Scott Adams, creator of every office worker’s favorite comic strip, lost his voice a while back. Now he’s tricked his brain into giving it back.
My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.
The secret (for him) was rhyming!
Great Ape Scolded for Pulling Fire Alarm
The fire alarm is on a wall in the bonobo home in an area used by the apes and members of the scientific team. Panbanisha is one of seven bonobos at the Great Ape Trust, and was among the first group to arrive in April 2005. Bonobos are among the most human-like of the great apes.
Unfortunately, this story was posted to the Monkey Wire email list with the title “Great Ape Scolded for Pulling Fire Arm“. That would have been a much more entertaining (er… I mean worrisome or something like that…) story!
This month’s issue of Wired (to which I have recently (re)subscribed for almost entirely different reasons than I did in the 90s) has a cover story by Gary Wolf called Battle of the New Atheism. The so-called “New Atheism” is, in particular, the brand of atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins whose latest book is called The God Delusion. Dawkins is extremem in his atheism — to the point of anti-theism. He thinks tolerating the good that religion does is as evil as tolerating the evil religion does. It’s an extreme view, but one many people are adopting, it seems.
“I’m quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism,” Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. “The number of nonreligious people in the U.S. is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million,” he says. “That’s more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes.”
Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first U.S. politician is honest about being an atheist. “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” he says. “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”
That “Smart people are atheists, and I’m wicked smart, so I hate your ‘God’!” attitude is largely what turns me off when I read or hear something from Dawkins.
Continue reading ‘Deus ex Point/Counterpoint’
That’s all it costs to refresh your hipster cool when Threadless has one of its $10 sales. (Like now, yo.)
The Wife and I will be spending Hallowe’en party night with the lovely ladies of the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls.
Because that’s how we roll.
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