Monthly Archives: December 2007

Discrimination Against Atheists

A survey from Pew (Sep 2007) reported on Americans’ opinions of various religions. Basically, most people (76%) tend to have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics, more than half (53-60%) like Evangelical Christians, Mormons and Muslim Americans, though non-American … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Death Gives Life Meaning, or Cognitive Dissonance?

The Singularity Institute (Oct 2007) posted a piece on how immortality can give meaning to a life, in much the same way people have argued that death gives meaning to our lives. The author, E. Yudkowsky, gives some common arguments … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Dolphin Language?

The Telegraph (Dec 2007) has a story on Liz Hawkins’ research into dolphin communication which claims they might be using language. Basically, they used different whistles and clicks depending on environmental and behavioral context. Not exactly a surprise: many species … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

New Blog Design, With RSS

I’ve switched my blog over from hand-coded HTML to a more comprehensive, managed solution (with open-source WordPress software).  The blog now allows syndication (click RSS up at the top of the menubar), and will have a tag cloud at the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment