Thursday, September 10, 2015

Fifty Billion Shades of Grey

There is an argument I hear a lot from delusional idiots like Ray Comfort and his ilk.  They make the point that even a kindergartener can plainly see that evolution is false and "God" is real.  I often get puzzled by why they use this argument...  are they really suggesting that we should base all of scientific fact on the cognitive capacity of a 6-year-old?  The thing is it's not even rare or confined to denial of evolution.  The insipid food blogger, Vani Hari, AKA "Food Babe" -- someone who ranks among the most dangerously stupid people in the country (which is quite an achievement in a world in which Louie Gohmert exists) -- once put out a little sound bite that "if a 3rd grader can't pronounce it, don't eat it."  Her adversary, Yvette d'Entremont, who uses the tongue-in-cheek name of "Science Babe", was quite quick to respond with her own sound bite: "don't base your diet on the pronunciation skills of an 8-year-old."

To those of us who have functioning brain cells, it would seem more than a little bit silly to ever think that decisions about something as complex and nuanced as personal health should be so cut and dry as "all chemicals are dangerous"...  or that quantum mechanics "proves" the existence of the afterlife, when life itself is so ill-defined...  or that climate change is clearly false because there's snow in your driveway.  It's so obvious that god is real because evolution isn't obvious!  Isn't that obvious?

It's obvious to me that your search for the obvious only obviates obliviousness.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Blog update...

Hey, there.

It seems like it's been a while since I posted anything on the blog, and well, there are number of reasons for that.  The TL;DR version of it is basically that I've been more than a little preoccupied with matters in my actual life.  Nothing tragic...  just...  extraordinarily time-consuming, and they wreak havoc with my schedule and it has taken some time to get my feet under me.

Although there are other factors, I'm just going to focus in this update about the biggest.  The biggest time sink in the picture is actually the fact that I've returned to the realm of higher education.  I'm basically in a graduate dual degree program right now...  and I'm doing that while still holding a full-time job...  and that basically means that I have to spend a lot more time outside of work actually studying.  And class days on the weekends for me typically means getting up at 4:30-5 am.  This is mainly because of the time difference...  it is an Ivy league school after all, and that means I'm 3 time zones away.  The main motivation for doing this really comes from a supremely depressing realization that I summarized in a one-liner that one of my friends seemed to really enjoy as he put it up on Facebook immediately.  Basically, I said then that I'm living in a place where people like me are worth their weight in gold...  and get paid their weight in silver...  and the cost-of-living is so high that we actually need our weight in plutonium just to get by.  Sad, but true.

So, yeah...  You can probably guess that blogging has not been on the front burner for a while.  That doesn't mean I'm lacking for content or that I intend to stop, but simply lacking for time.  I've got a few things I'm going to post shortly, but now that I have a reasonable size consistent readership, it's worth pointing out that the delays have not been for nothing.  In a sense, I've kind of gotten used to the idea of a sleepless life a little bit ahead of schedule.  Anyway, that's the long and short of it.  There's more worth mentioning, but I'll save that for a later update.  Just stay tuned for some real pertinent content to come.