As an Amazon.com employee, enthusiastic Mac user, and life-long lover of Marmite, this story in the Register about “Amazon’s offer of a 12-pot pack of Marmite with a copy of Apple’s .Mac online service” is completely unsurprising. (Though I do wonder why it showed up in the Hardware news….)
Read More Why is this hard to understand?From The Seattle Times Puget Sound-area residents spent much of Wednesday bracing for another anticipated snowstorm…. But the predicted snow was interrupted off and on with rain and November became Seattle’s wettest month on record. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported a monthly total of 15.37 inches late Wednesday, breaking the previous record of 15.33 inches…. At…
Read More The wettest month on recordVia Pharyngula: “Get on your blog, link to http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html, and let’s see how quickly we can saturate the blogosphere.”
Read More This is a test. It is only a test. Please ignore this test.Back in the north-east, a couple of inches of light snow would barely make the front page of the local section of the Globe. But here in Seattle…. Drivers inching their way through the evening commute cursed the snow that returned to the Puget Sound region this afternoon, shutting down at least one highway and…
Read More Massachusetts drivers may be notoriously bad, but at least they can drive in snowFirst John Peel, now ‘Fluff’. RIP
Read More "Greetings, pop pickers"Tim Bray alerted me to a fascinating on-line test of pitch perception, called Test your musical skills in 6 minutes! While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good…
Read More Test your tonedeafnessI just checked in (online) for my flights back to Seattle on Sunday. I’m due to depart Boston at 6:00am and land at IAD (Washington Dulles) at 7:49am; allow a few extra minutes to taxi to the gate. Meanwhile my flight from IAD to SEA is supposed to start boarding at 7:50am, and to push…
Read More Optimism in its purest formBBC FIRST TEST, BRISBANE, DAY TWO (close): Australia 602-9 dec v England 53-3
Read More OuchVia Charles and the WNMTC* list comes this forthright piece by Steven Pinker on the subject of Harvard’s Report of the Committee on General Education. First, he objects to the way in which the Science and Technology Requirement is justified: The report goes on to emphasize the relevance of science to current concerns like global…
Read More Pinker rips Harvard on the balance between science and religionIn all of the recent brouhaha over theism, atheism, and science (especially evolution), there’s one question which I haven’t seen much discussed. Since I can’t see an obvious answer, I thought I’d blog about it. This question is specifically addressed to those people who accept the current state of brain science, and who also themselves…
Read More How do people reconcile science with the idea of an afterlife?