Logical Fallacies poster / website

Posted on April 28, 2012 by RichardPrins

Logical fallacies poster
Recognizing logical fallacies is not only an indispensable tool in the skeptic’s toolset, but it is also very useful in day-to-day discussions/debates for recognizing faulty arguments:

In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is usually an improper argumentation in reasoning often resulting in a misconception or presumption. Literally, a fallacy is “an error in reasoning that renders an argument logically invalid”. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or participant (appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority). Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure any logical argument.

Though an argument is not “logically valid”, it is not necessarily the case that the conclusion is incorrect. It simply means that the conclusion cannot be arrived at using that argument. (…)

The nice poster above is from yet another website that explains the most common logical fallacies. Other excellent sites with information on, and explanations of, logical fallacies are this one, this one, and finally this one.

It may take several readings of those sites to become familiar with the specifics of these fallacies, but the result is being able to recognize them in discussions when they occur, as well as knowing how to counter them, if needed.

BBC: How TV Ruined Your Life

Posted on July 5, 2011 by RichardPrins

How TV Ruined Your Life is 6-part comedy series by the BBC in which Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television:

Ever wondered why life doesn’t measure up to those youthful lofty expectations?

From love and money to fear and progress, Charlie Brooker explores a different universal theme each week as this six-part series attempts to explain where it all went wrong and just how wildly the TV and movie ideal differs from life’s grim reality.

Marking the point where the mad daydreams of TV and the sorry reality of real life collide, the series employs a mixture of archive footage, sketches and interviews that will have you wiping away tears of laughter while nodding in recognition, which means you’ll probably have your eye out if you’re not careful.

The episodes explore the following themes:

Fear: From public information films to crime dramas, Charlie explores TV’s approach to fear.

The Lifecycle: From kids shows to Countdown, Charlie explores how TV can infuriate anyone of any age.

Aspiration: From Dallas to Grand Designs, TV continually rubs desirable lifestyles in your face.

Love: From Blind Date to rom-coms, TV has warped our expectations of romance.

Progress: Charlie Brooker argues that television has warped our relationship with technology.

Knowledge: Tracing how TV’s notion of knowledge has sunk to celebrity presenter drivel.

Charlie Brooker at The Guardian and on Twitter.

Robert Sapolsky: Human Monkey Business

Posted on June 12, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC’s Big Ideas, a lecture on where humans are the same as, and different from, other animals:

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University who has spent much of his working life studying chimpanzees in Kenya.

His enviable gift for storytelling led the New York Times to describe his latest book like this: “If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like ‘A Primate’s Memoir’.” Dr. Sapolsky’s account of his early years as a field biologist and his findings as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. He is sure to dazzle and delight with tales of what it means to be human.

His Pritzer Lecture, “Are Humans Just Another Primate?“, was delivered to the California Academy of Sciences in February 2011.

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a professor of Biology and Neurology at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including “A Primate’s Memoir”, “The Trouble with Testosterone”, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” and “Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals”.

Watch below (76m 16s, 283 MB mp4 from ABC) or on fora.tv.

Update 20110614: Bering in Mind: One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot (Scientific American blog)

La Linea

Posted on June 12, 2011 by RichardPrins

A favourite from the days back when…

La Linea (“The Line”) is an Italian animated series created by the Italian cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli (“Cava”). The series consists of 90 episodes which are about 2–3 minutes long each which were produced originally broadcast in the Italian channel RAI between 1972 – 1991. Over the years the series aired in more than 40 countries around the world. The cartoon features a man (known as “Mr. Linea”) drawn as a single outline around his silhouette, walking on an infinite line of which he is a part.

The character encounters obstacles and often turns to the cartoonist to draw him a solution, with various degrees of success. One recurring obstacle was an abrupt end of line. The character would often almost fall off the edge into oblivion and get angry with the cartoonist and complain about it.

He was voiced by Carlo Bonomi in a mock version of Milanese that resembled gibberish as much as possible, giving the cartoon the possibility to be easily exported without dubbing. The voice resembles Pingu’s, the Swiss animated penguin, which was also voiced by Bonomi.

Due to its short duration (usually 2 minutes 30 seconds), it has often been used in many networks as an interstitial program.

An existing YouTube playlist with lots of episodes:

EteRNA

Posted on January 14, 2011 by RichardPrins

EteRNA, developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University is a Flash-based folding game, like Fold It, that enlists users to fold RNA for optimized versions, which can then be tested in the lab. Citizen science!

You can participate by signing up directly at the site or linking through facebook (and setting your profile on the EteRNA site).

The game comes with a tutorial to get you familiar with the building blocks of RNA and how to manipulate them to get the desired folding shape. After the tutorial one can try to solve a number of increasingly difficult puzzles.

Scores are kept and displayed in a leaderboard. The game auto-saves the progress on the latest puzzle you might have been working on.

For more expert knowledge on how to solve the puzzles, a number of strategy guides can be found through the community which help in solving and further optimizing the RNA folds.

Scoring 10,000 points or more, by solving the tutorials and a bunch of the challenges, gives you access to the RNA Lab where a real version of some version of RNA can be designed and proposed, which after voting, will then be tested in the real lab.

You can get an idea of what it looks like through an embedded version, as below:

For more detailed info on how the folding of RNA is used, see their information page.

Some media links:
RNA Game Lets Players Help Find a Biological Prize (NY Times)
Online game helps predict how RNA folds (New Scientist)
New video game makes game players Stanford professor’s virtual lab assistants (Stanford)

And finally a short video from Carnegie Mellon that explains EteRNA:

Gary Numan – Cars

Posted on January 9, 2011 by RichardPrins

Cover

“Cars” is a 1979 pop music song by UK artist Gary Numan, and was released as a single from the album The Pleasure Principle. It reached the top of the charts in several countries, and today is considered a new wave staple. In the UK charts, it reached number 1 in 1979, and in 1980 hit number 1 in Canada two weeks running on the RPM national singles chart and rose to number 9 on the U.S. Billboard charts.