richardholden.info

Proof-reading is a difficult task

Posted on 11 November 2008 @ 10:11 pm. This post has 1 comment. Tagged books, evolution, humour.

This is the first paragraph of the (self-published) anti-evolution book Evolution: A Monument to Human Stupidity:

I wouldn’t argue with that.

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There’s always one (in 12.5 million)

Posted on 10 November 2008 @ 8:07 pm. This post has 5 comments. Tagged internet, spam.

A study has found that only 1 in 12,500,000 pharmacy spam emails on the Storm botnet actually leads to a purchase.

According to Wikipedia, over 100 billion spam emails are sent every day, of which approximately 13% are health related. This means that about only about 1,000 purchases are made as a result of these messages every day, translating into less than half a million purchases every year. Is this really enough to make the whole thing worthwhile?

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The future is now

Posted on 5 November 2008 @ 5:49 pm. This post has no comments. Tagged CNN, election, hologram, news, television.

Well, I’m sure everybody’s heard the big news from last night by now: that’s right, CNN now has a fucking hologram. Cooooool. And perhaps a bit pointless.

An important area of research

Posted on 28 October 2008 @ 8:49 pm. This post has 1 comment. Tagged humour, science.

Science: don’t take anything for granted, no matter how messy an experiment promises to be.

[From The Lancet of 12 February 1916.]

Imagining death

Posted on 25 October 2008 @ 11:10 am. This post has 4 comments. Tagged death, link, science.

Why we can’t imagine death:

People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

…

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

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