Hume - a prologue

A couple of years ago I had a roommate who told me that she didn't have any time for philosophy because philosophers talk in circles and never arrive anywhere. That is a fair criticism, and it would be enough to damn philosophy altogether if not for developments in recent centuries that have attempted to bring it back to Earth, so to speak.

Vsauce

Vsauce is a pretty cool youtube channel. The videos usually ask a quirky or interesting question and then makes an attempt to answer the question as scientifically as possible. Videos after the cut:

Supertasks

I first heard about this when being taught about Zeno of Elea during a philosophy lecture in university, though at the time I simply knew of it as one of Zeno's paradoxes. A supertask is a task which has an infinite number of steps but is completed in a finite amount of time - something that seems like a certain impossibility. But, we in fact complete a supertask every time we move from one place to another, and this brings me to Zeno's paradox:

Voyager 1

So, you've probably heard that recently the Voyager 1 space probe entered a new region of space. At first we were told that it had indeed left the solar system altogether and entered interstellar space, apparently this rumour got started by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). But NASA then sent out a press release saying that it was their opinion that the probe had in fact not yet left our system. I doubt it is very easy to determine where the boundary of our solar system is from data being sent back from a probe launched over 30 years ago, but it seems that there are a couple clues.

TEDtalks "moral behaviour in animals"

Interesting TEDtalks, I particularly enjoyed the grape/cucumber experiment near the end:

The true North strong and genetically superior

Maybe it was Hitler week on the History channel, or it might have been that time when I got on a World War 2 kick, youtube style. Anyway, however I got into it I found myself looking around the world wide web at the history of Eugenics. Eugenics, which roughly translates to "good generation" from the Greek, is the (or was the) 'science' of improving the 'inheritable' characteristics of a race or a collective through control of breeding (I find it hard to define Eugenics without using lots of scare quotes). It was a pretty popular movement in the decades before WWII, before Hitler showed the world just what evil such a notion would lead to, now it is much maligned. 

Varmints and Game

Alright, this is kind of off-the-cuff, but here I go.

I was perusing some sportsman magazines recently; well, the Newfoundland Sportsman in particular, but a simple trip down google-lane will reveal similar sentiments all across Canada and the United States. That is, anti-coyote and wolf sentiments - 'varmints' as they are almost exclusively referred to in some magazines. These animals, many say, are pests that if left alone will decimate the caribou and moose populations, the former of which are experiencing declining herds populations in the province. And so the government has decided to introduce a "seasonal" coyote harvest aimed at controlling their numbers and easing pressure on the large ungulates. That season runs from September to July, and licenses are free. It's basically open season, boys, kill those 'yotes!

Camels in Canada

A research team headed up by the Canadian Museum of Nature have discovered fossil fragments from the leg of what appears to be a camel (or at least a close relative) - a camel that lived over 3 million years ago.

Pan-STARRS

http://www.sliceofscifi.com/2013/03/09/sun-diving-comet-will-be-visible/

Logical Fallacies

There's hardly a politician that speaks, hardly an argument or debate that wraps up, hardly a talking head that gives an opinion without some logical fallacy in the mix. These fallacies are usually honest attempts to prove a point, but can also be intentionally used to mislead. Here are a few:

Telekinesis

Well here is something cool. In the interest of saving time, I'm going to just post a link to the blog where I found it:

http://io9.com/5988596/this-wireless-brain-implant-could-make-telekinesis-a-reality

"In particular, this implantable neural interface technology will greatly assist in the development of advanced neuroprostheses. Once refined and proven safe for humans, it could allow disabled people to move objects remotely with their thoughts. It would be a kind of technologically-enabled telekinesis. Indeed, the project is very closely linked to the BrainGate initiative — another Brown University project that's working to develop brain interface technologies for the disabled.
And of course, this technology will very likely trickle over to non-medical applications, allowing even able-bodied people to move objects with their minds."