Work again

So I'm back at work. No big deal, except that I'm in Toronto, and will be working tomorrow with not one but two temps (Norfolk Dude and Ms N are working on another project). Furthermore, the Human Sawmill isn't feeling too well. I suspect the days are going to drag on terribly.

The wonders of modern technology

So it seems they've managed to produce a robot cat:

Yume Neko Smile, the Creepy Cat Robot from Sega
Uploaded by AkihabaraNews

Via atomicat.

The return of Ms McD

Yesterday, after an afternoon of canvassing and a brief visit with the Ps, I went to Pearson to pick up Ms McD upon her arrival from Saint John. Of course, this is Ms McD we're talking about, and bad luck seems to follow her in an uncanny fashion (though perhaps the choice of our once-esteemed national airline as the carrier has more to do with this particular problem). She phoned as I was preparing to leave and said that her flight had been delayed... by around an hour and a half. It was close to 3 AM by the time we got back to town. It was, of course, the same airline that gave me and my boss the luxury of an extended rest in the airport terminal last winter. She's now back at Mr and Mrs Stone's place; I do hope that there are no irregularities with her settling back in.

Man this is warped...

...but I wouldn't have it any other way. Have a look.

The Globe gets nasty

You probably all remember the furore that arose when Globe and Mail reporter Jan Wong wrote an article on the Dawson College shooting, suggesting that the shooter, as well as two other well known mass murderers in Quebec, had been rejected by Quebec society as not pure laine, and that the resulting alienation helped drive them to commit their crimes. I can't defend what Wong said, but the response has included racist caricatures and death threats. And, if this article in Toronto Life is accurate, it sounds like her editors knew in advance roughly what she was going to say and did nothing to discourage her- and then left her to take all the heat. If this is true, her employer has wronged her far more than she ever wronged anyone she had lunch with.

The long weekend is over; resume normal suffering

The weekend itself went quite well, though busy. On I drove Mr Stone to Breslau, where he needed to pick up a piece of equipment at a store there (his stepson's car has died). I then managed to get my new computer working (and it's like night and day compared to my old PIII). The latter is going to be scrubbed of data and then lent to Catherine's campaign.

On Sunday I went canvassing, and in the evening I met up with Lee's son (who was back in town to retrieve stuff from her house) and a friend of his. This led to a rather late night. On Monday I helped run the NDP table at the annual Labour Day picnic in Waterloo Park.

Is credulity adaptive?

This past Tuesday, while my boss and I were driving out to the sort centre, there was a feature on The Current about a self-help film called The Secret. It's really a rehash of old ideas like "the power of positive thinking" (as touted by the "deep philosopher" Norman Vincent Peale). My boss likes most of the proponents quoted on the show. One thing that he mentioned in passing is the fact that most of the proponents of this sort of thing are quite religious (as he is) while most of the critics are atheists or agnostics (like yours truly). This seems to be true (Peale, for instance, was a preacher) and it got me to thinking about why this might be. There's nothing obviously wrong with the idea of positive thinking, though I agree with the critics that, pushed too far, this could lead to a blame-the-victim mentality (Lost your job? Got mugged? Raped? You must not have been thinking positively enough!). The thing is, though, if you're an atheist or an agnostic, your beliefs are going to depend on such annoying little things like evidence- and if so, you're likely to have a hard time thinking positively about yourself unless you're already doing well. I know that I do.

Given this, it's not too big a stretch to suggest that a certain amount of credulity might be adaptive. Not too much, obviously (otherwise everyone would take advantage of you) but some. This might go some distance towards explaining why so many people fall for shit like this, this, and this.