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The End Of Faith

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.
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"Which search engine should I use?"
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I come not to bury love, but to complicate it. There is something wrong with our concept of love. Romantic love (just “love” hereafter) isn't what many of us think it is when we ask ourselves “Do I love her?” or “Does he love me?” Many of us are making some kind of mistake. But what kind of mistake is it, and what is love if it isn't what many of us think it is? A concept, roughly, is a way of thinking of things or features of things in the world. To have a concept of something is to have a kind of psychological ability to “individuate”, or pick out, all kinds of things in the world, for thought and talk, and for action. Some of our concepts are of psychological states. For example, I have a concept of pain and a concept of belief. I also have a concept of love, as do you. The suggestion that I am making is that there is a mismatch between love and our concept of love. But what is the nature of that mismatch?
Love's complications From The Philosopher's Magazine
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Man takes apart Google's cookie - Google bites man.
comment posted at 6:12 PM on Mar-9-05

Are Blogs to Blame? Tom Regan, Associate Editor of the Christian Science monitor wrote an interesting piece referencing the latest findings of the Feb 2005 Harris Poll showing that more and more Americans (64%) *still* think that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al-Qaida. Tom's piece proposes that too many Americans are getting their "news" from sources -- including blogs -- that are tainted with right-wing opinion. Tom proposes that blogs share a large responsibility for confusing readers and blurring the lines between news and opinion. On this same topic, last week Editorial Cartoonist Ted Rall wrote an Op/Ed piece last week on blogs that primarily talks about the dangers of the right-wing blogger "lynch mob." Does the sphere of right-wing blogs far outweigh the sphere of influence of left-wing blogs? And is this something that is worrisome? Are blogs a danger to further polarizing public opinion? What do you think?
comment posted at 4:48 PM on Mar-4-05

Kottke.org! Time was that you could get the crap kicked out of you for posting kottke.org to MeFi. Three and a quarter years later, what's changed? Jason's decided to make a living off this blog ... but without running advertising. Good luck, says I.
comment posted at 8:16 AM on Feb-22-05

Doom , Doom2, Duke Nukem 3d, Heretic, Hexen, Hexen II, Quake, Quake 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, plus dozens more.
comment posted at 5:22 AM on Feb-22-05

The Watchmen movie site is up. Nothing much to see beyond the logo, but still...
comment posted at 12:06 PM on Feb-11-05

LokiTorrent was a popular spot to get movies and they even put up a fight against the recent crackdown, raising thousands in a legal defense fund. Today, it seems the MPAA won, forcing the owner to shut down. That's understandable and I'm not surprised, but they've gone a bit further than I expected, turning the site into a big scary ad against filesharing and warning that you're next. Even worse, the old owner is turning the logs over to the MPAA, for them to go after folks.
comment posted at 9:56 AM on Feb-11-05

The Pond is the history of a secret, independent US intelligence-gathering group which preceded (and outlasted) the OSS. Shuffled from Cabinet to Cabinet to the CIA, it eventually ran aground against the infighting of McCarthy's Red Scare hearings and was no more by 1955.
comment posted at 8:15 AM on Feb-3-05

Momblogging. The NY Times (reg. required) looks at some blogging mamas. As someone who's regularly losing friends to the new-parent netherworld of suburbia and early nights, I had previously had little interest in reading about childrearing. I checked out Bad Mother because I'm a fan of the author's husband - the novelist Michael Chabon - and realised it was a hoot. I also like the Pessoptimist. So what other good bringing-up-baby blogs are out there?
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R.I.P. SuprNova Greetings everybody, As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up! But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it. Apparently something went down last night that prompted this exit from the scene, a great loss indeed as suprnova was the gold standard for bittorrent sites. From the inside I have also learned work on exeem is being halted (any beta testers can verify?) trying to head off problems previously seen here.
comment posted at 11:12 AM on Dec-20-04

"The lawsuits are coming," school board member Angie Yingling said. "It's like being on the Titanic. Everyone seems to see the iceberg, but no one is steering away." The ACLU sued the Dover (Pennsylvania) Area School District today to prevent the district from enacting their recent controversial decision to teach "intelligent design" in the classroom.
comment posted at 6:16 PM on Dec-14-04

Bowed by Age and Battered by an Addicted Nephew 'They went out late. It was ugly weather. Six below zero in the Brooklyn night. Wind took garbage into the air. A blizzard was in the forecast. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 2003, in Brighton Beach. Not a night for humankind, but the sisters, one 73 and the other 70, didn't get holidays off, didn't get snow days. In years of miserable low points, it was one of the lowest. As they had done the day before and the day before that, Lillian and Julia hobbled out to Coney Island Avenue, a lineup of chromatic storefronts, to beg from strangers in their cars. They were known out there, regulars among the mendicants. The money was for their bilious nephew and his crack habit, their own blood who was smoking up their lives. He had already cost them their house, their savings, their dignity. "I need one more," he would tell them when he desired a hit, "one more." Not comply and he would fly into crazed tirades, blacken an eye, bruise their ribs. It had been this way for years, since their lives stopped being comprehensible. ' [From the New York Times; they'll want registration, if you haven't already.]
comment posted at 8:24 AM on Dec-12-04

Noted British atheist Antony Flew has changed his mind, persuaded by scientific evidence that God exists and that "intelligence must have been involved" in the origin of life. As Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Reading and the author of several influential books on the subject of atheism, Flew was once one of rationalism's leading lights. He now compares his beliefs with the predominantly American concept of Intelligent Design. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads," he says.
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