-
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
Tag Archives: history
Speaking of collusion (and treason)…
The Vietnam War, Episode 7: The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968 – May 1969) at 51:55-55:42, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2017): NARRATOR: But on October 31st [1968], just five days before the election, the president himself made a surprise announcement. He was stopping all bombing of North Vietnam. There had been real progress in Paris, […]
Also tagged collusion, entertainment, government, treason
Comments Off on Speaking of collusion (and treason)…
Donald Trump: The “I” of any storm
Dave Pell nails it at NextDraft: President Trump doesn’t get to be graded on a curve. The Texas visit was a complete failure. No mention of the victims. No empathy for the survivors. More silly asides about crowd size and cable-TV fame. Once again, Trump proved that he will always be the “I” of the […]
Genetic evidence suggests the Canaanites weren’t destroyed after all
Annalee Newitz, writing at ARSTechnica: The Canaanites are famous as the bad guys of the Book of Joshua in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. First, God orders the Hebrews to destroy the Canaanites along with several other groups, and later we hear that the Canaanites have actually been wiped out. Among archaeologists, however, the […]
Aging Soviet Space Vehicles Still Impress
Eric Berger, writing at Wired: The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just […]
Also tagged space
Comments Off on Aging Soviet Space Vehicles Still Impress
Star Wars at 40
Star Wars, a film which has unfortunately come to be known as Episode IV: A New Hope, was released 40 years ago today. Although I didn’t see it on opening night, or even opening weekend, I did see it soon thereafter (you have to be able to get a ride when you’re eleven…), and I […]
Also tagged awesome, entertainment, movies
Comments Off on Star Wars at 40
Masterpiece restored: Stolen Stradivarius will sing again
Ah!, some non-depressing news from Yahoo News Digest: After a meticulous restoration that took more than a year, a Stradivarius violin that was stolen from the violinist Roman Totenberg and missing for decades is about to return to the stage. Mira Wang, a violinist who immigrated to the United States from China 30 years ago […]
Also tagged entertainment, music
Comments Off on Masterpiece restored: Stolen Stradivarius will sing again
President Obama interviewed by Dateline’s Lester Holt
President Obama on Dateline NBC, “Barack Obama: The Reality of Hope”, 1/13/2017: If you had told me at the beginning of my presidency, the day after in fact of my winning the presidency, that eight years later the economy would be stabilized, we would cut unemployment in half from its peak, that the stock market […]
Also tagged government, politics
Comments Off on President Obama interviewed by Dateline’s Lester Holt
Eugene Cernan, last man on the moon, dies
R.I.P. Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 Commander and the last man to make a footprint on the surface of the moon.
Also tagged rip/remembrance, science, space
Comments Off on Eugene Cernan, last man on the moon, dies
Tommy Allsup, guitarist who avoided Buddy Holly plane crash, dies at 85
R.I.P. Tommy Allsup.
Also tagged music, rip/remembrance, rock
Comments Off on Tommy Allsup, guitarist who avoided Buddy Holly plane crash, dies at 85
10 ways the iPhone has changed our world in the last 10 years
For me, a guy who used to carry around a flip phone, a palm PDA, a DSLR, and an iPod, nearly everywhere I went, the greatest initial change was simply convergence: The iPhone hasn’t just created new technologies – in expanding the definition of what a phone could be, it’s incorporated so many other devices […]
Also tagged apple, insanely great
Comments Off on 10 ways the iPhone has changed our world in the last 10 years