According to paleontologist Gareth Dyke, “fossil evidence
According to paleontologist Gareth Dyke, “fossil evidence that [predatory] dinosaurs were feathered is now ‘irrefutable’”. Digitally remastered Jurassic Park can’t be too far down the road.
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Entries for September 2005
Dingle’s name change from its English name
Dingle’s name change from its English name to the now-official Gaelic one (An Daingean) is messing with the Dingle brand…opponents to the change say that the tourists, upon which Dingle depends, are gonna get confused.
Malcolm Gladwell on why focus groups suck.
Malcolm Gladwell on why focus groups suck. Focus groups are an attempt by management to reduce risk (and with it, potential reward)…Gladwell says that management should instead trust their creatives, be patient, and tolerate uncertainty.
If you’re a Flickr user, you can
If you’re a Flickr user, you can now get a book of your photos printed up for display on your coffee table or to put in your bathroom bookshelf. I’ve got one of these and it’s neater than I expected.
In case you’ve never looked into it,
In case you’ve never looked into it, here’s an overview of what the scientific method is; it explains what hypotheses, theories, and laws are in the context of science. As this article states, “a theory in science is not a guess, speculation, or suggestion, which is the popular definition of the word ‘theory.’ A scientific theory is a unifying and self-consistent explanation of fundamental natural processes or phenomena that is totally constructed of corroborated hypotheses.”
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne on intelligent
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne on intelligent design: “You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.”
Chris Ware’s new book is out soon
Chris Ware’s new book is out soon and Salon has an early review. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is one of my favorite books of all time.
Bullshit parallels
In Jim Holt’s review of three recent books about bullshit, he writes:
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn’t be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter’s fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
In thinking about Judeo-Christian religion, atheism is a bit like bullshitting in this respect. If you believe in God, you also necessarily believe in the existence of Satan. So too for Satanists…like the liar, they are concerned with the counterpart to their main interest (i.e. God) as something to defend against. But atheists opt out and don’t believe in the existence of either.
Update: There’s been a bit of confusion as to what I’m actually trying to say here. My fault. I’m definitely not trying to say that atheists are bullshitters. Or that Satanists are liars. Or that Christians believe in Satan (as opposed to believing in the existence of Satan). What I’m saying that as both truth-tellers and liars are concerned with the true and false, so too are Christians and Satanists both concerned with God and Satan. But the bullshitter cares little for the true or false, just as an atheist is little concerned with God or Satan.
Also, someone pointed out that Satanists often don’t worship Satan. Sez the Wikipedia entry on Satanism:
Many Satanists do not worship a deity called Satan or any other deity. Unlike many religions and philosophies, Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes.
So my whole point is shot anyway. (thx, kevin)
PayPal has changed their fee structure to
PayPal has changed their fee structure to allow easier micropayments. For payments less than $2, the fees with be “at a rate of 5 percent plus 5 cents per transaction” compared with “1.9 to 2.9 percent, plus 30 cents per transaction” on their regular transactions. Smart move by PayPal to harness the Long Tail of ecommerce. (via rw)
According to this chart, the price of
According to this chart, the price of a gallon of gasoline in NYC rose about 70 cents in the 5 days after Katrina…that’s one of the steepest increases I could find.
Nikon is releasing a pair of digital
Nikon is releasing a pair of digital cameras with built-in wifi. The cameras will only send photos via wifi to a designated Nikon application, but I wonder how long it will be before someone hacks the firmware to send those photos anywhere…like to Flickr on the fly.
Taking a little break
I’m taking a few days off from the site, publicly anyway. I’m still going to be working on some upcoming posts and such, but there won’t be any posts or links to the site. I was going to write about why, but it got to be too long and I just scrapped the whole thing. Something about the crappiness of online communication and the faceless, nameless, hugless, merciless place the blogosphere can be sometimes…along with my desire to not post much more about Katrina or to post much of anything else that seems trivial in comparison.
So yeah, back after the long weekend.
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