My favorite quote, and for you logicgod readers,

The first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons.

Just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and I was impressed yet again. Whether or not I’m hearing the complete truth is uncertain, but I do certainly feel like I’ve heard Moore’s truth. It’s a truth that definitely feels logical and from the logical progression of the movie itself, no one can argue with it.

It’s hard to find someone that’s truly on “the people’s” (the majority, middle class’) side these days, yet that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Moore is a shining and trustworthy example of someone fighting on our side, showing our struggle and working to improve our (and everyone’s) well being, even if that does mean a 90% tax on the hyper-wealthy.

Call to action? The best thing to do now for the bored and lazy is to go watch the movie! It’s interesting if not infuriating at moments.

Check out the site: http://www.capitalismalovestory.com/

Does animal cruelty really matter?

The answer to me at first was no, of course not. The world is constantly simplifying and industrializing everything since the first factories cropped up. I attributed animal cruelty concerns to certain humans heightened sense of morals and ethics that are outdated in this scientific age. However, technology can’t protect us from everything. There are many changes that “necessary animal cruelty” cause to the animals. Higher stress levels and of course forced cannibalism in cows produces unpredictable and deadly results to the final yield.

An issue of ethics and morals?

Maybe I’m biased, but I believe heightened morals are going to be the true test of modern science in the coming decades in regards to gene testing/treatment and radical human improvement. When it comes to animals I think people are being too sensitive. Animals can feel pain yes, but they lack the ability of higher thought. They can’t long for green pastures or dream of bounding in a field of grain which they have never seen. People attribute human emotions to animals in the form of their pets and those destined for the slaughterhouse. There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the difference between our brains function compared to an animals and this misunderstanding causes many people to obsesss over animal cruelty to the point of equating it to child abuse and above.

At my college I saw many PETA signs and they were handing out fliers. On the fliers an animals life and “predicament” is constantly put on equal footing with the civil rights movement and pregnant mothers. Humans far surpass animals in cognitive function, so these comparisons are detrimental and only serve to hurt PETA’s cause.

The true and logical concerns.

We’re breeding, raising, and killing pigs and cows in an artificial world each day. Though an animal lacks heightened reasoning, desires to mate and eat in particular ways do exist. We shouldn’t stray too far from their natural instincts. The day we can engineer an animal without higher cognitive function (which there isn’t much of anyway) is the day that all concerns can disappear. In fact, we may as well biologically engineer meat or a meat-like protein substance cheaply and leave the messy and unpredictable business of animal slaughter behind.

Then Jesus “spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him.” Jesus then asked, “Do you see anything?” This is a very important question because it indicates that Jesus was intentionally making a point. The man said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Then Jesus put his hands on Him again and the man’s sight was completely restored. source

Who can argue with that right? Jesus “spit on the mans eyes” and with the power of his hands gives a blind man sight. Gene therapy just can’t compete! Unless Jesus has a seriously modified virus lurking in his saliva.

In all seriousness now, it’s only a matter of time. Gene therapy has received flak during its entire existence because it’s complicated and we don’t fully understand it. Who else got into trouble for being misunderstood? That’s right, and that’s why we should increase research on genetic treatments for common ailments. If you want to go to heaven (a.k.a. make heaven on Earth) you have to play God.

Article source with more details: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/gene-therapy-bl/

Dagmar Herzog says it all about how religious conservatives ( largely the Bush administration) have lied to us by preaching that those who wait to have sex until marriage will benefit greatly. They are selling the idea that by waiting, you will experience a marriage that is stronger and even superior both emotionally and sexually to those who do not wait. Plus, you will have a better life outcome, self-esteem and self-worth! They have even gone as far as to promise euphoric “soulgasms” for life.

Coincidentally, religious right wing authors are increasingly condemning and policing masturbation for married men through numerous recently released books (over 3 million sold in the U.S since 2000).  The popularity, marketability and accessibility of porn and Viagra in the past decade shows that people aren’t completely satisfied with their supposedly perfect virgin marriages. They still seek sexual pleasure and performance that stretches far beyond their initial “promise of pleasure” from their vow of purity and religion.

Obviously, your sex life is not unequivocally intense and rewarding solely because you waited until you were married. When 95% of Americans have had pre-martial sex for the past few decades*, it seems ridiculous that we are still labeling it as shameful/sinful and keeping young people uneducated about sex with abstinence-only education.

*http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-12-19-premarital-sex_x.htm

Having finished Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in about half a day, I found some quotes that I really agreed with. The book is told through the first-person perspective of 15 year old autistic Christopher Boone. He fears large groups of people, has trouble identifying emotion in even his parents based on facial expressions, and has a photographic memory. He isn’t, however, devoid of all emotion. He loves math and physics and thinks very logically.

This is a rundown of some of the notable quotes. God is mentioned a few times throughout the novel, accompanied by Christopher’s explanation of how it’s merely an idea. The human mind is compared to a computer, and evolution and the origin of the universe also make quick appearances.

The first quote demonstrates Christopher’s inherent atheism due to his logical nature:

“People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist. And there are billions of planets where there is no life, but there is no one on those planets with brains to notice. And it is like if everyone in the world was tossing coins eventually someone would get 5,698 heads in a row and they would think they were very special. But they wouldn’t be because there would be millions of people who didn’t get 5,698 heads.

Then a very short explanation of life follows:

And there is life on Earth because of an accident. But it is a very special kind of accident. And for this accident to happen in this special way, there have to be 3 conditions. And these are:

1. Things have to make copies of themselves (this is called Replication)

2. They have to make small mistakes when they do this (this is called Mutation)

3. These mistakes have to be the same in their copies (this is called Heritability)

And these conditions are very rare, but they are possible, and they cause life. And it just happens. But it doesn’t have to end up with rhinoceroses and human beings and whales. It could end up with anything.

By the way, some may be saying, “that’s all fine and good but what created these conditions? What sparked life in the first place” and to that I say we are getting ever closer to understanding. Science can’t explain everything but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer, it just hasn’t been found yet. As for this “spark of life”, two of the four building blocks that make up RNA (a chemical cousin of DNA that can carry and transmit information though it’s much simpler) have been created in the conditions of the early Earth (source). It isn’t as much conclusive as it is a step forward in getting closer to explaining the origin of life scientifically.

Finally Christopher compares the human mind to that of a computer in a way that I have always thought logical myself:

“… And that is why people think that computers don’t have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captain’s seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means a little man. And they think that computers don’t have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn’t see this happen because it is like the eye flickering from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.

And this is why brains are like computers. And it’s not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.

Also people think they’re not computers because they have feelings and computers don’t have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.

As computers grow ever more complex (with Moore’s Law holding true) the destinction between our human mind and a computer will eventually dissapear. Our brain seems and feels complicated (because for one part it IS, with over 100 billion neural cells, each of which requiring a laptop sized computer to simulate!) but that doesn’t mean it has anything a computer couldn’t simulate. The fundamental structure is different, where in a computer all calculations are done centrally, one at a time, in the CPU, while in a brain every single 100 billion neurons can fire simultaneously in a blazingly fast parallel structure. Yet there still isn’t a mental function that requires a soul or some extra paranormal force. It can be argued that consciousness or the voice we all hear inside is unexplained, yet as the quote above shows our consciousness is just one part of the brain looking at another part. Consciousness arises from complexity. Our brains mould themselves to the environment in an accelerated type of “survival of the fittest” with neural connections strengthening and dying due to real-time feedback. With intricate feedback loops and electrons following billions of pathways processing super high definition stimuli of video and audio etc. and still reasoning and observing itself how could it be possible for us not to have consciousness? (Unless we’re hit over the head with a brick of couse)

• An estimated 10% of living Europeans were conceived on an IKEA-produced bed.
• Ikea is so popular in the Middle East that three people were trampled to death at the store’s 2004 grand opening in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
• The Ikea catalog is printed more than the Bible annually.
  
• People have hosted dinner parties at the dining room displays in the store, eating the cafeteria meatballs, lingonberry jam and mashed potatoes.
  

This blog post dishes all the secrets of our beloved Ikea, http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/31198