I can haz be faymuss on the internets?

I still don’t know quite what I was thinking, but I’ve been and gone and done a video thing of myself talking to a camera and put it up on the YouTubes. The quality’s pretty terrible, because there’s no point spending the kind of money it’d take to buy a camera that doesn’t suck, for [...]

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Down, boy

Interesting report from Ben Goldacre today about drug sniffer dogs used by police. Which might not leap out at you as a fascinating source of potential gossip, unless you have a better sense of these things than I did. But it’s turning out that the Clever Hans effect might play a bigger role in sniffer [...]

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Flip the police

This post makes several good points. Sometimes, bad words are bad. Language can be extremely offensive. For instance, unless you’ve been paying no attention at all to the last few decades or so of Western culture, you’ll be aware that there are some things you don’t generally call black people in public. And there are [...]

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But tea and cakes excite me

While I was writing that post about gender bias and whatnot last week, and looking up related things online in a manner which could very loosely be described as “research”, I found something I wanted to talk about but which ended up not really fitting into that particular post. Specifically, this Rihanna video. (It may [...]

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Look behind you, a three-handed monkey!

Haven’t had much to say here lately, so let’s comment on this. You might have already come across the “rubber hand illusion”: It’s a fascinatingly weird example of neuro-somethingorother and brain-oddness. Basically, you put one of your hands somewhere you can’t see it, and place a more or less realistic-looking rubber hand on the table [...]

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Womyn and menz

I am in favour of the objectification of women. … Okay, that might be a little misleading, but if I said I was against it then that wouldn’t be controversial or edgy at all. Either way, I should clarify my position a little. Objectifying women isn’t always a good thing. Nor is it always a [...]

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Homeopathetic

Proper posts are on the way. In the meantime, read Alice’s report on a leaked email that was recently sent to professional homeopaths around the UK. It emphasises the importance of choosing an argument that “avoids the need to prove the science”, when advocating for the right to market homeopathy as if it were medicine. [...]

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Heh heh… second coming…

My Christian friend Jessica makes a lot of sense. About sexual health and education, anyway. I’m less on board with the Jesus stuff.

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I would never lie to you about cake

I happened across some articles online about “Friendly” Artificial Intelligence not long ago, and then spent most of the rest of the afternoon reading up on it instead of doing any work. There’s actually more to learn about AI than you might think, even as relates to our current state of scientific progress. The Singularity [...]

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Homeopathically diluted honesty

Only just noticed this one. The Society of Homeopaths’ “Media Code” guidelines have been leaked, and recommend that its members be unsurprisingly weaselly in dealing with media attention. Le Canard Noir has the details. In short, professional homeopaths are being urged either to perpetuate dishonesty, or to be as disingenuous as possible in making positive [...]

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