Dragon Skull!

Last autumn I contributed to a Kickstarter campaign by fellow Canadian Raven Garfield.  Through this particular Kickstarter campaign I ordered a replica skull of a young Draco arctus, a white dragon found in the colder, more remote regions of northern Canada.

From the Kickstarter site, Raven says:

My educational background is in Fish and Wildlife biology. I’ve spent over 15 years creating exhibits and building dinosaur skeletons for museums around the globe. During this time I’ve always found it unfortunate that available dragon skull sculptures were simple blobs of bone with some teeth, sockets for eyes and some random spikes. By comparison, dinosaur skulls are so much more than this, being highly evolved pieces of biological architecture, comprised of many bones like the nasal, premaxillary and always fun to pronounce, squamosal. The thing that began this Kickstarter was the desire to teach people that skulls were complex structures and that there isn’t simply one “skull bone”. Of course you can’t talk about dragons without including an element of fantasy, so I’ve added embellishments to my pieces, but all in a way that are scientifically viable in keeping with the theme of the skull.

This skull of a Sub-Adult White Dragon (Draco arctus), inspired by an interesting dinosaur known as Coelophysis bauri, is to hopefully become the first in a series with many more designs to follow.

Today, my dragon skull replica arrived!

Bill O’Reilly: The Man, The Legend, The Piece of Shit

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the “tide goes in, tide goes out; you can’t explain that” bit Bill O’Reilly shat out of his mouth while talking to American Atheists president David Silverman in 2011.  If not, here’s the clip (skip ahead to 1:54 for the bit):

And here’s an interesting bit from a different interview with Silverman about that particular exchange (skip to 4:15):

I’ve heard from other sources that Bill O’Reilly is actually very intelligent, quite contrary to his on-air persona.  But is this really a good thing?  One might be tempted to think a little better of O’Reilly when they learn that what he does on TV is mostly (all?) an act.  But is it really better?  Is it better to have an intelligent, educated person poisoning the minds of Americans and damaging their country for personal fame and profit than it is to have an idiot poisoning the minds of Americans and damaging their country because he is an idiot?

I think that’s worse.

 

WTF is wrong with you, Bill O’Reilly?

 

 

The Science of Morality

I’ve [relatively] recently come across some very interesting pieces of information regarding morality and the brain:

Philosphy Bites Podcast: Morality and the Brain (mp3)

TED Talk: Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

Pedophilic urges caused by brain tumor (scientific paper referred to on this link)

The more we study the brain, the more we understand how and why people make the decisions they do.  As incredible as it may seem, it’s beginning to look like mankind could conceivably achieve moral perfection through technology.  It might be possible to cure things like pedophilia via brain surgery, or maybe genetically engineer people to be less apt to behave in certain ways that are harmful to society.  One day we might be able to simply engineer evil out of human nature.

As mentioned in Sam Harris’ TED Talk above, I think such a step would have to be predicated on a global mutual agreement on what is right and what is wrong.  While that may seem an insurmountable task, it’s possible that such an agreement could eventually come about as a natural consequence of technology.  By this I mean the connecting of people throughout the world via whatever the internet ends up evolving into.

Instantaneous, long-distance communication — most notably its current apex epitomized by the internet — has connected humanity in a way that was likely never even conceived of before the invention of the earliest telegraphy devices.  But what if further advances in technology start to connect us all to a more intimate degree.  Instead of just communicating through text, pictures, voice, and video, what if our understanding of neurobiology eventually leads us to learn how to build devices which enable us communicate to each other via thought?  How cavalier would we be about starting wars when, instead of some poor faceless statistic in some foreign nation arbitrarily labelled as an “axis of evil”, our enemy’s thoughts and reasons for his behavior and beliefs could be understood on a level more personal than speech?

And perhaps the whole world would not need to come to an agreement on what constitutes right and wrong.  What if it only takes “enough” people to make such an agreement and engineer morally perfect progeny?  Likely a society of people so perfectly able to work as a group (and what is immorality but the antithesis of a functioning group dynamic?) would simply out-compete other cultures, in an evolutionary sense, and eventually dominate the planet.

And what would the future hold for a humanity engineered to be perfectly moral and able to do the right thing whenever realistically possible; a humanity perfectly able to work together in harmony?  What would be beyond its grasp?

 

One more video on the science of morality: The second annual God Debate features atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris and Evangelical Christian apologist William Lane Craig as they debate the topic: “Is Good From God?”

Things I learned this week

Things I learned this week:

• It’s surprisingly easy to turn a $700 phone into a very expensive brick when you’re messing with things the average person is not meant to mess with. (I managed to finagle my way into getting a free replacement, though ;-)

• Barbecued intestines taste exactly what one would expect them to taste like. (imagine a cross between calamari and liver)

• It is an exercise in futility to try to teach a three-year-old what “the future” means. (Statement: “You’ll get more toys in the future”, Response: “No, the toys aren’t in the future, they’re in a box”)

Method For Determining if a Series of Integers Is Sequential or Not

I’m sure this must be a well known mathematical trick, but I actually figured this one out myself, so I’m understandably astonished:

I’ve discovered a neat math shortcut for determining whether or not an arbitrary group of integers are sequential (that is, if there are any gaps in the numbers).

A group of unique integers is sequential if the difference between the largest integer and the smallest integer is equal to one less than the total number of integers.

Here are some examples:

e.g. 1

1,2,3,4,5

largest = 5

smallest = 1

largest – smallest = 5 – 1 = 4

count – 1 = 5 – 1 = 4

largest – smallest = count – 1 , therefore, the series is sequential

e.g. 2

1,2,3,4,6

largest = 6

smallest = 1

largest – smallest = 6 – 1 = 5

count – 1 = 5 – 1 = 4

largest – smallest ≠ count – 1 , therefore, the series is not sequential

e.g. 3

-3, -2, -1

largest = -1

smallest = -3

largest – smallest =-3 – -1 = -3 + 1 = -2

count – 1 = 3 – 1 = 2

largest – smallest = count – 1 , therefore, the series is sequential

e.g. 4

243, 246, 244, 245, 242, 247

largest = 247

smallest = 242

largest – smallest =247 – 242 = 5

count – 1 = 6 – 1 = 5

largest – smallest = count – 1 , therefore, the series is sequential

Neat, huh?