Interesting Stuff Thread

Dave! · 24-10-2010 11:23pm

Woah, that's mad -- Josh Timonen was rather heavily involved in everything wasn't he? Ran the website, made DVDs and stuff I think?

MagicMarker · 25-10-2010 10:16am

Dave! wrote: »

Woah, that's mad -- Josh Timonen was rather heavily involved in everything wasn't he? Ran the website, made DVDs and stuff I think?

As one of the comments said.

‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ was dedicated to Josh Timonen.

“This book is dedicated to Josh Timonen, with thanks to him and to the small and dedicated band who originally worked with him to set up Richard Dawkins.net. The web knows Josh as an inspired site designer, but that is just the tip of an amazing iceberg. Josh’s creative talent runs deep, but the image of the iceberg captures neither the versatile breadth of his contributions to our joint endeavour, nor the warm good humour with which he makes them.”

Turtwig · 25-10-2010 11:04am

As with all trials I'm just going along with innocent until proven guilty. That said, I didn't like his conduct when he shut down the forums.

Galvasean · 26-10-2010 2:43pm

Paul the psychic octopus has passed away

'He appears to have passed away peacefully during the night, of natural causes, and we are consoled by the knowledge that he enjoyed a good life here,' said Mr Porwoll.

'We may decide to give Paul his own small burial plot within our grounds and erect a modest permanent shrine.'

http://www.rte.ie/sport/soccer/2010/1026/octupus.html

Let us pray that the FSM welcomes him with open noodly appendage.

Dades · 26-10-2010 4:10pm

The Lord hath smote him for his sinful love of shellfish.

mikhail · 26-10-2010 5:04pm

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/50524251-76/depression-health-mental-jensen.html.csp

Religion cuts both ways when it comes to depression, according to two Utah Valley University researchers.

People who see themselves as active participants in their faith are less susceptible to depression. But for those who feel alienated from their religion, it makes them more likely to be clinically depressed.

mehfesto · 27-10-2010 9:41am

Apologies if it's Ben Dunne, but some bible hicks have bought the url 'davidnorrisforpresident.com'

MagicMarker · 27-10-2010 1:17pm

Pedobear vs Sexual Harrassment Panda?

ColmDawson · 27-10-2010 5:01pm

mehfesto wrote: »

Apologies if it's Ben Dunne, but some bible hicks have bought the url 'davidnorrisforpresident.com'

Every bit of that site is creepy and intrusive and presumptuous and ignorant.

recedite · 27-10-2010 6:59pm

The Magill article is a bit disturbing.

mehfesto · 28-10-2010 12:59am

ColmDawson wrote: »

Every bit of that site is creepy and intrusive and presumptuous and ignorant.

Yup. It's worse on Campaign for Conscience, the page it's linked to. But some great one-liners/headers there. Such as:

Homosexuals can have tens of thousands of partners in a lifetime.

"Lesbian" women were more than 4 times as likely to have had more than 50 lifetime male partners than women in the general population.

He seems to refuse to accept lesbians - they're always "lesbians" to him:D.

amacachi · 28-10-2010 2:16am

mehfesto wrote: »

Yup. It's worse on Campaign for Conscience, the page it's linked to. But some great one-liners/headers there. Such as:

Homosexuals can have tens of thousands of partners in a lifetime.

"Lesbian" women were more than 4 times as likely to have had more than 50 lifetime male partners than women in the general population.

He seems to refuse to accept lesbians - they're always "lesbians" to him:D.

They don't sound like the kind of lesbians I've come across.

magicbastarder · 28-10-2010 11:13am

evolution proves to have taken another wrong turn:

New species of monkey sneezes when it rains
A new species of snub-nosed monkey that sneezes when it rains has been
discovered in the remote Himalayan forests of Burma.

The monkey, measuring almost two feet high with a tail even longer than its body
size, has an extraordinary upturned nose and full lips. It is the largest
snub-nosed monkey species in the world.

Little is known about the habits of the black monkey with a white beard, but
locals say it is easy to find the animals because it sneezes when it rains.

To avoid getting rainwater in their noses they spend rainy days sitting with
their heads tucked between their knees, according to locals.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8087632/New-species-of-monkey-sneezes-when-it-rains.html

strobe · 28-10-2010 12:03pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

evolution proves to have taken another wrong turn:

New species of monkey sneezes when it rains
A new species of snub-nosed monkey that sneezes when it rains has been
discovered in the remote Himalayan forests of Burma.

The monkey, measuring almost two feet high with a tail even longer than its body
size, has an extraordinary upturned nose and full lips. It is the largest
snub-nosed monkey species in the world.

Little is known about the habits of the black monkey with a white beard, but
locals say it is easy to find the animals because it sneezes when it rains.

To avoid getting rainwater in their noses they spend rainy days sitting with
their heads tucked between their knees, according to locals.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8087632/New-species-of-monkey-sneezes-when-it-rains.html

An early and abandoned attempt by God to use evolution as his tool to turn monkeys into man by intelligently designing their noses in such a way as to encourage them to adopt a position conductive to prayer when the good Lord rewards them with life preserving rain. Obviously.

Pygmalion · 28-10-2010 11:24pm

mehfesto wrote: »

Yup. It's worse on Campaign for Conscience, the page it's linked to. But some great one-liners/headers there. Such as:

Homosexuals can have tens of thousands of partners in a lifetime.

Where can I sign up for this lifestyle?

mikhail · 28-10-2010 11:37pm

Pygmalion wrote: »

Where can I sign up for this lifestyle?

60*365.25 = 21915.

That's sixty years of one partner a day for just over two tens of thousands. To really get into the tens of thousands, I think you'd need to be participating in huge orgies pretty regularly. And all of this insists that you almost never sleep with the same person twice, while finding new partners at a rate of a couple a day. Most people don't speak with tens of thousands of people in their lifetime.

I'm never sure to what extent the sort of people who make this kind of claim are phenomenally stupid, and to what extent that they're just outright lying to attract attention. It's a bit like Poe's Law: you just can't tell.

Pygmalion · 28-10-2010 11:48pm

mikhail wrote: »

60*365.25 = 21915.

That's sixty years of one partner a day for just over two tens of thousands. To really get into the tens of thousands, I think you'd need to be participating in huge orgies pretty regularly. And all of this insists that you almost never sleep with the same person twice, while finding new partners at a rate of a couple a day. Most people don't speak with tens of thousands of people in their lifetime.

I'm never sure to what extent the sort of people who make this kind of claim are phenomenally stupid, and to what extent that they're just outright lying to attract attention. It's a bit like Poe's Law: you just can't tell.

He did say homosexuals, as in the plural, maybe he meant that all homosexuals in the world combined will have 10s of thousands of partners over the course of 70 years.

robindch · 29-10-2010 12:05am

Pygmalion wrote: »

He did say homosexuals, as in the plural, maybe he meant that all homosexuals in the world combined will have 10s of thousands of partners over the course of 70 years.

Given that there are almost certainly between 200 and 500 million gay men and women around, but only tens of thousands of partners, then he must think that these fine individuals must be amongst the most celibate humans on earth.

I'm fairly sure that's not what he meant though.

Galvasean · 29-10-2010 12:09am

Just masturbate in the ocean. That way you have sex with everyone who happens to be swimming at the time. Simples

mikhail · 29-10-2010 12:10am

robindch wrote: »

Given that there are almost certainly between 200 and 500 million gay men and women around, but only tens of thousands of partners, then he must think that these fine individuals must be amongst the most celibate humans on earth.

Jayzus, if only priests had that kind of celibacy rate.

robindch · 02-11-2010 11:15am

Massimo Pigliucci's maintains a web page where he puts the slides for his talks.

http://www.lehman.edu/deanhum/philosophy/platofootnote/PlatoFootnote.org/Talks.html

Pigilucci leans more towards Dennet's accommodationist stance than Harris' or Dawkins, and I'm not sure that I agree with many of his conclusions. But he's an interesting read all the same.

robindch · 02-11-2010 1:56pm

Meanwhile, in Paris, the luckiest kid alive fell from a sixth-story balcony and bounced off an awning into the arms of a passing doctor whom god had placed there for the purpose, thereby allowing for the "miracle" that has been proclaimed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11673774

sponsoredwalk · 02-11-2010 2:57pm

robindch wrote: »

Massimo Pigliucci's maintains a web page where he puts the slides for his talks.

http://www.lehman.edu/deanhum/philosophy/platofootnote/PlatoFootnote.org/Talks.html

Pigilucci leans more towards Dennet's accommodationist stance than Harris' or Dawkins, and I'm not sure that I agree with many of his conclusions. But he's an interesting read all the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPv3ANwAhg

Interesting guy, debates Hovind and that ilk a lot

Turtwig · 02-11-2010 7:13pm

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPv3ANwAhg

Interesting guy, debates Hovind and that ilk a lot

Oh fuck delete that video before JC infests this thread again!:mad:

Turtwig · 03-11-2010 11:55am

You see these days it goes without saying if there is a thread about Evolution on boards, some anti-evolutionist will be there. If there is a thread about God some irrational theist will be there. If there is a thread about climate science, some pseudo skeptic will be there. If there is a thread about vaccines, some nut job denier will be there. And so on and so forth, in each of these cases there will be the folks who will spout the same old tired pathetic argument that will be more inclined to make you lose brain power rather than gain some. Also leaving those with the more valid and well thought out original arguments in an Oasis in a desert full of shit.

So let's get to it folks, let's create an automated boardsie response unit for instant response to tired old JC like arguments modelled on something similar to this beauty.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question

In other news, a serpent had a virgin birth of 22 offspring - Snakes triumphing God since the 23rd October (A sunday mind you.) 4004 B.C.

Mark Hamill · 03-11-2010 2:05pm

Malty_T wrote: »

You see these days it goes without saying if there is a thread about Evolution on boards, some anti-evolutionist will be there. If there is a thread about God some irrational theist will be there. If there is a thread about climate science, some pseudo skeptic will be there. If there is a thread about vaccines, some nut job denier will be there. And so on and so forth, in each of these cases there will be the folks who will spout the same old tired pathetic argument that will be more inclined to make you lose brain power rather than gain some. Also leaving those with the more valid and well thought out original arguments in an Oasis in a desert full of shit.

So let's get to it folks, let's create an automated boardsie response unit for instant response to tired old JC like arguments modelled on something similar to this beauty.

To be honest, I've long thought that J C was a creationist chatbot.

robindch · 03-11-2010 7:25pm

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy tells the church to stop managing schools:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/1103/schools.html

RTE wrote:

The social campaigner Sister Stanislaus Kennedy has urged the Catholic Church in Ireland to begin to disengage from managing schools.

Sr Stanislaus Kennedy has told a conference in Dublin that it should be left to the state to provide schooling for a diverse and multi-faith society.

Speaking at a Royal Irish Academy event Sister Stan said that our society was now a diverse one and that it was no longer appropriate that most schools were under church management.

She continued, it was the role of the state to provide education for our children regardless of their faith.

Sr Kennedy said that the church's task was to spread its faith, ethos and values while recognising the ethos and values of other religions and faiths. She said it had a proud record in education.

She criticised the Government for rejecting almost half the applications for citizenship that it receives saying that Britain and Australia had a 90% acceptance rate.

Sr Kennedy said that those who had been lawfully resident in the Republic for five years were eligible to apply but that often those applicants who were rejected by the Minister for Justice were not told why.

President Mary McAleese told the gathering that, for the first time, the country had a cohort of immigrants who were steeped in the languages and cultures of the countries we hoped to export to. And she said they would attract foreign investment here.

Turtwig · 03-11-2010 9:38pm

I fucking love youtube.:D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk

sponsoredwalk · 03-11-2010 9:42pm

Debate between Steven Pinker & Steven Rose
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/pinker_rose_p1.html
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/part2/part2_p1.html
(5 pages in each link).

Interesting discussion on what could be viewed as part of the discussion
between people like Gould and Dawkins on the interpretation of modern
biology and darwinism in that.

And:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIXFeTx9r-g

(Guy takes 6 minutes to offer up his opening question & really annoys all
the youtube commenters but he seems to be an author in his own right
and makes a lot of interesting points).

The Mad Hatter · 04-11-2010 12:16am

Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us

It's unusual he actually refers to religion as religion. He usually says Mysticism instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxlPVSAnWOo

Interesting Stuff Thread

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