I've Got a Lot of Problems with You People!

It's December 23 again and that means Festivus is here once more. Put up your Festivus poles, air your grievances, and perform the feats of strength.

A Festivus for the rest of us!

Joseph and Mary in Time for Christmas

Sorry, but I lied to you. I don't think I'll finish a substantial post until after the weekend when I finish my final final. I'm too busy studying.

Just kidding. No studying. Instead I've been watching all of Doctor Who and learning a new method for the Rubik's cube. Before I leave Brown on Sunday I will have watched all of the new run of Doctor Who in about a week. Last weekend, the day after I started my Doctor Who marathon, I competed in Brown Cubing Day, becoming the 5519th best cuber in the world! I'm now trying to work my way down to a somewhat more respectable time (well, more respectable for speed cubing, my best was still 53.61 seconds). There have been a lot of interesting things this month that we've missed. Most recently, James Randi dropped the ball on anthropogenic global warming and then partially recovering.

By the way, I originally intended to write a post about the stolen emails of climate scientists from the CRU, but I don't think I'll waste my time. Sean Carroll's post on Cosmic Variance expresses my sentiment very nicely. Essentially, this was a theft of private information in an attempt to discredit perfectly reputable science ahead of the talks in Copenhagen. Despite what climate change deniers are say, the emails show no grand conspiracy, no creation of fraudulent data, and no suppression of data. Essentially the climate change deniers are misinterpreting what the scientists wrote to put a malicious twist on benign things. And yes, denier is the right term for people who are promoting such a demonstrably false interpretation of the stolen emails. I might be willing to give the few climate scientists who disagree with anthropogenic global warming the benefit of the doubt, but those who are not involved in the scientific process and go against the piles of evidence and the scientific consensus are no more deserving of the descriptor "skeptic" than any of the other deniers (Holocaust deniers, evolution deniers/creationists, &c.).

This post ended up being longer than I wanted it to be—I need to get back to Doctor Who. But I have finally gotten to what I originally wanted to show you. From BBC News comes a New Zealand billboard of Joseph and Mary put up by a local church for Christmas. Yes, it was actually put up by a honest-to-FSM church.

Homeopathic Webcomic

I'm afraid I've been busy these past two weeks. I'll try to finish one of the posts that I've started and put it up in the next day or two. For now, enjoy this comic from LukeSurl.com". Make sure to mouse over it to read the wonderful title text.

Blogs and Podcasts

I became interested in the rationalist movement during my senior year of high school. That fall, Richard Dawkins (peace be upon him) published The God Delusion. It wasn't until the publication of that wonderful book that I saw other people attacking religion just as I always wanted to. Previously I was somewhat conflicted. I wanted to challenge these beliefs and almost always did, but I had been told that religion wasn't something that you should confront people on. Obviously, I decided to go with my first instinct.

That spring, I started listening to podcasts, which introduced me to the world of skepticism. I already knew about the Center for Inquiry (CFI) so I naturally chose Point of Inquiry as one of the first podcasts to which I subscribed. If it weren't for listening to that podcast, Brown Freethought might not exist. CFI - On Campus was often mentioned during episodes so I tried finding a rationalist group at Brown but had no luck. So naturally I decided to start one.

Here's are a list of the blogs, podcasts, and comics that I regularly (or at one point regularly) read, listen to, and view. Many of them are great resources for keeping up to date on atheism, skepticism, and science.