The world according to Monsanto

A documentary showcasing the global takeover of our food, farms, and agriculture.

Seriously Microsoft IE 8, just fuck off

Seamonkey for Linux

Safari for Windows

Safari for Mac

Konqueror for Linux

Internet Explorer 8 for Windows

Galeon for Linux

Firefox for Windows

Firefox for Mac

Epiphany for Linux

WearRadio.co.uk goes live!

I’ve been working every hour Dawkins sends on http://wearradio.co.uk for the past 3 weeks and it is finally ready for primetime.

The big headaches were getting it to look as intended in Microsoft Internet Explorer, surprise surprise, and of course all those little things you come across now and then that are sent to try you—like why certain graphics refuse to load and why the site occasionally takes more than 3 seconds to load on an empty cache.

All in all though I’m happy I plumped for WordPress as the main platform—although I can see how further down the line we might want to expand into a more dedicated CMS—but that’s the job for someone else.

For now I’m looking forward to actually getting “on air”. We have a soft launch of the site and other back-room management type information we need to share with the presenters and DJs at this Thursday’s first full staff meeting and other than the fact we don’t have any content yet, everything is going GREAT!!

Carrie Prejean can’t face her own ignorance

I mean this in no small way, but what a dumb cunt that underfed idiot is. That’s not a sexist thing at all, by the way—or even anything particularly to do with her pro-idiocy agenda, it’s just an observation based upon her demeanour, words, actions and all round miasma.

There’s a growing and very worrying trend here which defies belief. The more illogical and ignorant you are—the more you can lie through your perfectly straight white teeth and get away with it, so long as you’re “in favour of strong women” or against the “liberal media”. What in the name of Sam Hill is that supposed to mean, exactly?

Who in their right mind would be in favour of bias in the media, or against the empowerment of women? Do these ultra conservative brain donors never stop to ask themselves even the most basic of questions about the role they played in creating the mess we’re all in right now? Does this mouth breathing glorified coat hanger ever wake up in the night and realise how ugly on the inside she really is?

They trot out their imaginary fears about “fair and balanced” opinion forming, as if they’re uniquely charged with highlighting the hidden agenda of some mysterious, sinister force, from beyond the antenna of honest investigative journalism—and behave all offended and indignant when asked simple questions about their own reprehensible behaviour.

They’re a parody of a satirical farce within a hoax of themselves. Paranoid, deluded cretins with nothing better to worry about than bronze-age myths and beauty products.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/12/carrie-prejean-threatens_n_354891.html

The Dunning–Kruger effect

I recently had a long and “interesting” exchange with an individual on a Reddit.com story about the Yes / No on 1 vote in the American State of Maine.

You can read the entire debate here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/

..and my particular conversation thread here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/c0fcl3z

Needless to say I wasn’t very happy about the result of the vote, whereas my main opponent took the opposite stance. But I was reminded in the course of our conversation about cognitive framing biases—as is so often the case in matters where one side blindly argues X is a valid reason for turning reason Y on its head—such as arguing night is day, black is white or that old favourite, which is in-fact a corruption of something Bertrand Russell once said about mathematical axioms, 1 + 1 doesn’t always equal 2. Because these kinds of mental gymnastics are the only way a deeply misinformed opinion might begin to make some kind of sense, in the mind of the person who holds onto it, they are very easy to spot in someone else, but very difficult to identify in oneself.

Then, thanks to the power of the internets, this little gem came to my attention and things started to become a little bit clearer…

From Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

Yahoo! carries adverts that encourage eating disorders and promote “size zero” sexism