The most recent newsletter from Dr. Paintball Hammond recycles one of his articles from 2004, which claims that universities are “hijacking our youth“. At the end of another long year of teaching, involving having to confront plenty of mindless prejudice, fundamentalism of various sorts, and deep confusion on how to reach justified conclusions, it’s really quite gratifying to read that we’re apparently doing a fine job. According to Hammond, tertiary education manages to turn three-quarters of believers into sane people (well, to some extent at least):
Month: November 2009
Michael Meadon recently hosted the 12th Carnival of the Africans at Ionian Enchantment, and there are a number of pieces worth a look, and blogs worth supporting. Three posts that I’d recommend are Mike’s on the disturbingly common habit humans have of engaging in post-hoc reasoning with regard to medicine and the immune system, Tim at Reason Check reminding us of how “psychics” and their ilk exploit the vulnerable for personal gain, and Dr. Spurt at Effortless Incitement on robophobia in music. But you may want to look at the Carnival post itself, as there’s a lot more there that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. And if you’d like to host or contribute to a future Carnival, the guidelines are here.
Part of my routine, accompanying the second cup of coffee, is my morning browse through the 100 or so items that have accumulated in Google Reader overnight. As any of you who use it would know, it’s a very useful way to stay on top of peripheral interest areas, so long as you keep a firm editorial hand.
What I mean is that – as with most sources of information – if you don’t pay attention to filtering, the signals are soon drowned out by noise, and something quite interesting from one source can get drowned out by 10 links from some blogger who should really save his one-liners and links for Twitter (or keep them to himself).