As I’d mentioned in my part three to my Alpha Course reaction, How Can We Have Faith, I volunteered to help judge a high school speech/debate tournament. It was a blast, and I learned some things, myself. I was hard-core speech and debate in my high school days. (Probably no surprise to anyone who knows [...]
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My daughter (and I, when I’m too lazy to work on writing like I should), watches a lot of Discovery Kids Channel. It has a lot of non-U.S. programming that’s a few years old, but much of it is educational or at least semi-educational while still being entertaining. Well, I discovered a couple of days [...]
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First, a little story: I’ve been a huge fan of SF author Steven Brust since circa 1988 when Taltos came out. (I didn’t know at the time that was not the first in the “Vlad Taltos” series, but it worked out OK.) After becoming a fan, I discovered Brust was a self-described Trotskyist. Being in [...]
READ MORE »First an annoying introduction; feel free to skip to the next heading: I, unlike pretty much every other English grad student I know/have known, am not an English teacher. Not for high school, nor did I teach undergrads while earning my English MA. Chances are pretty certain, though, that when I go for my PhD [...]
READ MORE »Today I just received my 11th A out of 11 grad school classes. *glee!* Now, I’ve NEVER been one to care much about grades (I graduated 40th out of 88 in high school, and while I did earn a 3.8+ in my undergrad theatre major, everything else was sucky enough to get me a total [...]
READ MORE »I think that’s the first time I’ve not written “Dr. Burling.” I’d known him since my first day of grad school three years ago and he’s had more of an impact on my life than anyone I’ve ever known, short of my wife and daughter. He was my professor, my mentor of sorts, my scholarly [...]
READ MORE »Warning: Extreme elitist misanthropic opinion follows. I watched the latest “Real Time with Bill Maher” the other day, and he decried the intelligence of the American people as unable to do the right thing when voting, citing as one of his examples the fact that most people (according to USA Today) believe in angels, particularly [...]
READ MORE »The last few weeks there have been a slew of postings and releases (to feature only a couple) regarding the rise of deadly measles and other once fully contained contagious diseases in the U.K. and the U.S. due to people not vaccinating. Enough people in some places have stopped vaccinating as to weaken the “herd [...]
READ MORE »Yesterday I posted a super-bloated overlong post: The failure of conservatism. (That’s what happens when I allow myself to write unedited in stream-of-consciousness–which is every time, really.) I railed against the ideas of free market capitalism and libertarian, objectivist anarchy in the modern world. I briefly mentioned public education as part of “the commons,” a [...]
READ MORE »Animal Farm revisited: There’s a chain email that’s being passed around conservative emailers that tells a story of a foreign freedom fighter describing to his American college professor how to capture wild pigs by feeding them free corn and slowly penning them in. The email ends with a quote: “A government big enough to give [...]
READ MORE »Let me ask you a question: How would you react if one day came home to discover that every room in your house had two or three CCTV cameras installed in it? You don’t know who’s watching them or when or why? Would you be OK with this? Let’s say someone came to your door, [...]
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When discussing and criticizing New Age, New Thought, pseudoscience beliefs (like The Secret, crystals, homeopathy, chiropractic, ESP, psychics, Tarot, astrology, chi, feng shui, ghosts, reflexology, etc. ad nauseum) people often say “Oh, what’s the big deal? It’s harmless; let people believe what they want,” it’s often because they themselves have some belief or three that [...]
READ MORE »Ugh! Sometimes I just can’t stand the people I’m closest to in politics. It’s times like this that reassure me that I’m a free thinker and not a lemming: I’ve slowly gone from pro-capital punishment to against, war admiring to war hating, and am slightly becoming more non-animal-eating*… but on the issue of gun control [...]
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…with one of these great tees! ♦ Wear Science- Teach the Controversy (Thanks BoingBoing!)
READ MORE »Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid blog/podcast has made a spiffy little movie (40 min) as a primer for critical thinking: ♦ Here Be Dragons – Movie It’s got some nice visuals, but I let it play in the background and just listened to it while I worked. It’s a little rough (for example, there are [...]
READ MORE »The Gene Expression science blog has an interesting post today: ♦ Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first? It’s a meta analysis of existing data culled from various sources which indicates that people who hold onto literal biblical interpretations tend to have lower IQs, and people of certain denominations have lower educations. For example, [...]
READ MORE »A couple bits of news in religious ignorance which have caught my eye today. The first is just rediculous, but the second may have far-reaching negative effects on most American public school children. But first: ♦ Ford dealership uses bigoted radio ads to sell cars In a gorgeous display of perfect irony, this Ford dealership [...]
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