My favorite quote right now

TheTweetofGod is the Twitter account of David Javerbaum, author of The Last Testament: A Memoir By God. I follow it because somebody retweeted something hilarious he said one day and I decided that my day could do with some more ongoing hilarity. But he also makes some interesting observations, such […]

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LGBT news today

1. Lesbians sent to “forced confinement” clinics in Equador are being tortured. Change.org has a petition to the Ecuadorian Minister of Health to stop the practice. 2. The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’s (NARTH) annual conference this weekend will feature a speaker advocating for the imprisonment of gays around the world. 3. […]

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Pareidolia of the day: Face of foreboding

Here’s an interesting one: a face in a testicular tumor. The image of the man’s face, seemingly in some distress, was sent to Urology, the International Society of Urology’s official journal, and was published in the journal’s September volume. G. Gregory Roberts and Naji J. Touma, from Queen’s University in Ontario, […]

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Spokesgroups

Radley Balko got quite a lot of hate mail in response to an article he wrote for HuffPo on Occupy Wall Street. One letter hilariously complains I am appalled by your lack of integrity. You quoted someone from the Cato Institute but didn’t reveal that you also worked for them. […]

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Miss? Excuse me, Miss? Someone wants you to “represent.”

Is it a bit hasty to write about a movie you’ve not yet seen? Perhaps, but this one I’m eager to see, and it will be televised again on November 12th so perhaps there will be an opportunity. Miss Representation is a documentary made by Jennifer Siebel Newsom on the […]

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RPGs and skepticism (Sunday fun post)

If you really aren’t interested in video games at all, you….probably won’t bother reading this post. But if you’re somewhat interested in them but don’t know much about them, you might not know that this weekend has been BlizzCon, the annual convention held in Anaheim, California by Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard’s most […]

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Biased ! = wrong

Let me say this, right from the start: I love biases. No, I don’t love that they exist, but I think they’re endlessly  fascinating. I love thinking about them, identifying them, figuring out where they come from. Studying biases is how I came to the realization that the way we generally […]

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Spokespeople

Not allowed to be right aboutanything. After posting a clip from Bill Maher’s show in which the comedian mocks the Republican presidential  candidates, Ed Brayton got some flack from readers complaining that they wouldn’t watch it because Maher has established himself as having some pseudoscientific views, specifically being anti-vaccination. When […]

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The phenomenon of the petty tyrant

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business decided to examine the relationship between status and power in how people treat each other. So they organized a study that involved telling participants they would be working on a business exercise with another student, and randomly assigning each participant a role […]

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“Normal” is overrated

“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” — Andrew, The Breakfast Club The Pervocracy has a great post on the end of “normal” relationships in general, but I particularly liked the part about gender norms: you don’t have to be non-heterosexual to […]

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