Were you all following the big fight yesterday? No, not the overhyped, overpaid sight of two rather repellent grown men pounding each other, but the one between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it, or tuned out after the first couple of blows, because they were grossly mismatched, and it was kind of a rout.
Here’s a round-by-round summary.
We’re going to find out. Red Dwarf is coming back, with the original cast.
Does anyone else remember that comic book? It was about the far future, 4000 AD, at a time when humanoid robots are ubiquitous, and they go bad, very bad. Magnus was a human with amazing martial arts abilities, who’d run around in every issue destroying the robots with his bare hands. That was pretty much the theme of the entire comic book: page after page of Magnus demolishing robots. He’d often rip their heads off, and then you’d get a panel with the standard sound effect of a robot getting decapitated: “SQUEEEEE!”
If you’ve ever wondered where that word came from, I think that’s it.
It would be a great comic book to turn into a movie, except that it’s already been done. It’s called The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
That paper with a grossly sexist review? We now know the journal: it was PLOS ONE. And they are on it.
In my previous post about Paul Nelson’s weirdly ignorant view of nematode evolution, Kevin Anthoney made a prescient comment:
Remember that Nelson’s got this bizarre linear view of evolution which starts with a single cell creature, which evolves into a creature with a few cells, which evolves into one with a few more cells, and so on until you reach the 1031 cells in the nematode today. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Nelson thought that the creature at the 150 cell stage in this process had to be like a modern nematode at the 150 cell stage of development.
The Discovery Institute has responded. I got as far as the massive projection in the following paragraph before giving up.
Vast, dense swarms of migrating squid, all swirling about a boat. How can the sailors resist leaping into the water with them?
What awful people. Boston Magazine has a run-down of their obsession with Zoe Quinn, and it’s sick and disturbing. This Eron Gjoni guy who started it all just keeps talking, and making himself look worse and worse with every word, and he won’t shut up. That’s the thing that disturbs me about these people: they aren’t smart enough to realize when their own words are more devastating to their reputation than anything anyone else can say. Or perhaps they’re so vain or so lacking in empathy that they can’t imagine anyone not siding with their perspective.
And there’s yet another example of their habit of unlimbering Schwerer Gustav and aiming it at their own foot.
I’m being badgered to repudiate Richard Carrier now. It’s not going to happen. But the sentiment is revealing.
I’m going out to the theater in a few hours to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I just now discovered this promo that reveals a lot of the details of the movie. There are some big surprises!
Brown has always been a strident defender of religion, and over the years he’s said a lot of incredibly stupid things. But now I have to partly agree with him on this problematic Cult of Dawkins. This is getting embarrassing.
At the RDF website, there is a fundraising page. Fundraising is fine, organizations do have to do that, and so I don’t chide them for having a necessary function on the web; but I do criticize them for two things. What the money is for, and how they are raising it.
