Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old. We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories. These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments. Many of these posts (I'm guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day,…
Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergrad student at the University of Missouri, I took a psychology course that required me to interview someone who worked in the mental health field. A nurse working at the Missouri State Mental Hospital (on Arsenal Street in the City of St.…
The NYT has written a long piece of Mike Huckabee. Who is he? Huckabee is an admirer of the late Jerry Falwell (whose son, Jerry Jr., recently endorsed his candidacy) and subscribes wholeheartedly to the principles of the Moral Majority. He also affirms the Baptist Faith and Message statement: ‘‘The…
Intrigued by my review of numerous articles on neural plasticity, I concocted a simple experiment that had dramatic results. I set out to see whether I could cause people to have the illusion that a cheap rubber hand could “become” their own hand. Over the past few years, I’ve run this experiment on about a half-dozen people, just out of curiosity. Most of my “subjects” found that the experience was “creepy,” in that it appeared that the rubber hand “became” their own hand. It’s an do-it-yourself artificially-induced out-of-body experience.
Here’s how I ran my experiment. Step one is to buy a rubber hand, the creepy kind often used in gags.
Here’s one place where you can buy a fake hand. Alternatively, here’s a site that teaches you how to make your own rubber hand. You’ll also need to bend a coat hanger into a “Y” shape.
Finally, you’ll need a simple barrier, such as a large book. That’s all the equipment you’ll need. Here’s how you run the experiment.
Put the rubber hand side-by-side with the person’s same-side real hand.
You’ll be using the “Y” shaped coat hanger to touch precisely the same part of the rubber hand and the subject’s hand simultaneously. Move the hanger around and tap on or stroke a wide variety of corresponding parts of the two hands.
While you tap on the same portions of each hand, the subject should only be looking at the rubber hand–that’s why you’ll need some sort of barrier. …
If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”
This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).
One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.
Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (“unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.…