I wasn't going to be insulting, but...

I was just listening to a pompous fool talking about a waste of paper book he's just had published dismissing humanism. The stupidity of his analysis is that he really only considers 19th century humanism, and then only as seen from a religious point of view.

Humanism has changed a lot since those early days, and his statements that it produces a moral vacuum are just absurd. The most moral people I know are agnostic humanists. Weirdly, he feels that humanism places humans at the center of the universe. In my experience the opposite is true; through humanism we come to see how much a part of the tapestry of all life we are. He sees humanism as giving us a life devoid of meaning. What a stupid jerk! How typically religious! Modern humanism shows us that we are how the universe comes to understand itself! What a truly marvellous meaning to give us.

In the end his lack of understanding about what it is to be a modern human leads him, oddly, to align himself with another jerk who wants to bring back the superstitious past: he sees value in Osama bin Laden's statements that his god's heaven has no pillars and if we in the west believe only in pillars he will bring us down, hence the attack on those 2 metaphorical pillars of modern life. He thinks that we need to believe in myths or else we are lost.

What a fool!

crows making tools

I meant to post this a while back, but forgot to.

Some months back Betty the New Caledonian crow caused a stir when she demonstrated extraordinary tool-making intelligence. She spontaneously created a hook out of wire in order to get some food. Go to http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tools_main.html to read more about this and look at the short (1.2Mb) video there showing her actually doing it. At first she tries to get at the food using a straight piece of wire, and at one point almost manages to, but she soon realises this won't work and bends the end of the wire into a hook to lift the food container up.