QotD: Don't Try to Answer Unanswerable Questions
and not to answer them:
This skill is most needful in times of
stress and darkness.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
QotD: Religion Makes People Vulnerable to Manipulation
"...growing up in church desensitizes you to logical inconsistencies, and that opens up large numbers of people to manipulation tactics employed by individuals and institutions keen on controlling groups of people for their own self-serving purposes."
—Neil Carter in How Faith Breaks Your Thinker
APRIL 10, 2018
SOURCE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/04/10/how-faith-breaks-your-thinker/
Excellent resource on logical inconsistencies:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
QotD: 50% of everybody is below average-->democracy fails
--Henry Louis Mencken in 'Notes On Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19 September 1926)
QotD: Democracy
--H.L. Mencken
One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
--Robert Kennedy
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant threat winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov
Democracy if four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
--Ambrose Bierce
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
--Winston S. Churchill
The main problem in any democracy is that the crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy -- then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards than the tube for a nickel apiece.
--Hunter S. Thompson
Quotes from page 18 of the Funny Times, September 2017
QotD: Taxes in America
Well, duh. The American people also want drive-through nickel beer night. The American people want to lose weight by eating ice cream. The American people love the Home Shopping Networkd because it's commercial-free.
--Will Durst (quoted in the Funny Times 4/16)
QotD: NdGT on Ignorance
Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it?... If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
--Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Word of the Day: AGNOTOLOGY
( Great article here from the NY Times )
How People Die in Grand Canyon
by Tom Myers and Michael Ghiglieri
This book logs all the mistakes you can make at the Grand Canyon. There's an interview with the authors here. There have been some changes since the first edition. There are more environmental deaths, climbing deaths down in the canyon, and suicides than when the book was written. There are fewer deaths overall and fewer falls from the top of the canyon. Perhaps the park has improved safety and access to cliff tops to cause this change.
Q: What are common risk factors for death at the Canyon?
A: "Men, we have a problem," Ghiglieri said to an audience at NAU's Cline Library this winter, displaying a graphic with a skull and crossbones.
Being male, and young, is a tremendous risk factor, he and Myers found.
Of 55 who have accidentally fallen from the rim of the canyon, 39 were male. Eight of those guys were hopping from one rock to another or posing for pictures, including a 38-year-old father from Texas pretending to fall to scare his daughter, who then really did fall 400 feet to his death.
So is taking unknown shortcuts, which sometimes lead to cliffs.
Going solo is a risk factor in deaths from falls, climbing (anticipated or unplanned) and hiking.
Arrogance, impatience or ignorance also sometimes play a part.
SOURCE
http://azdailysun.com/news/local/canyon-deaths-and-counting/article_ba588a05-e816-55be-87f6-80f15b76f744.html
QOTD: My Belief is Just as Good as Your Belief (or better)
-—Isaac Asimov
How the US Government is going to Stay Ignorant
No independent scientific input is allowed!
What a crock.
QotD: Stupidity in Science
--Martin A. Schwartz
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full
Tennessee Allows Creationism into Schools
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/11/tennessee-opens-door-to-creationism-in-schools/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/law-allows-creationism-to-be-taught-in-tenn-public-schools/2012/04/11/gIQAAjqxAT_story.html
http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/04/11/tennessee-passes-law-allowing-creationism-in-the-classroom/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29
QotD: Ignorance Begets Confidence
--Charles Darwin
Imagine being lost in the wilderness with a group of 10. Who is the most confident about which way you should go? Always an interesting test.)
(Didn't mean to but both knowledge and confidence tags just created. Not sure I will ever stop creating new tags, sorry. Follow a parallel tag to track the idea farther back. This journal is a form of mind map.)
QotD: Pain in Growth
--Nagui Mahfouz in Palace of Desire
QotD: on Travel
The traveller doesn’t know where he’s going.
--Paul Theroux