A rhetoric and subversive masterpiece by V. Putin on the US and conflict in Syria was published yesterday in the NYT.
link of the day Category
You might have seen Robin Thicke’s video of the song “Blurred Lines” which got lots of PR because … women are naked in it. It’s terrible.
Now, a group of feminist law students from Auckland University posted a parody of it on Youtube – in which men are wearing underpants. Nonetheless it was deleted because the video violated its terms and conditions by displaying sexually explicit content (?!).
There were protests, and the video is up again. And it’s amazing.
(Source: samuel-warde.com)
Link of the day: a (pretty much complete) taxonomy of logical fallacies. Very much recommended!
A great and very inspiring blog post by David Cain about what he calls “9 mind-bending epiphanies”. I am usually allergic to other people sharing their wisdom, but this post is absolutely worth reading.
“4. Most of life is imaginary.
Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.”
The economist posted an overview about the rockets fired from Israel into Gaza and vice versa, both for the last years and the last days since the conflict broke out.
The Scientific American, April 2005, about giving up on being persuaded by “mere evidence”.
In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
A hilarious article worth reading.
(– via brainchallenged spacegirl)