I had a brain fart yesterday. The movie "This Must Be the Place" did not star Johnny Depp. It starred Sean Penn and he was magnificent.
I find it fascinating that without that little tiny bit of triangular cloth, she would have been arrested for public nudity...
This morning I watched Oprah while eating Wheaties from a large salad bowl. I was naked. Have a nice day.
I'm a revolver man myself, Pablo...
Watching a documentary about meth. It just said, "If you can bake cookies, you can make meth." Well, great, now I want cookies and meth.
Half of life is fucking up. The other half is dealing with it.
Just one job...one fucking job...
This is just one town bombed in advance of the Allies advance...
Do me a favor. Think of your house. Now think where driving 15 miles due north would put you. Now do the same for south, east and west.
That 900 square miles could be totally destroyed with just one of America's biggest bombs, and we have thousands of them.
Have a nice day.
I don't know how old this is, but it's obvious that this problem has been with us a long, long time...
If you don't know how an extension ladder works, you may not see how impressive this is...
Well, that's one way to do it...
Wouldn't it be great to die during your turn at charades.
"Schindler's List!"
"Iraqi Kurds?!"
Think Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.
If Kevin Bacon doesn't occasionally refer to his children as "Bacon Bits", then he can go fuck himself.
This is a good idea...
Why can't they genetically engineer mosquitoes to suck fat?
This is one of mine...
There's too much blood in my alcohol system.
Finally, a drink for people like me...
Nature is such a great engineer. We could do worse than to just reverse engineer what she has figured out long ago.
My daughter told me about scientists working on a solar panel that was almost as efficient as a leaf. She seems to think they are close to solving the problems.
Can you imagine how this must smell?
Do. Not. Light. That. Pipe.
I told my buddy that his deciding to ride his motorcycle without a helmet is a beacon of hope for those in need of new organs.
I told my buddy that his deciding to ride his motorcycle without a helmet is a beacon of hope for those in need of new organs.
I so hope this is true...
I do find it odd that we can substitute letters and/or other words for "the very bad ones" and it's okay even if you know what they are thinking. Jeez comes to mind. Gosh. Friggin'. Why do we allow ourselves to be manipulated by these too sensitive people?
If you are a vegan who ran a marathon and got your dog from a shelter, how do you decide which thing to wedge into the conversation first?
If you are a vegan who ran a marathon and got your dog from a shelter, how do you decide which thing to wedge into the conversation first?
At least the last guy was getting paid...
Said to be Alain Roberts, and he does this a lot.
You think all those people are down there just to watch him?
You think all those people are down there just to watch him?
One of my very own...
Magnificent.....simply magnificent...
Shot at just the right angle...
Jung Un is in the graphic on the screen.
She always left the door ajar to signal him that she was available...
But on this day he would not appear sweaty and eager. On this day he lay bleeding from a gaping, gurgling wound in his the left lung; the bullet from her husband's pistol having met its mark. After she learned of her lover's demise, she eventually forgot his name, but she never allowed the door closed again....it was the least she could do.
And she got fat.
Guns don't kill people. Gaping holes in vital organs kill people.
And she got fat.
Guns don't kill people. Gaping holes in vital organs kill people.
My bet is that she's wearing headphones...
We have satellites on polar orbits...passing over each pole per orbit. How would that look in a graphic like this?
“The universe is not required to be in perfect
harmony with human ambition.”
I was approached by a company that can put any image I give them on any wall no matter how big it is. They basically have a huge printer whose cartridges are filled with high quality paint. It is printed on a tough plastic film that will conform to the wall surface, including mortar joint indents. I'm pretty sure that is how this mural was created...
I'm still dealing with the art/Art ramifications.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Brilliant....
And you could feed the dead mice to your cat and save millions of song birds.
"Mini Cupcakes": As in the mini version of a regular cupcake, which is already a mini version of a cake.
Honestly, where does it end, folk, where does it end?
"Mini Cupcakes": As in the mini version of a regular cupcake, which is already a mini version of a cake.
Honestly, where does it end, folk, where does it end?
I predict that when the space
ship lands and the aliens step off, the first thing we are going to do is make
them gods.
I have a reader known to me lovingly as The Boy who is very passionate about the hemp plant. I like passion.
Damn!
This Cinco de Mayo I'm planning on puking tequila and gorditas on the side of a Taco Bell.
It's the light...it's all about the light...
My wife promised not to yell Al Gore's name during sex this Earth Day.
You think?!
Sex is like a joke. It's not any good unless you get it.
Sex is like a joke. It's not any good unless you get it.
Then, BOOM, she got naked...
AND THEN THERE'S THIS...
I did a little research and discovered that there is great concern about how scientists communicate with the public...the same public that they are asking for funding.
One panel discussion was titled "The Storytelling of Science." The consensus was that science need not be dumbed down for public consumption, but communication is a two way street. Many professions use an argot that is almost indecipherable by outsiders, but for science this need not be the case. Very complicated concepts can be understood by laypersons with a slight change of the language used to communicate these concepts.
That was kind of what I was trying to say with the "First there was nothing, then for no reason the nothing turned into everything" bullshit used to combat science.
I did a little research and discovered that there is great concern about how scientists communicate with the public...the same public that they are asking for funding.
One panel discussion was titled "The Storytelling of Science." The consensus was that science need not be dumbed down for public consumption, but communication is a two way street. Many professions use an argot that is almost indecipherable by outsiders, but for science this need not be the case. Very complicated concepts can be understood by laypersons with a slight change of the language used to communicate these concepts.
That was kind of what I was trying to say with the "First there was nothing, then for no reason the nothing turned into everything" bullshit used to combat science.
7 comments:
I'm not 100% sure, but chances are high that "mural" is a work of french photographer JR: http://www.jr-art.net/
He prints his photos with regular printers/photocopiers in hundreds of little pieces then pastes them up on walls. This might be a unique technique in street art, but I'm also not too amazed with it since it doesn't requires too much "challenge" to get your art up.
There's decades worth of culture- and ability-appropriate material for effective science communication. The problem is that it's ignored or marginalized by certain groups.
"Everything came from nothing" is what appears to have happened and we don't know how. But that says nothing about Christianity and atheism. If one doesn't understand what science is and how it's different from religion, making science-talk better is addressing a symptom rather than the disease. One must lose (or loosen up on) one's dogmatism before one can appreciate science.
That's a different battle; a philosophical fight rather than an empirical one.
Yeah, all that is well and good, Matt, but it's not just the religious who are confused. 90% of Americans are confused and it's not all their fault.
You've heard scientists on TV or whatever and they seem to relish the idea of talking over their listeners heads.
And just like any other discipline, no one can understand everything...meaning, if you wanted to understand how to fix a...say...boat motor, the man explaining it to you needs to use language you can understand.
Throwing around the phrase "Super nova" does no one any good. Why not just say, a really big star exploding.
I taught kids the fine points of art and I never used the traditional art terminology. I explained it, then asked what we should call it. Symmetry may have been voted stupid and "Same same" with a flipping hand gesture may have been substituted. It makes no difference what you call something as long as the concept is understood.
I understand, as I'm sure you do, that the singularity before the big bang is just a fancy way of saying, before that we really don't know. Why not preach that part of it? Why not plead the case for more research on the back of humanity's hatred of not understanding something.
And, fuck the bottom dumbest people (whose tax dollars fund all the research) meeting scientists half way, they aren't smart enough to do that. Scientists are the only ones in a position to educate the unwashed....and they are doing a miserable job doing it.
Regarding the caption of your "hope", it's a shame that photo of the matador sitting in front of the bull is a fake caption. The photo is real, but the comment is fake.
You can read it more at : http://www.dailydot.com/society/facebook-share-torero-munera-bullfighting/
Turns out that photo is of a much younger bullfighter, Francisco Javier Sánchez Vara, who’s standing in “desplante”—an act of defiance. Because the bull is so near death, Vara is able to rest in its path with impunity.
Thank you. I abhor bullfighting. I regret the error, but am more than willing to lie to promote a more humane world.
"Scientists are the only ones in a position to educate the unwashed....and they are doing a miserable job doing it."
We all find overly-broad, mostly-meaningless problems to decry. "They don't make 'em like they used to," etc. Scientists being poor educators is one such.
It's absurd to expect more than a small minority of scientits to be good educators. In reality we're always getting more David Attenboroughs, Neil deGrasse Tysons, Maggie Koerth-Bakers, Bill Nyes, Michio Kakus, etc, but not because of some nebulous fear that scientists are bad teachers.
People must loosen up on fundamentalism, egotism and consumerism before science-appreciation takes a meaningful hold. How does one achieve that? One's a personable and ethical person first and a scientist second, like the aforementioned popularizers.
Wanting "better science education" is like wanting "better gun laws": a good idea, but too general. Better science-talk could reduce credulity but wouldn't address dogmatism, unchecked egotism, consumerism, etc. Better gun laws could reduce murder but wouldn't fix gangs, drug laws, sociopathy, etc.
wrt "the American masses": it's meaningless worrying territory again, but the problem isn't that plebs are ignorant of science; they're largely ignorant of everything. Consumerists are taught to covet and to buy, not to be discerning. Bush responded to 9/11 by inviting people to shop!
———
You might appreciate this interview:
What Martial Arts Have to Do With Atheism: An interview with Sam Harris about self-defense and the seduction of faith
And this'n, in which Sam's the interviewer:
The Straight Path: A Conversation with Ronald A. Howard
The germane bit, from Howard:
"I tend to go back to something like the Buddha's eightfold path. I remember hearing a Buddhist speaker once give a talk, and at question time a woman said, 'I was raised as a Christian, where the idea of charity is built in, and yet you haven’t mentioned charity at all. So I'm having trouble understanding your ethics.'
And he said to her, 'Well, when you were doing all these charitable things'—which she said she regularly did at church, helping people all over the world, sending them baskets and stuff—'did you really care about these people you were doing these things for?' The woman was silent for a moment and then she said, 'No. I hadn’t really thought about that.' And the teacher said, 'Well, when you care, you'll know what to do.'"
Emphasis mine. Do you know what the problem is or are you just upset at some generalization that can't be combated? Probably the latter. To be clear, you're not unique in this kind of thinking; I fall prey to fluffy doom-and-gloomery rather frequently myself. Everybody does. But I think it's healthy to question oneself.
There are thousands of science, math, and tech vids which are excellent at communicating some complex facet of those fields. There are as many comments on said videos in which people expressed a newfound appreciation for the topic. Science education has never been better. Yes, there are many poor science communicators, but they're always going to exist. We're more likely to complain when something is broken than we are to praise it when it's doing a good job.
Sorry for the long rambly post; I kinda obsess over this topic.
I think i might use the wrong phrase, what i mean is, im also hoping it's true. And i might do the same if i were you to share those humane word to others.
It's nice to know you, i've been following your blog for this two year, and this is the first time I've ever post a comment on your blog. I'm a big fan of your writings and the ideas behind it.
Wish you all the best.
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