Uninformed Conclusions

I believe random behavior or free will to be conclusions processed and arrived at by an uninformed brain.

Say you are presented with two desserts, neither of which you have ever tasted.
Having no previous data on the desserts, your brain will begin to recognize patterns like typical dessert flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and so on. These and other patterns in the desserts will be processed for previous experience.

Eventually your brain will help you decide on the dessert with the most patterns recognized for having had a pleasurable outcome.
For me this would mean having both desserts.

The trouble with free will is that when you inform someone they don't have it they'll change their actions to prove to you that they do.

"If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?"
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-vs-programmed-brain

In the above sentence resides a truth much more sinister than dessert.

Psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler tested this question by giving participants passages from "The Astonishing Hypothesis." One group received a passage that talked candidly about free will, the others did not.

Afterwards the participants filled out a survey on free will and were then told to complete 20 arithmetic problems. It was explained that when the question appeared on the computer they would need to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen too.

At this point it is safe to assume the results, since I wouldn't have brought up the topic and the article wouldn't have been published had the participants reacted differently.

There Will Come Soft Rains

I don't like the song "It's a small World."
Aside from it being an irritating assemblage of notes and high-pitched lyrics, it contains a message I don't necessarily agree with.
The surface area of the globe we cruise around the solar system on is 510,072,000 km² with 29.2% of that being land. Perhaps a more accurate lyric would be that 'it's a small percentage of land we humans can inhabit after all.'
So what's my problem?
When I drop my keys in a dark parking lot somehow the world seems like a rather large place… Or better, if I’m feeling lackadaisical on a day I run out of yogurt and have to make a trip to the store, the world once again feels like a very large place.
However, when I search the planet (and by "planet" I mean the Internet) for rationale thinking and signs of social improvement, suddenly the world starts to seem very, very small.
There’s book banning, albeit rather amusing in an ironic sense, censoring of comics, armed patrol keeping you in twos, seemingly harmless dubious behavior, and the obnoxiously extolled.

And leaving the planet isn't an option.

Now it's an old tale that the world isn’t perfect, and I’ll admit I prefer this time period to any of the previous ones, however, I have to wonder if this is the best humanity can be.

Near Misses and You

The Earth’s orbit intersects with the orbits of many asteroids. NASA estimates “many” to be about 1000 to 4000, that are bigger than half-mile across, which is when an asteroid begins to pose a threat to human civilization (as you may have learned from Armageddon).

Toutatis, an asteroid 2 miles in diameter, passed by Earth January 3, 1993 at approx 2 million miles away. Before Toutais, on March 23, 1989 an asteroid about half a mile across sauntered by at 0.7 million miles (Oh, and 'Guitar Hero' has sparked an 80's comeback).

Now, nearly everyone will agree that an asteroid (or comet) ended the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago with the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, while some will insist that there was no such period and the Earth was created 5000 years ago (or something equally silly).

250 million years ago Trilobites ruled the Earth, until a mass extinction wiped them all out, ending the Permian period.
Is that too far back to concern ourselves with?
How about the Eocene period at 35 million years ago, which ended with the mass extinction of many land mammals? (This just in, Court overturns fine on Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction')

Whenever I bring up these topics and ruin perfectly good dinner parties I’m always met with an obtuse skepticism, “Well, don’t you think the Universe has tired of these mass extinction antics by now?” or “Certainly humanity has reached a measure of intelligence where we can dispatch any cosmical threat” or there’s those responses I get back from the “5000 years ago” crowd.

I suppose those people are the worst of the bunch, since they have already reached the conclusion that everything is and will always be fine and dandy, that it’s all part of the plan, and communication comes to an abrupt stop (Kim Kardashian has been tapped as the latest celebrity to join the cast of Dancing With The Stars).

Fantastic Headline

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cloned Dog Owner Manacled Mormon for Sex

I have two favorite lines from this article, one is, "tumbling back to the dark days of early autumn, 1977."
Those were dark days indeed, ask Robert Smith, oh, and they were especially dark if you happened to find yourself in NYC during the month of July.
But July is not really in autumn now is it?
Maybe they were passing the darkness around and only NYC took it literally.

What does it take to assemble thoughts? How do some people reason themselves into what appears to be just terrible ideas on the level of common sense and assume a positive mental outcome?
Cognitive Dissonance, sure, but there are some extraordinary cases out there.

I believe the key to solving a part of this mystery, at least for this subject, is in observing sentence structure. Take for example my second favorite line, "I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

You can't send me your thought for tuna, instead you have to speak it or gesture it.
If words represent thoughts, then it would be safe to speculate that we could gather information on how she assembles thoughts from this one sample of her syntax (note: there's probably something out there like this already, I just don't know what it is).

Why a carnation and where did Mount Everest come from? These are seemingly unrelated items. And why do you think she was redundant when it came to specifying what she wouldn't be wearing?
I wonder what color the carnation is?