So, where’s the Doctor’s cowboy hat? You have to wear the hat.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
So, where’s the Doctor’s cowboy hat? You have to wear the hat.
And that’s a good thing, because I could never bear to fill it with just plain ordinary water.
Although…you probably can’t keep squid in custard, either.
You may have heard that Bill Nye, in a flurry of profanity, challenged Todd Akin to a debate. Enticing as the story sounds, I hate to tell you…it’s completely made up. False. Phony. A bit of lazy satire.
It seems to be spreading everywhere. Let’s nip it in the bud right now.
Also, I’ve met Bill Nye, and had dinner with Bill Nye, and that article did not sound like Bill Nye at all.
That nutcase Jack Sarfatti (he’s been a plague on the internet since my usenet days) left a comment on the Scienceblogs side of things, which is very similar to a lot of my email, and I really don’t understand it.
You sound like a Nazi with The Final Solution for those you consider crazy. Shame on you – another self-hating Jewish Liberal. I don’t buy Creationist’s stuff either but I would not send them to the ovens as you clearly would do if you could with the venom in your writing.
Jack Sarfatti
He’s objecting to the fact that I pointed out there’s a concentration of stupid building up in Kentucky. I didn’t say anything about concentration camps, or ovens, or Final Solutions, unless you think Kentucky is all of those things, but that never stops run-at-the-mouth Sarfatti.
What I find weird, though, is all these people in my in-box who a) use “Jewish” as an insult, and b) think I’m Jewish. I don’t consider (a) to be true (although obviously many do) and (b) is simply incorrect, as far as I know. I can’t quite put my head in the same space as theirs, so I’m just wondering what it is about me that triggers this assumption that I fit a Jewish stereotype. My accent? My curls? That funny cap I wear? My resemblance to Tevye? A fondness for a good New York bagel?
The busy beavers have been hard at work and have provided a complete transcript of that discussion between Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson, Louis, Brownian, and me on Atheism+. Thanks!
Although…never, ever bother to read the comments on youtube. I went to get a link to the video, and found this amazing gem.
Uh, yeah. Elevator Guy ring a bell? It started out as a non-issue, then PZ Myers trumped up a storm and all of a sudden, Elevator Guy is a rapist, sexist misogynist son of a bitch bastard with white cisgender male privilege. Then she found all the traction in the world to make a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m sure she’s gotten more than a pretty penny from the whole debacle, and of course with support from PZ Myers himself.
We don’t even know what he looks like because she’s never said.
The distortions continue. I did not “trump up a storm”, and certainly did not say any such things about this elevator guy…and Rebecca Watson herself hasn’t said anything like that, either. It’s really bizarre to see how disconnected from reality the whispers have become.
The mirror test is a well known indicator for some degree of self-awareness: surreptitiously mark an animal’s face, show it a mirror, and see if it recognizes that the reflected image is of itself by whether it reaches up to touch or remove the mark. We see that behavior and infer that the animal has some knowledge of itself and can recognize that the mirror image is not another animal.
But now robots are being specifically programmed to pass the mirror test.
Ow. It makes my brain hurt.
So this is a computer that has no other indicators of consciousness or awareness or autonomous “thought” (whatever that means…my brain is hurting again), and is being coded to respond to a specific kind of visual input with a specific response…to literally pass the mirror test by rote. Does that really count as passing?
I think that all it actually accomplishes is to subvert the mirror test. It’s always been a proxy for a more sophisticated cognitive ability, the maintenance of a sophisticated mental map of the world around us that includes an entity we call “self”, and I don’t think that training a visual processing task to identify a specific shape unique to the robot design counts.
I’d also like to see what happens if two identical robots are made and put in the same room. To recognize “self” you also have to have a concept of “other”.
Take one squid. Pin it down in a dish. Dissect out one of the peripheral nerves innervating the fin. Plug it into your iPod, and stimulate the nerve with the speaker output while playing Insane in the Membrane. Record the behavior of the chromatophores.
You have my permission, once I’m dead, to run any kind of patterned electrical signal through my nerves to see what my corpse will do. I don’t have the nice chromatophores, but maybe you could get some interesting twitches.
How many fucks does America give? I don’t know, but a lot of them come out of LA and New York. This is a ‘heat map’ produced by an analysis of tweets for how often somebody says “fuck you” on twitter. In it’s current state, it’s not very useful — this is raw data, not per capita data, so all you’re really seeing is flares of general activity in the US and Canadian population centers.
If it helps, they’ve also done an analysis of how often people say “good morning”, and the distribution is different. There’s more activity in the Midwest. It still may not be meaningful, though, because here in the center of passive-aggressive niceness we say “good morning” when we mean “fuck you.”
I think this might be about the last thing I’d memorialize.
But looking on the bright side, this must be one happy guy if that’s the one thing that he’s most sorrowful about.
The Steelers must be doing well, then.
It’s getting a little weird…now people are sending me more cannibal stories, like this one.
Papua New Guinea police have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday.
Part of the strange twist here, besides the Penis Soup, is that they’re killing sorcerors. Not for sorcery per se, but because their prices for casting curses on people are too high. So it’s kind of like the New Guinea version of the Occupy Movement, only with less chanting and more enchanted machetes.
