Friday, January 30, 2009

Giddy Science Shit

"Melton asked Doerflinger if he considered a day-old embryo and a 6-year-old to be moral equivalents; when Doerflinger responded yes, Melton countered by asking why society accepts the freezing of embryos but not the freezing of 6-year-olds."

Time Magazine.

Dude gets my Hero tag any day.

And: Fledgling Ansible Technology (?)

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Say and Do


I try not to engage in the culture wars online very much any more. There are more reasonable people doing it. But every once in a while, something draws me out.


This cartoon, by Jessica Hagy, on Index
, gets to the point of my discomfort with religion, and for some reason, I thought I could be polite about it. I might have been wrong. I often am. But this is what I wrote in response to two comments on the board. Misspellings included.

I figured I'd post it on my personal blog. Anyone who knows me can tell me why I'm wrong.

"1) I sadly will be removing Indexed from my blogroll. I cannot support a blog which moves from advocating atheism to attacking other people’s faiths."

If your faith is that prayer is more efficacious than action (and science isn't a belief, it's a set of activities), then maybe it's worth lampooning. God helps those who help themselves, right?

Or as the punchline to the joke goes, "God: I'm trying to help you out, here, but you have to buy a lottery ticket first."

"Both science and prayer can serve a purpose. Science, when rigorously (and responcibly) applied, has answered many physical problems. An honest application of prayer (if you were to seriously try it and not dismiss it.) has ammazing effects on the personal level."

The problem being that many people believe that they're prayers move things in the world, not just in themselves. It answers their physical problems. Kind of like Uri Geller. But in this case, it sometimes kills them or their children.

Friday, January 02, 2009


This joke is so in it's in-grown. Last panel from this cartoon.
It's especially funny for me given the amount of Warcraft I am playing and the amount of tabletop RPG's I'm not. More on that later.

As an addendum, this twitter post:

# Sitting in Caribou coffee, working on rewrites to second part of novel. Sweeeet. 182 days ago

Makes me vaguely nauseous.