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An animated sitcom about day to day life in a post-apocalyptic environment. It should be a mix of apocalypses (ie. they dropped the bomb in a war over the little remaining oil and then the fallout from the bomb created all the zombies....)

It was even worse before

The assembled crowd stared in awe at the stabilized wormhole
Finally one of the engineers asked "How did you manage to create the negative mass necessary yo do this?"
"It's the exhaust from the perpetual motion machine," I said, "Duh!"

The hour of jugement is nigh and the moon is cleft asunder. When they see this sign they turn away. They reject the admonition and demand to know why they've been linked to Goatse.

A mockumemtary about a religious order who take a vow to live on alms, drink heavily, and wear hats made out of foil (satirizing the fact that many christian and buddhist orders have vows to actually panhandle in the street like a bum; it's one thing to say to quit the rat race but to me it seems like quite another to tell people to go out and be actual beggars. Ideally the mockumentary should subtly mock the irony of the fact that the right wing has a tendency to be really religious and to criticize beggars as lazy)

I cane across an excerpt from a poem recently and I'm trying to figure out where it's from originally.

In the talk page for the wikipedia article on the mythological land Cockaigne one of the posters mentioned a modern poem on the subject in which the name of the land is rendered as "Cocaine" (by analogy with the similarly named drug) and which after describing the wonders of the land ends by describing the following hazing ritual required to enter:

Seven summers you must sit
    In a pile of piggy shit
    That reaches slightly past your chin
    And after that, we'll let you in!
    I hope you'll do this holy penance
    Sweet Cocaine could use more tenants

The person who posted it couldn't identify the source. They said they thought it might have been by Shel Silverstein but that they weren't sure and that a Google search turned up nothing. I've double checked, and A Google search for it, depending on how it's parsed, indeed turns up either literally nothing or else a bunch of pages that have some of the search words but are missing most of them, and a DuckDuckGo search turns up only the original Wikipedia talk page, and, strangely, a bunch of unrelated Homestuck, Inuyasha, and My Little Pony fanfictions (none of which seem to be the source of the poem)

I thought I'd ask here if any of you know where its from since the excerpt has a slightly Discordianish ring to it

I want to force ISIS and the Klan to be parts of the same human centipede. Extremists of different faiths will alternate in this construction. They will be forced to eat each other's shit.

[How much longer till we all die off? 760 years, give or take.]

How much longer till we all die off? 760 years, give or take.

As per the article:

'The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the "doomsday argument," a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.

The doomsday argument doesn't tell what's going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).

When I first came across this idea, I thought it was absurd. A prediction must be founded on data, not math! That is by no means an uncommon reaction. One critic, physicist Eric J. Lerner, branded doomsday "pseudo-science, a mere manipulation of numbers."'

Here's the link: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/28/18760585/doomsday-argument-calculation-prediction-j-richard-gott

Gott, the creator of the prediction technique, calls it  "the Copernican method." 

That's a damn good name to build a marketing campaign around, and I would normally dismiss something like this out of hand, except for the lulz possibilities. But, Gott did get his prediction technique published in the prestigious journal Nature.

I'm familiar with this argument, and it fails because the same reasoning can be used to prove other numbers for the end of the world. For example, civilization has existed for 10000 years so under the copernical principle we might expect it to last for another 10000 years. Anatomically modern humans have been around for around 300000 years, so we might expect another 300000, or we might expect to lasy the average lifespan of an apex predator species, or a keystone species

An extreme relative abundance of interneurons, those neurons that connect only to other neurons and not to any muscular or sensory apparatus, is one of the main distinguishing features of the central nervous system that set it apart from the peripheral nervous system and allow it to perform learning and decision making tasks that the peripheral nervous system cannot

An updated version of The Inferno. Notable additions and changes include that Hitler is made to suffer all the punishments of the seventh circle at once, having commited violence against others, against himself, against art, and against nature. Jack Valenti and William Hays are in the circle of violence against art. Proponents of conversion therapy replace the sodomites in the circle of violence against nature, but this area is now primarily inhabited by land developers and oil barons and the flaming rain is specifically a rain of burning crude oil. Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, for instituting totalitarianism and slavery under the false pretense of working towards the exact opposite of these things, are pinned to the ground of the sixth bolgia (hypocricy) by a sickle through their hearts and trod upon by all lesser hypocrites, effectively replacing Caiaphas. Supporters of the confederacy are hacked apart as schismatics, excwpt for the confederate leaders, who are condemned to the ninth circle as traitors against nation.

[Consciousness]

The assertati9n "Consciousness requires subjective experience, and that comes only when information is received from probing, sensory tissues -- those of the body." seems like it's mincing words; they seem to be defining consciousness as "awareness of one's surroundings", which at best is stretching the definition of the term

I do not claim any special expertise on the subject, other than I believe I know when I am conscious, and I believe I usually, consciously know when I am dreaming. However, the simplest definition of consciousness, as per Wikipedia, is as follows:

'Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." You become aware that your actions have an effect on other people.'

Here's the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

It appears to me that Dr. Hideya Sakaguchi's statement is consistent with the very first sentence of the Wikipedia definition.

So, how does your definition of consciousness differ from Dr. Sakaguchi's, and that of Wikipedia?

It doesn't differ from wikipedia's, just from Sakaguchi's. I'd define it somewhere in the realm of "the ability to...feel ... having a sense of selfhood or soul ... the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it.", none of which require outward sensory input. Cogito ergo sum.

"In a paper published in 2003, Nick Bostrom argued that at least one of several propositions is likely to be true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage, i.e., (fp≈0); (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof), i.e., (fI≈0); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation, i.e., (fsim≈1)."

2 seems to me to be the most likely

A combination of The Fast and the Furious and Wacky Races[/i[

[Mini-brains grown from stem cells don't think, but they do show 'complex' neural activity, researchers say]

Mini-brains grown from stem cells don't think, but they do show 'complex' neural activity, researchers say

As per the article:

"Evidence of dynamic activity, in individual and synchronized neurons, was seen across a network of cerebral organoids grown from stem cells in a preliminary study published Thursday in the journal Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Hideya Sakaguchi, study co-author and postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University (currently at the Salk Institute), explained in an email that the important thing here is not just the creation of a mini-brain but that a tool was developed to detect nerve cell activity. Someday, this new calcium ion analysis tool may help researchers better understand complex brain functions and neurological disorders."

Here's the link: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/health/mini-brain-activity-study/index.html

My first reaction, upon reading the article's title, was not all that many full-size brains do much thinking either.

I suspect, one day soon, we'll actually be able to add "floating disembodied conscious brains" to the list of things like climate change apocalypse, rogue AI, unsanitized telephones, etc. that may will eradicate us killer apes primates from the face of the earth. But then, it is the apocalypse. Try to have fun.

The assertati9n "Consciousness requires subjective experience, and that comes only when information is received from probing, sensory tissues -- those of the body." seems like it's mincing words; they seem to be defining consciousness as "awareness of one's surroundings", which at best is stretching the definition of the term

An instructional video on choosing the right tornado for your home

That sounds like a great bit, I'd totally watch that