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At first glance I thought this was a poster for the horror movie Rubber. Like it was actually older than 2010 or this was a sequel to the original set in the snow.

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Isn't it fucking insane that so many people think that IQs are real. Like people genuinely believe you are born with one set level of intelligence that can be measured on a scale from 1 to ~200. As if intelligence wasn't extremely nuanced and completely subjective. And the fact that the majority of scientists that have advocated for IQ tests in the past have been eugenicists doesn't seem to concern anyone either

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Creationism: Isn't it impossibly convenient that the physical properties of the Earth just happen to be so perfectly suited to the existence of human life?

The Anthropic Principle:

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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When a person complains about the US being a Republic vice a Democracy they sound like the same people who think Atheism is a religion. You clearly have never thought about frankly anything and don't know what words mean.

You also seem to not know how people use words or how sometimes things change. Not everyone in the US had the right to vote when it was founded, a large amount of people weren't considered people. Maybe just maybe it wasn't the most thought out and good system when it was created and it needs to stop being treated like a fucking religion.

We made it up we can make it again.

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Wondering if anyone made the mistake of going to the Bi weekly meeting instead of the bi-weekly meeting.

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If your religion tells you that you need to submit to your "Lord and king" then maybe you should abstain from voting in any democratic society .

You don't want democracy according to the things you claim to believe. You want a king, you want people to follow rules that apparently exist in your holy book and live in accordance with that book. You don't want people to be free.

People that believe in that idea about the good it does can't seem to identify what specifically is the good part and if that is good then prove that it can't be done outside of that religion.

You have chained yourself and want everyone else to do so as well. I won't. I don't accept your claims that your god exists or that your religion was/is a net benefit to the world.

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saw a really good post about how atheists should be allowed to voice our beliefs just as loudly as religious people do without always being seen as the bitch for it, and how atheists shouldn’t have to put religious people’s feelings and comfort above our own beliefs, but unfortunately op turned off reblogs because people were calling them a fascist for it :|

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Given that words change meaning over time saying someone is a "cultural icon" doesn't immediately make me think positively of whoever it is or that phrase. If that person is a representative of toxic culture and is regularly used as the model for a terrible person.

This particular person was used as the model for Biff Tannen and various other villains even a quick reference in The Amazing World of Gumball.

I get that it seems like he is being "attacked" but it isn't like people really liked him in the first place. Those that claim to were making use of him and those that gain nothing from him seem to think they were being attacked for their identity. Which I get sucks.

Being attacked for who you are sucks. However, there are things we can't control that are part of our identity and things we can. We can't control our general appearance (as in averages like height, size, skin tone, etc. ) or if we are attracted to one type, no type, or a variety of types but we can look at our beliefs and their outcomes. We can fight our beliefs that we determine are harmful.

It seems like the issue is that much like heritage was taken from those that were enslaved in America those that weren't in power had theirs taken as well. They fed them lies and convinced them that another people were their lesser, they told them that they were all one people and invented new categories black and white sorting people into those telling them that they have nothing in common with the other and should fear the other.

I don't absolve people of their actions but I try to see if they are a victim so they can get better. I think that "white" people in many places in America are lost because those in power encouraged isolation so now they see others with community and they don't have it. They have their jobs which are going away but they don't have community.

Again, I don't expect forgiveness from any marginalized group. You don't owe anyone anything. I am just observing something that perhaps can be used to bring more people peace.

They see in him a person who pretends to care, he won't help them but he will convince them to follow him into the sea to drown dragging everyone else with them.

I don't have answers. I just needed to get this out of my head.

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It's one thing to have a contractor do work for the government. Like provide services for things like building maintenance or servicing equipment or even building a specific piece of equipment.

It is completely different to rely on a corporation to do all of it. Like you aren't buying the equipment from them, they are renting it to you with their people operating it and in full control.

NASA shouldn't have stopped operating the shuttle until they built a replacement themselves. Space corporations can exist but the American people shouldn't be beholden to them for a fucking ride.

The American government has issues, our military is gluttonous and inefficient, the lack of public healthcare is just stupid at this point, and the anger and hatred towards people trying to survive crossing some invisible line is cruel. Those are all fucked things that must be fixed if we are tone er be a good country.

That said, we did invest in science and understanding reality. Space, medicine, etc. I don't pretend we are the good guys, American people want to be but they live under the Empire of propaganda and many are forced to struggle so much they don't have time to see what's wrong beyond their own direct problems.

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Does the ICA change their logo for Pride month?

Issuing 47 with Rainbow Ballers for his contracts the month of June.

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Currently I am unable to understand the mechanism that would allow for a "mind" to exist independent of a physical brain. Given that we know the material/physical (however you want to call it) can impact the thought process via chemical, electrical, or physical interaction in a positive or negative way I don't see how an immaterial mind could exist.

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Agent 47 first attempt. Been playing Absolition, taking a break from World of Assassin.

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The purpose, in my mind, for any type of automation is to make your job easier. To handle tedious tasks like running reports or alerting someone of an issue. It should exist to allow a person to handle more important things.

In the building automation world that means dealing with issues that a computer can't. Maintenance on pumps, fans, valves, or whatever else equipment exists.

Automation shouldn't replace people, it should aid them. Humans don't want to work, humans want to build and create and enjoy being human. Unfortunately, humanity has been infected by a concept that survives because it benefits a small group of people. A poison that if taken enough is hard to stop taking.

This poison makes people use automation to run empty buildings where no human works to generate profit for a single human to do nothing with it.

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For any Christian out there trying to convince an atheist about God. Please take this piece of advice, don't send videos or arguments from Eric/Kent Hovind (young earth creationist), Cliff Knechtle (disrespectful to everyone that disagrees with him), or even John Lennox (mathematician that thinks he is smarter than everyone else).

Find people who speak honestly and respectfully. They exist.

There are similar atheistic people and I won't send a Christian to them cause I think they aren't a good bridge to understanding. I have stopped watching some atheistic YouTube channels because they don't have anything useful to say and found others that have more to say.

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A hotdog eating a taco. Need to fix the coloring

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What about the zeroth law? "A robot may not injure humanity, or, by inaction allow humanity to come to harm"? It rewrote the other laws. Though only R Daneel could fully use the new laws. The robot ( R Giskard) that created it was damaged because it basically violated the parameters set in their positronic brain so they passed on their knowledge and telepathic ability to R Daneel who continued to guide humanity beyond earth.

Three laws of robotics has gotten a lot of discussion but leaving aside some of the contradictions the second law seemed such a weird concept, "robots must obey orders given by a human" really? Any human's orders are as good as any others? What were you imagining robots doing when you created this rule? Robots that cannot be private property but also cannot be free, that is a perplexing combination.