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 | 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 | Nov 11, 2013 | Atrocities and Oppression, History, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness
Young members of the Khmer Rouge, Tuol Sleng Museum, Phnom Penh It’s a cliche that various horrible events from the 20th century have changed the popular understanding of human behaviour — but it’s true. It particularly hit me in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum looking...
by Carl Howard | Jan 7, 2013 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Yes. (At least for many of the most useful definitions of machines/beasts.) But I guess there’s a lot more to it — or so a lot of bloviators would like us to believe. There are a lot of opinion pieces out there that decry the materialism/reductionism/scientism...
by Carl Howard | Dec 11, 2012 | Blog Topics, Medicine, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
There’s a pretty common view that as a society we’re inappropriately overmedicalising ourselves in terms of psychological and psychiatric disorders. Some of the reasons given include: We’re self-centred and whiny first worlders who all have comfortable lives and...
by Carl Howard | Nov 22, 2012 | Blog Topics, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Philosophy, Sex
On Dan Savage’s podcast and advice column about sex, he sometimes get questions about particular turn-ons that ask about their origin. Three fake examples I made up since it’s a bit hard to go through the thousands of archived questions: “My partner has a rape fantasy...
