Australian Tyrannosaur

Well, the headline is overblown, but it's still interesting; I wouldn't have expected a tyrannosaur would be found in Australia

Finally, a report that isn't a hatchet-job

The coverage of the 2010 Global Atheists Convention in the Australian media has been generally appalling, full of the usual theist combination of stereotype, bile, and bafflement - "militant" this, "unhappy" that.

However, I was impressed to see one reasonably straightforward, in places even positive, report - which is unusual enough that I thought I'd point to it.

Hey I can read my blog again

First time is more than six months, I can actually read my blog when logged on as efrique.

Huzzah!

I didn't change anything before it stopped working, and I didn't change anything before it started working.

At least it's working again.

Crocoduck 0 - Crocadillo 1

This is just the cutest thing.

Interesting how "upright" the stance is, with the legs under the body rather than splayed. Some other land-dwelling crocodilian fossils seem to have that more mammal-like stance.

---

In other news, Scripps Institute scientists have advanced the study of abiogenesis, by putting together self-replicating ribozymes.

First, try thinking *inside* the box.

One of those phrases that drive me nuts is "think outside the box". A lot of the problem is that people don't bother to *think* "inside the box" (in the usual framework), particularly when it's repeated as a mantra (yesterday I heard someone say it to me three times in ten minutes .... gnnnhaaahhh, makes me stabby).

The problem isn't so much the box, its the lack of thinking.

We have frameworks - ways of thinking about things - for a reason, and we should take advantage of them first. Then, maybe we should consider if the framework is the problem.

You want an illustration of the emptiness of the concept "think outside the box"?

An obvious one is that rarely to people give you strategies for doing so*. Without it, "think outside the box" is pretty useless.

Here's a second one: the people exhorting you to "think outside the box" can't be bothered to think outside their framework for long enough to come up with a less hackneyed and overused phrase, thus illustrating that they are utterly unable to follow their own advice for the few minutes it would take to come up with a more interesting expression.

"Think outside the box" is about as useful and as cliche as that poster of a kitten saying "Hang in there".



*(de Bono does have some exercises/approaches that are sometimes useful, sometimes not -- but he also doesn't say "think outside the box", thankfully)

Out of body experiences... interesting, but not mystical

The weekly TV science program on our national broadcaster, called Catalyst, started its 2010 season on Thursday, and had an item on the various things that combine to produce out of body experiences (I don't know if that video works outside Australia, but the transcript is there too).

The text there is only a fraction of the item on out of body experiences, they talked about what produces the feeling of floating up out of your body (showing how you can induce sensations of rotation and floating), and how you can identify your body as being somewhere other than it is, before talking about trying to actually produce an out of body experience.

[As usual I didn't watch the whole thing live (early evening is a hectic time in our house, so we record anything we actually don't want to miss). I'll give it a more careful look when I get to it, but what I saw of it was fascinating.]

So anyway, the point was that out of body experiences are simple consequences of the way our body and brain work, and that it's not hard to reproduce many aspects of them. Nothing particularly mystical, and certainly not evidence for a soul.

The God Delusion - English Language sales pass 2 million

In a thread related to the The God Delusion being back in the bestseller lists, Richard Dawkins mentioned English language sales figures for TGD (here):

    How many have been sold in the USA?

As it happens, I have just been sent some recent figures for sales of The God Delusion in English:-
North America 907,161
Rest of World 1,179,241
Total English language 2,086,402

(Another commenter mentions in excess of 260,000 sales for the German edition)

Not bad.

Polls

I just recently posted on polls.

This comic kind of says it all.

Darwin vs the crocoduck

A bit of fun. I do love schadenfreude.

Kirk Cameron on O'Reilly:

"Darwin said in order to prove evolution [...] you gotta be able to prove [...] one animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don't find one of these - a crocoduck."

(original here)

So did Darwin say that? Well, no. In fact, he specifically debunks the notion.

Darwin, Origin of Species, Chapter IX:

"... it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants."
(emphasis in the original)

Nothing more needs to be said. Darwin completely debunked Cameron and Comfort 150 years before they even thought of it. When you're pwnt by a guy that's been dead for about a century, you're too stupid to argue with. Just quote what Darwin actually said, and you're done.

[But just in case a creationist wanders by and is too dumb to just read Darwin, it's kind of like this. If I find you and your cousin and I'm looking for an intermediate form to see if you're related, I won't find a direct intermediate (a 50-50 mix of you and your cousin, or even worse, a Frankenstein's monster of components of both of you, like Cameron's crocoduck). The intermediate form is your nearest common ancestor -- your grandparents. Your grandparents will have characteristics different from both of you, and will not be directly intermediate. Not exactly like that, of course, the analogy is imperfect. But it's really not that complicated.]


The only possible conclusions are that they never read Darwin, or they did and they're deliberately lying. Either way, we end up with creationist lies. As usual.

To paraphrase Haldane, God must have an inordinate fondness for lying creationists, since he made so many of them.

A New Years "What shits me"...

What shits me is when people make a youtube video out of a piece of text.

If it's just a piece of text, make a fricking blogpost. I can read it ten times as fast as your video goes, and twenty times as fast as it will download.

I can jump back and forth instantly to the parts I want to reread. I can rescan a sentence I read that I didn't quite understand without reaching for the mouse.

Oh, and the comments will sound less like they were made by a 12 year old with Tourette's Syndrome.

If you have an animation, or a sequence of images that's more than a second or two (too long for an animated gif), then by all means, youtube it. But if it's just a way of fancying up some text, and putting it to bad music, forget it, it's a blogpost.

A youtube of a blogpost is a waste of time and bandwidth.

It's the present day version of what 5 years ago would have been a 14-point-purple-comic-sans-in-blinking-text blogpost.

A bit of biblical fun

I don't usually do the biblical bits here, but this one tickled me:

1. Jesus calls himself the Son of man (e.g. Matthew 16:24-28):

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.
Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.



2. Numbers (23:19) points out that he's therefore NOT God:

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent

My life is not a marketing exercise

I read so often from liberal theists, faitheists and people who want to frame science, that "aggressive" atheism is "hurting the cause" of atheism or reason or cute puppies, that it will convince nobody and turn off those we wish to convince.

These arguments are long on emotion and very short on evidence. They're also factually inaccurate (in that most so-called "aggressive" atheism is anything but aggressive).

My usual argument has been that not every atheist activity is about convincing others; in fact, hardly any of it, as far as I can see.

My life is not a marketing exercise.

But sometimes it actually does impact those we criticize, and sometimes they come to understand what we're getting at, whether that was the aim or not.

I have read a lot of deconversion stories and related discussion (hundreds by now).
I have seen many times former theists say things along the lines of "Well, actually, I had my faith criticized and it wasn't until that moment that I began to really think about my beliefs."

I've seen comments like that on blogs, in forums, on youtube, yahoo answers and reddit. I saw another only this morning.

Not every deconversion of course - a lot of the time people start thinking about these things themselves, or the trigger to start down that road is something different. But quite a lot of the time, an aggressive challenge to someone's beliefs is actually effective in getting them to think about it. Yes, it will also annoy plenty of people - people don't like having cherished beliefs criticized. You have to pick your moments. But that doesn't mean it is automatically counterproductive.

Being likeable is not often a catalyst for change.

I think being generally thought of as likeable is impossible. Atheists - unless we hide ourselves in a closet forever - will often be regarded as confrontational, simply for existing.

There's absolutely a place for people like Hemant Mehta, with those who seek to actively engage with the religious. More power to him. I think Hemant and people like him do a great deal of good, not only for atheism and reason, but for wider humanity. There's also a place for the louder, less compromising voices.

I have never once seen someone say "my former beliefs were respected and treated with deference - and that was what convinced me they were wrong".

Why would it? How could it?

Yes, if you want to work with theist allies in some other cause, be it gay marriage or proper health care or whatever, it might not be the occasion to critically discuss the truth of their beliefs, but to focus on the current priority. (On the other hand, it's probably never the time to agree to propositions you acually disagree with, or even to hold silent on them, simply for the sake of getting on.)

I think most atheists can manage the distinction between present priorities and longer term goals well enough.

But if we're talking about reason and evidence and skepticism, attempting to promote them and spread them, it makes no sense at all to ignore the most egregious transgressions against them.

If we are trying to get people to critically examine their beliefs, it makes no sense to pat them on the head and tell them we think their crazy beliefs are just dandy. Freedom of belief is only that - to believe as you like. It doesn't mean freedom never to be called on those beliefs. It is not freedom from criticism. It is not freedom from questions.

Our commitment to freedom of belief does not mean we must accept other people's fanstasies as perfectly valid, or that we must meekly hold our tongue when they're brought up. Indeed, we should not. The person you risk offending may also be the person you eventually goad into the line of thought that leads them to convincing themselves.

What could be better than people thinking for themselves?

How to mislead others for the sake of a zippier story

In which I spank Gallup's shiny arse a little, and maybe USA Today's

I wrote a much more detailed version of this post a couple of weeks ago, but my lameness resulted in me losing the whole damn file, and I didn't have time to rewrite... until now. This is not the same post. [Couldn't remember The Greatest Post in the World, no, no. This is a tribute...]

A couple of weeks ago, Gallup published a media release about its annual Honesty and Ethics Ratings of Professions survey, USA Today had an article on it, and Hemant Mehta expressed puzzlement at the fact that while overall approval for clergy had gone down, it went up amongst the non-religious. In his words, "What. The. Hell?".

Hemant quotes the USA Today article:

Ratings dropped year-over-year among Catholics and Protestants, as well as among regular and occasional churchgoers. However, they rose in one category: among those professing "no religion." Last year, 31% rated clergy honesty high or very high; in 2009, that figure inched up to 34%.

That came from Gallup's media release, where they published this graph, which deliberately sets out the comparison that was made in the USA Today article:


So what gives? Why would it go up for the non-religious?

The most likely explanation is sampling variation. Gallup mention sampling variation, but in this case, that's just not enough.

Gallup says, hidden away down the bottom:

"Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,017 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Nov. 20-22, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points."

Even with this disclaimer, this doesn't make sufficiently clear the magnitude of the problem. That 4% is a little more than the 3% figure for the difference, so maybe we should be a little bit cautious about the three percent being real (and caution is all it would suggest, since if we scale back from 95% confidence to say 75% confidence, it would go below the three percent difference).

But it's much, much worse.

First thing to note is that the 4% sampling variation figure that Gallup give only applies to the overall figures. [By the usual calculations, I get 3% rather than 4%. I assume Gallup is inserting some additional margin of caution there, but it's nowehere near enough, as we'll see.]

The 4% they give does NOT apply to percentages of subgroups.

There were about a thousand interviewed (1017). The proportion that are willing to give “no religion” for a question about their religion on a phone interview varies a bit, but it's generally around 10-15%. I can't tell what it was here, so let’s be generous to Gallup and say 15%.

That’s around 150 with no religion. The sampling variation for that subgroup is more than 2.5 times as big as it is for the original sample (sqrt(1017/150) times as big), or roughly 10% by Gallup’s reckoning of 4% for the original survey (their 4% is very rough so I am not worrying about being too precise - and I will err in Gallup's favour at each point).

Now, when you compare TWO surveys (31% vs 34%), the margin of error is bigger – if we can assume independence of the responses in the two surveys, you actually use good old Pythagoras’ theorem here.

So the margin of error on the change between two surveys on this subgroup is around 14%.

14%!

We have an increase of 3% give or take 14%.

There is no reason to assume anything happened at all. Maybe it went up, maybe it went down. We have NO clue. No way to tell if anything happened at all.

Yet Gallup clearly invite precisely the comparison USA Today made, and Hemant ran with.

It was irresponsible of Gallup not to point out that the comparison they made in the graph above had such a high margin of error that such comparison was meaningless. They should have pointed it out, or not made the comparison at all.

The disclaimer at the end is entirely insufficient. (And USA Today should have at least realized that even with a 4% margin of error their own comparison was at least a little dodgy, but you know, it's the media we're talking about. Probably didn't even read all the way to the bottom of the Gallup release. Take a look at approval figures for journalists some time.)

Godless creep up to around 30% in Australia

A recent Nielsen survey in Australia on religious belief puts the number who don't believe in god at 24% and not sure/don't know at 6%.

The percentage of Christians is 64%, with other major faiths totalling around 5%.

The numbers are not changing rapidly, but disbelief is much higher among the young, so it looks like the numbers of nonbelievers will continue to grow, albeit slowly - census information from New Zealand shows that people don't adopt religion faster than they leave it as a cohort ages, and there's nothing to suggest that this trend would be any different in Australia; that is, the overall percentage of nobelievers will likely be well in the majority in a few decades.

Belief in life after death is only 53%, and belief that the bible/quran/etc is the word of god is only 34%.

But there were some worrying numbers, too, with Darwinian evolution not far in front of some form of "god guided" development (42% to 32%), and YE creationism coming in third, but with alarmingly high numbers (23%); in this case I'd particularly like to see the exact wording of the question that was put, because the numbers seem quite out of kilter; it would suggest that there are very few theists (only about 20% or so of theists in all) who accept Darwinian evolution, assuming almost all nontheists do.

What evidence would it take to make you believe in god?

I've answered this question a lot lately. So I thought I'd put down how I am answering it - that way I can just point to a reasonable answer, instead of having to write one every time. I may polish it slightly over time, to clarify what I am getting at.

So what evidence would it take to make me believe in god?

The short answer is "almost any evidence at all, if it meets a few criteria, and I know before we start what it is we're looking for evidence of".

Here's a longer version, slightly clarified from one I posted elsewhere to a question from a theist.

First, let's agree on what phenomenon we're investigating:

1. Which god are we discussing? What are its properties?
2. what observations would rule out such a being?

This is necessary because if its properties are undefined, how can *anything* constitute evidence for it? How would one distinguish between evidence for, evidence against and irrelevant information?

Given suitably clear answers to those, I will accept pretty much any evidence that's

• sufficiently extraordinary to match the extraordinariness of the claimed god,
  
• sufficient to rule out alternate non-supernatural explanations, and also
• sufficient to rule out alternative supernatural ones

i.e. any evidence sufficiently strong to convince me we found what we were looking for (rather than something else extraordinary or even ordinary), and that we're not just fooling ourselves or being fooled by someone or something else.

In other words, if you specify which god hypothesis we're proposing up front, and what evidence could rule the hypothesis out (otherwise it's an hypothesis without any explanatory value at all), I'll then be prepared to consider evidence for it. To cover all those bases, it will have to be multiple, pretty consistent pieces of evidence, but I won't limit it. Lots of things will do.

[One problem I often run into is that frequently the theist asking the question's concept of what constitutes evidence is not what's normally regarded as actual evidence for a phenomenon at all. Feelings aren't evidence, for example. Nor is popular opinion. Nor is "it's written in this book" really evidence, because not everything written in books is true. Historians have ways of becoming reasonably convinced of certain things having happened, rather than relying on statements in a single work of unclear providence.]

Any real evidence. Almost anything that's demonstrably not just at some stage come out of people's heads.

---

Now your turn, theists: What observation(s), if any, would convince you that your particular god doesn't exist?

That offensive F-word

There's a word that I'm finding increasingly offensive, because people use it for dramatic effect rather than conveying meaning.

The F-word.

The F-bomb, if you will.


No, I don't mean "fuck". Fuck's a very useful word, as noun, verb and expletive.

I mean "faith".

You see, the problem is I see more and more two very different meanings of the word being conflated, using faith to refer to both making progress in the absence of complete, absolute knowledge and to refer to belief-in-the-absence-of-any-evidence-whatever.

That conflation, in turn, is used to equate the magnificent enterprise of extracting understanding out of the universe, and fuzzy-headed theological obscurantism.

These mythomaniacal word-games are designed to mislead, to paper over the oxymoron.

That's what's offensive.

Non-religious weddings boom in Australia

Non-religious (civil) weddings in Australia have boomed over the last decade.

See this "Civil weddings now double the number of religious" media release (pdf) by the New South Wales government, and this newspaper article on the corresponding figures in Victoria (which together account for 60% of Australia's population).

So I made a graph. It shows the percentage of weddings that were civil ceremonies by year for the two states (with the corresponding remainder - the religious weddings - percentage shown over on the axis on the right).

Non-religious weddings in Australia Data Sources: NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages
and Victorian Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages

By 2002 religious weddings were already in a minority... and presently they're outnumbered about two-to-one. If anything, from the NSW figures, the trend is accelerating.

Of course, lots and lots of people just aren't getting married at all. They're not in these figures, and they're growing too.

(edited Nov 2011 to fix dead link)

Pew online Political News IQ survey

Pew have a Political News Quiz up, here, and you can see how you went compared to a national US survey.

I did okay on that:

Here's Your Score: You correctly answered 12 of the 12 possible questions along with approximately 2% of the public. You did better than 98% of the general public.

If you do it, once you get a graph like the above, there are some further links on the left with more information; the link How you did, question by question takes you to a list of which questions you got right or not and the percentage of correct responses on each question from the previous survey.

Finished "The Greatest Show on Earth"

Extremely short version of a book review, kinda.

In short, I was quite impressed with it.

Dawkins, though given to occasional infelicities, is a very engaging writer. Good coverage of a lot of the evidence for evolution. Highly recommended.

It's also a book that sits well beside Coyne's Why Evolution Is True - there's definitely value in having both.

I'd write more, but I am not feeling up to much analysis of the book right now.

[To be more specific, I now have a partially collapsed left lung, as well as some scarring on the right lung, which is apprently otherwise okay now. I feel a bit crap, to be honest.]

Ten, no eleven! things that shit me about research seminars

1) People who can't stick close to time. There's a time limit for a reason - people have other places to go. The last 5 talks I attended all went way, way over time; if you can't get the point across in the time, you don't understand what's important about your work.

Don't these people have ANY idea how long they're going to take? Unless I am interrupted a lot, I can usually time my talk to within a few minutes or so, based off nothing more than the number of slides I have; generally close enough to finish with time for a few questions before the scheduled time is up. I check my watch a couple of times as I go, so if I am running well over for some reason (which almost never happens), I can skip ahead to the more critical stuff. How can someone go almost twice the allocated time without realizing? (And if they do realize and do it anyway, who the hell do they think are?)

2) Morons who think that putting their entire PAPER on slides is acceptable practice. In 12 point.

As soon as I see someone holding their slides in portrait orientation, I start to sweat (well, hardly anyone carries actual physical slides any more - but a few of these guys still do). I'm in for a lot of eyestrain, and they are absolutely guaranteed to run way over time. And they're going to spend the entire talk with their back to me. The back of your head just isn't that interesting.

For some reason, by far the most common offenders on this are LaTeX users. I don't know why. I can read your freaking text 5 times as fast as you can say it. Maybe more. If I want to read your freaking paper, I will read your freaking paper. I do NOT want to listen to you READING your freaking paper to me. This is not going to get me interested in what you did.

If you can't summarize it, you don't understand it well enough to be giving a presentation. If you won't put in the effort to summarize it, why should I put in the effort to sit through it?

3) People who think it's necessary to go through proofs, protocols, algorithms or whatever in excruciating detail. If I want extreme detail, I will read your damn paper. If you did something particularly clever to prove a result, tell me briefly what that was, but otherwise, unless it's the only thing your paper is about* don't do more than present the result, tell me why it's interesting and what you can do with it. Outline the proof if it's really brief.

* and if it is all you can talk about, I probably won't be back at your next talk.

4) If I have to ask "Why should I care about this?" (though I may put it more politely than that) then you have already failed.

That's the entire point of giving a presentation, something you should convey in the first few minutes. If we got to the end of your talk and I am asking, you didn't even hint at it.

If I ask and you still can't answer, you have no business giving a talk on it.

5) People who think that spouting bullshit is better than answering "I don't know". I don't expect every speaker to have a ready answer for every question - that would be ridiculous. "I don't know" is okay, "but I'll find out and let you know" is better. But whatever you do, don't bullshit me. Chances are I will know the moment you open your mouth. If not, I will likely find out a few minutes after the talk has finished. I will NOT be impressed.

6) People who think that brown text on a purple background is a good idea. Black on white is readable. Many other colour combinations are definitely NOT. And fancy wipes and shit - it's distracting, not interesting. Knock it off. Your talk should be interesting. If you have to fuck around with brainbending colours and wipes and fades and crap, you're not spending time on the content. ... and starwipe!

7) People who can't answer basic questions about how they got some particular result (e.g. "Did this come from the survey or the interviews?"). If you don't know your own research that well, why would I believe it's your own work? Even if I do, why would I trust anything else you say about it?

8) People who make some amazing assertion but don't have a good answer for "what is your evidence for this assertion?". Look, if you're going to make a claim, someone is going to make you justify it. If it's an extraordinary claim, you have to have really good evidence.

If you can't justify it, don't make the claim. Just don't.

9) People who put three words and some clipart on a slide and present 5 slides total... (and STILL, unbelievably, somehow manage to go 45 minutes past the allocated 45 minutes).

If you don't have some actual content, you're wasting my time. Have something to say, and don't spend longer than necessary to say it.

10) People who start their talk with a list of assumptions, every one of which is known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to be completely false in practice, well beyond any sense of "approximation"*. And then finish their talk without attempting to address why their results are in any way relevant, or even identify which assumptions their results are robust to deviations from, and which ones are more critical.

If your work is always a bunch of unexamined, unrealistic assumptions followed by some unenlightening proof of a result and no applications, I am sorry, but I don't think your work is brilliant. I think it's masturbation, with grants.

*("assume a spherical cow" can be just fine, in the right context)

11) People who obliviously break a bunch of these rules, over and over, and never seem to learn a single thing year upon year. Even if you're utterly incapable of self-reflection, at least pay enough attention to notice what works and what doesn't when other people present.