by Carl Howard | Nov 28, 2011 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy
The question of definitions (what is an atheist vs agnostic) and all that nonsense have been popping up again. Especially the recent exchange between Larry Moran (here, here and here) and John Wilkins (here, here, here). Before I post on this I thought it might be...
by Carl Howard | Nov 14, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
A quick follow-up to last week’s post about the dancing squid. An interesting related post was made on the Seed of Reason blog in 2009. The post speaks of the danger of basing too much of our conclusions about the lives of animals on direct observation — which I would...
by Carl Howard | Nov 7, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Science and Skepticism
You might have seen this video making the rounds a few months ago. It’s of a whole (small) squid on a bowl of rice in presumably a Japanese restaurant. The diner pours soy sauce over the squid and it starts to wriggle around coming alive. My first impression of the...
by Carl Howard | Oct 10, 2011 | Blog Topics, Science and Skepticism
Last week I looked at biodynamics, the brainchild of Rudolf Steiner. However, this forms only a small part of anthroposophy, the belief system invented by esoteric philosopher Steiner. Anthroposophy was developed in the early 20th century and as such it has some of...
by Carl Howard | Sep 6, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
There’s quite a lot of content out there that reaches beyond the standard logical fallacies and peels the layers of the onion. It talkis about the deeper biases and features of our brain that make us all susceptible to flawed and magical thinking, as opposed to more...
by Carl Howard | Aug 22, 2011 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Interesting Stuff, Science and Skepticism
You’re probably familiar with the original Sokal’s Hoax. If not here’s a brief summary otherwise skip down to the Sokal 2 heading. The Sokal hoax was perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics+mathematics dismayed at the excesses of postmodernism in academia....
