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Notice: server back up
Due to a server upgrade, the blog will be unavailable between 11am and 12pm GMT today. Server is now back up. Please report any issues in the comments.
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Could there be a Third Way for Criminal Psychopaths?
Last week, Steven Farrow was convicted of murdering a grandmother and a vicar. 77 year old Betty Yates was stabbed in the face. He had planned to crucify the vicar but had left behind his hammer an nails, instead covering his dead body in pornographic DVDs, party poppers and condoms. Though Farrow is likely to…
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Personalised weapons of mass destruction: governments and strategic emerging technologies
Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler sketches in an article in The Atlantic a not-too-far future when the combination of cheap bioengineering, synthetic biology and crowdsourcing of problem solving allows not just personalised medicine, but also personalised biowarfare. They dramatize it by showing how this could be used to attack the US president, but…
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The Fable of Speeding and Prance Legstrong
Imagine that the Teetotaler party came to power. They stood for family, safety and old fashioned values. Their first target was the car and the speeding culture. They wanted driving to be as safe as possible. Indeed, they would have preferred it if there were no driving cars at all and people returned to bicycles…
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When the science of sexuality meets the politics of gay rights
By Brian Earp See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here. See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here. Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. Gay genes and gay rights: On the science and politics of sexuality If homosexuality has a genetic basis, and if gay sex produces no offspring, why hasn’t…
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Singularity Summit: How we’re predicting AI
When will we have proper AI? The literature is full of answers to this question, as confident as they are contradictory. In a talk given at the Singularity Institute in San Francisco, I analyse these prediction from a theoretical standpoint (should we even expect anyone to have good AI predictions at all?) and a practical one (do…
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Too much too young?
There has been outrage this week over a new sex education website aimed at young teenagers. Funded by an NHS West Midlands research fund, Respect Yourself has been developed by Warwickshire County Council in collaboration with NHS Warwickshire and Coventry University. The site hosts information about a whole range of topics relating to puberty, sex,…
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Nine to five philosophers
Owen Barfield was lunching in C.S. Lewis’s rooms. Lewis, who was then a philosophy tutor, referred to philosophy as ‘a subject’. ‘”It wasn’t a subject to Plato”, said Barfield, “It was a way.”’1 It would be dangerous for a modern professional philosopher to say that her philosophy was her ‘way’. I can well imagine the…
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Watch your words! The challenges of law around the end of life
by Dominic Wilkinson Here in South Australia last week, a bill has been proposed to clarify the legal status of advance directives. One very small part of that bill involves a modification to an older palliative care act. The modification corrects an ambiguity in wording in the earlier act. The ambiguity is subtle. However, that…