Weirder and weirder. From http://tonyortega.org/2013/05/15/chi… :

The following 30 individual completions for Ryan Lee appear in official Scientology publications:

I wasn't the first to catch it, Google tells me: http://tonyortega.org/2013/05/15/chi…

I love that the certificates on the wall are for completion of Scientology 'courses' (you can see them clearly if you pause at :45). The "OT" in the framed documents on the right stands for "Operating Thetan", a 'spiritual level' above 'Clear' in the 'Church' of 'Scientology'.

(Whew; I didn't know if I'd have enough…

What is the evidence or reasoning they use in the PNAS paper cited above?

Relatedly: A friend of mine, a writer, spends his summers in Galicia. He's shown me photos of a sacred spring at the base of a hill. Beside the spring is a tree, on whose branches dozens of tattered rags have been tied. What the locals do is wet the rag with the sacred water, and then wash themselves with it so that…

"Eagleman is not making any extraordinary claims."
True enough; though he is employing fallacious reasoning in order to suggest that extraordinary claims (of the kind Marcus is indicating) are defensible on the grounds that human knowledge is limited.

Does the Machine of Death anthology have new competition?

"No other country claims to be the Greatest Country in the world..."

The harm isn't religion per se, but supernaturalism. The normalization of supernatural beliefs anywhere, makes it more socially acceptable to hold, profess, and act on supernatural beliefs everywhere. Which in turn makes it more likely that dangerous absolutist and anti-human supernaturalist beliefs and behaviors will…

Also, a nota bene, re: the use of the word "silly" to refer to religious believers. From "Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meanings" (Random House, 2008), as cited by grammar.about.com:

Agreed. There's a third path (more than that, actually) between accommodating nonsense, and deriding it: that of neutral disagreement. When in the course of my secular activism, what I tell believers (when it is relevant to tell them anything at all) is that I think they are mistaken about the way the world works, and…

Agreed. There's a third path (more than that, actually) between accommodating nonsense, and deriding it: that of neutral disagreement. When in the course of my secular activism, what I tell believers (when it is relevant to tell them anything at all) is that I think they are mistaken about the way the world works, and…

"Most of the PLoS paper is over my head..."

I would also like to know if the Lifehacker contacted this quack, or if the quack came calling in search of self-promotion.

Nothing unusual about that (or about the kid's suffering, poor guy). In child development and psychoanalytic circles, such an animal is called a "transitional object" (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_object#In_child_psychology).

How neat would it be if player-made characters, with stats and abilities earned in game play, could be turned into cards usable in this game...

I suspect what's at their core is not evil as much as an absence of good. And a great deal of narcissism, and a great deal of indifference. Which, perhaps, amounts to evil, if you like I don't subscribe to a supernatural view of the world.

(Not that the size of any body part has much of a bearing on that person's character; but I see what you did there.)

I'm inclined to ask why a non-poem is being presented as a literary text, but for my fear of seeming like I'm calling into question the effort to expand the canon to include non-white, non-male authors. My question REALLY is, why is this (rather weak) poem the one selected for the exam, when there are more…

Relatedly: Ambystoma tigrinum, the tiger salamander, exhibits a variant morphological form triggered by (among other factors) population density that gets too high. If the pond the little larval salamanders are living in gets too crowded, a small percentage of them suddenly Hulk out: their body size increases, they…