One of my favorites. Learned about this the first day of a course on Lonergan, oddly enough (or not, really, as much of Lonergan says is counterintuitive and made a nice lead-in). This video is a very eloquent explanation of the problem. Easily half of my classmates refused to believe it. I was skeptical at [...]

It may be possible to smell fear on another person: “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of the paper. Here is the paper at PLoS ONE. I’ve [...]

When it comes to philosophy (in this case political philosophy,) how you state your argument is arguably just as important as the context of and point you are trying to make. Chuck posted something interesting about the dialectal process being used in the abortion debate. Egalitarianism has slithered its way into our pocketbooks once again; [...]

Ecosalon has a list of the top 20 things we throw away, but shouldn’t. I won’t bore you with the details, but anyone who is as poor as I am might look at this list and say, “seriously?” I’ll admit to using paper-towels because my roomie got a metric ass-ton of them for free from [...]

Logic and language are not the same thing It’s difficult for us to imagine what our mental lives would be like without language. Some theorists have even gone so far as to argue that language and logical thought are one and the same thing. A new brain imaging study challenges this notion by showing that [...]

Yes, these are a bit old. Yes, I have been incredibly busy and unable to post. Suck it. First, from May 15th, Fattie gets all upset because her yearbook signature page said the truth: “I just feel like sitting in my room and crying,” said freshman Marie Gray. “I don’t feel like doing anything.” Marie [...]

Why DO babies turn so many brilliant women into slummy mummies? Why is it that when so many women become mothers they turn into boring frumps with one-track conversational minds that rarely stray from the oh- so fascinating subjects of nurseries, nappies and (lactating) nipples. These women infuriate me. They think they are doing what’s [...]

So awesome. Worth the hour. The biggest lesson that can be gained from this (along with the entertainment) is that there is a lot of value in what is omitted. The negative image of anything can be just as enlightening as what is visible.

This is an ingenious test of reasoning and logic skill.