Remember Hitch

Christopher Hitchens was my hero. There I've said it. I'm not really one for idolising people, but it's very difficult not to in this case. He was the coolest atheist we had and even though we never met I knew him through his work and loved him for it. There will never be another like him.

To memorialise Christopher Hitchens we have the internet. Google produces 7,860,000 results for "Christopher Hitchens" so far and there is also a lengthy Wikipedia article dedicated to him. YouTube has 42,600 videos. Many of Christopher's fans still share his material using BitTorrent. To help keep track of all the new stuff being added, to help keep his memory alive and also to help defend his memory against those who would try to distort it, I've set up a Twitter bot tweeting Google Alerts in memory of Hitchens @RememberHitch

Check what's popular on the Freethought Feed

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Doesn't Dawkins look just great on tumblr?

rdfrs Twitter list

I'm compiling a list of all the Twitter users who have an active profile on RichardDawkins.net. It's slow going tracking everyone down, so I'd appreciate some help. If you are already registered and posting for at least 1 year please tweet me the link to your profile or post it in the comments below along with your @username so I can add you to my RDFRS Twitter list. My profile is http://richarddawkins.net/profiles/51655.

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Aw, look at the cute little twitterbots tweeting so nicely!

Looks like I've finally got all the feeds and pipes working properly. Thought I'd savour the moment before I plunge back in again and wreck everything. You can watch them all tweeting with me in a list called mine. Twitter also has some cool scripts which you can embed, but I don't think it will be sent to tumblr. Let's see:

Testing Post by Email

If I've got everything configured correctly this post should appear both on tumblr. and on wordpress. Oh and I'll insert a youtube video just to see what happens:

Testing Email Notifications

Did you know that your Blogger posts can automatically be sent to a list of up to 10 email addresses whenever you publish? You can find the option under Settings >> Email & Mobile. This post is just a test to see what the email looks like. I'm thinking this feature could be very useful...

Subjective experience is Real

Let me begin by saying that I dislike and distrust most philosophy. I didn't always feel this way, but the more philosophy I have read the greater my dislike and distrust for it has grown. The biggest problem I see is that much of it is based in the persisting historical association between subjectivism and anti-realism. This can be traced way back to dualism, when they thought that the mind and body were separate, and even further back to Plato's essentialist ideal forms.

We now know that everything we experience, all our thoughts, feelings, desires and perceptions, is a result of physical stuff happening in our brains. There is no "ghost in the machine", there is no "free will". We cannot choose our experience, it is not something we create out of nothing. We experience what we experience because the universe is the way it is. Just as there are laws governing all physical systems, there are laws governing human experience and, in principal at least, they can be known. Values are facts about which we can have greater or lesser uncertainty.

Test Post

This post is to test my twitter feed.

My first blog post

Thought I'd start a blog for those extra long tweets, though admittedly I'm more interested in the feed it generates. Been mucking about with Yahoo Pipes quite a bit lately, you can check out what I've been up to here.

The two main pipes I've set up so far are AtheistFeed and AtheistTorrents. Please post other interesting feeds to add to them, I want to put all the best atheist stuff in one place :D