I'm too worn out today to write anything original. So, I think I'll just send you to some I've been reading that I found linkworthy.

There's an interesting post over at Transterrestrial Musings about a lecture Simberg attended at Cal Tech. The speaker was Dan Dennett. Go read the the whole thing.

A snippet: "Dennett is kicking the ladder out from under this philosophical balancing act by saying that while humans are special, and they do have a "soul" in some sense, that they are only somewhat more special than their non-human ancestors, who also possessed the same property--just to a lesser degree.

That doesn't grate in any way on those of us who are provisional transcendental materialistic reductionists, but for those who believe that man is unique among all animals, it is not just unsettling--it is indeed heresy and unreconciliable with the foundation of their beliefs, because it doesn't draw a bright line between man and ape. Or aardvark."

I was saying something similar a while back, discussing, of all things, my Mercedes, Otto. "...despite my distaste for most things of a "spiritual" nature, I'm fairly anthromorphic about some things, particularly cars and computers. I always give them a name, and truly think of them as partaking in that quality that we call "life" to a greater or lesser degree.

In fact, I believe everything around us, from dirt to dahlias to Dells to dolphins to Dubya, is alive, in varying degrees, (with the possible exception of dogmatic yellow-dog Democrats :-) and that between the quick and the dead there lies not a dichotomy, but a spectrum.

I don't know how often y'all ever go hit the link over there on the right, under "obligatory blogrolling" but I do every day. You should too. I don't put a link there just cause someone else has linked to me, etc., but because I enjoy their writing. I even link to a freaking liberal, for Pete's sake.

As an example, go read this by Bill Whittle, the most recent edition to my blogroll

From a girl that won't dance, to Saturn, to the Evil Empire and back again, all in the comfort of your chair. Really.

Finally, I just finished taking a test online that looks at unconscious racial bias. You can find it here. This isn't one of those goofy tests that litter the internet like trashy talk shows do the local TV listings, but a serious study conducted by the folks at Yale.

I ended up in that small minority of folks, (12%) that showed no significant bias. Who'd a thunk it, me living in Texas and all?

I wonder if that's why I think that brown people in 2003 (i.e. Iraqis) are as deserving of our efforts to free them as if they were, say, Frenchmen in 1944.