spudtater

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• Commented on I, Singularity...
  > There might also be a psychological draw for some of us "nerds." We never got to experience what it meant to be truly beautiful in everyone's eyes. Bingo. And this loops back into Elizabeth's feminist critique of the Singularity....
• Commented on It's people!
  > Racism isn't all that massive in Australia. You must be kidding. The stolen generation? One Nation? The casually-used "Abo", "Chink" and "Wog"? Australia has an enormous problem with racism, but white Australians refuse to even see it....
• Commented on Helplessly dominant
  What's so bad about Cracked? It's often amusing and, unlike many online magazines, at least has the decency to link to secondary sources....
• Commented on Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
  @Charles: Early ECT may have been unsubtle and damaging, but that is the case with a lot of medicine. Techniques are improving all the time, and the ECT of today will be rather different from that of 20-40 years ago....
• Commented on Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
  @Alex: Please don't compare electro-convulsive therapy to lobotomies! ECT continues to be used, effectively, to this date to treat serious depression. However, its somewhat gruesome reputation means that it is not popular with patients or even doctors, and that means...
• Commented on Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
  Basically, anything that the Daily Mail goes on about....
• Commented on Egypt
  @Kevin: A good point, and one which I utterly failed to acknowledge in my comment. For "Egyptian", read "Muslim Egyptian", as they form the numerical, political and cultural majority of the country. Copts are very much an oppressed minority, and...
• Commented on Egypt
  I lived in Egypt, albeit almost two decades ago now (hard to believe!). From what I remember of the people, I can definitely imagine an Islamic party coming to power... but not an extremist one. Religion in Egypt is a...
• Commented on "It doesn't have a major theme or anything"
  No, it's more than simply enjoying a work. There are many books that I did not enjoy, but nonetheless judge to be good. (e.g. 1984). But there are also books which are generally rated as excellent, and yet for some...
• Commented on "It doesn't have a major theme or anything"
  Point taken. But inasmuch as art is subjective, everybody's entitled to their opinion of whether a particular work is "good" or not....
• Commented on "It doesn't have a major theme or anything"
  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem: 2 stars A solid and interesting premise, but Lem sadly fails to make it work. I found myself wondering what was the point of the book and waht was happening. There isn't really any mystery (although...
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  @paws4thot: I'd rather see a controlled experiment than hear your anecdotes, thanks very much. That's the thing about science; it makes testable predictions....
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  @paws4thot: Willing to perform a blind trial to back that up? Don't underestimate peripheral awareness. @john: I never said they weren't. His videos are full of examples of him doing it, but I don't for a second believe that it...
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  @Greg: Hypnotism might not work if you consciously choose not to allow it to, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it works by default. Humans in general seem pretty willing to be manipulated....
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  I can't remember where I saw it, but somebody rather insightfully compared our view of obesity to our past view of alcoholism. We used to view it squarely as a vice, a sin — "drunks" were characterised as lazy, as...
• Commented on You say sin, I say disease
  @paws4thot: I recall seeing videos of "Qi masters" supposedly projecting their "Qi" at people and making them fall down. Initially I thought it might be faked, but then I realised there is another explanation which fits the facts: hypnotism. Derren...
• Commented on Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
  The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity?...
• Commented on Books I will not write #5: Floater in the Sea of Time
  Not enough potential readers, I think. The prevalent opinion in the UK, at least, seems to be "stay as far away from Israeli politics as possible"....
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Jocelin: a more to-the-point lesson might be: mention of the holocaust is not something to be thrown around lightly....
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Greg: Once again, confrontational. You're being very rightly accused of blurring the line between "religious" and "fanatical"... and describing the former as "demented fuckwits" isn't helping your case. Your tactic of creative definitions is intellectually dishonest, because your artificial definition...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Even if the word "religious" is vaguely defined, that doesn't mean that everybody's free to redefine it to suit their particular point of view. Large numbers of people self-identify as religious, and you can't just blaze in using it in...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  John: that sounds a lot like The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris. Not only does Morris explain a number of social ills as resulting from the replacement of "tribe" by what he terms "super-tribe", but he also goes on to...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Oh, wow, nice display of the No true Scotsman fallacy. You don't like the fact that communists killed loads of people? Never mind, just redefine them out of being atheists and into being religious. Job well done! Accusing your enemies...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Guthrie: sorry, that was perhaps lacking in clarity. Darwin was religious at the time he came up with the theory of evolution, is all I was saying....
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  > Similarly, Darwin, famously, was not a believer Almost, but not quite, true. Darwin, famously, was driven to unbelief by a dogmatic, combatitive church. At the time of his voyages on the Beagle he was a believer: "Whilst on board...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  > What do religious believers DO? > What have they done in the past? Oh, I don't know; concertos, mathematics, the theory of evolution. Philosophy, chemistry, The Lord of the Rings... The reason I'm pointing out your bias is because...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  Greg @91: As opposed to your world view, which is unique in being completely without observer bias....
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  As an atheist, I'd like to distance myself from the idea that all religion is "the enemy" and inherently harmful. Of my circle of friends, some of the most vocal and active against fundamentalism are themselves religious. I am happy...
• Commented on A working hypothesis
  You bring up eliminationism, the purest and most concentrated form of intolerance imaginable, and then you ask if less tolerance is the answer? You can't get any less tolerant than genocide. Clearly, we can all think of a lot of...
• Commented on Mediocrity
  scentofviolets @168: The only "hydraulics" I can think of wrt to spiders would be a muscular analogue, as in jumping spiders. Erm. Yes. Exactly. Not just jumping spiders, but all spiders, have legs which contract via muscles and extend via...