In which the Secular Therapy Project reaches 2000 clients in the first year of operation!
In which I review Mark Edward’s book, and find it a bit lacking from a skeptical point of view.
A while back, I weighed in on a topic that can get quite heated – Down Syndrome and the potential…
I don’t think that I’ve mentioned it before on the blog, but I am something of an amateur photographer. I…
On Archive.org, one can find an enormous number of intriguing and wonderous things. Every once in a while, though, you will stumble upon something that is a bit beyond the pale. What I have linked below is a short documentary that is part of the Perlinger Archives. It documents the, frankly, disturbing experiments conducted in the Soviet Union during the early 1940s. These experiments focused on the revival of dogs that had been clinically dead for a period of time, including just the revival of a severed head.
As hopefully all of you know, the James Randi Educational Foundation put on their annual conference this past week, The Amazing Meeting (TAM). I was privileged to be able to attend this year as a “first TAMmer” (there were buttons if it was your first time, which I thought was great ) in a couple of different capacities (which I’ll get to in a minute). I didn’t have a chance to blog any during the weekend, but I did put up quite a few tweets under the #TAM2013 hashtag, which was very active (and I recommend going and scrolling through them to get a general feel for the conference).
I am on the editorial board of a fairly new peer-reviewed, scientific journal called the World Journal of Psychiatry. In what I see as a brilliant, and yet bound to be controversial move, the journal is going to begin publishing not only the completed, revised, accepted manuscript online but also both the peer reviewers’ comments on the initial paper and the authors’ letter addressing the reviewers’ concerns. An email I received yesterday from the publisher said that:
This past week, on June 30th, the cast and crew of the recently completed version of 1977’s classic film Star Wars that had been dubbed into the Navajo language, or Diné Bizaad, gathered to celebrate the release. This is a monumental occasion, as this is the first major Hollywood film to be translated into an Native American language (Star Wars has previously been translated into over 30 other languages). The film opens in a public release on July 3rd, but you can catch a couple of other key scenes below.
If you are a frequent reader of the Huffington Post, you are probably quite familiar with TAM speaker Cara Santa Maria. She rose to renown as a science writer for HuffPo, where she produced the well-received series “Talk Nerdy to Me” and held the post of Senior Science Correspondent until she left in April 2013. Since then, Cara has become a host on the Young Turks network as well as co-hosting a series on The Weather Channel called Hacking the Planet. She also runs a very active Twitter account.
(Fairly relevant image, and also really fun game)
Since I was fairly young (pre-teens, certainly, although I can’t put an exact date on it), I have been fascinated by mythologies of all types. The earliest ones I was exposed to were the Greek and Roman myths, quickly followed by Egyptian stories and Norse sagas. Thanks to growing up in Oklahoma, I also got lots of early exposure to Native American stories, particularly ones from the Kiowa tribe. Reading stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh and learning more and more about comparative mythology was a critical step in my road to embracing a naturalistic worldview.