1. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Comment #175580 by cynthax on May 5, 2008 at 4:20 pm

Harris is the real Uncle Sam that should represent the US!
I'm always worried when I read people saying that stupid people shouldn't vote or their vote should count less. This is a very dangerous road! If there is any way of limiting who can or can't vote, what are the limits? Remember that once the door is open for that, it might turn against you in the future. Also, there are no reliable measures of intelligence. As someone pointed out, IQ numbers are very unreliable. Besides, there are a lot of intelligent people who are very very very bad. I bet Hitler, Stalin etc had high IQs, and so do a lot of misguided people. I know that many of the IQ-based voting eligibility suggestions here were jokes, but from time to time I hear people seriously suggesting that there should be some limitation based on education or whatever, and I get very concerned about it.
Instead of limiting who can or can't vote, I believe we need to continue educating people so that they're better informed when they vote. As I said, even intelligent people are sometimes very misinformed. I'm glad to see that on this website we always see lots of people willing to do educate people! :)

2. Museums teach society lacking in science literacy

Comment #173576 by cynthax on April 30, 2008 at 9:35 pm

It was only when I was almost 30 years old and saw the Scaling the Universe section in the American Museum of Natural History (NY) that I really understood a bunch of size relations in different orders of magnitude. Also, it was in the same museum that I learned what cladograms were, in the voice of Cate Blanchet! How can you see the dinosaur section of that museum and not see that evolution is real and that the fossil record can indeed tell a lot? Someone mentioned the Bell curve shown with balls dropping, and I remember seeing that in Boston and understanding it so much better!
I'm hardly a kid, but I learn so much in museums, and I think they do a great job at making some concepts more concrete. I myself have trouble visualizing things sometimes and the stuff in museums has helped tremendously.
Thanks to the people who work in museums, as employees or volunteers, for helping us kids of all ages understand the world better!

3. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed

Comment #163555 by cynthax on April 18, 2008 at 1:57 pm

Teratornis:
Thank you so much! I'm new to this stuff!

clearmind:
As a linguist, I'm saving your comments to help me teach syntax. Your name is also very good evidence that reasoning skills (in case your mind is as clear as you claim) are totally unrelated to language use.
Also, in your post you mention "being in denial" several times. I really think you should listen to yourself.

4. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed

Comment #162960 by cynthax on April 17, 2008 at 6:00 pm

A bit off-topic:
Playball, what annoyed me even more today than the commercials was to see the Expelled Google ad in MY OWN blog!!!

5. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed

Comment #162950 by cynthax on April 17, 2008 at 5:48 pm

This whole sex theory (yes, it's just a theory) is evil because it leads to rape. And, of course, to homosexuality. People who get deluded by the sex theory think,"well, if all I need to have a baby is sex, then same-sex sex should produce a baby for me, right?". It's destroying the holy marriage, because now people think that they don't need to get married to have babies. Preposterous!
Furthermore, we all know that Mary was a virgin. Helloooo! This means she NEVER had sex!! And she had a Baby!
What's worse is that this ridiculous belief that babies come from sex is what is responsible for the spread of AIDS. God is punishing people for believing the atheists. Yes, because notice how the sexnatists are all atheists! They're pushing their fundamentalist atheist agenda into our schools!
Finally, don't forget about the correlation between sexnatism and abortions. Many women think that they got pregnant because they had sex. (I'm not a sexnatist, but I know that babies don't come from storks! Give me a break, I'm not stupid. We've all seen pregnant women. God made them pregnant, there is no such thing as stork birth because I'm from Brazil and there are no storks there!) Anyway, women fail to understand that they are pregnant because God wanted them to be pregnant. Then they think it's because of sex and go get abortions. Here's how it works, in case you atheists didn't know: when a girl has sex outside of marriage, God needs to give her a lesson. And He makes her pregnant to force her to marry. It's too bad that lots of girls just don't get it...
Well, I hope the sexnatists stop being afraid of the truth and stop trying to see sex in everything. After all, this sexmania also led to Freudianism, which was reponsible for destroying the minds of millions of people who believed in psychotherapy. It has been PROVEN wrong, just look at the evidence! But this is a topic for another day.
BTW, can't wait for the third film about Terraspherism!

6. Religious education as a part of literary culture

Comment #160837 by cynthax on April 14, 2008 at 1:03 pm

I'm one more person in disagreement with Robotaholic. Do you also think we should get rid of Roman, Greek, Norse etc mythology writings? Should we rename all planets and constellations? I think as long as it is clearly identified as a document reflecting some people's beliefs at a certain time in history, the Bible can stay around. As for art and stuff, it's hard to believe that anyone who visits the Vatican museum, for example, can leave without being impressed by Christian art (in spite of the vine leaves that they put over any body part they don't want shown!).
Maybe you mean that we're too close to the Bible and Christianity to be able to look at it impartially as we do with classical Romans, Greeks, and Norse. Is that it?
And Teratornis, I don't think books are obsolete at all! The thing I look at first in people's homes is their bookshelf! Digital media cannot beat the beauty of a bookshelf! But then, maybe I am the one who's getting obsolete...

7. PZ-Away

Comment #152736 by cynthax on March 31, 2008 at 12:31 pm

I think PZ-Off would be a better name!
Oh, someone already suggested that on Pharyngula. That's what happens when you're in a rush to finally have the first post...

8. Beware the Believers

Comment #151748 by cynthax on March 29, 2008 at 9:55 am

My impression is that it was made by those people that want to defend that "it's possible to believe in God and in science at the same time and Dawkins et al. are a bad thing for science because they are too radical and don't respect people's points of view".
The only thing I enjoyed was the machine walking down Avenida Paulista, in Sao Paulo, my home city!

9. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150780 by cynthax on March 27, 2008 at 12:16 pm

The more the merrier, I guess, so here are my best wishes too!

10. American kids, dumber than dirt: Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

Comment #82032 by cynthax on October 25, 2007 at 3:04 pm

I am also a foreigner (Brazilian) living in the US. I'm a teaching assistant at a big university, and us foreign TAs are always amazed at how some of the undergrads even made it into college.
In my opinion, a big problem is that things come too easily to kids these days. They don't have to work for anything. Another thing that shocks many of the foreign TAs here is how easy it is to get an A, and it looks like that's the way it is in high school. To me both in high school and college the minimum passing grade was 50%, and sometimes it was hard to get even that. Getting an A was a real challenge, you really had to work hard. But here, if the class average is below B, we have to "curve" the results and raise everyone's average. I see people getting As who shouldn't be getting more than Cs!
The other problem is transforming educational institutions into businesses, where "the client is always right". And "the client", who is usually the parent, will give teachers/professors a hard time when his/her precious little dumbass of a kid gets anything lower than a B. In Brazil I worked a little bit with middle and high school kids, and some of them will talk down to you with that I'm-paying-your-salary attitude. Add that to a culture of attributing all the fault to the teachers and parents blaming misbehavior on ADHD, and if you don't do exactly what the parents want, i.e. give their kids an A, they make trouble. By the way, I'm not saying that ADHD doesn't exist, it's just an overused term to justify bad parenting.

11. 1996 Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Comment #73140 by cynthax on September 24, 2007 at 8:53 am

One more brilliant response to the claim that life is meaningless if there is nothing beyond the physical world. I believe we need more of that sort of inspired and inspiring words. It would be great if people finally saw that there is enough grandeur in life as it is than any man-made divinity could ever explain.
BTW, I think that the occasional wickedness of life is part of how fascinating it is!

12. Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation

Comment #65696 by cynthax on August 25, 2007 at 6:23 pm

Corylus,
I remembered reading about treating phantom pain on Scientific American Mind. I looked for it online and here is the link, if anyone is interested in a summary of Ramachandran's experiment: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00009E79-2A61-1196-906983414B7F0000
They actually have a feature on the "out-of-body" experiment, here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=98A1FC65-E7F2-99DF-3150711A65904907&ref=sciammind

13. Are antidepressants taking the edge off love?

Comment #60971 by cynthax on August 3, 2007 at 8:03 am

I agree with Cartomancer in many ways. My point of view may be biased, because I take an SSNRI (acts on serotonin and norepinephrine). First of all, it took me a while to agree to take meds for depression. I've been on them for two years now and it's been one of the best decisions of my life.
The reason for my initial reluctance is that nothing in this field is very certain. Descriptions of the medications are always worded as "thought to be", "believed to act", "seems to work" etc. So it's really scary!
One thing about these medications is that it takes a while to find the right combination of chemicals and dosages. For example, the one I tried first made me kind of bland, then an increase in dosage just made me ridiculously sleepy all day. Then my doctor switched meds, combined two of them, and we finally got to the perfect combination. It's a bit painful, you're kind of experimenting on yourself, but it's well worth it.
Because of that personal experience, I'm here wondering if these people that would rather live with depression than go on antidepressants again didn't just have the wrong prescription the first time around. It's not easy, you're at a time in your life when you're afraid of trying, you dread the possibility of failure, and you can't even decide what you want on your pizza, much less what to do about your life. So it's less painful to just stick to good old familiar depression than to risk having unpredictable side effects. It's understandable, but sometimes to recover we've got to be brave.
I agree with Cartomancer that passionate love can be, like religion, a way to deal with difficulties, an that the problem is when you think someone else can save you, when you need to rely on someone else for your own happiness. Passionate love can give you a surge of all the "feel-good" chemicals that a depressed brain fails to do on its own. But that's just blinding yourself to reality, which means that once it's gone, you're left with nothing. Getting out of depression is like getting rid of religion: you take off your dark glasses and can finally see the world clearer. This may lead your brain to "decide" that it doesn't need passion or someone else to be in equilibrium. As for the Pandora's box thing, have you guys ever been on therapy? It's always a Pandora's box, because you start being aware of things you do that you're not usually aware of, and that's frightening. But finding the truth is not always easy, is it? The process of getting out of depression includes discovering a series of self-destructive behaviors you have that are not easy to accept, and at first you deny deny deny.
In short, blandness and indifference (which if you think are actually a step further from hopelessness) are potential results of antidepressants, but usually of the wrong antidepressant. It doesn't have to be like that.
Just for the record, after starting to treat my depression I got out of a harmful relationship and am now happily in love with my current boyfriend. Love is possible with antidepressants! :)