Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Pirate Bay has been formally blocked in the UK by all the ISPs (BT, O2, Sky, Virgin Media etc…). They have done so for legal reasons, a High Court ruling in April directed them to do so. So now of course nobody can access the Pirate Bay from the UK and so their UK traffic … Read more
This I love … over on Pharyngula PZ gives a very nice sequence of events that illustrates an example of a Douchebag of epic proportions … truly hilarious. The brief summary is … oh heck no, I’ll not spoil the fun, just go read it. You can also read more about it here. Least you wonder, … Read more
The news is that the Equality Network (a group that works for equality and human rights in Scotland) commissioned Ipsos-MORI to survey Scottish attitudes towards marriage and found that of 1,003 people asked, 64 percent supported the idea of allowing gay and straight couples an equal right to marry. Hey, that’s quite good news. Ah but not everybody thinks … Read more
A team of smart folks in Japan have found a mathematical model for the ‘hit’ phenomenon in entertainment. It basically uses the advertisement budget time distribution and also word-of-mouth (WOM) to work things out. Oh wait, how the heck do you measure WOM? Well they went for the number of posts on social network systems such as … Read more
When you confront some believers with examples of truly outrageous religious behaviour, the common rebuttal is “Ah but they are not real believers, no true believer from my faith would …“. Now that indeed might be factually correct, but they are missing the key point, so let us now take a quick look at all this. First, what … Read more
The Jakarta times reports … An Indonesian man arrested after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page was jailed for 30 months Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online. Alexander Aan, 30, was found guilty of “deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity,” presiding judge Eka Prasetya Budi Dharma told … Read more