Doggone Right!

Title Irony

Look at the subheading of this book and tell me it doesn't chill you to the bone!  In the face of works like BNW, F451 and 1984, I still can't believe this sort of thing is standard procedure.

Blinders Unaware

"As defined by social psychology, a schema is the automatic mental template that each one of us uses to organize the world. Schemas are our organizational and active perceptual lenses that impact what we notice, what we think about, and what we remember. Though schemas can be quite useful due to their ability to make the "awareness endeavor" smoother and more efficient, they can also serve to prohibit new and important information from entering our paradigms. Schemas impact us in ways that may or may not be consciously known to us."   (My emphasis)

Not So Fast There, Atheist!

Secularists constantly bleat about God and the spiritual realm not being "observable or measurable" and faith being "illogical."  A comment at a forum does a good job of replying to this:

Let's talk about "observable, measurable."

 In Martin Rees' famous book he posits six numbers define the universe (the nuclear strong force, number of spatial dimensions, amount of material in the universe, etc.).   Stephen Hawking said the odds of these six numbers combining they way they have is about 1 in 10^300. That's a one with 300 zeroes after it.

Let's put that another way. Say you are facing a firing squad of sharpshooters. The odds of one missing is 1:1,000. So the odds of two missing would be 1/1000 x 1/1000 or one in a million. You face ten sharpshooters. The odds of them all missing would be one quadrillionth of a quadrillionth.
They aim, fire and all miss. They aim,  fire again and miss again. They miss a third time.  A fourth time.  In fact, they fire ten times each and miss each time.

At some point, the reasonable explanation is that this occurrence cannot be explained by stochastic probability; the game has to be rigged. Someone is slipping blanks in, or the sharpshooters are missing on purpose. But the outcome is so outlandish that the logical, reasonable explanation is that it is not left to random chance.

Now I ask you... based on that observable, measurable evidence, who is being logical and reasonable?

From a Former Jihadist

Jihad, or what we define as Terrorism, comes in three forms – Jihad by the pen, Jihad by the sword and Jihad by finance. When one is not in a position of military strength he uses the pen, or propaganda. If one has military strength, he uses violence, including acts of terror. Jihad by finance comes in the form of money to fund both the propaganda and the terror.  (Source)

Artificial "Intelligence" My Foot

I've written about Google's failings before, but it never ceases to amuse me anew when that search engine lets its imagination run wild.  So today, I was trying to find out where this image came from (it was "quoted" at a different site than where it originally appeared).  So what does Google come up with?  This.  ROTFL! 

I think maybe Google needs to just FACE its lack of smarts and CLOCK out.  (Edit many months later:  the original google link showed clock faces.  Now, it shows "images to color."  Not sure why it changed in the meantime.   But who can fathom the "mind" of A.I., eh? {snort})