July 2010
120 posts
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Yesterday, we heard that Christopher Hitchens had suspended his book tour for “personal reasons.” Today, we found out what that means. Hitch has esophageal cancer and will undergo chemotherapy for it. Chemo for esophageal cancer usually involves cisplatin, which is often described as one of the most “emetogenic” chemo drugs. In other words, it makes you puke your guts up,...
June 2010
78 posts
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“I’m just saying you only get one life. There’s no God, no rules, no judgements,...”
– Nate, Six Feet Under. (via travors)
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Gasland: A film by Josh Fox →
“The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a “Saudia Arabia of natural gas” just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey...
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Lara Logan, You Suck by Matt Taibbi--... →
Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat...
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A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret : NPR →
For nearly 20 years, neuroscientist Jim Fallon has studied the brains of psychopaths. After learning that his ancestry included alleged murderers, he decided to study his own brain. He was shocked at what he discovered.
Very interesting! And kind of creepy…
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Should skeptic organizations be atheist... →
The skeptic movement will be inclusive and allow anyone to participate, and participation means your ideas will be scrutinized and criticized and sometimes mocked and sometimes praised. It is the very nature of the beast. If you want to claim special privilege for your ideas and insist that they may not be exposed to the light and harshly dissected, then you’re right — you aren’t a...
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Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.
Great talk!
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Dear Chelsea Handler,
Tonight you were laughing with your panel about how Al Gore might have sounded when he was (allegedly) sexually assaulting the massage therapist and insinuating that she must be making false accusations because she was 54 years old.
This is the angle you want to take? She was too old and ugly to be assaulted?? That is a bunch of BS and shame on you for using it at an attempt at comedy. It is...
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The Devuvuzelator! →
Sick of the vuvuzela? Me too. If you’re watching the game on your computer like I am, just download and run the program below to filter your live World Cup broadcast in real-time (ESPN3, BBC, etc), choosing which level of de-vuvuzela’ing filtering you find most suitable. No installation required, just download and run!
Haven’t tried this out yet, but it could be useful :-)
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Men who batter think other guys do, too |... →
In every case the men vastly overestimated the actual instances of abuse. For example, the participants on average thought 27.6 percent of men had thrown something with the intent of hurting a partner while the actual number is 11.9 percent. Similarly, they believed 23.6 percent of men had forced their partner to have sex involuntary compared to 7.9 percent in reality. “With sexual assault the...
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Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn’t make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls “word blindness.” His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him.
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chad swanzy...: ATHEISM →
A true atheist has devoted considerable time, effort, and energy searching for God. They have explored for themselves, seeking answers from all sides, asking countless questions, while never leaving their quest for the truth.
Um, no. Let me flip this around so perhaps you can see your error. Have you “devoted considerable time, effort, and energy searching” for the Flying...
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“They’ve distorted our constitutional discourse to make it sound like the Court’s...”
– Al Franken (via azspot) (via wfb) (via jonathan-cunningham)
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Wrong by Design: Why Our Brains Are Fooled by... →
Our brains are weird!
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http://twitter.com/GeorgeHrab/status/15433802938 →
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Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being... →
Different people prioritize different values over others, of course. And of course, different individuals and different cultures come to different conclusions about the right ethical choice in any particular situation: based on our cultural biases, as well as on our own personal observations and experiences. But according to this research, these basic values — fairness, harm, loyalty,...
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“Wait, David Beckham is real?!”
– My nine year old niece after seeing Beckham during the US v. England match
(Like he’s a mythical creature! We just about died laughing, it was so cute.)
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“It’s always been my sense that feminism, skepticism, and atheism are a natural...”
– Amanda Marcotte, Feminist Atheist Skepticism
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The Just-World Fallacy « You Are Not So Smart →
The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.
“Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian,...
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“Imagine if Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) — the nation’s first elect Muslim...”
– Schumer Says Strangle Gaza Until They Do What We Want (via ryking) (via ihatethismess)
So true. 