Here’s a fun site. Did you ever play “telephone” as a child? Check out this clever website: Lost in Translation. It takes advantage of the successive use of good quality Internet language translators. It will convert an English passage into a different language and back to English, five times in succession. …
Maybe I’m the last to find out, but I just today stumbled upon an incredibly . . . well . . . provocative . . . wiki site: uncyclopedia.org. How I got there I can’t actually recall. Perhaps I stepped into a space-time warp. The article I first encountered was an official-looking article about that well-known scientific theory, “malevolent design.” I hadn’t before encountered this theory, so I eagerly read the article:
Malevolent Design (or M.D.) is one of the leading theories in micro-miracology, the division of Creation Science which deals with the origin and development of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses and fungal parasites. Beginning with the fundamental insight of Creation Science that the complexity of life is such that it must be the result of divine intervention, and employing the micro-miracological observation that pathogenic organisms change rapidly in order to defeat or circumvent the human immune system, the theory of Malevolent Design posits that the adaptation of human pathogens is the result of malevolent actions taken by an intelligent designer. Put simply, the theory explains that humans continue to become sick because God hates us.
Quite interesting, I thought. I’ll have to tell mention this to grumpypilgrim, who thinks he is well read. But why stop there? I moved on to another topic that theory grumpy often does discuss, Intelligent Design:
…Intelligent Design, or as the French would say, L’Intelligent Design, is the absolutely true and totally scientific theory that the Universe is so gee-whizzy fantastic and
How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…
If someone asked you how deeply you subscribe to biases- based on race, age, sex, sexual orientation, or religion- what would you say? The more open-minded of us usually try to avoid prejudice at all costs, to the extent that we reject our natural tendency to generalize. But even if we don’t accept it, society exposes us to a barrage of prejudiced perspectives on a daily basis.
How many times do you see a black criminal at large on the local news? How often do household cleaning product commercials center on women? How does the teenage character behave on prime-time sitcoms? These small, frequent examples spread a variety of stereotypes, and impact the way we perceive others, even if we feel loath to recognize such bias.
Since most people don’t want to admit upholding prejudice, Harvard psychologists devised the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT tests whether an individual has a preference for certain ideals of gender, race, and other categories, all of which indicate bias. The test works like this:
Below I’ve provided a list of words, and four categories. The IAT asks you to group the words provided into one of two columns. Each column represents two categories- in this case, Male & Career, and Women & Family. Go down the list and tap the appropriate column on your screen for each word as quickly as you can without making any mistakes:
You probably found that test fairly simple. Now try it with two of the …
Our designer, nicksmithdesign.com, has added a few new features. On each post contained on our homepage, you can see the number of "views." This feature refers only to the number of times that someone has clicked on the permalink of that specific post. It thus vastly underestimates the number of views for…