Internal Monologue

Here's a great writeup of an annual Turing Test competition from the perspective of one of the human confederates: In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do. I must convince them that I’m human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help.

Politico 44 via Sullivan : SHIFT ON GAY MARRIAGE: President Obama has decided that he won’t “defend the constitutionality” of a part of the Defense of Marriage Act that seeks to bar gays from marrying, the Justice Department announced. The change in the White House’s position means that the administration will no longer argue for that part of the law in two lawsuits filed in the Second Circuit challenging it. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement Wednesday that Obama “has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.” “The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional,” Holder said. “Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases.”.

Here's the story from his own website : My most recent accident was becoming a well-known humanist. Somewhere along the line a nice group of people, the Secular Coalition for America, sent a form requesting information from those of us who support separation of church and state. In response to a question about belief you could check one of three boxes. I checked the one that said I didn’t believe in a supreme being. Then there was a blank to answer the question, “What religion do you associate with?” I wrote, “Unitarian” and sent it back to them. (What I didn’t know is that there was a reward offered to find high-ranking nontheist politicians and that some guy out in Hayward, California, was hustling to make $1,000 by turning me in. I met him later at one of my town hall meetings, and he wouldn’t share the money with me. I told him, “That’s not fair!”) I love his story about how he became involved with the Starr-King Unitarian Seminary: Returning to accidents, I then became an acci

"Being in a good relationship is a risk factor for becoming a parent." -Thomas Bradbury, a father of two and professor of psychology at UCLA From this article: http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/index3.html

This is pretty sick: A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171 , has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote , and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon. The gulf is wide. I don't know how to bridge it.

In our employer-based health care system, we give bosses the power to take away the health care of their worker's children. That's hardly conducive to an equitable power relationship between workers and employers. It's positively Dickensian. I hope future generations shudder in horror at the barbarity and inequity of our practices.

According to this brief article, two astrophysicists think they found evidence of a gas giant in our solar system much bigger than Jupiter: The name of the planet is Tyche. The scientists are John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. According to them, this colossus is hiding in the Oort Cloud—the asteroid beehive that forms the outer shell of our home system, one light-year in radius. They claim that data already captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer proves its existence. It only needs to be analyzed... over the next two years.