I found this article interesting – new research suggests that exposure to the absurd or irrational may provoke higher levels of thinking – for example, pattern recognition – in humans.  The theory appears to be that when confronted with input which breaches the predictive model that our brains have established, we go into overdrive seeking [...]

Shock, horror.
Kudos to Kelvin Thompson, federal Labor MP, for having the courage to stand up to the “eternal growth” fools who currently dictate economic and development policies in the western world and point out that excessive population growth is the root cause of most of our serious problems.
It is time for governments and policy makers [...]

Anyone interested in housing affordability in Australia (as I currently am) could do worse than to read this fascinating piece by economist Steve Keen, who I have sadly only just discovered.
In short: housing is extremely expensive in Australia; we may well be in line for a major correction in house prices; and there appears to [...]

Epic win:

You might recall this post from a couple of years back about water use in Australia – basically, the point was that as a matter of measurable, objective fact urban water use is utterly dwarfed by agricultural use, and if we are serious about changing our water consumption in this country the only realistic option [...]

Pictures like these seem like a good enough reason to continue exploring space – it’s an excellent tool for reflecting the utter triviality of the apparently significant matters with which we fill our days.
Now if only we could find one of those obelisks…

I really wanted to believe that this was fake when it was first emailed to me – but no, there it is on the Catch the Fire Ministries website: Pastor Danny Nalliah, leader of that esteemed fundamentalist Christian group, tells us that the horrendous bushfires in Victoria in the past week which have so far [...]

Uh oh: three+ cups of coffee a day increases the risk of hallucinations. Also:
In moderation, caffeine can increase the capacity for mental or physical labor, but when used in excess, it also can be intoxicating, causing nervousness, irritability, anxiety, muscle twitching, insomnia, headaches and heart palpitations, other studies have shown.
I wonder what my customary 4+ [...]

This is just awesome – we may not be all that far off being able to clone an actual wooly mammoth. Occasionally, despite our major effort to annihilate ourselves and the planet, humans do manage to do something which is really impressive. The usual chorus of “it’s impossible” is happening, but reading about [...]

This is fantastic: ads on London buses advocating atheism.
I wonder how hard this would be to fund in Australia, and whether it would somehow offend our anti-discrimination/hate speech laws, which (like our constitution, according to the High Court) seem to protect every belief system except atheism.

This article highlights something which seems pretty obvious to me: it is a bad idea to leave an economic system at the mercy of frequently irrational human perception and emotion, and the current crisis is more a product of fear and anxiety as it is an actual reflection of an objective problem in the real [...]

The Age reports on the pressing issue of the growth of independent schools teaching from a faith-based curriculum in Australia.  Presenting religious indoctrination in the Howard era clothing of “choice”, some such schools are teaching creationism in science classes and directly counteracting government efforts to provide sex education to students.
For example, the principal of one [...]

FYI, Mike Huckabee, potential Republican presidential candidate and by extension potential President of the United States, has this to say about creationism (and the fact that he believes in it):
If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that.  I just don’t happen to think that I [...]

This is an excellent piece by Barry Jones in The Australian in which he highlights the extraordinarily dangerous attitude currently being promoted as the “new normal” by politicians and their lackeys in the western world, in which objectivity, rationality and informed debate are completely subsumed by “faith”, expedience and knee-jerk reactivity:
We live in an era [...]

Repeating the mantra that members of parliament meet with Australian citizens “all the time”, it has emerged that the Government’s links to the extremist Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren remain as strong as ever. As mentioned previously (1, 2), the sect both prohibits its members from voting or from participating in society generally, and [...]