Tag Archives: geeks

How do the (secular) geeks celebrate the birth of Our Teacher?

Let’s find out how they celebrate His birth courtesy of Short Sharp Science:

In a twist on the traditional Christmas carol service, British comedian Robin Ince has come up with a show called Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which he describes as “a rational celebration of Christmas”.

On Friday night, I went along to see how his atheistic vision – starring luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais – measured up.

In the meantime enjoy the Dawk talking with mentalist Derren Brown.

[via Short Sharp Science and Boing Boing][image from Waka Jawaka on flickr]

You Are Officially Mentally Disturbed

The American Journal of Psychiatry has officially declared [courtesy of a Wired.com article] that “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V [Diagnotic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]”.  Yup, that’s right.  If you get angry because you missed that raid on Onyxia’s Lair, then you could very well be mentally disturbed.

The biggest problem I see with such a claim is that the basis for most of their research is from people who spend more than 23 hours a week on the computer.  23 hours?  That’s it?  This figure would include nearly anyone who works for a business that is any kind of computer-dependent (and that includes most of them if only through internal emails and the internet).  It’s one thing to use a computer 23 hours in a week; it’s another thing entirely to spend 23 hours in a day playing video games (which is the root of much of this kind of research).

It just seems like yet another blow to geekdom for people to be able to say, “well you have a disorder because you like your computer too much.”