-
About
- Yeah, in a Minute... is the personal dumping grounds of Paul Landry:
- NAME AND PRONOUNS:
- "Paul" / "he–him–his"
- FIND ME ON:
- The Fediverse:
- and pretty much everywhere else via [About.me]...
- PHOTO BLOG:
- LASTLY:
- But not leastly, [Fuck Facebook!]
- And Royally [Fuck Twitter!]
-
News Gathering vs. Confirmation Bias
- Remember, if you do not have at least one source of news that you turn to regularly, with which you routinely disagree, then you are not practicing news gathering! You are practicing [confirmation bias].
-
Search
-
Science
-
[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) at p.32.
-
[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
-
Subscribe
-
Top Tags
-
Most Recent Entries
- 📌 Mastodon
- 📌 Science is more than a body of knowledge
- Happy Festivus
- Don’t Talk on Cell Phone While Driving, Just Don’t Do It
- Trump Contradicts Himself Regarding Sidney Powell’s Role
- R.I.P. Jimmy Buffet
- Project Street Vet
- The Best Way to Spot an Idiot: Kindness as a Signifier of Intelligence
- Wasn’t even a Nazi in his youth.
- Twitter Limits Backfire
- Oh no! The “Woke” Police are Going to Have to Cancel Their Precious Chick-fil-A
- Why Prince May Have Been the Greatest Guitarist Since Jimi Hendrix
-
More Recent Entries
- Twitter Limits Backfire
- Oh no! The “Woke” Police are Going to Have to Cancel Their Precious Chick-fil-A
- Why Prince May Have Been the Greatest Guitarist Since Jimi Hendrix
- Smokin’! Gary Clark Jr. Performs “The House Is Rockin”
- Fox News Settles with Dominion for $787 Million, Averting Defamation Trial Over its 2020 Election Lies
- How Tennessee Became the Poster State for Political Meltdown
- Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire
- Trump’s Arrest and Republican Outrage
- Nashville School Shooting and the Metro Nashville Police Department
- Nashville School Shooting
- All right, what’s next?
- Elon Musk puts $20 billion value on Twitter
- The One Thing Every Influential Guitar Tone Has In Common
- Extreme are Back, Baby!
- It’s Time to Ban “Right Turn on Red”
- Tucker Carlson texts reveal he hates Trump “Passionately”
- End Daylight Saving Time and switch to Standard Time all year
- Trump Visits East Palestine, Conveniently Forgets Own Record
-
Etc.
- Gunga Galunga. Gunga—Gunga Lagunga.
- For another grand, I'll let you take me out to dinner.
- Sippin' on booze in the House of Blues.
- Dude! Stop saying that—it was just a party!
- It's not exactly rocket surgery.
- Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
- Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock!
- iPhone, Bitch!
- 6EQUJ5
-
Meta
Author Archives: Paul
Six months and man’s best friend
Six months. Six months and I still can’t see his picture without getting emotional. Cisco was a remarkable dog; he was a wonderful companion, but more than that, he was a friend, taken far too soon. Damn I miss him.
Tagged cisco, family, man's best friend, personal, rip/remembrance
Comments Off on Six months and man’s best friend
Penn & Teller get star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Penn Jillette on Twitter (@pennjillette): Maybe the favorite picture I’ve ever seen. Wow. Makes me cry!
Tagged entertainment, freethought, reason
Comments Off on Penn & Teller get star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Roger Ebert: Self-help books are bullshit.
Simple wisdom from Roger Ebert in April 2010: Self-help books are bullshit. Read a good book. That’ll help you. Indeed.
R.I.P. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert, writing in 2011: I do not fear death: I will pass away sooner than most people who read this, but that doesn’t shake my sense of wonder and joy
Tagged entertainment, history, movies, personal, reason, rip/remembrance
Comments Off on R.I.P. Roger Ebert
Adoble: Please keep using Flash Player…
I find it somewhat telling that Adobe actually “sells” Flash on its “Flash Update Available” notice. Flash is dead in the mobile space and something tells me that if Adobe feels the need to “sell” Flash to people who clearly already have it installed, it can’t be long for the desktop… Personally, I completely removed […]
Reason: How Even a ‘Well-Trained Narcotics Detection Dog’ Can Be Wrong 84 Percent of the Time
So even a dog that is very good at finding drugs in a “controlled testing environment” will generate a lot of false positives when sniffing randomly selected cars. Again, forensic “science” (with the exception of DNA) largely isn’t science. The U.S. Extreme Court is WRONG.
Tagged crime, government, reason, science, skepticism
Comments Off on Reason: How Even a ‘Well-Trained Narcotics Detection Dog’ Can Be Wrong 84 Percent of the Time
How reliable is the science behind forensic science?
Fascinating PBS: FRONTLINE show from April, “The Real CSI: How reliable is the science behind forensics?” So it turns out that the Forensic sciences (with the notable exception of DNA) are no more “hard science” than Creation “science”, social “science”, or Scientology… Most have no scientific basis at all, and those that do rarely reach […]
Tagged crime, education, government, reason, science, skepticism, tv
Comments Off on How reliable is the science behind forensic science?
AP: Meteor Explodes Over Russia, Nearly 1,000 Hurt
“Ever wonder just how much damage a meteor exploding in the sky can do?” “The Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement that the meteor over the Chelyabinsk region entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000 kph (33,000 mph) and shattered about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) above ground.”
Why is the media so in love with Tom Brady?
The question could be just as relevantly posed in terms of The Patriots, but that’s a discussion for another day. First of all, let me be perfectly clear: Tom Brady is one of the greatest (and perhaps THE greatest) quarterbacks to every play the professional game. He has been an amazing “ambassador” of the game, […]
Tagged entertainment, history, media, nfl
Comments Off on Why is the media so in love with Tom Brady?
Using the Samsung ML-1740 Printer in Mac OS X 10.8.x “Mountain Lion”
Well, my Mac-friendly Epson color printer went down, and pressed to print some things for my son, I was forced to go to my backup printer, an old Samsung ML-1740 laser printer. The ML-1740 truly was never intended to be a Mac printer. Even when I first bought the thing, it was apparent that Mac […]