From the New York Times:
The evolutionary blueprint for hands was borrowed in part from a much older genetic plan for our nether regions, a new study suggests.
Think about that the next time you shake hands with someone.
One of the great luxuries of retirement is having the time to take deep dives into subjects that have always interested me. Artificial intelligence is one of those subjects. As part of my AI education, I’m experimenting with various AIs on my home PC. All it takes is a graphics card of sufficient compute power and video RAM capacity, and I already have a powerful graphics card that I use for flight simulation.
A few days ago I was playing with an AI called Deepseek-r1:8b and I somehow pushed it over the cliff into psychosis. I asked a fairly simple question: “What is the value of the second derivative at points of inflection?” The major web-based AIs can answer that question in less than ten seconds. Deepseek “thought” about it for a full six minutes, and as it worked on the problem, I could see its thought process displayed in a scrolling window (it’s a nice feature that many AIs are starting to implement these days).
Donald Trump’s behavior is so far outside the norm that many people (including mental health professionals) have suggested that he is mentally ill. The most common suggestions I’ve seen are that he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, also known as sociopathy), or a combination of the two (known as malignant narcissism). There is also widespread concern about cognitive decline.
Pascal’s Wager is widely misunderstood by atheists and theists alike, as Glen Scrivener and Graham Tomlin explain in this video. They’re right about that, but they also claim that the original version of the Wager is more robust, which I think is a mistake. It falls to many of the same criticisms as the popular version and then some. More on this in the comments.
I ran across this amusing video from right-wing nutjob and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens:
You have to admire the confidence with which she says the most idiotic things.
Ran across this short video the other day:
That is not the mic drop that @Daily_Dose_Of_Wisdom thinks it is.
A recent thread (Does the square root of 2 exist?) dealt with mathematician Norman Wildberger’s aversion to irrational numbers, which he finds suspect because of their infinite decimal representations. It also dealt with his skepticism regarding infinity in general. Commenter petrushka posted a link to a relevant Medium article by Carlos E. Perez, who is similarly averse to infinities in mathematics. I thought it was worth an OP, so here’s a link:
Infinity as a Conceptual Shortcut in Mathematics
I’m skeptical of Perez’s skepticism, but I’ll save my thoughts for the comments.
In a recent OP I looked at a discovery by mathematician Norman Wildberger, who found a general method for generating power series solutions of polynomial equations of any degree. Wildberger has an interesting, extremely unconventional and (in my opinion) flawed philosophy of mathematics, which among other things denies the existence of irrational numbers. Here he explains why √2 doesn’t exist, at least not in the way that mainstream mathematicians thinks it does:
There’s lots to criticize about this, but I’ll save it for the comments.
Some of you may remember a wild discussion we had at TSZ a couple of years ago, spanning eight months, debating whether “3” and “3.0” refer to the same number and whether measurements can be expressed using real numbers. (Yes, really.) One of the questions that arose during that discussion was on the boundary between pure and applied mathematics, and DNA_Jock referenced the mathematician Norman Wildberger’s opinion on that topic.
In response to comments questioning his mental stability and cognitive capacity, Donald Trump once tweeted:
Actually throughout my life my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being like really smart…I went from VERY successful businessman to top T.V. Star…….to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart but genius….and a very stable genius at that!
I’m going to be scathing in my critique because these people are both dishonest and incompetent and deserve to be called out on it.
The problem of evil is arguably the most difficult philosophical problem facing Christians and other theists who believe in an omniGod — a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. The problem, concisely stated: If God is omnibenevolent, he doesn’t want his creatures to suffer. If he’s omnipotent, he can eradicate evil and suffering from the world. Why, then, doesn’t he do so? Why is there so much evil and suffering?
Atheists have no trouble explaining it. If there’s no God, then there’s no one to prevent evil and suffering. Yet some people insist that the problem of evil is a problem for atheists, too.
An interesting (and scary) New York Times about Trump’s cognitive decline:
With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
The previous post (by vjtorley) featured a video by a YouTube Christian apologist, IMBeggar, in which he attempts to defuse the problem of evil. It’s riddled with problems as you can see by reading the OP and the comments.
Out of curiosity, I visited IMBeggar’s YouTube channel and watched some of his other videos. One of them, titled “Why doesn’t God just show Himself?”, tackled the problem of divine hiddenness. It was even worse than the one that addressed the problem of evil. I was surprised to find that I disagreed with every major point.
Yesterday I saw someone joking online about how if you apply dimensional analysis to fuel efficiency, you end up with an area. Why? Because fuel efficiency is expressed (in Canada and Europe, anyway) as liters per 100 kilometers. The liter is a unit of volume, or length3. The kilometer is a unit of length. If you divide length3 by length, you end up with length2, or area. (Similar reasoning applies to American-style fuel efficiency expressed as miles per gallon.) Continue reading
We’re all familiar with déjà vu — the false sense that what we’re experiencing right now is something we’ve already lived through in the past. Continue reading
Wanted to share this interesting article in Aeon on human gestures and the extent to which they are universal vs culture-specific:
Those are terms I found in descriptions of wine and high fidelity sound, respectively. Descriptors like that have always made me wonder: Do they name anything objective? Do wine experts agree on whether or not a particular wine exhibits an ‘energetic, stony character’? Do audiophiles agree on what a ‘chocolatey mid-range’ sounds like? Continue reading
In the photo above, you can see the famous basketball player Shaquille O’Neal endorsing Epson printers. He was undoubtedly paid a lot of money for that, because Epson believed that the increase in profits would more than offset the large expenditure. Companies pay big bucks for celebrity endorsements, so they’re obviously convinced that these endorsements are effective. Continue reading
Perhaps the most disturbing idea in Christian dogma is the notion of hell — a place of unending torment for the detestable souls who don’t qualify for a blissful eternity with God and the angels in heaven. Who are these horrible people who are condemned to agonizing, eternal punishment? Those who don’t believe in Jesus. That’s it. Merely failing to believe in Jesus means you are one of the loathsome vermin who must suffer forever, with no possibility of a respite, and not even the prospect of a welcome oblivion. Continue reading