Weekend Thoughts - 1.2.16

Image by Wayne S. Grazio, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The Washington Post published an article about how used bookstores are making a comeback across the country, despite fierce competition from websites like Amazon. There are several factors that come into play here. Many book lovers enjoy browsing a physical store and serendipitously finding the perfect match for them, rather than shopping for books online. The profit margins on used books are better than new ones. And even the latest generation of kids born directly into the digital age has found reading books printed on paper to be preferable to reading them on a screen. All around, this is great news for print books, which are one of my favorite physical media (and pretty much the only one I collect any longer). Go visit a used bookstore today and be sure to support your local shops!

2. One of my favorite food documentaries, Food Inc., was recommended in an article on High Existence. The film covers various aspects of the overall food industry, including the inhumane treatment of animals, the economic and environmental repercussions of our current industrial production model that is used to grow vegetables and grains, and how the industry's economic and legal forces actually encourage an unhealthy diet. I would definitely give the film a strong recommendation—check it out if you are able!

3. It turns out that the NSA is not only surveilling American citizens, it has also been spying on members of Congress and Jewish American groups, according to an article published by The Wall Street Journal. To make matters worse, the security administration blatantly lied to Congress when directly asked about this accusation in 2014 by current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.26.15

Image by Wayne S. Grazio, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. An article on Vox explores one of the major issues in science today—how elite scientists can hold back scientific progress simply by staying alive; in this sense, it could be said that science is advancing very slowly—one prominent scientist's funeral at a time. We see this issue when new evidence is presented that contradicts the currently-accepted scientific (and historical) model of reality, such as the recent ideas put forth by Graham Hancock, Rupert Sheldrake, and Randall Carlson. From the article, "Science is not immune to interpersonal bullshit. Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die."

2. A feature at Mother Jones details nine ways police have more protections than average citizens do when they are arrested. Must be nice!

3. For years, people were able to opt-out of the body scanner line that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) maintains at airports in favor of a physical pat-down. However, the Department of Homeland Security has ruled that although citizens are still allowed to opt-out of the body scanner process, the TSA now has the ability to decline the opt-out request for "security" reasons. Essentially, you can say "No thanks", but the TSA can now say "No thanks" right back to you, for any made-up reason they want.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.19.15

Image by Jutta M. Jenning, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. As a followup to last week's news article about the identity of Bitcoin's founder, it seems that it may have been a hoax after all. Not surprising, really. Andrea Castillo, writing for Reason, argues that we should entirely halt the hunt to identify the cryptocurrency's creator, because "The entire purpose of the Bitcoin project is to facilitate a way for humans to access financial channels regardless of personal circumstances. That its leader would be pseudonymous and impersonal is therefore appropriate, even necessary". I really enjoyed reading Castillo's take on it, and have to agree—why does the mainstream media feel the need to know who the founder of Bitcoin is (or was) in the first place!?

2. There is yet another followup from last week's Weekend Thoughts, when I published a link to #GOPDildos, an art project that takes photos featuring them Republicans holding guns and replaces the weapons with dildos. The project's creator wrote an article that discusses the motivation behind it and the artist's personal opinion on the issue of gun control. It's definitely worth reading for anyone interested in politics, Republicans, guns, and/or dildos.

3. I enjoyed this 2015 edition of the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, from science fiction author Philip K Dick's seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the hit film Blade Runner. The 2015 version includes a satirical political spin, mentioning the movements #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter in a fairly humorous (depending on your take, I suppose) way.

4. An article written by a well-known YouTuber made the rounds this week, pointing out the economic difficulties that online content creators face. Many people who have tens (or even hundreds!) of thousands of followers have trouble affording to pay for their basic bills like rent or groceries. It is essentially necessary for them to publish company-sponsored videos/posts or ask their followers to sponsor them with a service like Patreon. The catch-22 for many creators is that they are seen as too big to ask for money from their followers but too small for advertisers to consider working with. It's an interesting article, and it brings up something that I wanted to mention about Think Wilder—as of now, I haven't made a single penny off of this website. So far, all of this content that I have created has been not only free for my followers, but it has actually costed me money (in hosting and domain name registration fees). I consider this project to be a labor of love, so for the time being I don't mind paying to share my work. In the future, I may consider instituting a sponsorship program for readers to chip in or running sponsored posts from time to time, but I haven't made a decision on that yet. However, I'm lucky in that I have a steady day job and don't rely on an inconsistent income source, so my situation is simply different from the ones that are described in the article. At any rate, give the article a read, and if you have any input on whether or not I should attempt to make money off of this website, feel free to contact me using one of the social share icons below!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.12.15

Image by Hartwig HKD, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The FBI is going to expand its system for tracking police-caused deaths by 2017—however it will still rely on local police departments to voluntarily provide this data, rather than make it mandatory. This has been something I have covered for several months on Think Wilder, and I'm happy to see that it is an issue that is getting more attention, even though it seems that local police departments will still decline the opportunity to provide this data to the FBI. This just means that pressure and incentives matter—law enforcement heads in favor of this new system will most likely lobby others to participate as well, and community interest will come into play too. If a local community truly cares about police conduct in its neighborhoods, it will encourage its local police department to pony up this data. I suppose that time will tell how successful this program expansion will be, but I do hope that in a few years' time we find ourselves in a position where we can reliably research how many police-caused deaths there have been nationwide.

2. The founder of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been identified solely by the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" for the past several years, but Gizmodo and Wired identified Australian man Craig Wright as the brain behind the operation. Australian police raided Wright's home this week to seize computer equipment in an effort to assess these claims. There is still plenty of speculation that this could be a hoax, but as someone who has followed news about Bitcoin for several years, it is fairly exciting to have some new material to read about it.

3. Have you ever been waiting on edge for days or weeks at a time for mail to arrive? Well, the United States Postal Service plans to roll out Informed Delivery, a service designed to email you pictures of your mail so that you know what to expect when you get home. At least for the time being, this will only include letter-sized mail, not packages. We'll have to see how well this works out as the USPS doesn't have a great track record when it comes to technological advances.

4. According to a study utilizing 280 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, lots of people are susceptible to believing pseudo-profound bullshit. The study simply required participants to rate randomly-generated statements on a scale of profundity from 1 to 5. The statements were constructed from the website Wisdom of Chopra, which is a site that scrubs the tweets of alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, and uses them to construct the random sentences. The study claims that participants who rated random statements containing new-agey buzzwords as "profound" (therefore "being more receptive to bullshit") may lack critical thinking skills, exhibit lower cognitive abilities, are less reflective, more prone to conspiracy theories, more likely to subscribe to religion and belief in the paranormal, and more likely to be fans of alternative medicine. I'm not sure what to make of this study. It seems very anti-Chopra, which (in my experience) most scientific materialists are, there is a small sample size, and it is highly subjective. Take the results for what you will. My main goal in sharing this is to remind the community to be wary of buzzwords and question everything—even articles covering "scientific studies". (And yes, that means you should be wary of Think Wilder as well!)

5. In the wake of so many mass shootings that have happened this year, police in South Carolina unearthed one man's treasure trove including thousands of firearms and ammunition. This may have been the largest firearm seizure in history, and it's definitely worth taking a look at the pictures and videos in the linked article.

6. And finally, some humor for you this week: #GOPdildos is an effort to replace the guns in Republican's gun-toting photos with dildos. Enjoy.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.5.15

Image by Matt Westgate, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. There are a lot of names being bandied about for what to name the generation of kids that follows the Millennials: Gen Z, iGen, Posts, Homeland Generation, ReGen, Plurals, etc. But MTV has proposed that we name the new generation the Founders, because while the Millennials have done an effective job of disrupting society, it is up to the new generation to rebuild it. Way to make me feel old, MTV. But I do hope that this is correct—now that we are aware that the systems in place are broken, we do need a group of people to muster up the energy to rebuild our global society. If any Founders want some help collaborating on a save-the-world project, let us Millennials know!

2. A new study found that quitting Facebook can make you happier and less depressed. The study essentially took a group of Facebook users and split them into two groups—the first group continued using the platform while the second group ceased activity on Facebook entirely. After one week, 88% of the group that left Facebook said they felt "happy" compared to 81% in the group still using the site. The first group "also felt less angry, less lonely, less depressed, more decisive, more enthusiastic, and enjoyed their lives more." Stress levels for the second group were reduced by as much as 55%. Now, keep in mind that this is just one study, but the results do indicate a trend—perhaps limiting or eliminating social media activity altogether would be wise if you are consistently feeling blue.

3. I don't fully understand this, but in case you are able to and might find it interesting, scientists have not found any evidence that we are living in a hologram. Apparently a machine called a Holometer was constructed to find holographic noise in the universe, but was unable to find any. Not to say that the lead physicist, Craig Hogan, isn't still hopeful: "This is just the beginning of the story. We've developed a new way of studying space and time that we didn't have before. We weren't even sure we could attain the sensitivity we did."

4. A Canadian man was arrested in an airport with 51 live turtles in his pants that he was intending to smuggle to China, where they are worth a considerable amount of money.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.