Friday, April 27, 2007

Birthday Hodgepodge

Today's my birthday. Don't worry, I don't care either.
I just want to know why the format of these posts is never right. Anyone know how to fix it?










You are getting sleeeeeepyyy.


Don't you love the human nervous system?



I can't understand why this dickwad doesn't get busted like Imus did for this shit. You can feel the winds a changing in America. BillO is shouting on a regular basis and cutting off people's mics (56% of the country is a member of "the far left" according to him), talk radio heads are getting called on their shit, people are actually listening to Bill Moyers.







I finally finished the selfish gene today. I don't know why it took me so long to read, maybe because I was already familar with the "gene's eye view". But don't let that detract you from reading this book, it is worth all it's hype. It's amazing to think how recently Watson and Crick discovered DNA. One must understand that all Darwinian understanding was based on observation of nature without the meat of the entire operation- the unit of replication clear up to the 1950's! Therefore ideas of evolution consisted of group selection theories which are now known to be inadequate. Trivers, Dawkins and Maynard Smith were giants of the field who developed the way of understanding that genes use organisms to replicate themselves, not the other way around. Dawkins took blossoming information coming to the fore in the 70's and wrote this book with an inspired torrent of passion- it was literally a revolutionary new world view that clarified the workings of the natural world . 8th most influential science book of all time, written with precision in such a powerful explanatory way that you cannot read the entire book without already knowing that his idea is simply and obviously the most parsimonious way to understand evolution in the natural world. The anniversary edition is great because the footnotes elaborate on further developments of the ideas, and outcomes of the debates going on at the time.





Started this book today by Hitchens. Some review it as better than Dawkins or Harris, so I thought I'd try it. It's pretty much atheist porn. Poignant, but I fear the backlash. Great writing so far. At any rate I think these recent books will desensitize the populace, clearing the way for atheists to be panel members on political talk shows where they did not exist before. In fact I saw evidence of it today on the McLaughlin group- a pundit regular in the discussion circle openly stated that she wished the religious and religion were marginalized from a certain political topic. I couldn't help but think that she would not have said this one year ago. The climate would not have been right.


I also ordered "varieties of religiious experience"- Carl Sagan/Ann Druyen


I think this will be great. Better be for the price. It's got color photos inside.


"Moral Animal" Richard Wright- already read it once, want to own it. I admire Richard Wright and share his cynicism. This book is almost unreadable in it's condemnation of human nature. Love it!


"Cosmic Jackpot" by Paul Davies- I heard him speak at the science conference and he seemed reasonable. I don't know shit about cosmology, I just know that the shit everyone else knows doesn't tell me shit either, so I figure Davies may be a good primer. And I'm just intuitively unconvinced by the multiverse theory... (but again, I don't know shit). I guess the reason I never got into the details of cosmology is because I realize that at the very end of the story the truth is something which cannot be understood. It's like watching all three installments of the Lord of the Rings back to back only for the screen to go black right when Sam and Frodo get to Mordor.



Almost forgot... This is classic on Westwing. Ripped straight from that letter sent to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. But we'll forgive them for that. I can just see the eyebrows of millions of viewers raising- "The Bible says what?!?!?! He's making that shit up!"

I can't link the clip. Its at onegoodmove.org april 27.

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