So, I wasn’t on campus when the most recent edition of the student newspaper, Varsity, hit the proverbial streets. But I’ve been made aware of something that should surely be directed to the Media Tribunal – an article by Kathryn Mitchell which fails to point out to students just how dangerous it could be to have sex before marriage. Not dangerous in terms of things like STD’s, embarrassment and regret, but rather dangerous in terms of threats like having your spirit “torn up”. Yikes. That would certainly trouble me, if I believed in nonsense like spirits. Judge for yourself whether Kathryn is an agent for the forces of darkness, or just a normal, fairly sensible youth (not that sensible is necessarily the norm). Continue reading »
Sep 012010
The voting phase of the SA Blog awards 2010 has started, and it seems that Synapses has made the final 10 in two categories: best blog about politics, and best post on a South African blog, for my February post on Giving Jacob Zuma the finger. Thanks for the nominations, whomever you generous folks may be. If you’re inclined to follow it up with a vote, then the banners below give you an easy way to do so. The left-hand one is for the politics category, and the right-hand one for best post – of course, you can just click one of them and fill in your other nominations when you get to the voting site.
There’s a bunch of good stuff there to vote for, but also some very strange contenders. Some of the blogs haven’t been updated in ages, and some aren’t even blogs (for example, The Daily Maverick). Unfortunately for me, if one is going to (falsely) consider the Maverick to be a blog, then they (rather than me) should certainly get your vote. But they’re not a blog, so rather vote for me. (Update: see Chris’s comment below. The Daily Maverick have taken themselves out of the running.) You can vote until the 17th of September, and the process allows for one vote per day. Yes, I know, the methodology is completely screwy, but there you go.
Other people/blogs worth checking out:
Two of my competitors for best post: 6000 with his Dear Uruguay (clearly inspired by my post, The hand of god, revisited, but never mind that); and Michael Meadon’s post, On deference, which exhorts us to bear the limits of our knowledge in mind, and to understand what authority means in the context of scientific claims.
Then, two of the entrants for “Best Science and Technology blog”: Michael Meadon’s Ionian Enchantment and Angela Meadon’s The Skeptic Detective.
For many years, I have been a coffee snob. But my entitlement to this snobbery is somewhat questionable, seeing as it stems from a few years spent as a barrista, back in the early 90′s when nobody knew what a barrista was. We did roast our own coffee, though, so were at least marginally authentic. And I could make funky layered drinks, after all. Given that most SA restaurants still today serve a cup worse than the one you can make at home, I certainly felt entitled to some snobbery at the time.
And “the time” lasted for a good 15 years, long after I had desisted from making layered lattes, and had instead begun digging myself into theoretical holes so deep you needed a heidegger[1] to get out of them. But the time is now over, as I have gone and done one of the things that make real coffee snobs roll their eyes, and sometimes snort in disgust. Continue reading »
- [1] borrowed from the (absolutely tremendous) novel 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein (partner to Steven Pinker) ↩
Apr 122010
All very late in the day, as I’m sure you’re already all bored with touching yourselves in your studios. I don’t have a studio, so can’t really say whether your boredom is premature or not. However, if you are bored of it, and want to encourage others to touch you in your studios, you have two clear options. First, you could contact this guy:
Or alternately, you could procure yourself one of these:
If you opt for the former, make sure to get hold of the Rat before Dawkins does. But if you choose the latter route, simply contact Larry (a Juve fan, but don’t hold that against him) by email using this address. R80, in red, black or white, and available in various sizes – just like your studios are.
Originally published in The Daily Maverick.
As that master epistemologist (and occasional US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld reminded us in 2002, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Some of these unknown unknowns are probably harmful to us, but seeing as we don’t know what they are, there’s little we can do to safeguard ourselves against them. But as my earlier treatment of the moral panic relating to DStv and porn implied, a known unknown (in this case, the harmfulness of porn) can be treated in two entirely different ways. Continue reading »
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