On Tuesday night, Caleb Lack did a presentation to the UCO Skeptics and the Oklahoma Atheists about a study done to determine whether people who are skeptical of the paranormal tend towards certain measurable personality traits. The results were often strongly significant and occasionally surprising.
Chas and Damion had a lovely time chatting with Professor Caleb Lack about skepticism, science, and his new book, which you can read more about over at Skeptic Ink.
Point your podcatching device or software at this RSS feed and enjoy!
Or just listen right here…
Part one:
Part two:
Excellent middling-to-long form piece on the insurgent rhetoric of emotional trauma.
by Jack Halberstam
I was watching Monty Python’s The Life of Brian from 1979 recently, a hilarious rewriting of the life and death of Christ, and I realized how outrageous most of the jokes from the film would seem today. In fact, the film, with its religious satire and scenes of Christ and the thieves singing on the cross, would never make it into cinemas now. The Life of Brian was certainly received as controversial in its own day but when censors tried to repress the film in several different countries, The Monty Python crew used their florid sense of humor to their advantage. So, when the film was banned in a few places, they gave it a tagline of: “So funny it was banned in Norway!”
Humor, in fact, in general, depends upon the unexpected (“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”); repetition to the point of hilarity “you can…
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This suddenly seems sort of relevant again, because… http://sfy.co/bkeA
Skepchick SurlyAmy scolded Sharon Hill for following well-known parody Twitter account @AngrySkepchick over the weekend:
Sharon responded:
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Via Ryan Holiday
Over one hundred years ago, editorial cartoonists were harshly satirizing the inflammatory, hate-mongering, and fact-distorting means by which various periodicals competed for eyeballs on adverts. Nowadays, we call it click-baiting, but the cephalopod remains apt.
LOL WUT
Richard tw**ed the following a few days ago after Deepak put up his video offering a million dollars to solve the “Hard Problem” of consciousness.
Then a bunch of people took it seriously (go here and here), some being quite critical.
So Dawkins had to clarify:
I’m starting to wonder whether a sense of humor is a dying virtue.
What do you want from skepticism as a movement?
(We’re in it for the lulz.)
((J/k))
Good post on what TAM means to some of us.
The other night I had one of those classic “you’re back in school” dreams. Despite the fact that I’m almost forty, and high school was a mere 4 years out of my life, I still occasionally have dreams about being in high school or sometimes college. I think part of this is that for a number of years, I was a college dropout. I left college to go to work for a startup and then stayed for fifteen years. It never bothered me that I didn’t finish for a while, it was just unexpected. I think that is part of why I have these dreams even though I eventually did finish with a degree. I still have visions of going back to school and starting over, if I ever go into some sort of retirement.
But for now, I rely on one event every year that satisfies my education desires:…
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Someday, BlueBall Skeptics will be a real skeptical podcast, just as Pinocchio hopes to be a real boy. For now, though, it is the toxic dumping ground of a certain atheist podcast that is constrained by certain sensible editorial policies which need not apply here. That said, please enjoy the following outtakes:
