Friday, June 15, 2007

Stuff

There's a fair bit of stuff I'm considering doing, and I think I need a bit of input:

1. I'd like the html for some "Digg" widgets and the like I can attach to all my posts. Imagine having those on the Doggerel Index would spread the popularity pretty well. I don't normally handle that stuff, so I don't know how that works, beyond the superficial. It'd be helpful to know which ones may be worth bothering over.

2. I've thought of this for a while, and since I'm past the 100 mark on the Doggerel series, I'm thinking of producing another index by category. It'd be annoying to update two at once, so I'd like to have a numbered list that updates automatically, if that's plausible. Suggestions for how I should lay out the category index would be appreciated.

3. I've recently created a "Pointless Fun" tag for those posts where I link to various games, videos and such. Suggestions are always appreciated, especially since I'm in the mood to create another, but I don't really have all that much right now.

4. Send me Scientology-related crap. Ryan's post is getting quite lonely being the only thing labeled accordingly, and I need to expand my woo-busting a little. I figure a few of my fellow skeptics can point me to a few good starting places.

Commence Digging! (Thanks go to Matt)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Deepak Chopra on Mind outside the Brain and mirror neurons.

"To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn't register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as images, sensations, and an infinite array of experiences."


"So far, the phenomenon of mirror neurons hasn't been isolated to single neurons in the human brain. Due to the complexity of the laboratory work, it hasn't traveled very far into the general public. This means that mirror neurons will be held captive for the time being by the belief system of neurology, which is overwhelmingly materialistic. That is, the brain being a solid object comes first while mind, if it exists at all, comes second. Yet I would argue that most of the things we most cherish about the mind, including empathy, language, and learning, depend on mind coming first, and the mirror neuron serves its purposes."

http://tinyurl.com/2p3js5

The Mind Outside the Brain (Part 4)

Don said...

Look, it's the same dumbass that posted that shit to my blog. Is he just making the rounds today or something?

Bronze Dog said...

Sorry, buddy, but SCIENCE is approaching from the top-down and bottom-up. So far, bottom-up is showing the most progress from what I've seen.

Chopra's drawing of a fictional line to artificially divide the universe into "natural/material" and "supernatural/immaterial" serves only to wall off knowledge: Chopra and other woos make a living out of putting up barriers they say can't be breached by any amount of research.

It's such a downer.

Anonymous said...

Bronze Dog: Indeed. But Deepak Chopra does talk about PEAR lab, Dean Radin, Dick Bierman and other parapsychology experimental efforts to prove the paranormal. He seems to believe that science will prove many paranormal phenomena soon and that there is a strong case already. The latest evidence he claims is the mirror neuron phenomenon.

akusai: I was merely providing potential material for your blogs. You have written about more disgusting "shit" in your blogs than the Chopra shit.

And people do listen to Chopra shit and his New Age Philosophy, and read his books in millions and watch him speak on National TV.

So rather than just calling it "shit" on its face for what it is, if you can provide some material along it which might convince the gullible, that would be great.

Bronze Dog said...

Bronze Dog: Indeed. But Deepak Chopra does talk about PEAR lab, Dean Radin, Dick Bierman and other parapsychology experimental efforts to prove the paranormal. He seems to believe that science will prove many paranormal phenomena soon and that there is a strong case already.

Well, unfortunately for him, the case really isn't strong. Kind of unfortunate for me, since I wanna be a Jedi, like my father before me... except he wasn't a Jedi.

Anyway, sorry about misreading your intentions. Kind of used to copy-pasters doing hit and runs.

May need to look up a thing or two about mirror neurons.

Don said...

Apologies from here as well. When I see the same context-free Chopra post at two blogs, I think "drive-by troll."

TabAtkins said...

Bronze: They've done a lot of mirron neuron stuff in SciAmMind lately. In fact, there's an article which talks about it in this quarter's issue.

Basically, mirror neurons are just sets of neurons which trigger on specific inputs. You see a particular face, and there are certain neurons which always trigger, but don't trigger for anything else.

They had another very interesting article recently about our ability to sense location, which seems to use a system very similar to that of mirror neurons. Essentially, as you move around the polygonal surface that is life, you trigger specific neurons which actually physically map to realspace. You've got several overlapping networks of these 'map' neurons that all work together.