Rush Limbaugh calls for racial segregation

Rush Limbaugh thinks buses should be racially segregated.

Meanwhile, 35% of New Jersey conservatives think Obama could really be the Antichrist (and fully half of them believe he actually is). Dana gives some additional figures.

I find myself unable to adequately convey just how scary that level of unhinged-from-reality is (to have more than a third of conservatives seriously contemplating that Obama is literally the antichrist? Really?).

America, Hi, it's me, frequent visitor to your shores, who happens to be somewhat fond of the US. Look, I don't want to alarm you or anything (please put the guns down for a sec, thanks). Uh, would you mind handing your nuclear weapons over to somewhere sane (Sweden or New Zealand would do) until the proportion of people in your country who are completely bugfuck NUTS goes down just a tad? Please?

Greatest Show on Earth...

Well, I bought Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth", and got it for a reasonable price (i.e. half what I paid for Coyne's "Why Evolution Is True").

Have not yet started to read it. It is sitting right here beside me, though, and I am about to dive in.

Healthwise: improving, slowly.

health... again

Now a partly collapsed lung...

If I don't update for a while, I'm either better, or back in hospital.

Update: antibiotics and several sessions of physiotherapy seem to be helping with the lung. Recovery continues. (Some occasional vision and related issues that I assume relate to the torn carotid; I will take it up with the neuro specialist when I see him.)

The problem with the "moderate" view

Tom Schaller writes on fivethirtyeight.com in response to Obama's speech on health care:

This was classic Obama, both from a policy conceit and rhetorical framing. Anyone who read The Audacity of Hope knows how Obama works through issues—he sets up how one side conceives it and how the other side does and then, after admitting he is inclined toward progressive/Democratic side of the ledger, he humbly suggests the best solution is probably somewhere in between.

Such an attitude works when both sides you mediate lie toward either end of a spectrum of reasonableness - when both have sensible points of view that differ mainly on relative emphasis placed on items that everyone can agree are important.

In the current environment, such mediation-between-viewpoints reads more like this (the idea here is not original with me, but I have no idea who started it - and searching hasn't been helpful in finding the origin, sorry):

Side 1: Let's kill all the kittens!

Side 2: What? No! That's ludicrous! There's no need to harm kittens!!

Mediator: Tell you what. We could just kill half the kittens, while recognizing that it's really only half-necessary to kill kittens.


If one side is batshit insane (and prepared to lie and move goalposts and never actually compromise), you can't hope that an intermediate position ever makes any sense. Halfway to batshit-insane is still insane.

The golden mean is not resistant to outliers, and soon starts to smell of them

Further health issues

I now have pleurisy. Yay me.

"Why Evolution Is True" mini-review

I recently bought Coyne's book "Why Evolution Is True". I had not planned on finishing it quite so quickly, but an enforced 5 days in hospital made short work of it; I could have read it four times over.



Overall: It's a solid covering of a lot of both the evidence that evolution has occurred (and continues to occur), and the evidence that a major driver of evolutionary change is natural selection. It's clearly and engagingly written - the level is a bit lighter than I'd like (there are many places where just a bit more detail and depth would help), but probably spot on for the audience it's aimed at.

Nits: Actually, I have quite a lot of nits to pick. I won't list them all just now (I may visit some in a later post), but they're mostly minor. I'd love to have seen more on ERVs, for example. A number of assertions are made that really should have some evidence to back them up -- and at least one of those assertions is, I think, very likely wrong, and reads like accomodationism. (Coyne is no accomodationist, which makes it seem weird.)

Who this book is for:
- anyone who wants to learn what evolution is, what is the evidence that it happens, and why natural selection is such a powerful explanation of it.
- anyone who finds themselves in the position of having to try to explain to someone else what evolution is, ... and so on. This includes me. The moment a creationist finds out I am interested in science, I'm enthusiastically Gish-galloped. This is a good start on background for being able to give better responses than my original laser-like response of "uh-whuh-huh?".
- anyone who wants to argue that evolution is wrong. This is a basic introduction to what they have to try to argue against - that straw man they currently pound makes them look like morons.

In short, "Why Evolution Is True" is an enjoyable book. Well worthwhile, even at the relatively exhorbitant price I had to pay for it in Australia.

Facing death

I get into discussions with christians a lot. Recently, I've had a lot of (online) discussion with fairly radical bible-literalist largely-creationist types.

I'm often asked by them if I fear death, and I explain that I came to terms with it years ago. I say I don't fear it at all. Many of them tell me I am lying, or that I am deceiving myself, and when faced with the real prospect of death I will come crying back to the Lawd begging for forgiveness, no-atheists-in-foxholes.

I never bought it - I've come close to death before, and even before I really thought it through, the prospect of dying wasn't that terrifying (pain, on the other hand, I'd really rather avoid, but that's a side issue). But how would I feel NOW?

Well, I recently had a serious prospect of death. I was laying face down on the floor, having crawled a few feet toward the phone and unable to move any further, with all the symptoms of a stroke, and resolved to wait for someone to find me (which I was pretty sure would be no more than ten minutes). So anyway, I had several minutes to ponder the very real possibility I might die, not at some distant time in the future, but with the very real good chance I might die today, possibly right there on the floor.

I didn't actually think death was all that likely, mind you; I was more worried about the prospect of surviving with major defects and being a damn nuisance, but even that didn't seem hugely likely - if things went well, I expected I'd probably come out of it mostly okay, given a few weeks or months at most. But still the prospect that "this could be the day I die" was there.

So how was it?

I felt not the slightest twinge of fear. Not the briefest moment of doubt. I had no impulse to pray. I had no sense that I was risking infinite torture imposed by the merciless and implacable god of the new testament*.

I simply thought that it was possible I might die. It was annoying, like missing the last half of a good TV show that I'd really been enjoying. I was somewhat concerned that my kids might see me dead on the floor, which would be somewhat traumatic. That was it.

So I feel vindicated. I was right. When faced with the immediate, real possibility of death... I don't fear it. Not a whit. All the vile christian threats - they don't work on me any more. Even when I think I might really die.




* This guy (I'm looking at KJV):
Matthew 10:28, 13:41-42, 25:41, 25:46
Mark 4:11-12, 9:43-48, 16:16
Luke 12:5, 13:23-30
John 3:36, 15:6

My close-up experience of grandma-killing "socialized" medicine

I had a very interesting experience this past week. Last Wednesday night I had a TIA (transient ischaemic attack).

So (long-story-short) emergency was dialled (not 911!) and an ambulance arrived in a ridiculously short few minutes. The ambos checked me out, asked a few questions... and after a few seconds of discussion they decided to take me to a hospital a few km south with a specialty neuro unit - a public hospital.

I was in the hospital in minutes. I was assessed again in emergency; and then an emergency doctor saw me almost immediately. After a surprisingly short wait (though this was probably after 7pm) the neuro specialist had come in to check me out - and he had a few residents with him. Though my case was unusual, he had figured out the cause of the TIA instantly he saw me, and attempted to get the residents to figure it out too.

(It turns out that you can cough yourself into a stroke... if you cough so hard you tear your carotid artery, and then dislodge the clump of platelets that form over the wound - with more coughing. It sounds funny, but I have to stop laughing because it makes me cough more. His diagnosis was confirmed by later scans.)

I spent nearly 5 days in hospital, and over that time (beside the initial time in emergency) I shared wards with seven people in their 80s and 90s, as well as one slightly younger lady I didn't find out much about. Apart from a few hours in emergency, I was in the stroke ward (which is opposite the nurses station and has monitors at every bed) for most of the time, but my last few days were in the next ward along. [Each of these wards is only four beds - and they're usually not all full.]

Everyone, public patient or private, old or young, had CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, blood tests (and further tests depending on their particular case), along with regular monitoring. While I was in the stroke ward, I and my fellow patients were all visited by a stroke team, a physiotherapist, a speech pathologist, an occupational therapist, a social worker, and several others as necessary for the individual case (e.g. I also saw a respiratory team and a dietician - to work out how the hospital might cater for my unusual dietary needs and to assess my diet longer term). Everything was being done not only to get us well and able to function as best as possible, but to try to make sure we were able to remain out of hospital and either be able to care for ourselves or be properly cared for.

The staff were amazingly professional, competent, friendly and helpful, though usually very busy.

Was everything perfect? No, several minor things went wrong. I wouldn't expect everything to work perfectly in a large organization where the situation is so chaotic and constantly changing and the people so busy. What mattered to me was the way that the problems that did arise were dealt with. If you brought a problem to the attention of the nurses or doctors, it tended to get solved. They listened.

I was one of several private patients in a public ward (by choice). Being private meant I was free to choose my doctor (why would I choose anyone but the excellent specialist they had on hand?). We got a few trifling extras (like they supplied me with shampoo and soap which was handy the first day before I got organized wityh all my own stuff).

Were there shortages? Yes, now and then - I saw the nursing staff dealing with some kinds of shortage (like not enough kidney-dishes), but I never saw a moment where they let these difficulties impact the care of their patients.

Of the four people over eighty I shared time in the stroke ward with, three improved rapidly and went home within a few days, and the fourth was transferred to another facility her son worked at for some longer term care nearer her family. In the second ward was another TIA patient in his nineties who also came along very well and was likely to be able to go home soon.

So how was the time in the "socialized-medicine" public hospital?

The sun shone in through large windows overlooking million-dollar river views. There were bevies of committed professionals looking after us. There was lots of talking and laughing and joking. One old guy did a bit of tap-dancing. People, old and young(-ish), recovered and went home. Nobody killed grandma.

[It is interesting to think on this: We have just as much a problem with obesity here as the US does. We have less money (about 20% less per capita). But we live FOUR YEARS longer. Government involvement in health care - it's certainly not perfect - but it seems it saves lives. Lots of lives. Even grandma's.]

Finally managed to get hold of "Why Evolution Is True"

I've been trying to get hold of Why Evolution Is True" for months and months... and I finally found a copy. It was always "[typity-type] oh, our store in outer Mongolia has a copy. Or I could order it in for you... (... for $45)".

Anyway the bookstore on campus actually finally got it in. Yay. $46 (WTF!?) but with discount it was just under $43 ($35 US - yeah, I should have just waited 4 weeks and I'd be in Chicago and could have got it for heaps less, or even had it shipped from the US by Amazon, for that matter). But anyway, I decided not to wait and just get it.

Haven't had much time to read it, but the little I have read so far is very good.

I have put Darwin aside for a little (I'm about halfway through), because reading Darwin constantly had me saying "but don't we know such-and-such now?" - I really wanted to have a better understanding of current evolutionary ideas; actually I'm not too badly off, since I read around a fair bit, but it's always been in tiny disconnected pieces - this book of Jerry Coyne's looks like a good laymans overview.

Jerry Coyne aptness

Jerry Coyne said something I have been struggling to express so concisely in many recent discussions. I liked it so I figured I would quote him.

And here we have the real difference between faith and science, for, unlike faith, science can answer the question, “How would I know if I were wrong?” And if you can’t answer that question, how can you know if you are right?

Ontologically logical

Today I used Anselm's ontological argument to prove the existence of Odin.

Odin was very grateful.

Now what do I do with an 8-legged horse?

Edit: See Skeptico's debunking of Anselm's argument

Gallup Poll on religious belief in US:

Gallup poll here on religious belief in the US. Total sample size is over 178000.
(page 1, with map and article here, but to me the numbers were the story.)

None/Atheist/Agnostic:
USA overall: 13.2%

States over 20%:
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska

States under 10%:
North Dakota, Nebraska, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oaklahoma, Texas

200 and counting

I passed my 200th post a few posts ago (here). That was in just a few days over 21 months.

My volume is down, but I'm still around.

If a picture is worth a thousand words...

If a picture really is worth a thousand words... why do we keep saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" ... in words?

I got push-polled about cigarette tax

I've never been pushpolled before. I've never even heard of anyone being push-polled (outside of the US).

I was asked to participate in a short survey. I was somewhat suspicious ("surveys" are often thinly disguised marketing), but the guy promised 3 minutes, and I thought, "what the heck".

So I was asked about my attitude to a proposal to increase cigarette taxes.
I gave my answer, and began to think it might be legit after all.

I was then asked a series of carefully-worded and ordered questions, and became increasingly suspicious that something was up, because the questions seemed increasingly designed to elicit a particular response in opposition to the tax increase. After four minutes (okay, so he fibbed, but not by a whole lot), the guy (an Indian, as usual) asked "Given what you now know about the proposal ..." and then it was the exact same FIRST question I had been asked.

Now I didn't know anything I hadn't known before (apart from some slightly dubious statements in the questions that I didn't attach much credence to - but I'm a skeptic; a lot of people would probably accept them as true). To ask the question again implied it was expected I might have changed my mind. No legitimate poll does it like that. I guess most people wouldn't realize what was up, but I was peeved.

I just said "I've already answered that question", and got off as fast as I could, but DAMN I'm annoyed now.

The results of the SECOND asking of that question will no doubt be used to fuel a push to oppose the proposal (with, of course, no mention of the tricks it took to lead people to that answer).

Expect some agitation from this puppy, you ghouls. I haz internets and access to bordz and groopz. You don't entwine me in your devious little push-polls without some push-back.

The question is not whether people might die...

Dana over at En Tequila Es Verdad discusses health care reform, quoting Rep. Paul Broun:

"...and that's exactly what's going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don't have the appreciation of life, as we do in our society, evidently. And, um. Dr. Roe, a lot of people are gonna die, this program of 'government option' is being touted as being this panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price -- is gonna kill people."

Let's get this straight. EVERY form of health care will lead to deaths.

Any society has finite resources. Any time you spend those resources on anything whatever, you're not spending those resources on saving a life that might have been saved otherwise. Even when you're spending the resources on saving a life over here, you're not spending them on saving a life over there. If you install that traffic light, you might have spent it on heart medication. If you build that school, you might have spent it on cancer research. If you build that bridge, you might have spent it on an MRI machine. But the traffic light, the school and the bridge also improve survival...

And it's not just government expenditure. Buying a boat rather than donating money that could save lives is a health care choice too.

The one constant then, is that under any form of health care, under any form of public and private expenditure, people die. It is a nonsense to pretend otherwise.

The question is not whether health care will be rationed. It always is. The question is not whether bureaucrats will be involved in health care decisions. They always will.

The question is when and where resources will be spent. This always comes down to what treatments are effective and where to get value for the resources that are spent.

Currently an overwhelming proportion of health care expenditure in the US is spent to keep very old people, mostly very wealthy people, alive for another couple of months, at the expense, frequently, of children and babies, had some of those resources been spent on younger, poorer people.

Any way you try to allocate those resources, people die. The thing is, if you reallocate only a tiny amount of that expenditure toward younger, poorer people, the overall impact on survival can be very dramatic indeed.

The UK and Canadian systems (and for that matter, the Australian one) are imperfect.
As far as I understand, they all involve some form of judging what is effective treatment.

If there are two similar treatments, but one costs twenty times as much for only fractionally better outcomes, the public systems will tend to plump for the cheaper one - because you can treat twenty times as many people with it! (As Cujo rightly points out in comments, similar decisions happen with private providers in the US as well - though obviously their priorities are slightly different.)

Overall, these decisions do a fairly good job of allocating resources away from less effective or marginally-effective-but-hugely-expensive treatments, in order to make the health of the society as a whole somewhat better. But government involvement in providing some minimal health care doesn't stop wealthy people being able to buy additional health care.

Every system involves rationing. The present US system rations health care quite dramatically. Firstly, millions of people don't have health cover at all, and for many that do, their provider strictly rations what health care is provided - the main problem is that their decisions are not only predicated on value for money. Again, the question is not "will health care be rationed?", the question is "what is rationed, and in what circumstances?".

On its northern border, the US has a neighbor that has universal health care. However, it is not a single system - there's a different system in each province. There's been a long-running experiment right on the doorstep of the US, with different approaches to providing health care (link is to Snopes article debunking claims about Canadian health system).

It would be easy to examine what works well and what doesn't about each system. There are many other systems around the industrialized world, with different methods of paying for care and different approaches to providing it. The US is in a uniquely privieleged position to see what works, and has the ability to find out what the users of each system think of their health care and its costs.

I live in a system that has private and public components. It is not cheap, and it is far from perfect, but it is still cheaper than what you presently have in the US and (usually) does better at providing a minimal level of basic health care to the poor.

The US has a unique opportunity to get it right. But there are some people whose aim is to scare you out of making a considered decision, and the private health industry is spending enormous amounts on lobbying politicians (and people in the media) to make sure that you don't. The result is you get told a lot of lies and half-truths and get conclusions based on bad assumptions. If you pay attention to the scare mongers (mostly politicians with pockets filled by the private health insurers and incredibly wealthy media people whose concerns are very different from that of the ordinary working person), they will create so much smoke that proper, considered decision making will become politically impossible. And the only certainy then is that no matter what health care system you get, you will end up with worse health care than you could have.

So, Rep. Broun, do we spend a little and save perhaps a dozen babies, or is extending the painful death of someone in the unavoidable process of dying, for perhaps another few days, really more important to you?

edit: fixed link. Added a couple of paragraphs and a link

Tea? Coffee?

Recent research shows that
(i) caffeine prevents and even reverses the effects of Alzheimers, and
(ii) tea consumption reduces the risk of Parkinsons

So do I drink coffee and get Parkinsons or tea and get Alzheimers?

I guess tea has a little caffeine, so I could drink like 15 cups a day.

Who knows - if I stop putting milk in it, all that peeing might even help with kidney stones. Or then again, maybe it will power my car.

The atheist busy

Been busy grading exams.

I did go to a particularly religious wedding on the weekend. Uh. May say more later.

Tired.

Erdős number - do published books count?

In the past I've tried tracking my Erdős number through a particular coauthor that I think is likely to have the smallest number of all my coauthors. Today I tried doing it a different way, through someone else who I know well but don't have a direct publication with (who I just realized would have a low number)... and found a link to him.

But the question is, is the series of links I found legit?

Do coauthors of published books (which are not only citeable but cited) count as links toward Erdős number?

If so, mine is at most 5. If I look hard enough I can probably get it down to papers only, but if books count I don't need to spend the time looking. (Later edit: found a papers-only link that's of length 6. Considering its convolutedness I expect there's a shorter one to be found somewhere.)

Judging by the discussion later in the wikipedia article, the answer is that the book counts. So E ≤ 5.

One day I'm going to take some time and try to find a shorter link.

The unreported tragedy of the missing former atheists - fortunately now found

One thing I have noticed in debating theists, particularly christians, is how often one will tell you they are a "former atheist".

If even half the Christians who paint themselves as "former atheists" had ever actually been recorded as such, atheism, instead of being the fastest growing (in raw numbers) "denomination" in the US, would be by far the fastest shrinking.

At a rough guess, I would say enough christians claim to be former atheists than would overwhelm the number of atheists in the 2008 ARIS survey by a factor of well over five. In the 2001 ARIS survey, the proportion of atheists was - get this - 0.4%; 4 in a thousand. Yet easily several percent of christians seem to proclaim "former atheism"?

What gives? Were they closet atheists?

Even stranger, this group of "former atheists" presents their "former atheism" in a light I have NEVER heard from actual atheists. They were, apparently, every kind of terrible thing that the less enlightened of the rabid rightwing fundies try to paint us as... and they are conveniently held up as experts on everything from science (especially evolution) to atheism to separation of church and state.

Now there are actually a few former atheists of now various theistic stripes whose former atheism was apparent to more than their later selves - so the phenomenon does occur.

But what about all these other ones that appear in debates, on message boards, on interviews, on youtube videos, as subjects of sermons, etc etc?

So where was this enormous group of thieving, drug-addicted, sexually deviant, but all-of-a-sudden-completely open to the message of christianity experts-on-every-subject hiding?

Why weren't they showing up in religious surveys?

Were they all hiding in one large (and presumably unbearably hip) basement?

Or, as seems much more likely, are they largely exaggerators-for-Jesus?

The Chaser and right-wing censorship

"The Chaser's War on Everything" is a satirical TV show in Australia. (The Chaser itself was a satirical newspaper - the nearest US equivalent I can think of would be The Onion). The Chaser's TV show (which is on ABC-TV - owned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a public-owned broadcaster) has been through various incarnations, but relies mainly on satirical sketch comedy and various other bits.

The Chaser boys regularly go over the top - some of their skits can be challenging to watch. And they don't always hit the mark - sometimes they're just not funny. None of that matters, except to their ratings.

They regularly offend the right wing, and talk radio goes completely berserk - the last time they went off quite this much was when they did a less-than-kind (but not completely inaccurate) song about people who had died. This time it was for a thing they did about the Make-a-wish foundation (a charity for sick children) - so you can imagine the furore from the "won't someone think of the children!" brigade. In both the earlier case and the current one, I actually watched the piece that caused all the fuss when it went to air - and in both cases the reaction was so over the top as to be pathetic.

Look, it's simple. If you find these guys offensive, don't bloody watch them, okay?

If they break the law - well, that's what police are for. If they break guidelines for broadcast material, there are regulations and penalties in place there too. If they contravene ABC's own internal procedures, there are penalties there as well. None of that happened. There may be a question of whether the internal review was sufficient, but that's an internal matter for the ABC. To take them off the air for two weeks to pacify the right wing - when they followed ABC procedure (the piece was reviewed and approved) - was ludicrous.

The weird thing is, it was relatively speaking, the cases that the right wing decide to go nuts over are not extreme compared to other stuff that they do. It's generally no worse in offense terms than South Park or Drawn Together (except it's live, rather than animated).

Occasionally, *I* find something they've done offensive. That's not bad, it's valuable. We need our comfortable middle-class existence shaken up a bit. Nobody and nothing should be above ridicule, and it can be very valuable to step back from yourself and try to examine why you find something offensive.

If a parent of a dying child watched the piece and was offended (and I can certaonly imagine some would), *that* parent has every right to take it up with the ABC. But all the people screaming about the possibility that someone might be offended? You offend me. Get a fucking life.

The ABC is moving to curtail the way satirical programming is reviewed - which means less satire. That's a terrible loss to our society.

You have a right to find things offensive. There is, however, no right to never be offended - and there should not be.

pax atheism?

I recently saw the latest global peace index rankings.

The thing that stood out was the countries with the low scores ("most peaceful"). They're countries well-known for low levels of religious belief. So I thought I'd try to get some data. I grabbed numbers on "no religion" from wikipedia, and looked at the relationship. There were a lot of countries really squashed up at the low end of non-religous percentage (left side), so I did a transform. Unfortunately a large proportion of "0% atheist" countries make a log-transform impossible - so I did a cube-root instead.

So here's my graph of Peace Index (Low = Peaceful) vs non-religious percentage (click for larger)




Interesting, eh?


Issues:
- "wealth" will be a confounding variable (poorer countries will on average be less peaceful and more religious)
- a few of the non-religious percentage figures are a bit rubbery, and my treatment of ranges (taking the upper end) less than ideal.

I'd like to improve this plot by getting other/better figures (e.g. I'd also like to try some of these), giving ranges where ranges were given and giving less weighting by the width of the range (make them smaller or paler or something, if the figures are really uncertain). I'd like to use other figures, and see what adjusting for wealth (say GNP per capita or somesuch) does. Just looking at some of the wealthy "western" countries, it looks like the effect remains, but would be weaker.

I'd also like to label the points!

But this is a good start, and I've spent all the time I can on it for now.

I can has scienz

(Well, it seemed funny when the idea came to me. I haven't seen this anywhere, but no doubt it will have occurred to others also.)

Creationism - a party of no Idas?

The media hype about Ida is wearing thin.

But by contrast Dana's post is a delightfully clear summary of the issues. Perhaps the most engaging one I have read.

Sharpening the horns

I recently saw a version of the Euthyphro dilemma that to me resonates better than the usual presentation. It's the same argument, but it fits better as a reply when theists do the old "can't be moral without God" dance.

In a comment by Ian Spedding at John Wilkins blog, he said:
"Ask them if they believe their chosen deity is a capricious being or one of reason and order. If the former, why follow a moral code that was thought up on a whim, if the latter, what is to prevent us from reasoning to the same conclusions all by ourselves."

I have a feeling it may be further teased along, but it's a good one as is.

(Some of the other discussion in that comment thread is also interesting.)

[edit: b0rken link fixx0red]

creation and existence

If you assert that everything that exists must have a creator, then you assert that either god does not exist or god in turn had a creator.

If you instead agree that at least some things don't have a creator, then there is no need to posit a creator at all.

Infinite cake.

I can happily have ice-cream without whining that I can't enjoy it because nobody promised I would get infinite cake after I finish.

The lack of infinite cake does not make the ice-cream worthless. Instead, undistracted by the imaginary need to gather cake-forks, I can focus on the very real ice-cream at hand, and enjoy it while it lasts. It's pretty good ice-cream.

"God delusions cloud a world of wonder" opinion-piece in The Age

Worth a look, I think:

God delusions cloud a world of wonder

Why 60 Dem senators is not all that filibuster-proof

There's a lot of noise about Arlen Spector's move to the Dems, which along with Al Franken (when he finally gets there, probably some time in 2011) makes for 60 democratic Senators.

But 60 democratic senators, while it sounds filibuster-proof, is nothing of the kind.

If the democrats try to rely on those 60 votes, where does the power lay? With the right-leaning democrats. It hands blue dogs the ability to bring on a Republican filibuster any time they have an issue that they want their own way on... and I don't imagine they won't use it a few times.

They can't do it *every* time, but that doesn't mean that they can't do it at all. If there's something they *really* want, you can bet that's a bargaining chip they know they hold. Even if they don't actually use it, the threat may be enough to get them what they want at the bargaining table.

Let's wait and see how it all pans out.

No posts in a month!

I don't think I've gone a month without posting before on this blog.

This has been caused by a number of things - an ongoing illness, combined with work pressure has led to a general ennui with regards to writing much. Anyway, I won't bore you about it, but I wanted to say that I am still around.

I have a number of topics to talk about, but finding the energy to actually turn them into priceless prose? Not so much. Hopefully I will be back at it in all senses very soon.

An ambigram

Hemant mentioned that he wanted a "flying spaghetti monster" ambigram tattoo.

That struck me as a pretty tricky thing to do, so I had a go at just making "Spaghetti Monster" just to see if it was possible. It's a quick and dirty attempt with no artistic merit, but I think it's adequate as a proof-of-concept that an ambigram something like what he wants should be quite doable in the hands of a more accomplished artist with the time to attempt it.



The Atheist "A" was just something I tossed in at the last moment (I noticed it on my blog as I was about to upload a first attempt and wondered if I could work it in. The answer was "yeah, sort of").

Will Lie for $$$

The people providing political commentary on US TV are extraordinarily wealthy. As far as I can tell, they're all in the top tax bracket.

As a result, their opinions are necessarily coloured by that fact. Even the honest ones (a list which appears to be quite short) will give you the news filtered through the lens of its impact on them. So you cannot easily get much useful information about its impact on you. And many of them (I'm looking especially at some people on Fox News and CNBC) will lie right to camera if they think it will make them better off.

Their alarmism makes people make bad decisions. Instead of debunking the bad decisions they've caused, these parasites will encourage them. The lesson is threefold:

• You can't trust main-stream media. At all. Ever.⁽¹⁾


• You have to work things out for yourself. ⁽²⁾


• You can't trust main-stream media. At all. Ever.

1. Watch them by all means, but always assume that every word comes with an agenda, and make sure you understand how the person you're watching (and the people they work for) are lining their own pockets. Follow, as the saying goes, the money. They will tell you what's good for them, not what's good for you. They will tell you what's bad for them, not what's bad for you. They will exploit you.


2. That's a nuisance. There are plenty of sources of good information online, but there are plenty of bad sources of information, too. You have to equip yourself at least well enough to tell a good argument from a bad one, and read more than one source of information.

There's a major case in point on income tax. And it's not just the cable news and finance guys that you have to watch out for - networks and the newspapers are doing it too.

They're exploiting dumb people. They want you to be dumb too.

Specifically, one thing that's got me cranky is the way the media has been playing up stories about people trying to earn less than $250,000 in order to pay less tax (as discussed in several of the links). Instead of doing the responsible thing - explain the actual situation - they're encouraging you to misunderstand.

Most of my readers are very smart, so I'm probably stating the obvious, but let's look at what's going on.

Most western countries have a progressive tax system. That means that as you earn more, you pay a higher percentage of your income in tax (however, as you earn more, your ability to shift income in ways that lowers your tax rate also goes up, so it's sometimes not progressive at all).

This happens by there being progressively higher tax rates on the amount you earn above particular threshholds, creating what are called "tax brackets"

In the US in 2008, the top marginal tax rate (the amount you pay on your last dollar) was 35%. But the average tax rate for everybody is below that. What's happening is that the two highest marginal tax rates for those with the highest incomes in the US will in 2010 go ... back to what the highest two marginal rates were in 2000. That's all.

The very, very highest incomes will - in 2010 - be paying 39.6% on their last dollar.

The total (or average) tax rates for 2008 look like this (public domain image by Dejo):


What's happening is that in 2010, the green line will move up a bit, but in fact most people in the US will actually pay a little less tax - the red and black lines will only be higher up the right hand end - and most people are quite a way left of the middle of the graph).

Guess what? I already pay more than 39.6%. My marginal tax rate here in Australia is 40% (and it's recently gone down - I was paying 42%). If I was earning my current income in the US, I'd be paying 25%, not 40%. I pay a higher marginal rate of tax than every Rick Santelli in the US. Actually, if you include the way some of the government benefits reduce with income (something I strongly support), my effective marginal tax rate (impact of the last dollar I earn) is actually a fair bit higher than 40%.

The top marginal income tax rate here is 45% - oh, and there's also a consumption tax.

I experience very little disincentive to earn an extra dollar of income, even though I am paying a higher marginal rate of tax than everybody in the US will be paying, even after the tax changes come in. (The biggest disincentive I experience is simply the marginal cost in time, a far more scarce resource to me than money.)

I don't feel like I pay "too much" tax. I drive on roads. My kids go to school. I get less expensive prescription drugs than I otherwise would. When I have to go to the doctor, I get most of the money back. There are police, fire brigade, ambulance services and a hundred other things that make it possible for me to earn that money I pay tax on, and make it possible for me to enjoy the benefits of the rest of it.

I also gain the security of knowing there are a couple of safety nets available if everything were to go pear-shaped. The fact that other people are getting the benefit of those safety nets right now is not a source of envy - if you're badly enough off that you need them, there's really not much to be envious of.

Here's something to keep in mind: if they'll lie to you about that, what else can't you trust them on?

It's times like this I wish...

... that I had more than high school physics.

I was solving a nifty little optimization problem which occurred to me as a continuous version of a discrete problem that used to come up in an old computer game I used to play long ago. The problem boiled down to finding a best route of travel given two different speeds in different kinds of terrain.

Anyway, after a page of scribbling around, I came up with a formula for a simple case of the problem.

Then I realized that my simple case was (in a modified form) essentially going to be solved by Snell's Law (also called the Law of Sines). And sure enough, my simple formula was Snell's law (but changed about a bit so it wasn't instantly obvious, like having a ratio of cosecants of angles to the normal instead of sines - which is just a matter of inverting both sides...).

This is essentially what I was doing, but less formally and with a lot more faffing about and a few false starts. (It's easy to find on-line if you already know what to look for, eh?)

I felt like a bit of a dope. On the other hand, at least I was definitely on the right track. Since I'd had a headache all day, that was all I could manage in the time available, so I didn't go on to derive the problem I was actually interested in (the shape made by traveling as far as you could in a given time, given a particular boundary between the two regions), but with Snell's Law it should become a somewhat more straightforward calculation for the situations I was playing with (since it tells me "where to head" after striking a smooth boundary, so for the simpler cases it's a matter of computing where you end up given each boundary point).

The bus...

After going to the trouble of making my own "atheist bus" headlines (I have several ready to go if I decide they're worthwhile), I find out there's a website already set up that puts it on the bus for you and everything.

There's probably no...

Ding-dong, the witch is (probably) dead.

Looks like the Aus. government's compulsory web-censorship plans are dead.

Nick Xenophon changed his mind (even though he was doing it because he figured it would help his anti-gambling stance), so they don't have the senate numbers any more.

I'm leaving the banner up for now though, because Conroy has had his tits all over this like a stripper looking for a 20, and if it can be revived, you can bet he'll do it - I expect this legislation to be a zombie and rise again, looking for brains.
(Stephen Conroy is the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy... and rubbing his tits all over brain-eating zombies)


What's the point in metaphors if you can't mix them? Or stick 'em in a blender on "pulverise"?

Technology stuff

Hey, did you know the Chinese have a cell-phone battery that can last a lifetime?

(line break in link now fixed)

The law of recursion

An observation based on reading many comment threads:

As any comment thread grows sufficiently long, the probability that Godwin's law will be mentioned approaches 1.

Reading the man

I'm reading Darwin's Origin of the Species.

I've read extracts before, and one day I sat in a library and read a chunk of it, but I've never actually read the book before.

I'm not doing anything high-minded like reading it for the blog for Darwin campaign or anything - it just happens to be one of the many books I bought when I was in Washington D.C. last year, and I've read the other science books (Shubin's Your Inner Fish, Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience, both recommended). I just wanted to read it, and there was a reasonably-priced edition.

I feel the same sense of excitement I had when I plunged into D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, a book which can unfortunately only be experienced for the first time once. (If you've never read it, do yourself a favour and try to find a copy. Mine was the shorter 328 page edition.), except that with Origin, instead of a well-regarded descriptive book on the fringes of mainstream biology, we have a book critical to modern biological thought.

Oh, brave new world ...

... that has glider guns in't!

This is freaking cool. But if Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions or cellular automata are unfamiliar, don't go there just yet, read this first.

Wow, I want to explain six different things at once. Where to start.


There's some amazing chemicals (quite a few different ones) that undergo Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions, which switch between states. The image shows one such reaction where there's a cyclical colour change.







If you set up a BZ reaction in a thin layer (say something like a petri dish), then you can observe beautiful cycles of spiral waves.

Very similar spiral waves of excitation are observed, for example, in certain cardiac problems.














Now, to go off in a completely different direction, there are mathematical constructs called cellular automata (CAs).


These are basically a layout of cells - often in a line, or sometimes in a 2-D array (or sometimes even in higher dimensions), which evolve according to simple local rules (such as "if the cells either side of me are both black, next step I will change to white"). The image here is of the development of one such CA, called "Rule 30". As you progress down from the top, each row of the image represents one "time step" in the development of this 1-d cellular automaton.

While they were originally purely mathematical ideas, patterns that arise in essentially the same way, and look very much like those seen in some kinds of cellular automaton do occur in nature, for example, on some kinds of shells:








Further, people have noted in the past that a particular kind of cellular automaton, the cyclic cellular automaton can generate very distinctive spiral waves that look somewhat like BZ spiral waves.

The most famous of these cellular automata is undoubtedly Conway's game of Life, a 2D one that produces some amazingly intricate patterns.

One very early pattern that was discovered is called a glider - a pattern only a few cells across that changes in such a way that it appears to "fly" diagonally in a straight line.



In 1970, Bill Gosper, in response to a challenge by Conway to find a Life pattern that would show "unlimited growth", designed a constuction that produces a constant stream of gliders, called a "glider gun". (There are a large number of other constructions that exhibit such unlimited growth.)


Using many structures such as this, it has been shown that it is possible to construct a kind of computer that is equivalent to a Turing machine.

In 2005, Motoike and Adamatzky discussed using Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions in the construction of logic gates in liquids, and there has been a bunch of other related papers.

Now to the new bit. There's a new paper up on arXiv where a bunch of researchers the University of West of England (including Adamatzky) have constructed, using BZ reactions, a chemical version of a glider gun (it's not exactly a game-of-life glider gun, but it has similar properties.



As the authors say in their conclusion, "theoretical ideas concerning universal computation in these systems is closer to being realized experimentally. We were able to manipulate glider streams, for example annihilate selected streams and switch periodically between two interacting streams. We were also able to show that glider guns could be formed or annihilated via specific interactions with glider streams from a second gun. We also showed examples where glider guns could be used to implement simple memory analogs."

They also say, "[t]hese discoveries could provide the basis for future designs of collision-based reaction-diffusion computers". Indeed.


There may well be implications relevant to the development of the earliest self-reproducing structures (protolife) on earth.

via The physics arXiv blog

What distinguishes the best arguments for god from those of the ordinary believer?

Atheists are often derided for arguing against the dumb arguments for God that we encounter every day. (Well, it makes sense - those are what we're hit in the face with. Those are the ones in the media, in things like school board meetings, in everyday conversations, and the ones that show up in our blog-comments.)

But many of us get slammed for not engaging with the arguments of the sophisticated theists. I've seen a couple of supposedly sophisticated arguments before, and not been impressed.

Now, Greta Christina takes on the best arguments for God.

(Well, they're framed as "questions for atheists", but they're basically a list of "but what about this?" arguments for God.)

And one thing really stands out. I can see the difference now.

What distinguishes the best arguments for god from those of the ordinary believer?

They're not in ALL-CAPS, 14-point purple Comic Sans, they're correctly spelled, and they show a passing acquaintance of grammar... apart from that, well... they're pretty much just slightly more polished versions of exactly the same arguments we see all the time.

That's it.

That's all they got.

I am sad.

Dissing the doctor

PZ discusses a reporter at the L.A. Times dissing Jill Biden over her doctorate.

The really really stupid thing about this is you don't need to do more than the most basic research available to any moron with a good dictionary on the shelf or a keyboard - if you type "doctor" into wikipedia, it clears things up very nicely.

In short - the word "doctor" comes from the Greek "Didaktor Philosophias"* -- "teacher of philosophy", via Latin. Since the earliest degrees were law degrees, and the first law degrees were doctorates, the first such "doctors" were all doctors of
law - licensed to teach law. As the word "doctor" became more heavily used to refer to medical personnel, lawyers were known as "civil doctors".

*(transliterated into Roman characters here, since many people reading this don't read ancient Greek - though mathematical types can generally sound it out; I presume few actual ancient historians or people of classical education are readers of this blog)

The use of the word "doctor" to refer to someone of great learning in a particular academic sphere predates the use of it to refer to medical doctors.

Anyway, I have some thoughts on this. I have a PhD myself, and like most such, I'm not a stickler for titles.

Within any academic institution, I ask people to call me by my first name. However, if someone insists (against my wishes) on calling me by a title, then I will ask that if they must do so, they at least give the correct one.

(For some reason, at that point most of them knock it off and just use my name. Why not when I asked? Don't ask me.)

One reason I ask to be called by my first name is that I think when you're discussing ideas, they need to be disrespected. Beautiful and precious darlings though they may be, ideas that don't stand up to the harshest scrutiny need to be taken down to the idea vet, and given radical, lifesaving surgery, or for the ones beyond such help, unceremoniously put out of their misery.

Now if people are too busy bowing (and yes, that's actually happened) and respecting the person, they can't at the same time kick the crap out of their ideas. When that happens, there is no hope for them (the people or the ideas).

So first names, like we're colleagues trying to figure this stuff out. Paradoxically, I see it as a sign of respect, but it's a very particular kind of respect.

Outside of academia, my own attitude is one of laissez-faire - generally, my PhD is completely irrelevant. Most people neither know nor particularly care what a PhD is, and I don't tend to bring it up unless it's directly relevant to the conversation, someone specifically asks, or is being a major dick about it in some way.

Well, my employer puts it on my business cards; I don't begrudge them that, since they say it makes them look good.

There is exactly one person who universally refers to me by the title "Doctor". Perhaps ironically, given the current discussion, it's my GP. (He puts it on every prescription, on every referral, and calls me "doctor" to my face. And when he does it, he makes it mean something. It's very touching.)

So, given I don't really use it myself, it might seem weird to care about the use of academic titles.

But on the other hand, it annoys me to see people disrespect the honorific. A PhD is generally a signal that someone has done a great deal of very hard work, sometimes at a significant cost to themselves, their families and maybe even their health. It's also generally a sign that that someone knows a lot about their particular subtopic.

That entitles them to be called "doctor" in formal writing, whether or not a reporter with an inferiority complex likes it or not. Further, if the possessor of such a title wants their title used at other times, then dammit, they have that right, too. If you don't like it, go and damn well get one, and then you can tell people not to call you doctor.

Good luck with that. We could use more people who give a damn about learning, especially among reporters.

Carnival Of the Elitist Bastards IX: Keepin' yer wits about ye

Pirates be needin' to keep their wits and cutlasses honed. So here be a little tale to ponder.


We pirates be splittin' some booty - government bailout booty! We been busy doin' executin', so we be decidin' some executive bonuses are in order - an' we be takin' aboard a thousand bars o' gold!

We pirates be likin' three things. Mostly, we be likin' to live. Secondly, we be likin' gold. Thirdly, we be likin' to see a good keelhaulin' or three over a tot of rum, as long as we be the one gettin' the rum and not the keelhaulin'.

The senior pirate among us be proposin' a division of the treasure. Bein' democratic pirates, we all vote on agreein' to this division, but not likin' ties, the senior pirate also be havin' the castin' vote. If the proposal be voted down, the senior pirate be keelhauled an' fed to the sharks, an' the next most senior pirate be proposin' to divide the loot.

In order of seniority, we be the captain, the first mate, the bosun, the bosun's mate and the scurvy crewman. So how be we dividin' the booty?


Arr. While ye ponder that, sharpen yer wits by readin' this month's Carnival of the Elitist Bastards!

Splendidelles takes on a lubber who is apparently a stranger to robust dissent and administers a telling riposte... largely by letting the lubber's screeches speak for themselves.

Annie has moved blogs to 'a refrigerator box at The Virtuous Skeptic'. Annoyed at being treated as 'an invisible, inconsequential mindless paramecium,' in Nurse Is Not A Dirty Word, Annie points out that the contributions of nursing research to developments in patient care are being ignored.

PalMD at White Coat Underground asks what the inauguration of a new President will do for medicine. Beginning with the "ethical apocalypse", he tours the sorry legacy of the previous administration. (Apologies to PalMD - the original direct link to the article had a glitch in it - now repaired)

Z, over at It's the Thought that Counts calls on politicians to quit raising ignorance over expertise. In "Academia versus politics?", Z argues that politicians should be leading public opinion toward what needs to be done, not watering Steven Chu's expertise on energy policy down for tenuous political advantage.







Blake Stacey at Science After Sunclipse takes on the issue of the New Scientist with the "Darwin was wrong" cover (a popular target, for obvious reasons). However, never one to just run with the herd, Blake takes aim at the gross oversimplifications of the editorial, where Lord Kelvin's famous quote is taken out of context and put to bad ends. Blake argues that Elitist Bastards are people who care to get things right, revealing a much more interesting tale than the usual story of a grumpy and out of touch physicist. Blake says that his post is 'somewhat complementary to this post by my blogo-friend GG' - and indeed, it also takes on the tendency 'to streamline and oversimplify science history to the point where it presents a genuinely misleading impression of not only how things happened, but how science is done'.








George at Decrepit Old Fool takes on faith-based gambling (in its myriad guises) in his post Betting against the house. He points out that placing faith above data and knowledge is what built Las Vegas - and also landed us in some serious messes.



Meanwhile, over at Thoughts in a Haystack, John Pieret delivers a broadside in New Year, Old Crap, where he takes on a lubber who links eugenics and the Holocaust to ... you guessed it! ... "Darwinism." Pieret (now there's a piratey-sounding moniker) shows him the plank.







Stephanie at Almost Diamonds writes about the joy of making the world a little better by helping turn someone's rough diamond into a gem. We loves gems.

PodBlack Cat tackles the impact of superstition in traditional beliefs and looks at some amusing titles in 'Year Of The Ox - Charming Tradition Or Load Of Bull?'. (Catgirl pirates! Arr!)

Dana over at En Tequila Es Verdad reckons that getting people to read more science books seems like an Elitist Bastard-worthy goal. After seeing the nonsense produced by the scurvy knaves that some of our game crewmates have tackled, I can only say "Aye!"

Arr, and there be the skeptical scribblins o' some other sea dog, who wants ye to keep a weather-eye out. Better take a look, to be sure.







So, what should the captain propose to his crew?

I not be spoilin' a pretty puzzle so quickly, by just showin' ye where to dig. But if ye be yet curious and at the same time, too full o' rum to be figurin', the rattlin' finger bone of old Pete will point the way to dividin' a paltry hundred gold pieces. Ye'll have to figure it out from there.

Or in lego-comic-form, here. (Yes, that's where all the images come from.)

The skeptical reader

Some people may be smart but readily fall prey to learning things that aren't true. Like that split-infinitive (or more generally split-verb) nonsense -- which is what you get when a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals try to impose a restriction that is inherent in Latin onto English (where it has never belonged) and as a result make beautiful writing ugly. It infects even relatively intelligent people, and Steven Pinker gives a good argument that it may be what made Justice Roberts stumble when administering the presidential oath.

And it's not just language you have to be skeptical about. No less a body than the National Endowment for the Arts writing gushingly about literacy (pdf), fibs to us in graphical form:




Three years at the left hand end takes up almost as much room as six years at the right hand end! The aim is to make the upslope at the end look twice as strong as it really should - to give stronger support to their claim that "this dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working". (Lied to by a federal agency? Whodathunkit?) Now if they're willing to fudge the graph, really, how much can you trust that they haven't massaged the figures? Kevin Drum is completely taken in, reproducing the glaring fib with nary an indication he even noticed he was being lied to. There's something about graphical lies that tends to slip under the radar. Watch out!

Over at Understanding Uncertainty, Horace (David Spiegelhalter) looks at studies that say (among other things) that street lighting reduces fatal-injury road crashes by a huge amount. It was taken up by the media, leading to sensationalist headlines. Firstly, based on the quoted figures, the number in the press release was plain wrong (it's 65% not 77%), but various sources of bias lead to this smaller figure being an overestimate, and possibly a very dramatic overestimate. But that won't stop the media in search of a beat-up!

On the topic of things to be skeptical about, the BBC reports that a government-funded books project has edited the famous shanty What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?, though the charity running the project say it has "absolutely nothing to do with political correctness"; they claim the alteration to "grumpy pirate" was to make the rhyme fit a pirate theme, rather than censorship. Now I'm all for pirate themes ... but why then not "drunken pirate"? Is this another media beat-up, or political correctness run amok? Or even a little of both? Go read the story and the explanation given by the charity and decide for yourself. I'd give 'em both a skeptical eye.

Oh, you poor babies

Memo: to Rush and the other so-privileged-they-can't-even-see-it chickenhawk-cons crying about Joseph Lowery's words.

A little word of advice.

Harden. The. Fuck. Up.

Thank You.

___


The man has earned the right to talk about race in such terms. You have not. Your bleating about racism is the babyish whining of people who have no notion of just how good they have it. It's extremely unbecoming. Just cut it out.

Religion and the utility argument

I was just reading Greta Christina's post on hope.

It's a wonderful post. I just wanted to explore an aspect of one of her themes and head down a little side-track.

There is an argument that is sometimes made: "but religion brings people hope".

This is a claim that religious belief is useful, even when it isn't true.

I have several issues with this claim.

Firstly, it often comes during a discussion of whether or not a religious belief is true - a discussion in which it has no place whatever - and in that context, such ground-shifting is tantamount to an admission that it isn't true (or that the support for it is so weak that such ground-shifting is required).

But let's examine an argument about its utility even if it isn't true.

That some religion might be useful in some circumstances may well be the case. Is it always useful? Is it sometimes harmful?

The answer is quite plain on its face - religion for its own sake (i.e. irrespective of its truth) is not always useful, and there is plenty of evidence that it can be harmful, or that it can be used in harmful ways. I have different examples than Greta Christina, but I think she addresses this fairly well, so I won't spend time on it here.

The problem is the argument is used to justify religious belief outside those specific circumstances where it has utility. The exact circumstances where it is useful are not examined, because it isn't really being used as an argument for its use in those specific circumstances alone, but instead for its general use. It's another form of bait-and-switch; the underlying aim is to turn off the arguments against religious belief, so that religious belief can be maintained generally.

However, let us go further, and start with the assumption that in fact religious belief is useful in some circumstances, and we happen to be faced with exactly such a circumstance. Here we find a second bait-and-switch. The point is actually to support the theist's specific religious beliefs. Are they really willing to consider other religions? If we examine, say Ásatrú, and find that it's better (more useful) in these specific circumstances, will they abandon their current belief when in that circumstance and embrace Ásatrú in that situation instead?

The emptiness of the argument is immediately apparent.

If utility is what is sought, their religious belief must be put into competition with all religious belief, with incompatible religious belief, to find the belief(s) that are most useful. If the point is really about utility, it is the high-utility beliefs that should be maintained, and the theist's beliefs will very likely lose. There are many thousands of extant religious beliefs, many thousands more extinct ones, and uncountable infinities of potential beliefs (indeed, including lack of belief in anything supernatural) - if "religious belief" is a useful thing, we should try to work out which specific beliefs help the most. Is the theist willing for their beliefs to undergo such examination? If not, they undermine their utility argument - if they actually want religion for its utility, they'd be willing to find the most useful beliefs, not the ones they're currently infatuated with. The fact that they simply don't do this shows their argument for the bait-and-switch that it is.

On not fooling yourself

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool" -- Richard Feynman


(not fooling yourself is a favourite theme of mine - on my personal blog as well as here - so I found this quote particularly appropriate)

There are no legal numbers

This appears to establish that all integers* are illegal, via a less formal version the following argument.

*(and by a fairly obvious extension, all numbers)

• Some integers are illegal (in the sense, for example, that you can't publish them without violating certain laws)
  
• Publishing encoded versions of illegal integers (say via some publicly available encoding algorithm) is also illegal
  
• Assume there is some smallest illegal integer, k
  
• It is presumably legal to publish k-1
  
• However, if I publish an algorithm to convert k-1 to an illegal integer (such as "add 1"), it would then be illegal to publish k-1, since with the algorithm it's an encoded version of the illegal integer
  
• Hence, k-1 is an illegal integer
  
• Therefore, since the algorithm for converting one less than an illegal integer to an illegal integer has already been published, there is no smallest illegal integer
  
• A similar argument applies to any integer one larger than an illegal number (with the algorithm "subtract 1"), so there is no largest illegal integer.
  
• therefore, all integers are illegal.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't do my arithmetic homework. It's against the law!"

Light-weight reporting?

This item is a story saying that the Milky Way is bigger across and more dense than previously "thought" (it's not particularly clear on who thought this; I assume that the writer means "widely accepted by astronomers" - but that's not always the case).

The story contains the following: "More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight."

Why not just say mass? Why confuse it with weight, which has a different meaning?
Or if you must explain what mass is, why not take a further sentence to explain it in a way that isn't, well, wrong?

7x7x41

A nice shiny new year and a bright morning. Let's not screw this one up so bad, eh?