by Carl Howard | Feb 18, 2014 | Ethics, Feminism and LGBT, Society
You’ve probably heard about the Enders Game boycott. If not, it’s targeted at an upcoming sci-fi movie that’s based on a book of the same name by Orson Scott Card. The book is very famous and regularly makes lists of top sci-fi movies of all time (although this...
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 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 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...
