The pay is pretty good, and I guess we now know what a soul is worth: at least a few million dollars.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The pay is pretty good, and I guess we now know what a soul is worth: at least a few million dollars.
Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon, has made a bizarre post in which he reveals that he knows nothing about how the brains he cuts up work. Egnor claims that it is impossible for the brain to store memories. Yes, he knows that neural damage can cause loss of memory, that certain delicate areas of the brain, if harmed, can destroy the ability to make new memories, and he waves those awkward facts away to announce that there is simply no way memory or information of any kind can be stored in a meat-organ like a brain. He doesn’t say where memories are kept, then, nor does he account for any of the physiological correlates of memory, nor does he seem to give a damn about any of the neuroscience experiments that have teased apart the underlying molecular mechanism. By pure reason alone, if we can call his argument a product of reason at all, he deduces that the brain could not possibly have any way of storing memories.
Whoa, Oglaf had a very insightful panel today. As you can tell from the fact that I’ve blurred out part of that first panel and have cut out most of the comic, it is most definitely not safe for work — it takes place at a sex competition — but that last line is wonderful.
Sex exists by replicating itself but not for anything.
It seems to me that there is a significant difference between maintaining internet anonymity to prevent being harassed, vs. anonymity used to enable harassment. But this distinction is routinely ignored, especially by the harassers, who just lump violating either into the category of the most sacrilegious of all internet violations, the total desecration of the holiest principle of all communication, doxxing. I suspect the only reason that “doxxing” has been elevated to such a sacred level of knee-jerk abhorrence is not out of some virtuous desire to protect the innocent, but entirely to protect the guilty.
So we now have a situation where there is a hierarchy of crimes, with “revealing the identity of a troll” at the very top of the list, followed by “giving a damn about social justice” just below that, and somewhere near the bottom, “threatening to rape and murder a woman and her family”. It’s upside down. It needs a polarity reversal.
William Saletan takes a look at this chart and says creationism isn’t as bad as it could be; I look at it and see no good news, no consolation, at all.
I am now getting off the internet. I will not get back on until these two big stacks of exams are completely graded and entered into my gradebook, which I’m hoping will get me free this afternoon.
Deepak Chopra sent this to me, and to a number of other people, thanking us for “inspiring” it. The only way I could have inspired it is if Chopra were remote viewing the contents of my toilet this morning.
