September 2011

War of words breaks out among Jehovah’s Witnesses – Home News, UK – The Independent

For some reason, a bunch of newspapers in the UK have recently noticed that the Jehovas Witnesses are a cult. Nice to see so many people in the comments relating their stories of getting out.
(tags: religion cult jehovas-witness)

Richard Feynman on doubt, uncertainty and religion (subtitled) – YouTube

Feynman! Thou shouldst be living at this hour.
(tags: feynman doubt religion science physics)

Stephen Law: GOING NUCLEAR

A chapter from Law’s “Believing Bullshit” about the tactic he calls “going nuclear”: when the argument is going against you, blow everyone away by saying that “all arguments rest on faith” or “everything is relative” or some other such nonsense. Law anatomises the various forms of this tactic.
(tags: philosophy rationality argument stephen-law presuppositionalism)

Meeting Jesus at Oxford | Commentary | Fortean Times

CICCUs cousins DICCU and OICCU made the Fortean Times. Gripping stuff, with some ideas about why evangelical religion is so appealing to people at the famous universities.
(tags: ciccu religion university oxford cambridge)

An Interview with @AlmightyGod | Friendly Atheist

God has a Twitter feed (@almightygod). Hemant interviews Him.
(tags: religion funny god twitter)

gource – software version control visualization – Google Project Hosting

Cool tool which produces a video of your code’s history.
(tags: video programming history software tools)

David Graeber: On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics « naked capitalism

Interesting demolition of the idea that barter economies always precede the invention of money.
(tags: economics anthropology money history sex barter)

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills – Atlantic Mobile

Sleep paralysis and the Nocebo effect as a potential killer.
(tags: science psychology sleep paralysis)

Text Message | Sunday Magazine

"FRIENDS THEY NEVER MEET: ACQUAINTANCES MADE BY THE TELEGRAPH KEY. CONFIDENCES EXCHANGED BETWEEN MEN WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN EACH OTHER — THEIR PECULIAR CONVERSATION ABBREVIATIONS." Cool steampunk stuff. Via andrewducker.
(tags: telegraph communication sms message)

Writing Vim Plugins / Steve Losh

What it says on the tin.
(tags: programming vim plugin development editor)

Coming Home to Vim / Steve Losh

Someone's page about going back to Vim, listing some config options I didn't know about.
(tags: programming tools vim editor tutorial)

Lost Garden: Rules of Productivity Presentation

"How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal. Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams." Via andrewducker.
(tags: psychology programming software development overtime scrum productivity)

CPBD 089: John Shook – Dewey, Quine, and Some Varieties of Naturalism

John Shook talks to Luke Muehlhauser about philosophical naturalism (with a transcript, for those of you who hate podcasts). Interesting to find about the various naturalistic philosophies, and to see the responses to the supernaturalist "you naturalists think everything is just atoms" argument.
(tags: philosophy naturalism science physics materialism)

A. J. Ayer to the rescue! « Measure of Doubt

Ayer vs Mike Tyson, apparently really happened. "A. J. Ayer is known for writing "Language, Truth, and Logic." Lesser known is his sequel, "Language, Truth, and Being a Friggin' Badass.""
(tags: philosophy a.j.-ayer positivism funny biography)

TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search ‘Rape’ | Techdirt

A woman sexually assaulted by a Transport Security Agency employee is then threatened with a libel suit when she blogs about it. Thugs Standing Around, indeed. Her own lawyer writes an excellent letter in response. Note: contains a description of the assault.
(tags: privacy surveillance rape defamation tsa security transport)

What People Don’t Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper) – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic

"Tell us what people don't get or appreciate about your job. The response was so eloquent and overwhelming, it was practically encyclopedic. So we made an encyclopedia. From A to Z, we went through your responses to find the best vocational essays for each letter."
(tags: work jobs)

He Said/She Said

Grim-meathook-future SF author Peter Watts's wedding vows: "And you and I are going to kick biological determinism in the balls." Aw, sweet.
(tags: wedding marriage biology monogamy)

Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity

"One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory—the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems—leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis."
(tags: philosophy programming complexity compsci turing)

Does the future have a church? | The Briefing

What evangelicals think of the general decline in church attendance in the UK. Their churches are holding their own numerically but not growing, so becoming a smaller percentage of a growing population. However, they're doing better than other Protestant denominations, which will die out as their older members die off. Getting them while they're young is essential for propagating religion, and they worry about the lack of youf in the church. Social trends like cohabiting couples and single parent families are worrying because evangelical churches don't really know how to cope with those people so won't evangelise them effectively. Via the artist formerly known as nlj21.
(tags: church religion statistics christianity uk)

Kayonga Kagame Shows Us The World. Episode: Darkest Austria : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

A hilarious spoof on ethnological documentaries: an African TV team comes to the Austrian province to document the strange behavior of the natives… including the Feast of the Chicken. *
(tags: funnny anthropology ethnology)