Chapter 1: syetenb
WARNING: What follows is the very essence of TL;DR. You may actually be slightly less intelligent after reading all of it. No one should do so. There is one confirmed case of a poor American girl who read this whole page, and now all she can read is Dan Brown books. In an Australian accent. Don't be like Becky. Do not read this ( Read more... )

In the opening credits of the Simpsons, there is a tiny clip of the baby wildly steering a car through a number of dangerous curves. Then we pull back and it is revealed that she is sat in front of a toy steering wheel, happily imagining that she is influencing the course of the vehicle, while her mother drives badly, because she is a woman.

As a ( Read more... )

Sometimes people hear strange, possibly fictional, noises. In Bristol in 1979, a bunch of people heard a low buzzing sound through the city and environs. Efforts to track it down met with failure, and scientists are still trying to work it out. The most common explanation: it's all in their minds. It seems odd that a bunch of people could all share ( Read more... )

I get asked by people who should know better why I'm an atheist instead of an agnostic. They say things like "You can't know for certain!" This is, of course, true, in the sense that you can't know anything for certain. But we live our daily lives under a specific set of assumptions which serve us well, and we believe these things even though it is ( Read more... )

Information divides into two categories - opinion and fact (you can of course interpret either). There are literally millions of people who can't tell the difference. A brief look at the 'debate' on health care at the moment will demonstrate what I mean. On the one side are a bunch of people screaming like crazy monkeys about communism and Nazism, ( Read more... )

Graphs are supposed to illustrate data. If your graph does not illustrate anything, then don't bother. Look at this graph which appeared on mashable.com:


( Read more... )

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.
-Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, 4.6

*sigh*

Possible SolutionAfter many years of watching religious people confuse facts with opinions, I have hit upon a possible solution. The problem may be ( Read more... )

Here's how to lose weight, if you're interested. It's a two-step programme. It doesn't have a fancy name, but I can call it the Crash Whizz Bang Diet if you like. Whatever.

1. Eat less, and eat right.
  2. Exercise more."Yeah, we know ( Read more... )

There are few certainties in life. You will die. Also, you can't predict the future. You can have a guess if you like, and you can come to useful conclusions as though you could predict the future, but you can't really. No one can. Nevertheless, there are lots people whose livelihoods depend on convincing other people that they can predict the ( Read more... )

You can't make things happen just by thinking about it. This is one of the essential truths of the real world. However, as humans, our brains are accustomed to dealing with reality in a different way - everything, we reason, must have a cause and effect. Also, for some people, the concept that they have no control over anything that happens to them ( Read more... )