Caught Tegan and Sara live at The Forum last month. I’ve loved the indie sister duo ever since I was introduced to Sainthood sometime last year.
Thing about a great live performance is that you forget the opening acts. The Jezabels, a relatively new Sydney based band were pretty good and Astronautalis put up an awesome show. I love this brilliantly shot jam session. Thundercats!
(NSFW)
Astronautalis from Coach House Sounds on Vimeo.
I spend over an hour on the tram every day and when not dozing off, I’m listening to one of the many podcasts I can never find time for otherwise. I’ve put up a list of the ones I listen to religiously because, well, we all know there hasn’t been much writing going on around here.
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe: If you’re looking for a weekly debunking of irrationality, go no further. I’ve admired Dr Steven Novella ever since I came across his brilliant blog, NeuroLogica. You have to hand it to the man for making it his life’s work promoting critical thinking and skepticism while actually making a fun podcast with plenty of gastrointestinal humour. Also, Rebecca Watson is awesome.
Nerdist: Chris Hardwick is not that funny but I love how he tries. And if you need just one reason to tune into this podcast, it’ll have to be because they had The Muppets on. Yes, Kermit and Gonzo and everyone.
This American Life: I’ve been told that TAL is one of the best podcasts out there and I cannot disagree. The show consists of several acts with interesting essays, field reports and short fiction.
Reasonable Doubts: I’m a little tired of all the atheist blogs and podcasts out there but Reasonable Doubts manages to offer interesting analyses of religions and religion related news without being overly condescending. They also won a People’s Choice Podcast Award and the people are seldom wrong.
The Ricky Gervais Show: Ricky Gervais is genius. Fact. But what makes this podcast really stand out is the amazing Karl Pilkington. I’m still uncertain as to whether he’s pulling off an elaborate prank or if he really is as daft as he comes across. But face it, to pull of that kind of stream of consciousness stupidity, you’ll have to be a prodigy. Doesn’t make sense otherwise.
The Bugle: I’ve invited a million stares in public because of The Bugle. I dare you to not snicker if not laugh out loud. John Oliver and Andy Zaltsman have created a satirical news show that puts The Onion to shame. Oh and they ‘re responsible for my extremely unhealthy Florence Nightingale fixation.
Yeah, that’s about it.
While I don’t agree with Cory Doctorow on comic books (I rarely, if ever lend mine out), this is exactly why I won’t be getting an iPad.
Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.
But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).
(…)
If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.
If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.
If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.
I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.
Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.
Go watch. Now.
My favourite podcast, SGU has a list of 20 common logical fallacies up on their website. It’s a brilliant list; you tend to come across quite a few of them in everyday arguments.
Ad ignorantiam: The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.
Argument from Personal Incredulity: I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. Creationists are fond of arguing that they cannot imagine the complexity of life resulting from blind evolution, but that does not mean life did not evolve.
Confusing association with causation: This is similar to the post-hoc fallacy in that it assumes cause and effect for two variables simply because they are correlated, although the relationship here is not strictly that of one variable following the other in time. This fallacy is often used to give a statistical correlation a causal interpretation.
False dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.
Straw man: Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.
The moving goalpost: A method of denial arbitrarily moving the criteria for “proof” or acceptance out of range of whatever evidence currently exists.
Check out the entire list. It’ll probably come in handy the next time you’re matching wits with someone as logically dissonant as Bill Maher.
Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up. Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Deep Space Naan | ||||
|
||||
For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.
Where would we be without self-deprecation?
Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart’s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.
The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.
But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?
…
I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.
How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?
(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)
Talk about religion and you’re bound to get me all worked up; not that I don’t appreciate a good argument, just that a good argument is non existent when it comes to backing faith or the the existence of an omniscient and benevolent creator who has time to answer your petty prayers but blithely ignores starving children in Africa.
These days, creationists and right wing retards have a new ace up their sleeve. Piggybacking. Despite the Church’s open disdain for inquiry and exploration (over the last few thousand years), they seem oddly content using art and science to explain God and his mysterious ways. A few years ago, I was told that the God of the Old Testament asked for circumcision not merely as a sacrifice but (also) because of health reasons. Sadly, Mr Yahweh forgot to list out naturally occuring carcinogens and deadly viruses.
Now, the Anglicans are looking to appropriate the Doctor Who mythos to ‘explain’ to young people facts about the Bible that would otherwise seem ‘difficult’ to understand. Brilliant. So then, Jesus was a Time Lord right?
One day you distance yourself from Harry Potter and The Golden Compass because they’re well, satanic and the next day you embrace a character (immensely awesome as he is) who espouses the need for questioning and rejecting dogma. All this is probably a sign of the Curch’s waning influence. But then again, we live in a country where almost 70 percent believe in reincarnation and another sizeable number hope to get it on with 72 virgins in the afterlife. Bah.
Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.
And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:
1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.
2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.
Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.
Links:
