Bad Philosophy

Questions Answered in This Week’s FormSqueeze:

Who is your favorite YouTuber?

Do you guys believe in love?

Picturing people naked?

This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “Artificial Heart” by Jonathan Coulton (reversed)

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Reverse your expectations, everyone! It’s BF time. Hate to spoil it for you, but Kevin is officially a published scholar. This week we gathered to join with Kiki and discuss some good ol’ equivocation of the religious variety. Apparently having little more than a cross or uttering the world “Jesus” in your film automatically makes it Christian. Who’d have guessed? We certainly didn’t! It’s a backwards kind of world out there y’all, but in here, it’s all your glorious BF.

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ASL, Boing Boing, Christianity, Dan Savage, Dolly Parton, Dune, Epic of Gilgamesh, Fred Figglehorn, Gladiator, God, Harry Potter, ion, Joan of Arc, Jonathan Coulton, Kevin, Kiki, Logan's Run, love, MST3K, Mystery Science Theater 3000, mythology, Penn and Teller, pie, religion, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rome, Soylent Green, spoilers, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen, symbology, The Island, theology, World of Warcraft

For the last century or so, we have had a healthy little obsession with replicating the human ability to reason using machines. We here at BF are happy to announce that these efforts have finally brought us the holy grail of artificial intelligence: robot radio DJs! That’s right, now you can enjoy all your favorite radio banter distilled down to its bare, Cleverbot-on-Cleverbot essentials. This episode Kevin, Simon, Kiki and I put our connectomes together to discuss Stanford’s free A.I. class and marvel at the sheer 90’s gloriousness of VR Troopers. Let’s hope Watson adds some rabbit trails to its thought routines, ’cause we’re pretty sure he’ll be our guest someday. Until then, it’s BF time!

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This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “VR Troopers Intro” (via YouTube)

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AI, Artificial Heart, artificial intelligence, brain, Clear Channel, CleverBot, cognitive computing, computers, dinosaurs, Flowers for Algernon, football, fossil fuels, Ghost in the Shell, Google Wave, IBM, immortality, Japan, Jeopardy!, John Stuart Mill, Jonathan Coulton, Kant, Kevin, Kiki, Lawnmower Man, Levar Burton, Machine Girl, Machine Man, Magic School Bus, memristor, Michael Crichton, neurobiology, neurology, neuroscience, Peter F. Hamilton, Power Rangers, radio, Reddit, Richard Hatch, robots, Simon, singularity, soul, Stanford, Stephen, Stephen King, Survivor, UTSA, velociraptor, VR Troopers, Watson

Aging can be a trying process. One day you’re romping around the yard as a little kid. Then you wake up and you’re thirty. Of course lots of fun stuff happens in between, but you get the idea. Our good friend Kiki recently passed this milestone, so she and I got together with Bess and Katey (the former of whom you might remember from an episode many moons ago) to celebrate three decades of her existence with some hardcore anglophilia. Kevin even stopped by at the end to lend his answers to our FormSqueeze. So stock up for your next hurricane party, grab a bowl of sea plankton, and enjoy the stab-tastic new lead-in sequence, it’s BF time!

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This Week’s Post-show Song Pimpage: “Bob” by Weird Al Yankovic

Questions answered in this week’s FormSqueeze:

Why do strippers exist?

What is the difference between an orange?

Hell: endothermic or exothermic?

Clone sex + time travel?

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anglophilia, AppleBee's, art, Bess, Blue's Clues, Bud Light, cloning, copyright, Doctor Who, England, Facebook, fan fiction, Fringe, happy birthday song, hell, history, Hurricane Irene, Katy, Kiki, McDonald's, Misfits, New York, pedophilia, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Snickers, Stephen, strippers, superheroes, Taco Bell, tattoos, The Wire, TV, United Kingdom

Every once in a blue moon, the stars align, the burritos are just *that* good, and the right people end up coming together somewhat consistently over a three-year period to make something truly special. Such it has been for the last one-hundred (or so) episodes of Bad Philosophy. Ever since that fateful evening at a Freebird’s in Lubbock, Texas, we have laughed, debated, and philosophized down so many rabbit trails with so many wonderful people that it truly blows my mind.

To celebrate Episode 100, we managed to gather the *original* squad of Bad Philosophers who were there at the beginning. Kevin and I trotted down to our local Freebird’s to join Matt Legler via Skype and David Ronderos via Google Chat (!) for a little continuation of our free speech discussion from all those years ago, reignited by the recent BART protests and censorship. Not only this, thanks to Kevin’s quick thinking we managed to record enough episodes to have Episode 100 record on EXACTLY the three-year anniversary of Episode Zero! How’s that for manufactured serendipity? I hope you’d expect nothing less from us after so long.

What was your favorite moment from the last 100 episodes of BF? Let us know in the comments!

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This Week’s (Retro) Post-show Song Pimpage: “Pick Up” by Bonobo

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1st Amendment, Alias, AnimeFest, Anonymous, BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, C-SPAN, censorship, David, free speech, Freebirds, government, J. J. Abrams, Kent State Massacre, Kevin, mathematics, Matt, physics, police, protests, social media, Stephen, Texas Tech University, This Week at Texas Tech, wiretapping