Emoto’s Emotive Water Crystals

You may have heard about Masaru Emoto before–he’s the guy who claims that emotions, when directed at water just prior to freezing, will cause the water molecules to freeze in patterns that are associated with the emotion in question. He is, as you might imagine, completely fucking retarded.
Nevertheless, because the US gov’t is also [...]

Kucinich: “I saw a UFO.”

Kucinich: “I saw a UFO.”
.:sigh:. Look: I’m for Mike Gravel, and I back him 95%. But if he doesn’t make it, the only choice I have left is Dennis Kucinich. So it really irks me that he’s so idiotic as to say something like this during the democratic presidential debate.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

Today, I saw Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak at Columbia University. I’d like to share a few highlights of the encounter, and I don’t just mean the novelty of dealing with secret service agents staring down the visitors, nor the protesters outside, nor the fact that if you got up to use the restroom, [...]

Worthy of Attention: Taking Stock of Reality: Coming to New Beliefs

The question of morality is always a sticky one. What is or is not considered to be ethical changes with each person you ask. Nevertheless, it is clear that the vast majority of human beings agree on a few so-called ‘basic’ moral judgments, such as the undesirability of killing one’s own family without [...]

A Lack of Substance (or: From Flaky to Wiki)

I just finished my calculus midterm.
What I like most about take-home exams is that while taking the test you can listen to OCR songs and play games of chess and scrabble at the same time. Plus, if you get stuck on a problem, you can always sleep on it and try again the following day. I think that whenever I finally [...]

On The Use And Uses Of Skeptical Thinking

Originally posted at the MTGNews.com forums.
 On The Use And Uses Of Skeptical Thinking

A lot of the threads here in the Outside Magic forum are argument threads, and many of those arguments are on rather important subjects. Take Highroller’s Philosophy Thread for example. The level of subject matter discussed in that thread isn’t exactly what most non-Magic players would expect on [...]

An Interview

So there I am, reading racist periodical literature on the couch in Carpe Diem, when I overhear two people meeting for the first time at the table beside me. 
One of them is a reporter for some paper that I hope is obscure (if not, then the public is really in trouble), and the other is a seemingly nice [...]