Obsidian Wings

Your OBL is still dead open thread

by liberal japonicus

Somehow, the original is always better. Discuss.

 

 

 

 

Video parodies more interesting than their targets

by Doctor Science

This vid, a celebration of (shall we say) a certain lifestyle with which I am familiar, is just starting to go viral:

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

What's kind of boggling to me is how good the editing and special effects are for something with little money behind it, and how bland and repulsive the high-end pro video it's parodying seems by comparison:

A Billion Made-Up Conclusions

by Doctor Science

You're probably going to come across coverage of Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam's book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, released this week.

But judging by Ogas' article in the WSJ or his interview at The Daily Beast, they're not going to tell you that Ogas & Gaddam are a byword for how Not To Do It -- where "It" includes science, research, communication, thinking, and human decency. As Ned Pepperell of RMIT University (Australia) put it,

the whole thing unfolds something like a live action version of the phenomenon Justin Kruger and David Dunning discuss in their “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

I had a front-row seat.