Seeing what we hear. The McGurk Effect.

Either it's true or it isn't, 50/50.

I actually had somebody insist that their position was a coin flip because it was either true or not.

I am saying that the universe is natural phenomenon. That the only answer that has ever been right is generally the most likely answer for any new questions. You are saying that God needed blood to fix the universe and some bits of Semitic mythology are true even though they describe a radically alien universe. -- You don't get to slap a 50/50 on that bad boy. It's a horse race. My horse has never ever lost. Your horse has never ever won. My explanation has been the answer to everything we've ever figured out. Your answer has never been the answer to anything ever in the history of the universe!

Heh.

Christianity in a nutshell.

Mormonism

You'd always think that such things would be such a resounding slam dunk that nobody would believe it. You can make somebody watch this, have them fact check the data, and they'd still just ignore it.

Ask Tat: The Why of Gayness.

"Is being gay a product of choice, preference, environment or is it caused by a mutated sex determining gene?"

None of the above. These are often given as the main guesses but they are notabily wrong and naive. A couple facts of gayness.

1) Twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than siblings share sexual preference.
2) Identical twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than fraternal twins.
3) Identical twins do not share 100% identical sexual preference.
4) The youngest son of a woman who has had several sons has a statistically significant increased chance of being homosexual.
5) This increased chance does not exist if the child is not biologically hers.

These aren't in dispute. And they tell us a lot of what the answer could be. In that it's not choice, and it's not strictly genetics. It is to some degree congenial (being established during gestation), and to some degree genetic. Because twins are more likely to share sexual orientation than siblings and they are genetically just siblings. But, identical twins don't absolutely share sexual identity, which would be a requirement if it were genetic because they would share all of their genes.

So we're likely talking about something that is genetically influenced, that happens during development in a rather complicated cascade of hormones that isn't absolute. The ability to turn off the attraction to one sex during development isn't absolute. In fact, in bonobos it's completely gone leaving the population to be completely bisexual. Attraction to generally one gender more than another isn't an exacting thing, it's actually somewhat vague and sometimes wrong. Just as gender identity is often wrong, and a large degree of inter-sexed people. The fact is, being attracted to men, is perfectly common and typical for women. So it's not as much some kind of freak mutation as a imperfect sexual dimorphism of a somewhat useful but generally unrequired non-attraction to one gender. Both non-attraction to men and non-attraction to women are common but they are generally closely tied with one's gender. Being closely rather than absolutely means that gayness exists.

Richard Carrier on Bayes.

I preblogged this. I'm so sure it's awesome I'm already posting it and saying it's epic. Or at the least we can say that it's more epic than all the alternatives.

I am so smart! Minecraft triangulation.

I'm posting this to be humble.

If I weren't humble, I would post this to Facebook or something where people could see it. So playing Minecraft, there's a newly added end game section to the game. Where you can actually beat the thing rather than an endless sandbox. Well, to get there you can track Eyes of Ender, which are silly things that you throw into the sky that fly up and land towards the Fortress, where you might be able to get to the end part. I realized that you can just triangulate the position. After two throws at P(-32,-198) which ended at P(-22,-198) and P(-250,-1556) which ended at P(-241, -1546) I calculated the position at P(972,-198). We went there, dug around, and found the sucker at P(1070,-101). The important bit being that we found the sucker. Seriously, there's so much space in the game and I found the sucker with math. When used right, Math is like a super-power.

Quotes: Richard Carrier.

"God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it." - Richard Carrier.

Don't Talk to the Police

It's seriously one of the best lectures you'll run into.

I often love to cite unicorns as mythological creatures in some rants...

But, I actually pull my punches because years ago I ran into this stupid site:


http://www.lair2000.net/Unicorn_Dreams/Unicorns_Man_Made/unicorns_man_made.html

It's so stupid as to have a special bubbly mouse cursor and anything but it makes a pretty good case that unicorns under some definitions do exist.

Hm. You know, DarkMatter2525 might be on to something.

I admit it's a bit speculative, but really does fit the observed phenomenon well. When a god believer tells you to believe in their God. It's a bit like they are offering this figure in their heads to you, that they have come to know and love. And telling them, no, that doesn't exist, and you're wrong. Really is a kind of rejection of God (of their God in their head) and of that person. Reacting emotionally is the obvious response, whereas I've analogized it to becoming upset because I don't believe in bigfoot, but theists don't have a person relationship with bigfoot.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. Your God is fake, stupid, doesn't make any sense. Nobody should go steady with that mythological hogwash.

So ofcourse there's definite rejection going on there.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. I'm already going steady with MY God. 

Understandably, far less animosity there.

It puts things like Julia Sweeney's Letting God of God chapter where she "breaks up with God" in a new light.

The margin between science and faith.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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There's some margin between what we know and what is possible. For example if you want to think the universe is 13.6 billion years old, you're in luck that's within the margin of error for the last WMAP readings. If your religion says that the universe works by loop quantum gravity, you're in luck it very well might. If your religion says the universe is 6,000 years old, you're just wrong. That's well outside the margin of error.

Cutting glass is hard.

Just saying, how pass fail is that. You either cut it correctly or you need another thing of glass. Long story short I changed a very broken window in my house for a slightly broken window, that I cut and kinda glued the bits back on. And only really had the one large enough piece of scrap glass. My mistake was using the glass cutter after I broke it. I fixed it with a pin, a nail, and a screwdriver, but it didn't cut the same (I cut a bunch of smaller bits of scrap glass to practice).

Harold Camping says the world ends today.

Be ready, we may have to fight flying insects with goat heads or something. Yeah, sure he wasn't spot on come May, but he's certainly right this time. He's gotta be right.

An early review of Darwin. Exactly right.

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

(from an anonymous review of a work on evolution, Atheneum, 2102, 8 February, 1867, p. 217.)

Red Line on Monitor, who's your friend?

So if I tweak my monitor the red line going down it will sometimes go away. I did this a couple times with fantasies that if I keep it that way it would stay that way. Now, there's a red line and a green line!

DOG BISCUITS!

Memristors are coming. Yay.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/06/10/2011/51988/ief2011-hp-to-replace-flash-and-ssd-in-2013.htm

First properly developed a few years ago, Memristors have a really interesting property that as you send a current through them it changes the resistance as a lingering effect. And since it's pretty much just a special type of wire, and requires no transistors to work or capacitors like DRAM, it ends up being really really really tiny and taking very very little power. They are set now to replace SSD, and hopefully end up replacing a lot of computer memory including the memory on CPUs. With this technology it, you could significantly reduce the amount of electricity a computer needs. And, actually stop the computer without losing the computer's current state. You could turn it off, and all the data would stay where it currently is and turning it back on wouldn't change anything.

But, even without utilizing those properties yet, you still have faster and cheaper and better. Even if you don't yet need the non-volatile abilities for things which have traditionally been volatile. Also interesting technology in the pipeline (not at HP that I know of), non-volatile displays. It turns out there's more than a few ways to replace the current LCD displays which use refreshing liquid crystals with backlighting to technology that simply reflects different colors. Like a paper that changes what is printed on it. Then what is displayed on the screen stays on the screen, and if you take your device into the sunlight, it gets even more clear rather than bleaching out.

There's a lot of interesting technology out there, that's coming to fruition.

Skeuomorphs vestiges in human objects.

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines. An alternative definition is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material"

Quote: Ernestine Rose

Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. -- Ernestine Rose, Feminist, Suffragette, Atheist, Abolitionist

Marian Call's New Album.

Less Geeky, still good.

http://mariancall.bandcamp.com/album/something-fierce

*shrug*