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| Thoughts Explained |
| I just wanted a space where I could write in a semi-academic fashion about topics that were bothersome or interesting. This will probably range within the topics of moral issues, science, skepticism or just sobering explanations of drunken tirades. |
| Language: English |
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| Kingston Police Doubles Down on Power Balance |
| 2012-05-11 21:05:52 |
The amount of disappointment I have towards the decisions of the Kingston Polices choice to promote Power Balance is hard to match, but the overwhelming condemnation of their choice should inspire a lot of hope that at least next time they will do a background check into products they put on their website and spend uniformed time selling.
Kingston Polices twitter responses to Matt Watson shows why there isn't much hope for optimism yet though. Here is a copy of the twitter conversation between the two:
Matt Watson: @KingstonPolice you're selling those bracelets knowing full well they're advertising false benefits. Shame!
Kingston Police:@at0mat
Oh my, we've already addressed this. Don't endorse any purported
effects. Most buy b/c they simply like the look, goes to good cause
Matt Watson:@KingstonPolice pardon the pun but what a cop-out. Selling them at all is endorsement and contributes to the perception they're effective.
Kingston Police:@at0mat Pun pardo...
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| Kingston Police Selling Power Balance Wristbands |
| 2012-05-10 15:29:32 |
I was aghast as Cost-Co on the weekend, and it had nothing to do with low prices or 50 lbs. bags of dog food. As I was entering the store I saw a strange union set up at a table beside where the cards were flashed to gain entrance. I blinked and took a second look, but, unfortunately, it only made the picture more clear. The Kingston police were selling Power Balance wristbands.
I looked around for the same disbelief that must have sat registered on my face smeared on anyone else, but I didn't see it. I could forgive the lack of awareness for the people around me, but from the police I could only find contempt for their negligence and stupidity.
The police are people who investigate things and are trusted to make good decisions, but any quick search will show that this was a boondoggle from the start. Power Balance wristbands are a rubber bracelet with a hologram in it, that is claimed to improve strength, athleticism and balance, by working with the body's natural energy f...
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| Jesusaurus Rex FC |
| 2012-04-14 14:13:53 |
I was playing an X-Box live game one day when I was matched up with an opponent named 'Jesusaurus Rex' which I thought was a pretty funny name. It's really hard to narrow down what someone finds funny about something but I think I appreciated the novelty of the name and the contrast between the two ideas of Jesus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
It looks like I'm not the only one either, as there are songs entitled Jesusaurus Rex, a pretty funny youtube video, a Wikipedia style page and a few pictures on Google images, which are all pretty funny, although I didn't find the songs particularly enjoyable.
Anyway, after playing against this person I've unabashedly stole the name and used it for quite a few things when forced to name something. My trivia team, a name for my computer, and whatever happens to come up. It turns out that a few of my friends liked the name as well and one of them used the name for his Rec soccer team.
This seemed pretty lighthearted and silly, as Rec soccer ...
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| Rape Baby Morality |
| 2012-02-29 15:55:06 |
Rick Santorum is quite the news maker and I love and hate the guy. It would be hard for me to find anyone I disagreed with more than Rick, but he talks honestly, forgoing the usual political speech that clouds what someones true view are. He even backs up what he believes with why he believes it rather than say something vague. I think he at least deserves credit for that.
Yet, pretty much everything he says makes me shake my head, and if I had the chance to talk to him I don't think we could really have a conversation. There is a fundamental disconnect about such basic beliefs that we would end up talking past each other. This can be shown in two stances we take on what should happen in the awful situation when a woman is raped and becomes pregnant.
Rick's view is that even a mother who is raped should have to carry their birth to term because every baby is a gift from God, or as he says himself, "The right approach is to accept this horribly created - in the sen...
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| The Great Pacific Garbage Patch |
| 2012-02-24 18:17:02 |
Well, it's finally time to write what I have been putting off for no good reason. I think of myself as someone pretty environmentally aware and conscious, and like most people I had heard that, "There is a garbage patch the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean."
I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but a picture came to mind of a landfill with water around it. Pepsi bottles sitting on top of Coke cans spread out as far as the eye could see...smell that fresh ocean breeze. Yet, that isn't an accurate description of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch at all, despite what searching for pictures of the patch will show you.
The patch is actually more of a plastic soup, than a true landfill style garbage site. It was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore decided to take the rout less traveled back across the ocean after a Yacht race and ran into a plastic minefield that he would only later understand. In fact he would become the leader in studying and publicizing the problem, for instan...
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| What Does the Earth Want? |
| 2012-02-24 01:30:29 |
This seems to be the fundamental question of environmentalism and it's often ignored, assumed, or not even asked. I feel like Camus, who first really put the emphasis on whether life was worth living, and put forth a fundamental question that should have been answered or at least defined before people went to work on solving problems. The cart is years ahead of the horse, and people trying to upgrade the cart to see if they can make it work better.
Now it may be argued, correctly even, that any answer given to this question will be anthropomorphizing the earth, but that doesn't diminish the value in asking the question in the first place. How the question is answered is still important because it defines your starting place and the bias's that were applied when asking the question.
Bias isn't a bad thing, its a natural omnipresent condition that affects any judgement and it is best to be aware to keep it in check. Physicists are biased with preconceptions that make it easier to be...
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| Is There a Social Need for Violence? |
| 2012-02-18 00:50:23 |
I have a weekend class, and a group was presenting about the problem of concussions in sports...a much better/more interesting topic than I got to present on, but three times during their presentation they insinuated that there was a social need for violence. It wasn't the type of presentation where the audience felt welcome to talk during so I wasn't sure the question would be addressed, but as they ended they had discussion questions, and they had a question framed as it is titled in this post, "Is There a Social Need for Violence?"
I addressed the under-current that ran through their presentation, and said to the same effect what I'm going to recite with better statistics in the rest of this post.
I don't think that if sports became less violent and people lost what were described as their, 'outlets for violence' that they would take to the streets looking for someone body checking someone else or start to beat up other people because their was a build up in their in...
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| The Biological Spandrel |
| 2012-02-09 10:05:25 |
In 1979, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin saw a growing problem in the field of biology. To combat and point out the problem they saw they co-authored the paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" which is now a classic and somewhat controversial paper in the field of biology. Gould say's in I Have Landed that it's his second most referenced paper behind only his paper with Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium.
The problem was that every part of an animal's anatomy was being broken up and explained as having an evolutionary purpose. The tyrannosaur's small arms were to help it get up from sleeping, or the female hyena's masculinized genitalia created aggressive and larger than would be expected hyena, are the types of explanation's being put forward. Each piece or feature of an animal was broken up and weighed; if something existed it existed...
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| Anton's Syndrome and Religion |
| 2012-01-20 11:32:42 |
I just learned a of a new and interesting rare problem that a few people suffer from and think that it applies well to religious people and specifically how they prefer to answer one type of question, but I'll get to that later. The idea to write this came from David Eagleman's book Incognito, so I'll just plug it for a second. It's a book that expands on the idea I talked about in my last post, about how the mind constructs reality the importance of the subconscious, so if I haven't jaded you from the subject it's worth a look at.
Anton's syndrome or Anton-Babinski syndrome is a problem that happens when there is damage to the occipital lobe. It causes a person to become completely blind, but the sufferers don't immediately report any problem at all. Not all that interesting so far. What is interesting is that this blindness is also coupled with two other symptoms, the lack of awareness of the blindness and the creation of the objects around them through the mind only.
All this me...
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| Thomas Berry - Philosophy and Evolution |
| 2012-01-20 11:29:49 |
I was assigned to read Thomas Berry's The Viable Human, which was then a person/essay, I've never heard of so I wasn't sure what to expect. Well it didn't take me long into reading his essay before I could probably guess that I was going to disagree with almost everything he had to say, except for his overall conclusion. People should take a more active stance on how they see the environment and their place within it, but Berry gets there only through misunderstanding, mysticism and idealism.
It really comes from the first page of his essay and becomes more blatant further in. I agree with his first line that, "We need to move from our Human Centered- to an Earth-centered norm of reality and value." Yet, his second line starts the path to error and he begins to lose support and respectability.
Berry qualifies the first sentence by saying that, "Only in this way [Changing from human-centered view to a earth-centered view] can we fulfill our human role within the functioning...
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