A decade ago, I was marooned along with a couple of dozen of other international tourists on the rocky lava islet of Palea Kameni, off the legendary Greek island of Thira (Santorini). While we were soaking in its geothermally heated pool, a violent storm suddenly blew into the Aegean. We were told that there was no way we could make …
Bush judge: sharing a cell box with an insect (or a giant scorpion) is not torture. (Click it.) Glenzilla on the content of the just released Torture Memos: Just consider parts of this August 1, 2002 Memo (.pdf) by then OLC official (and now-federal judge) Jay Bybee, authorizing the following techniques for Abu Zubaydah, who was shot three times during …
From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale. In trying to account for the experience of color, neurobiologist Humberto Maturana decided to treat the nervous system as a closed system, depriving it of external sensory inputs. Incidentally, he found that deprived of such inputs, the nervous system can’t …
It’s not nice to fool with mother nature, especially when she comes armed with a bad-ass 28′ high robot named GORT. Such is the lesson of the remake of the classic 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original was set in the context of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, when nuclear …
A house built by slaves… Well, there goes the neighborhood. Huffpo reports that: Obama Plans To Invite Artists, Scientists, Poets To White House To Inspire “National Character” It cites a Politico.com article that reads: President-elect Obama says he and Michelle Obama plan to open the White House to local pupils as a “bully pulpit” to inspire youth to reach for …
President Bush getting in touch with his inner chimp George W. Bush can’t quite figure out why his presidency is proving to be the greatest failure in modern history. In an an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson the other day, he was his usual clueless and inarticulate self. GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what’s happening? BUSH: …
Children are born believers in God, academic claims By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent, Telegraph.co.uk 24 Nov 2008 Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose. …
