgusted. And yet many “ordinary” people in the US don’t see the obvious...
by Carl Howard | Jan 13, 2014 | Language
I’ve posted about some of the difficulties non-Chinese speakers may face with the language before. Recently I’ve read a wonderful 1991 piece called Why Is Chinese So Damn Hard? by none other than Moser, a professor of Chinese studies. It’s very interesting and worth a...
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...
