So, basically, the human brain uses pre-emptive multitasking instead of true multi-processing. It can execute either Empathy.exe or Rationality.exe, but not both concurrently.

I suspect further testing would show that not all people classify the same problems as “social” or “analytical”. This makes reaching a meaningful resolution difficult, as we would literally be executing two different programs against the same data, consistently producing different results that cannot be reconciled.

Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that the conflicts which consume our society are not about people not knowing the “facts”, but are the result of hard-wired neural patterns that are at least partially created the instant sperm meets egg.

Wow, a pair of “psychics” are shown to be nothing but skilled cold readers. Gosh. Who could have seen THAT coming? (Not them! Ha ha!)

So, the question now becomes, does Ms. Putt genuinely believe she’s psychic and not realize she’s simply good at reading people (a valuable skill in many situations and something most people would be proud of being good at), or does she know she doesn’t have psychic powers? I’m going to guess the former, because self-aware frauds know better than to show up for tests. (At least those tests run by magicians and other such experts in the bamboozling arts, as opposed to most scientists, who generally are as easy to dupe as anyone else — easier, in many cases, because scientists normally deal with a universe that can be very complex, but not actively deceptive. Science, in general, does not assume the subject of an experiment will consciously try to alter the outcome.)

re:Biggest Douche In The Universe

Checks date.

Not April First.

Oh. Bugger.

(Originally posted on stufffundieslike.com, reposted here.)

I would pay good money (well, sorta good… OK, not so good, gimme a break I don’t got much) to get on film the recorded response from any fundie preacher (the bigger, the better) to the following question:

“OK, so, we’ll assume you believe in the literal Biblical account of creation. You may or may not be aware that things like the Hubble deep field scan shows there’s hundreds of billions of galaxies, not stars, mind you, but galaxies in the universe, and that those galaxies have, on average, half a billion stars, and that in the last decade, we’ve come to realize that most of those stars have multiple planets. Now, according to Genesis, God created all of the lights in the sky on the fourth day, all of it, half a trillion galaxies, perhaps more, in under 24 hours. Now, OK, let’s accept that. That’s astounding. You look at the Hubble Deep Field, or any other such images, and you think, “This God did all that in a day…creation beyond what the human mind can hope to comprehend was brought into existence, an expanse of stars so vast that it cannot be accurately measured, merely guessed at, and we can see only the faintest echoes of most of it, only able to imagine the infinite beauty and variety of the quite literally trillions of planets which exist around all those stars. This God, this creator, who can do such things, with so little effort, a being of such incredible wisdom and power and artistry… this God, you believe, just killed 100 or so random people because he’s really upset that one guy stuck his shlong up another guy’s butt. That is what you believe? Yes or no?”

My October 18th entry has 460-odd views, about ten times what most of my entries have. Something tells me that certain words in it attracted a certain kind of person. Probably not the sort of person I’d want to be within 50 feet of. (Am I talking about perverts, or FBI agents looking for perverts? Or both?)

One candidate has a history of higher education, global travel, and business experience. His opponent worked in a restaurant. This is why you should vote for her.

Remember, Americans: Don’t pick leaders who are intelligent and experienced. And who like corndogs. Corndogs begin with “c”, just like “communism”.

So, every so often, I check my gmail spam because sometimes stuff I want gets tossed in it – legitimate notices from companies I buy from, MMO news that isn’t from wehaxuraccount.ru, etc. Today I spotted a truly interesting subject line, namely “You’ll become a real sexual predator with these meds”. Because, uhm, yeah. You know how it is. You get older, you just can’t quite get up the energy to commit sex crimes any more. I definitely need some drugs to give me the boost I need to hang around dark alleys and wait for sloshed teens with fake IDs to stagger out of the bar. Then there’s the choloform, the dragging them into the windowless van, and we don’t even want to discuss how digging even a shallow grave afterwards causes my back to spasm. So I definitely need some of that stuff.

Not sure why the link is going to “TakeASeatOverThere.com”, though. Chris who?

Schools might need to spend money on EDUCATION, not sports. Naturally, all those inbred redneck Republicans are opposed to this, and… wait, it’s Democratic progressives? (Seems to me that all tax money given to schools should go first to core education (language, math, science, history, etc.) , and, if anything is left over, to cultural education — music, art, etc. Sports, which are not part of education at all, should be funded by bake sale or private donations, never by tax dollars. In a perfect world, nothing would be funded by tax dollars, but we live in an imperfect world, and since the odds of eliminating taxation altogether are pretty much nil, it makes more sense to focus on spending the money appropriately. If you can’t stop Don Vinnie from shaking you down for protection money, you can at least try to demand he provide protection.)

So, it may be possible to prove we’re in a computer simulation. (Of course, if we are, how do we know it isn’t rigged to give a false reading of this proof? Contrariwise, how do we know the universe doesn’t simply have these limits, just because?). But, anyway, we’re going to do this by… building a computer simulation. Which leads to the next question — if this is a perfect simulation of  the universe, then it will enable us to build a simulation of the universe inside it. And in that simulation, someone could build a simulation. And, the other way — the universe that is running this simulation may, itself, be a simulation, and so on, infinite, in both ways. (For that matter, if you can run one simulation, you can run two, or a hundred, or a thousand, or… parallel world travel may be possible; it’s just a matter of switching servers, not actual realities.)

I just hope when I die, there’s no griefer camping my corpse.

So, pads/tablets are good for a lot of things, but clumsy for phones. If you make a phone screen big enough that it’s a decent eReader or Netflix player, it becomes progressively clumsier as a phone, and current table sizes are just *barely* tolerable for the work we ask them to do; they really should be an inch or two larger. (“That’s what SHE said!”)

Thus, I propose we borrow another idea from Star Trek — the Phaser I/Phaser II construction.

As all real Star Trek fans know, the small Phaser I, useful for covert missions, snaps into the framework of the larger, pistol-like, Phaser II. I propose that pad/phone design adopt a similar mechanism, where a phone can “dock” into a tablet, where it will automatically sync data, etc. It should be designed to snap in and out in a second or two. You can tap into the “phone” functionality while it’s docked, sitting with the tablet on your lap or desk, using the forward-facing camera and microphone. While walking, or in other situations where using the table to communicate would be awkward or intrusive, you snap the phone out and leave the tablet on your desk, in a bag, etc. Because the devices are designed to dock and sync with each other, it’s superior to having two completely separate devices which require a third device — a desktop PC — to swap information. Having one snap into the other makes travel easier. It also makes it simpler to design a phone with much less processing capacity, since it’s assumed it’s more of an adjunct to the tablet than a fully functional device in its own right. 

I’m thinking a dock on the back, with a thin sheet of protective plastic to prevent the screen scraping on the metal of the tablet. These things are so thin now that it wouldn’t seriously interfere with storage or use.

(Likewise, I think we should have a dock or connector on the long edge of a tablet, that lets it hook into a desktop machine, where it becomes primarily a screen and touch interface,with most of the processing work done on the desktop. When you leave work, you just undock and go. Applications, etc, will have data storage that is automatically synced based on filters like file size and so on; the UI department can work out the details.)