Happy Father’s Day!

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Lewis Black on Stupidity

Here is a little Lewis Black to bring some common sense to our lives. I watched him perform this sequence with my friend Andrea a few years back, and I gotta tell you, once he gets going you’ll struggle to breathe… too bad this clip doesn’t include his thoughts on soy milk: it can’t be milk because milk comes from titties, and there are no soy titties… it should be called soy juice…

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And given the recent opening of the “Creation Museum,” which makes the ridiculous claim that dinosaurs and humans co-existed sometime in the last 6,000 years, I thought this next clip would be perfectly appropriate:

I love it: “These people are watching The Flinstones as if it were a documentary…”
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Philosophy and the Matrix

We have a special treat today. The following is a documentary about the film The Matrix and its relationship to philosophy and philosophical themes. The discussion is broad, and explains how masterfully and seamlessly the movie touches on everything from Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Borges, Nozick, LaPlace, Hume, Schopenhauer to religion, meaning, purpose, causality, free will, consciousness, love, intuition, etc. Some big names are interviewed; among them John Searle, David Chalmers, Cornel West, Colin McGin and Daniel Dennett.

If you go to the official site, you can read a number of philosophical papers about the movie, many of which are written by the same people who appear in the documentary above.

I had never seen Chalmers before, but now that I know what he looks like I can make a little more sense of one of my favorite philosophy professors from college, Eric Dietrich, who was Chalmers’ roomate when they were students in college… it all finally comes together…
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Singing Paccini’s Nessun Dorma

I don’t watch the idol show… I tried once and felt my iq dropped significantly, plus I couldn’t stand the insecure British jerk who can’t seem to feel good about himself without first demeaning others… not that most of the others didn’t have it coming too…

Anyway, yesterday I stumbled upon this video accidentally, and it is pretty awesome (I’m not even sure how old this is, so for all I know this might be old news).

This guy, Paul Potts, is a little nobody. He is and looks very insecure, as though he’s afraid some kitty cat or perhaps a puppy or a hamster is going to kick his ass. Very innocent guy, with big dreams and, apparently, a godly and thunderous voice. He gets on stage and once the music starts rolling the innocence and insecurity seems to fade and a lion seems to come out and sing Paccini’s Nessun Dorma.

I think the female judge totally climaxed… what do you think? And by the way, who is that hottie?

For comparison, this is how it’s done by a professional:

The Nessun Dorma has been Pavarotti’s signature song for a few decades now. I remember the first time I heard it was during the Soccer World Cup held in Italy in 1990 and thought it was just absolutely brilliant… perhaps one of those early encounters with the sublime.

It made me wonder whether Pavarotti was perhaps a better tenor than Placido Domingo. I’m still ambivalent about it. Any thoughts on that?

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My safari & the neck of the giraffe

We went on a little expedition this weekend to do some animal research. We were very fortunate, and not only managed not to get eaten by predators but actually made a discovery that will revolutionize the world of zoology: the length of the giraffe’s neck is not, as we conventionally thought, a result of the process of natural selection and the advantage this long neck conferred upon giraffes foraging for high-handing leaves.

The culprit is something closer to sexual selection, although I’m tempted to coin this hitherto unobserved mechanism as ‘kinky selection,’ or something of the sort: it’s great for sticking up other giraffes’ butts! Just look at the pictures…

Since we wanted to accurately study these and other animals, we didn’t want our presence to influence their natural behavior, so we had to figure out a way to get close to them without making ourselves too obvious (we also didn’t want to get eaten), so we came up with the brilliant plan of going undercover and blending in… Can you tell where we are in the pictures? That’s right… I didn’t think so…

By the way, as some of the pictures suggest, tons of animals are obsessed with sex, huh? They like to lick and finger themselves… a lot!!!
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The Olympic Logo

Does anyone else notice Lisa Simpson is going down on a guy in this picture? Either that or he’s titty-f’ning her…. You decide…

Hat tip to Cheeky Monkey!
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Space: Black Holes

This is the third part of the BBC documentary series Space, narrated by Sam Neill. This one deals with the greatest monster killers of the universe: black holes, what they are, how they are formed, where they are, and how they can be detected. Once again, the graphics are awesome.

Click here to watch the first part: Star Stuff, and here for the second: Staying Alive.

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Richard Dawkins meets Charlie Rose

In this interview with Charlie Rose, Richard Dawkins talks about his book The Ancestor’s Tale, the separation of church and state, intelligent design theory as creationism, stem cell research, cloning, the virtues of the scientific method and what Dawkins rightly considers the most important and difficult question: consciousness.

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Carl Sagan on the Human Brain

I recently posted an awesome entry about the evolution of moral judgments (here), and how these seem to be directly related to the evolution of the brain, from the utterly guttural and visceral to the more calculating and representational character of abstract thought.

Well, here is the great Carl Sagan explaining the evolution of the brain in a bit more detail, and with his quintessential optimism.

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Surface-Touch Computing

The following video shows the remarkable pace at which technology seems to be advancing. The computers of the near future really will be based on the intuitive feeling of the fingers, but it gets better than that too, as wireless devices start to communicate with one another in what appears to be a seamless and automatic fashion. This is truly impressive stuff…

Click here to see a TED Talk presentation by Jeff Han on his multi-touch interface prototype.
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