NomadSoul's Articles, Page 1 of 2

A recent story on the CBC website details the hearing of a child custody case involving a mother who sent her daughter to school wearing a swastika, as previously reported on Omninerd.

The mother claims this was to protest alleged discrimination against white people, as evidenced by the presence of minority pride posters and the lack of similar posters celebrating whiteness in her daughter’s school. She also claims social workers were lying when they reported that her daughter was routinely reciting racist and white supremacist rhetoric.

Read the rest of this article and its 2 comments

Hey there. NomadSoul here with another somewhat rambling question to ask the Omninerd community. It pertains to aesthetic experiences and the sense of being “moved” by something. Let me clarify:

If I experience something beautiful—maybe something I saw while hiking, or a tender moment with a loved one, something like that—and I write it down in poetic or literary form, maybe you will be affected by it, maybe you’ll be indifferent.

But if you are affected by it, then what is it that is affecting you? What is it that allows a piece of poetry, or a work of art—a second-hand copy, incomparable to the fullness of the original experience—to cause such reactions? Or, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what is it about the beholder that recognizes and attunes them to such an aesthetic experience?

Read the rest of this article and its 5 comments

A recent New York Times article asks the question: Can robots be more ethical than living soldiers in battlefield conditions? Free of the conflicting emotions human soldiers experience, a well programmed robot might be better able to follow moral codes and rules of engagement; particularly with regard to non-combatants and civilian targets. So, the question for OmniNerds is: what do you think? Will ethical robots assist or replace soldiers on the battlefield and make war more humane?

And of course, the deeper question is: what will Skynet do with it’s army of ethical Terminators once we build it? Alternatively, does the prospect of wars fought largely or entirely by machines remind anyone of that classic Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon?

Read the rest of this article and its 11 comments

So, I’ve been pondering capitalism and morality again, as I pathologically do, and found myself going in circles. So, since I’m something of a sadist, I decided to share my confusion:

Most political, economic, and even religious debates seem to revolve around the balance of individual rights and collective rights.  To a religious conservative, gay marriage and abortion are issues where the collective rights of the religious community trump; compared to a liberal or libertarian who values individual rights in such matters.

To a fiscal conservative, or a libertarian, individual rights trump in matters of free market regulation and business transactions; while a liberal values the collective rights / fairness of the community more.

Read the rest of this article and its 19 comments

A recent New York Times article proclaims the wild discovery of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles: When you unroll Scotch tape in a vacuum, it emits X-rays. Although scientists have known Scotch tape emits light when peeled since 1939, in this new research Professor Seth J. Putterman reveals as the adhesive pulls away from the surface of the roll, the friction creates electric currents that generate X-ray bursts strong enough to take an X-ray photograph of a finger. The researchers see a number of applications for this phenomenon, including testing plastics and composite materials for fatigue, since they do not otherwise show obvious signs the way metal structures do. Perhaps the wildest idea, however, is the possibility of nuclear fusion: Could the energy generated be directed to heavy hydrogen ions in the tape, causing them to accelerate and fuse, releasing greater energy?

Read the rest of this article and be the first to comment

In this YouTube video Science Fiction writer Harlan Ellison talks about the insidious nature of television. Check it out.

Read the rest of this article and its 125 comments

Canada went to the polls on Tuesday to re-decide the composition of the federal government. The results are in, and the Conservative party won with another minority. The Conservatives gained about 20 seats in the House of Commons, giving them 143 seats overall (out of a total 308)—but effectively, not much changed.

It seems clear many Canadians are rather displeased with the affair, and unhappy about the entire process. This election had the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history at 59.1%, meaning 9.6 million of the 23.4 million registered electors weren’t interested.

Read the rest of this article and its 2 comments

From the world of the inexplicable, someone stole 5,000 condoms from an HIV/AIDS awareness vehicle in Mexico on Sunday. The coordinator of the program, Polo Gomez, said the "condom-mobile" was in its parking spot in front of a friend’s house in Mexico City when it went missing. It was later found on Wednesday in a shopping mall parking lot, but the condoms and some equipment were missing. Still in the vehicle were 800 HIV tests, and a "seven-meter inflatable prophylactic." (Why, that would just about fit – if I were an anatomically correct parade balloon!)

Read the rest of this article and be the first to comment

Why is it that some days, when I keep my file sharing program open on my desktop, the download speeds are terrible—and yet, when the program is minimized and I open it up, the speeds are great but immediately drop to nearly nothing?

Is there an unwritten law of the net that if there is no observer, bandwidth is higher than when there is one?

Read the rest of this article and be the first to comment

In a recent posting to YouTube (linked below), Social Psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks to TED about the origins of evil—how good people can behave badly because of the social or institutional situations in which they find themselves. Referencing his own Stanford prison experiment and the famous Milgram conformity experiment, Zimbardo discusses events like Abu Ghraib, and how groupthink can get even good people to perform acts of unspeakable evil. The YouTube video is linked here: it contains images of a disturbing, often sexual nature from the Abu Ghraib prison.

Read the rest of this article and its 15 comments

In a recent posting to YouTube, psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks to TED about the psychology behind the moral differences of liberal and conservative thinking. He relates these outlooks to the personality trait of Openness, as well as to his five areas of moral reasoning: harm/care, fairness, ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. By demonstrating the differences in how liberals and conservatives care about these factors, Haidt explains the basic differences between liberals as agents of change, and conservatives as a force for stability. He also shows how this relates to politics and religion, and how religion can be a force for good.

Read the rest of this article and its 2 comments

Scheduled collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have been delayed after a coolant leak. Apparently Friday’s leak (called a quench) was caused after an electrical problem led to a mechanical failure, which in turn caused about a tonne of liquid helium to pour out of the cooling system and into the tunnels. This caused about a hundred magnets, which steer the particle beam around the accelerator, to overheat and fail. The damage is severe enough to put the LHC out of action for at least two months. Looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer to find out if the Earth will be swallowed by a black hole. Better call your bookie…

Read the rest of this article and be the first to comment

Now, don’t get me wrong; it’s important to identify risky behaviours, but aren’t there some things we already know?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine "recently announced ":http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080904215613.htm the shocking insight that women who binge drink are more likely to engage in unsafe sex. One researcher went so far as to say that the results of the study were "not surprising," adding: "Binge drinking results in a decreased ability to make clear decisions and can enable individuals to engage in behaviours that they would not if sober."

Read the rest of this article and its 6 comments

While this Wired article I found last night is almost six months old, and somewhat lengthy, it’s really worth the time to check out. Bluntly, it almost makes me want to believe market economics may actually do more good than harm—which is no small feat.

In a nutshell, it describes the way that as digital technology advances, it becomes cheaper (as well as more powerful), reducing the effective cost of just about anything you do on the web to zero. This in itself is nothing new, but the article goes on to describe how emerging marketing models, based on the free interactions of the web, are bleeding over into other sectors, making everything from T-shirts to airline fares abundant and cheap to the point of being potentially free.

Read the rest of this article and be the first to comment

A recent article in the Toronto Star illustrates the quietly bizarre nature of Canadian politics in the twenty-first century.

The current federal Conservative minority government, headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has long been referred to as Canada’s version of the American religious right, and has been taken to task by the other three political parties and the media for its views on issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, health care, funding increases for the military and funding decreases for the arts, and its unflinching support of the Bush administration, etc.

Read the rest of this article and its 8 comments