Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainI've been taking a break from blogging lately because I contracted a nasty case of writer's block. However I haven't been twiddling my thumbs all this time. One thing I've been doing is working on a new and improved version of Neural Gourmet as well as doing a lot of reading about writing plus catching up on some books I've been meaning to read for a long time.
But I couldn't stay away from blogging entirely. So recently my sweetheart and I started a blog devoted to one of our favorite things -- food! You won't find just recipes there though. We plan to cover everything from restaurant, grocery and product reviews to news and commentary about food. There'll be an added emphasis on our adopted home town, Fort Wayne, Indiana.
So if you like to eat, or haven't yet mastered breatharianism, then check out Food In The Fort.
And look for Neural Gourmet to come back stronger and better than ever before real soon now.
Ballads For The Age Of Science: Two covers from Hy Zaret and Lou Singer's late 1950s/early 1960s six album series of science songs for kids.Back at the dawn of the Space Age it seemed like everybody was trying to turn kids onto science in every conceivable way. After all, everyone knew that if our kids didn't grow up to be scientists and engineers then those darn Ruskies would colonize the Moon and Mars and who wanted that? And what better way to popularize science with kids than by setting it to music? Oh, and if you can get the guy who wrote On Top Of Spagetti to perform them, then you might have thought you had a gold record in the making. Or maybe not. Who knows?
Whatever Hy Zaret and Lou Singer's motivations might have been, I'm sure thousands of kids must have been turned onto science and nature by recordings of their Ballads For The Age Of Science. Kids like Jef Pozkazner who found his old LPs in his parents' basement and graciously ripped them to MP3 format so a whole new generation of kids can enjoy them, or in the case of us old farts big kids, enjoy them again. There you'll find all six albums (although I agree with Jef that the first three are the best) free for downloading. At the very least, you'll want to give a listen for the sheer novelty and innocence of these recordings. Listen to The Ballad Of Sir Isaac Newton below.
Hat tip: Retro Thing.
Ron Paul won’t win the presidential election, or come anywhere near it. He will continue to be a Texas Congressman. I will continue to live in England, thousands of miles away from him. So why should I worry about him?
Some quotations from his own website indicate some of the serious problems with his views, from a progressive perspective:read more »
Just when I thought that our respective congress critters couldn't get any more absurd they went ahead and jumped the shark. From CBS News:
Freedom wafers, anyone?This is one straight from the headlines of the Onion. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has introduced a resolution (H.Res. 847) saying, and I am not making this up, that Christmas and Christians are important. The House is scheduled to vote on this groundbreaking resolution on Tuesday.
As someone with a Christian background, I can safely say this may be the silliest resolution ever introduced by, or voted upon, by Congress, although I am a little curious to see if anyone will vote against it.
Do we really need Congress to say Christmas and the Christian faith are important? Isn't that pretty self evident by now? Don't Christians already pretty much run everything in this country, except for the mainstream media, which is of course controlled by a Jewish-Illuminati-Bill Gates cabal? Don't we already get Dec. 25 off? Wasn't I forced to shell out $65 for a scrawny Christmas tree this weekend? Won't I have to go to Pentagon City or some other godforsaken place and spend more money in the next couple weeks as part of this strange ritual? What about the terrible songs that get endlessly recycled year after stinking year? And the useless catalogs that clog my mailbox, despite my efforts to get off mailing lists? Where will the horror end?
I realize that is has been blogged about before, by bloggers much more capable than myself, but it has been a while since I visited the website for the upcoming movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and I see that there is now a good deal more information available on it. It's coming out in February 2008, and stars everyone's favorite Nixon speech writer and former second-banana to Jimmy Kimmel, Ben Stein. Tongue firmly in cheek, Stein stars as a "rebel" student at "Big Science Academy" who, from what information I can gather, claims that "Big Science" is keeping "smart ideas" out of the classroom. Translation: scientists won't allow intelligent design to be taught in classrooms because they say it's not science, and that's just mean!read more »
I just happened to see on Slashdot that UC Berkeley is now making full lectures available on YouTube starting with over 300 hours of lectures in various subjects. You can see the videos divided up by course by viewing Berkeley's YouTube playlists. No psych or neuroscience in there although I did like the Physics For Future Presidents course. One can only hope this free service from Berkeley will blossom in future months. At least I think it's a fantastic thing. After all, considering the degree to which pseudoscience and the paranormal outweigh real science and fact in search engine listings it can't hurt to have one more avenue for solid information out there.
More than that though I think many adults are looking to expand their knowledge. Actually many kids are looking to go beyond the mediocre offerings of their schools too. Unfortunately in the past economic and geographic limitations have prevented those looking to increase their knowledge and skills in an academic arena from doing so. Berkeley's offering up of these lectures online is helping to eradicate those barriers. In my mind it's hard to see anything negative coming out of that.
The New York Times announced Monday that it is ending its paid subscription service Times Select.
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Save Internet Radio: Call your representatives today.Thousands of internet radio broadcasters are planning a mass protest on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 by going completely silent, or airing the sound of ocean waves or similar, to protest new draconian royalty rates established by the Copyright Royalty Board. The new rates, which are retroactive to January of 2006, are on a per listener basis versus previous per song royalty rates and will double over five years time. Just to give you an idea of how onerous the new rates are, current internet radio royalty rates are already double what sattelite radio broadcasters pay.
This will have the effect of driving most internet radio broadcasters out of business who will not be able to afford the new rates. It's important that artists be reimbursed for their efforts, but many independent artists need internet radio to gain the exposure that they are denied by mainstream broadcast radio. Internet radio serves a vital function in our society by introducing listeners to a variety of artists and viewpoints that are considered unviable by commercial sources. The new royalty structure will effectively kill off this vital medium.read more »
The Carnival of Feminists is held on the first and third Wednesday of every month, aiming to showcase great feminist posts from the blogosphere. The Carnival particularly welcomes posts which celebrate women's lives and female contributions to society across history to the present day. Founded by Natalie Bennett a Green Party (England & Wales) activist in Britain, the blog carnival is already upto No.39 which will be held at Laurelin in the Rain on June 6.
It is worth a read if you're like me a feminist, and/or if you are interested in reading about contemporary feminism thought at the grass roots. If you're producing blog posts of your own which are relevant to the experiences of women in a patriarchal society then please get your submissions in and get the word out about your blog!
Blogging will be really light for me this week. Don't worry, Pete at BogsBlog and I will still get out Carnival of the Liberals (well, Pete will be doing most of the work -- I just need to send out e-mails) but otherwise I'll be slacking off and posting videos here and there.
Today we have an educational film about the history of electronic music that can only be described as porn for music geeks. The oscilloscope shots are really hot and the Moog modular and Fairlight clips will leave you breathing heavy.
Seriously, I practically salivate at the images of all these classic synths and associated technology. I'm not a practicing musician (I can barely play the riff to Iron Man on guitar) but I grew up surrounded by both electronics and electronic musical instruments so I love watching old videos like this. While today's synths are just fantastic and our ability to create sound with them is practically unlimited, making music with them just isn't the same. There was something very personal and human about crafting music with these old synths. Perhaps because they were so primitive it was such a hands-on affair. It took really getting to know your instrument on a very intimate level to produce anything beyond mere blips and bleeps. I share similar affections for old computing technology.
Parts 2 and 3 are after the fold. If you have an antiquated technology fetish (musical instruments or otherwise), tell us about it in comments.read more »
We don't see very much overt, officially sanctioned, top-down racism anymore. There's no separate drinking fountains for people of color, the schools are (at least on paper) integrated and discrimination against people of color in the workplace can get your company in serious trouble (again, at least on paper). What remains though are the sorts of soft bigotry that are hard to erase because they're culturally transmitted. We can't legislate against a perception. We can try to educate, and Spotted Elephant over at The Bipolar View does an excellent job at doing just that by telling us about racism she found for sale (cheap!) in a mail order catalog. Hey gang, you have to see this!
John McKay over at Archy notes a post on Margaret Kane's blog at C-Net which rightfully takes to task 22 year old Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of the popular social networking website Facebook. Zuckerberg displayed rather blatant ageism in a recent speech:
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)
"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
Bigotry aside, the idiocy in Zuckerberg's statements is beyond measure. read more »
Sunshine movie poster: Image credit Fox Searchlight PicturesI can hear the Dobsons, Robertsons and Falwells screaming that headline at their audiences now. Bill O'Reilly will develop an elaborate conspiracy theory on how Hollywood is subverting moral values by making people question their belief in god. Actually, working on one movie caused one actor to become an atheist. Except, he kinda was already.
Actor Cillian Murphy says that after working on the yet to be released scifi film Sunshine caused his view on the existence of god to change from agnosticism to atheism:
He says, "I was agnostic before this film. Now I'm very much an atheist.
"Not just because I spent time with these guys--they just confirmed what I'd always suspected.
"For me, the film ultimately is a battle between science and religion, or science instead of fundamentalism."
Sunshine is set 50 years into a future where our sun is dying. A spaceship is launched with a device that is hoped will reignite the sun's nuclear furnace but out of radio contact with Earth the mission starts to come apart. Aside from the obvious question of why humans needed to be sent on a mission that could probably have been handled much better by a robotic spacecraft, Murphy seems to not realize that he was already an atheist to begin with before starting work on the film.
Agnosticism is of course one form of atheism, and is in fact what most atheists mean when they say they don't believe in a god. Atheism literally means without god and deals with one's belief while agnosticism means without knowledge (gnosis is derived from the Greek word for knowledge and refers to spiritual knowledge). Thus one can be either an agnostic or a gnostic atheist depending on whether you believe it is possible to know if a god exists (or not). Most honest atheists will tell you that they are agnostic atheists because true knowledge of the existence of a god is impossible. On the other hand, a gnostic theist would be someone who knows that there is a god (or at least thinks they do) and likely many believers would find such a person as insufferable as a gnostic atheist.
While I have a feeling that this film won't be hard science fiction, it's an interesting premise and the movie is directed by Danny Boyle who directed Trainspotting so it just might not suck. You can catch the trailer here.
Pharyngula has posted a list of the 50 Most Influential Science Fiction Books (1953-2002), via tikistich. Near as I can tell this list was compiled by the Science Fiction Book Club (where a good deal of my paper route money as a kid went). PZ highlighted all the ones he's read in bold but I decided to boldface only the ones I haven't read (after the fold). read more »
Everyone is invited to participate in something new we're trying here at NG. For quite a while now, some Neural Gourmet members and I have been having discussions using Skype. These discussions have been so much fun we'd like to extend that. So this Sunday, we're going to have our first public discussion using Skype's Skypecasting feature. This allows up to 100 people to talk, conference call fashion, at once. If we see a lot of interest, we'll be doing this regularly with a different topic each time.
The topic for our first discussion is centered around the recent BBC program 9/11: The Conspiracy Files which took a skeptical look at the the various paranoid conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. You can watch the whole program and read more about the discussion after the fold.read more »
Who knew!? Orac reports on how when autism-mercury fear mongerer grifter David Kirby goes up against Rosie O'Donnell, it's O'Donnell who comes out on the side of reason. But donchaknow, it's a conspiracy? That's right, Big Pharma has somehow managed to silence Rosie!
Of course, that's not enough for Kirby:
During the breaks, however, I could hear women in the audience murmuring to each other: "But what causes it? Why so many children? What about mercury? How can I get more information?"During the final break, I asked Rosie when the question of causation would come up.
"We're not doing that," she said, bluntly. "We're focusing on families and their kids."
"Rosie," I replied, "I think a lot of people are wondering about what's causing this."
"We don't know what causes it," she said. "You just want me to ask so you can talk about mercury."
Stung, I explained that her audience members were asking, and that production staff had also asked me about causation privately backstage.
"We're not doing causation," Rosie repeated. "In fact, I told them not to book you."
My head spun as the show wrapped up. Had The View finally squelched Rosie O'Donnell? Did mercury trump Trump? Was this the heavy metal that dare not speak its name, at least on a network flush with Pharma ads?
It's hard to say for sure. Last year, former host Star Jones posed the vaccine-autism question on the air, (but then again, look what happened to her).
Damn. Sometimes I actually miss not owning a television anymore.read more »
A planet where an atheist loves Christmas? Yes, my fellow skeptics, it's true. I adore Christmas. I look forward to the holidays all year long. Halloween is fun, but Christmas is the best!
How can I take this attitude and call myself an atheist? Simple. I treat the religious aspects of the holiday the same way I treat the materialistic aspects of it: I strip them away and celebrate what's left. What is left? The beautiful and tacky decorations: the lights, the tree, and the gaudy ornaments. (My favorite ornament is a lion with gold glitter all over his mane.) More importantly, it's a season in which people try to get it right. The average person tries (at least occasionally) to treat other people well, to be patient, and to feel compassion. So I have no conflict over my holiday celebration: I love the goodwill and the glitter. I ignore religion and over-consumption. read more »
Alice & Ray's Church: Alice and Ray's deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts where Arlo Guthrie and friends had Thanksgiving Dinner in 1965. The building is now home to the Guthrie Center.Hope everyone is enjoying their Turkey Day. Despite the roots of the holiday in Native American democide and religion (funny how those two topics go hand in hand), like many godless Americans I choose to co-opt the holiday and celebrate it in my own peculiar infidel way. Well, that and I just like turkey and pie.
Usually I'll gather with some of my friends at somebody's house and we'll do the usual big L-tryptophan and carbohydrate-laden meal and just generally have a good time. This year I'm flying solo on Turkey Day, although I did do pizza and wings last night at a friend's house last night. Still, I'll do my own mini turkey day dinner later on as well as celebrate with one of my own Thanksgiving traditions which I'd like to share with you all today.
Back on Thanksgiving Day in 1965, Arlo Guthrie had his turkey dinner at his friends Alice and Ray's place, a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Being good guests, Arlo and his friends decided to help Alice and Ray out by taking out their garbage and that's when the problems started. The series of misadventures that ensued led to Guthrie being arrested for littering, being rejected for military service because of his criminal record, and the inspiration for the 18+ minute long talking blues protest song Alice's Restaurant Massacree which launched Guthrie to fame.
Alice's Restaurant has also become a Thanksgiving Day tradition in the North East with the epic song being played on many radio stations during the day, which is how I picked it up as a teenager. It seems only fitting to share it with everyone who visits Neural Gourmet, so here you go. If you'd like to sing along, you can find the lyrics here.
