Everyone is entitled to my opinion

Why did I stop writing this blog? I still had about twenty draft posts that I was going to write up at some point. The reasons? I got lazy. ...

No, this post isn't dedicated towards ridiculing John Edward's beliefs. That'd be easy to do. OF COURSE the dead don't actua...

I don't like the word 'evil', partly because of the heavily supernatural and religious connotations it has (I prefer a scientifi...

...a book By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela about her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the so-called "Prime Evil" killer of apartheid Sout...

How did it get to the stage where instead of the Army or the Police doing domestic security or invading other countries / defending ones own...

Reading about how sophisticated the counterfeiting operation has become for many electronics products. The thing is though, if these product...

People say others have sold themselves out to this or that. Can't one buy oneself back? We use money to buy time, affection, fame, and o...

I'll be doing a series of postings about my growing hostility towards the concepts created by many philosophers over the millenia. I...

Sydneysiders, go to the Observatory. Me and the gf went last night, the clouds cleared up just in time, and it was great. It's an awesom...

So I'm learning to become a market maker. The learning curve is steep, the pace furious, and the work challenging and interesting. It...

Are neither good nor bad. The concept of an emotion being negative or positive was a stupid and destructive concept. Emotions are our motiva...

It's honestly strange that I've only recently realised this recently... I guess it is very easy to fall in to the trap of believing ...

"The Chaser's War On Everything" song caused a lot of controversy when it mocked people who had died in living memory...saying...

This post is about why I've become disillusioned with Philosophy generally. I've got major issues with its approach as a discipline...

Exams. 6 of them. Back 27th

What'd you do yesterday? Last Tuesday? What were you like two years ago? Five? As a child? How many memories can you bring to mind betwe...

What a quirky, brilliant old psychologist Szasz was. Now I don't agree with Tom Cruise that the whole movement of psychiatry is somehow ...

It's amazing that a book that would be largely uncontroversial today received so much attention in the early 1970s. I mean, can you imag...

So the court says that Richard Pratt's company Visy ripped off Australians to the tune of $700million by fixing the prices of carboard b...

As of last year, I had been to 26 countries, but I had not travelled much within Australia, except along the East Coast (usually to the same...

A tribute to my retiring History of Maths lecturer, Mike Hirschhorn. (He also takes a whole bunch of other Maths subjects and is widely know...

Some say that a person simply knows who they are. To another, that person is closed to change. And so we ask: "Have you considered......

Next in the series of crazy, excellent SBS TV shows; it's a series called "Why Democracy". One episode, called "For God, ...

This post is dedicated towards the absurd scenes (newstainment) beamed in to our homes from SBS television. I don't mean to be cynical, ...

Religious people like to "make sense" out of random tragic events; the events assume a cosmic significance, or become part of the ...

I notice that a lot of people confuse the concept of democracy with the state of freedom from various forms of oppression [Hardly unexpected...

As mentioned before, whilst I agree that there's more to quality of life than total income, it would be absurd to measure Gross National...

Our bodies are sinking ships, and we like to salvage things from sinking ships before they go down. So we pass on our genes while we're ...

Haha Judge Judy is funny, and generally, being smart, a good debater. She was wrong about one thing though. That cute little dog that attack...

The old religious person in you dies, causing discomfort for the person, or even to more than one of the people inside of you, who has a dyi...

I like my own type of study on nationalism. Ask people to rate different countries out of 10. How much they like them. That simple. France?...

I continuously am fascinated by language. Somebody once told me that I should be grateful to the English because they helped my native tongu...

Is just one kind of multiple-personality disorder? I, like Douglas Hofstadter, am a strange loop!

We're apathetic about politics because we've learnt our helplessness, as a dog might. It follows that people will only become politi...

It's old news, but I'm adding my bit about it. I thought it was damn funny, and served its purpose. Did it make it to the news in ...

Had a psychedelic dream of flashbacks to when I was in Cuba, and I saw an old Soviet cement mixer still in operation, slowly chugging its wa...

Vagueness, I love it. One of the harshest criticisms that we can make of another person's mind is that the thoughts within it are vague....

One of the supposed paradoxes of logic - if "This sentence is false" is true - then it is false - which presents a contradiction. ...

Something I play when I'm bored in psych class... See how well you can define things in the glossary... Hey you learn a few things. Like...

Crazy - This woman was abducted when she was 15, and kept in a dungeon for 20 years as a sex slave (amongst other things) - repeatedly tortu...

Often we think "Hey, I'd like to do this now, BUT..." or "I'd like to see you now, BUT..." Obviously, we're ...

Grow or decline not in strength, certitude or spirit, but in numbers only. Revolutions don't happen quickly, only change does. When peop...

Confusion, illusion, error, self-deceit and deceit all rolled in to one.

What exactly is a maternalistic society and how would I know if I were in one? Refer to the past if you must, but try to imagine it as an ad...

Haha, I pretend that one of his toys is having sex with the other, to see his jealous reaction. Having a dog is endlessly fun. Trying to wor...

People screaming. People, often those who feel powerless, feeling part of something bigger, being outraged or sad or joyous. The mania and t...

Which professions primarily involve an optimistic attitude, and/or idealism, aside from, say, some roles in the UN? I was thinking that lawy...

Can somebody explain this??? I ate a banana 4 nights ago, and I've been smelling banana ever since. Everywhere. Not only at home. It...

No, people, email does not make life 'easier'; that we can instantly communicate with anyone anywhere does not make life easier over...

Excerpts from a dictionary of crime: -A man who would hold pre-pubescent girls at knifepoint on their way home from school, ordering them to...

Often enquiring about the certainty of another's opinions shows very quickly how ignorant they are; there are some people who believe ve...

When I went to study in the USA, what I found odd was the vague familiarity of America. It's people and the way of life. Obviously Ameri...

I think parts of the brain of the human species are going to atrophy as we use them less and less. Apart from all the things which we'll...

It's 2am, and I'm doing a heavy gym session and listening to Stargazer, by Rainbow. One of the earliest metal songs. I'm in a pr...

I used to keep a dream diary. Just read some old ones. Ah, the weirdness of dreams 3/6/03: I am on ski trip, although I resemble myself now,...

Some people will inject themselves with botox more and more frequently Have facelifts more and more frequently Die their grey hair more and ...

Why is kicking an addiction hard, beyond the physiological reasons? Say, for example, a caffeine addiction. Caffeine enables a lifestyle tha...

Ah, Psychologists. The power to help humans or to manipulate them towards almost any ends. How sad it is that we can so easily be understood...

Historians of the future will have to be able to program computers, so as to interpret past data storage formats eg jpeg in 2030 and use the...

Hey, Philosophy can be fascinating. But one has to ask at some point why it is that it has essentially failed in many respects. Sure, philos...

Related to the blog post below; Aren't military personnel often viewed as would-be-criminals? I've heard that domestic crime levels ...

Our society is based around getting people to do things by giving them the right incentives... Although I dislike him in many ways, I've...

People often like to invoke the concept of a God to reinforce the virtues of obedience to blind authority. For example, some priests, due to...

Learning vs Instinct (sometimes characterised as Innateness vs Learning, or Genes vs Environment, etc). People, again, things are NOT THIS S...

The Swedes are less dogmatic than the rest of us. They're been exploring a substitute for nicotine, which is also addictive, but does le...

Who would've known that Haitian Zombie science may actually have a basis in reality? Haitian accounts write of men who went blue during ...

Self-deception evolves to serve deceit. It would appear that if you can be completely blind to aspects of your own personality, you can more...

Split between thinking and feeling. This is what is known as schizophrenia. Although, see back to DSM IV post... According to this definitio...

A 'disorder' is meant to not only make you weird/unnormal within a social group, but to reduce your ability to survive. (A friend pu...

Two random facts about Hitler which most people probably don't know He is strongly suspected to have killed his niece, and 6 of his 7 fi...

My lecturer jokes that people with common surnames should be embarassed of themselves. But the not-so-funny thing is that many take this ver...

Some particularly interesting ones: The hidden racism often Nerds: I must say, I do dislike and try not to identify with rapper culture, alt...

"I had a book stolen from the library" -- Can be interpreted in 7 different ways!!! Try it!! ** WTF: The Anarchistic Theory of Kno...

Has anyone ever taken the cognitive enhancer Modafinil? Does it work? Please share your experiences!

When we say we love knowledge for its own sake, aren't we simply saying that we get a kick out of discovering things? Just as somebody m...

There is no morally just tax rate. A religious friend once said to me that "as there is no moral good in reality, all that we can hope ...

I was thinking that various political parties have different conceptions of human nature, which are evident in their policies. For example, ...

I was writing the other day about how strange it is when you start out from slightly different axioms you may end up with entirely different...

States that the older child should be systematically different to later children. On average, they should generally be more conservative, mo...

Stacey Gelgor. She picked up on what must have been a Freudian slip of mine? She's probably smarter than Ayaan Hirsi Ali anyway. She may...

An increasingly complex society = inevitably, more conflicts of interest. To what degree can we expect society to manage this? Say one perso...