In Scientia Veritas

PZ Myers posted a link to this pagefrom New Humanist, where they created a some very funny “religion trump-cards".

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I’ve been quite busy this week, so I’ll just leave you with this awesome comic panel! Hopefully next week I’ll be able to write more.

This article is interesting. Constance Steinkuehler, game academic at the University of Wisconsin, thinks that computer games induce their players to scientific thinking. She spends many hours a day playing online games like Lineage and World of Warcraft as a part of a study on learning environments. She and her colleages, after examining 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a discussion board for players of World of Warcraft, have fount out that in order to defeat the bosses the gamers engage in discussions that have everything in common with the scientific method.

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You wanna know what’s going on in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? Watch and rap!

Credits:Kate McAlpine

Barenaked Ladies - The History of Everything lyrics

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait…
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool, Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!
Bang!

Actually it’s merely a coincidence, that I am trying to debate a denier of the (physical) big bang theory, when I learned about the CBS’s series. I know it’s no hot news now, because it began airing September last year, but I just discovered it a couple of weeks ago and wanted to share with you how much I enjoy it!

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This video is amazing. And the music too!

In four dimensional geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube, which is in turn the three dimensional analog of the square. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square; or, more formally, the tesseract can be described as a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells.

Wikipedia: Tesseract

This one is even prettier:

But if you want to appreciate its structure, watch this next one! The author gives a short explanation:

All six rotations of a transparent tesseract. Each rotation that includes the w axis is a minute long, while the other three are each 20 seconds long. This way, you’ll be able to zone out and better visualize the tesseract.

0:00 XW
1:00 YW
2:00 ZW
3:00 XZ
3:20 YZ
3:40 XY
4:00 All rotations in succession

First watch the Crazy Sprinkler Lady video. Phil also wrote about it some time ago. It was then that I learned of the evils of dehydrogen monoxide OMFG!!!!!

And now… now I found this:

It reminds me of this class I took last semester with Prof. Reiner Kümmel, Thermodynamics and Economy. As you can tell from the name, it had a lot to do with energy policies, it was so much more a class about politics than physics, which in a way was a freshening and totally new to me. The point is that there I learned even more how so many people and governments who are mostly not scientifically literate make stupid decisions, because they are not well informed or choose the wrong sources of information. The world would be so much better if governments would seek the help of actual scientists. Phil thinks the same:

Crichton makes claims about being a scientist himself. He has a book out on denying global warming, and advised President Bush on it. James Hansen, an actual climate scientist, couldn’t see Bush, but a guy who wrote about the work other people did got an audience. It’s a crazy world.

Take for example global warming (YES, it’s happening) and peak oil (YES, oil production has peaked).

In this case is the use of ominous technical words that frighten people into thinking something as harmless as water is gonna kill’em. As Penn said,

[the video] does show that maybe they are not so much environmentalists as they are joiners… of anything.

Stupid hippies

Snatsch is one of my all-time favourite movies. So is this short version.

I haven’t posted in a long time, I guess it’s time! I’ll just repost this image of our dear Benedikt

…is fun!

Religion is bullshit

You talk about a good bullshit story? Holy Shit!

Did he say “Humpty Dumpty"? Maybe that explains why Pat Condell had his vision in Jerusalem!

Thoughts can really fuck up the faith thing…

…just as any catholic priest

So I was watching the Wikipedia article on Pat Condell, an atheist guy from the Uk who hast posted some videos on YouTube and other sites criticising religion, so I’m quite a fan of him. There I read that actually he is one of the top hundred most subscribed to users on YouTube. And browsing through some of the “most subscribed” I stumbled upon this profile.

They are apparently two guys whose website is www.smosh.com and who do some video projects. In their last video they announced the winners of the Boxman Dance Contest. It’s a very funny dance to a pretty catchy song and after watching the winner videos I regretted not having known about the contest early, because I would have submitted my video too!

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I just found this amazing image, which portraits every mexican’s wet dream:

Of course, it’s only an ad (currently on billboards in Mexico) and a harmless joke, but there were of course idiots who felt deeply offended and called it “Insulting” or “outrageous”. This bich even “raises a toast” to this photoshopped answer.

I’ll just quote these guys and say: If they can’t take a joke, fuck ‘em.