Christopher A Carr

"I have just witnessed a rout – tonight’s Intelligence Squared debate. It considered the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, opposing the motion, comprehensively trounced Archbishop Onaiyekan (of Abuja, Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe, who spoke for it. The archbishop in particular was hopeless." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

Finally up: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Tanath

"Earlier this week, a billboard went up in Nashville for a group called Secular Life. An offensive, hateful, evil billboard. One so awful, a number of people denounced it! Which makes sense, I guess… just look at all the blasphemy:" - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

Couldn't stop laughing at the dude repeatedly saying 'Believe in god or burn', failed brainwashing ftw! - Jeremy˚H

"We used 3 different … [ways] to test whether the nonverbal expression of pride sends a functional, automatically perceived signal about a social group member’s increased social status.  Results suggest that the pride expression strongly signals high status, and this association cannot be accounted for by positive valence or artifacts of the expression such as expanded size due to outstretched arms. …" - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"Eleven famous gyoza shops from around the country are gathered here in this unusual dumpling-centered theme park inside the very noisy Namja Town game center. (Weekdays tend to be quieter.) The Antei shop offers some nice garlicky gyoza in tonkotsu broth, and good garlicky fried crab gyoza. And check out the dessert park upstairs if you've got a sweet tooth. (Y300 separate admission to get into Namja Town.)" - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"Want to know your entire DNA sequence? A California company has done it for as little as $1,700. Privately held Complete Genomics says it can do a better quality, usable genome map for about $4,400 -- compared with the $100 million the Human Genome Project spent to complete the first sequencing of the human genome in 2000." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

lol. Who is Steven"Hawkings"? - Colby

Thanks for that link, Eivind. - Christopher A Carr

"When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way. Hey, hey, hey." - Christopher A Carr

Wow, it's a LOOONG time since I've seen an actual "Under Construction" page. I was really hoping for some Universal Nonexistence too :-( - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

"... I recently had a look at Ray Comfort's "special introduction" to Origin of Species, and, I got to thinking that the first part of the introduction sounded a little too smart to be Ray Comfort. So I did some googling and found that Ray's introduction looks suspiciously like "A Brief History of Charles Darwin" by Dr. Stan Guffey. Here are some quotes from Ray's intro followed by their parallels in Stan Guffey's work:" - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"A 33-yr-old white male presented with bloody diarrhea, leukocytosis, and left lower quadrant direct and rebound tenderness after a self-administered concentrated hydrofluoric acid enema while intoxicated from intranasal cocaine administration. Intraoperative flexible sigmoidoscopy and a gastrografin enema revealed severe mucosal ulceration and edema in the rectum and sigmoid colon. Laparotomy revealed an ulcerated, necrotic, and purulent sigmoid colon and intraperitoneal pus. The patient underwent a limited sigmoid resection and a Hartman procedure. Five months later, the patient presented with a rectal stricture which was resected. This case demonstrates that a hydrofluoric acid enema can cause fulminant acute colitis and chronic colonic strictures." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

Victor: It would appear that's a wise decision. - Christopher A Carr

"A new, milder "Atheism 3.0" is on the market, teaching a more forgiving attitude towards faith. Bruce Sheiman, author of An Atheist Defends Religion, maintains that humanity is better off with it than without it. Although a recent Religion News Service classifies me and my book The Secular Conscience among the 3.0s, I have to say that I'm not all that happy with the taxonomy." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"After a hunter killed her mother, Dorothy was sold as a “mascot” to an amusement park in Cameroon. For the next 25 years she was tethered to the ground by a chain around her neck, taunted, teased, and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes for sport. In May 2000 Dorothy—obese from poor diet and lack of exercise—was rescued and relocated along with ten other primates. As her health improved, her deep kindness surfaced. She mothered an orphaned chimp named Bouboule and became a close friend to many others, including Jacky, the group’s alpha male, and Nama, another amusement-park refugee." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

aww, cute story. I wish that kind of good to all animals. - Bicentennial (Franc)

"Bioengineering students from around the world converged on MIT this weekend in what has become an annual ritual in synthetic biology--iGEM, the international genetically engineered machines competition. Among the finalists this year were "GluColi", a new generation of glue made by bacteria, a biological version of an LCD screen made of yeast, and multicolored menagerie of bacteria that might ultimately become part of a biological system designed to change color in response to toxins or other target compounds, providing an easy-to-read warning system." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

Fascinating stuff! - Gordon Herd

"Everyone would soon be dead. Human civilization ended its 10 thousand year run, the 200,000 year reign of Homo Sapiens was over, a pretentious and innocent little light suddenly and uneventfully turning off. In our place was some meaningless mechanical future, a small technical error propagating its way through the galaxy, covering existence with an alert message about a bad variable reference. Each person’s future, from their career hopes to the date they had planned on Friday, was matter-of-factly discarded by reality. Each aspiration and hope in a human heart, every dream you’ve ever had, was stopped in its tracks by a towering, boring, grey slate wall. And each of us knew with a numb and simple knowledge, that there was nothing. we. could. do. The probability of stopping The Machine was a page full of zeroes." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"Evo psych changed the way he viewed life and practiced psychiatry, Thomson has said. He's putting theory into practice, going so far as to suggest that people suffering from depression might benefit from more rumination, not less. "Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression," he and Thomson write in a popularized version of their paper." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"Clip, Tuck, Paste: Perhaps the most interesting interface element of Courier—aside from the pen—is clip, tuck and paste. A lot is made of the ability to clip virtually any content, which is "tucked" into the spine to move it from one page or section of Courier to another." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"By forcing bacteria to evolve in ever-changing conditions, scientists have induced a behavior in which colonies formed by microbes with identical genes take radically different forms, as if one sibling in a set of identical quadruplets could sprout gills. Technically known as “stochastic switching between phenotypic states” — or, more conversationally, hedging your bets — the ability may have been critical to the success of primitive forms of life." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

I'm scrolling through my feed with my toddler next to me and when he saw this picture he said "Pancakes!" - Mellissa Jane

Mellissa: Hehehe... - Christopher A Carr

""We've found that learning is a two-way street; motor function affects sensory processing and vice-versa," said David J. Ostry, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor of psychology at McGill University. "Our results suggest that learning to talk makes it easier to understand the speech of others."" - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"The source of the news, who was quite surprised that their post received all the attention it did, is now reporting that the most recent build of OS X 10.6.2, 10C535, has seen the rise of Atom support from the ashes like some sort of software phoenix. That's right, everything is back to normal, nothing to see here, everyone can go back to running Mac OS X on their underpowered baby laptop." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet

"In philosophy, it is assumed that wherever a distinction is claimed, a relevant basis for the distinction should exist and be substantiated. Special pleading is a subversion of this assumption." - Christopher A Carr from Bookmarklet