Why so green and lonely? Everything's going to be alright, just you wait and see.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

6.5e+9 and Growing

The earth hit 6.5 billion humans today. I'd like to personally welcome the approximately 375,000 people that were born today, and I suggest that as soon as they reach surfing age they head on over to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Thanks Numeric Life.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Stewart on Deficits

Funniest Daily Show segment I've seen in a long time, via Crooks and Liars (WMV and QT).
But sleep tight America! The government isn't taking money from your pocket——it's deficit spending. It means the United States is actually taking out long term loans from banks and foreign governments. So, don't think of it like $2,000 that you don't have. Think of it as $200,000 your grandchildren don't have. And, seriously, f**k them; they think you smell like ass.
He totally hits the nail on the head there. See my Feynman on Deficits post for more cynical fun.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

My Friend, Oscar

   I didn't win it,

      but I got to hold it.

         I'm a total nobody,

            but I still got to hold it :~)

Anyway, I might actually bother watching the Oscars this year considering the host.

Qigong 101

To look back on the centuries that people have relied on faith healing is a bitter-sweet reminder of how gullible we're all capable of being under the wrong circumstances, and I do mean all of us. I've got a post on faith healing in the works (Miracle Spring Water ring a bell?). Anyway, Mad Mike over at Majikthise has received word that a close relative of faith healing, therapeutic Qigong, has been taught to children as though it were science in some schools (although presumably very few). A concerned parent writes:
One of my daughter's classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was manipulating body energy or "Chi."
What's most frustrating about these practices to me isn't just the obvious stuff (dangerous to delay real treatment, blah blah blah) but that the practitioners somehow fail to see the value in forming a proper (falsifiable) hypothesis and testing it. You know, double blind tests and all that good stuff that we've developed so as not to make fools of ourselves time and time again. How, in this day and age, can people grow up in such a way that they fail to see value in the scientific approach?

The Power of Balance is based in Toronto, and here's what they claim:
With speialized [sic] training, [Qigong] can be used to heal others, somewhat like an energetic, no-needle form of acupuncture.
Yep, that sure sounds a lot like what the Qigong instructor at that elementary school was trying to do earlier, although I don't think it makes sense to apply acupuncture to a child that just fainted, even avec-needle acupuncture. If that was my kid I'd completely spaz. You can see Mike's post right here which includes a petition to keep Qigong out of schools (sortof like ID).

Update: This entry at the JREF Archives mentions a 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association study that suggests that acupuncture might be just placebo. Their summary:
New German research on the use of acupuncture for headache patients concluded that the placement of the needles on the body was of no importance whatsoever. One Klaus Linde at the University of Technology in Munich conducted the experiment. The old Chinese notion of "meridians" and energy-lines and spots in the body, are again falsified by medical experiment.
Sounds to me like bunk on par with reflexology and all the other pseudosciences.

Monday, February 20, 2006

Pop Quiz, America

A random sampling of Americans was recently asked to name prominant figures on the world stage. Here are the percentages of Americans who got each question correct:
Leader of Cuba70%
U.S. secretary of state56%
Prime minister of Great Britain54%
President of Russia37%
President of Mexico29%
Chancellor of Germany4%
I even got the Angela Merkel one right, although that might be because her party has the word Christian right in its name (which still totally blows my mind).

You might be thinking "with all the media focus on American foreign policy and the Iraq war, shouldn't Americans know who these public figures are by now??" Well that's the best part: wait for it... these results actually are an improvement:
Knowledge of world leaders in 2000 was lower compared with 2003 and this year. At that time, just 2% knew Jean Chretien was prime minister of Canada, only 33% could name Madeleine Albright as secretary of state, and only about one in five knew of Putin and Blair at that point in their tenures.
The Gallup Poll has the detailed survey results that summarise previous years as well.

John Kricfalusi's Blog

John Kricfalusi has a blog! Absolutely amazing stuff.
Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Answers in Genesis

Evangelist Ken Ham has devoted himself to debunking evolution in the minds of American children with the usual "does your grandpa look like a monkey?" type stuff. Ham's ministry is called Answers in Genesis and they specialise in making sure that children doubt evolution's merits (there's also a No Answers in Genesis group, ha-HAAH!).

Really though, I can't see anything wrong with Ham's approach in principle—we shouldn't expect the next generation to take our scientists' findings entirely on faith, after all. If our schools are teaching the history of evolution in a dogmatic fashion then, well, that seems wrong; evolution is a fact but, after all, our evolutionary history is just a theory. The problem with Ham's approach is that he doesn't apply the same principles of skepticism to his own claims:
Ham encourages people to further their research with the dozens of books and DVDs sold by his ministry. They give answers to every question a critic might ask: How did Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark? He took babies. Why didn't a tyrannosaur eat Eve? All creatures were vegetarians until Adam's sin brought death into the world. How can we have modern breeds of dog like the poodle if God finished his work 6,000 years ago? He created a dog "kind"—a master blueprint—and let evolution take over from there.
Remember that these are Ham's answers, and are only guesses based on the Bible. I never understood how a T-Rex could eat vegetables with those teeth, but whatever. I can't tell if he himself really believes these childish answers or if they're designed to appease the imagination of his young audience. A further sampling:
"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.
"God!" the boys and girls shouted.
"Who's the only one who knows everything?"
"God!"
"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"
The children answered with a thundering: "God!"


[...] He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."
Gay marriage a social ill? Evolution responsible for racism? RAAARRGGHHHH!! And I really don't think God cares if a store clerk says Happy Holidays—relax. You can read more about Ken Ham's adventures in this Wikipedia article and this L.A. Times article (found the link via this post by iocaste at Majikthise).

Feynman on Deficits

In 2005 Maclean's magazine published an article entitled Is America Going Broke? which (not surprisingly) presents a bleak outlook on America's ability to ever ever ever (...ever) pull itself out of debt:
[David] Walker's department projects that, under the current tax rates, interest costs on the skyrocketing national debt would be about half of all government tax revenues by 2031. Ten years later, the cost of servicing the debt will exceed all government revenues.
[...]
"The U.S. government is effectively bankrupt," [Kotlikoff] wrote. The available options to close the fiscal gap? Hike income taxes by 78 per cent; slash Social Security and Medicare benefits by more than half; or eliminate all other discretionary spending.
"That," he concludes, "is America's menu of pain."
Reminds me of an old Richard Feynman quote from way back when deficits were first becoming "astronomical":
There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
Given the Reagonomics policy that deficits-are-A-okay and can always be reversed once the economy is sufficiently st-st-stimulated (tee hee), I wonder if these same attitudes can be successfully applied to our personal finances. Wait a minute, now I remember: Americans are applying these same principles to personal finance, with $7,200 in average household credit card debt (see Stats Attack 1).

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Social vs. Sexual Selection

Coturnix of Science and Politics is currently a guest contributer at Majikthise, and he's added a really interesting post that summarises and reviews Joan Roughgarden's book Evolution's Rainbow and her new article entitled Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection (abstract). He includes a number of excerpts from her writing, and adds his own rather well-founded opinion:
I do not agree that sexual selection is not confirmed. Even the first arguments, those of Darwin in Descent of Man are pretty strong [...]

A few years ago I did an almost exactly same experiment in two very different species: the Japanese quail and the crayfish. The results from the crayfish experiment were consistent with sexual selection and not with social selection theory. The data from quail were not consistent with sexual selection but were nicely explained by Roughgarden's social selection theory.

So, do not dismiss sexual selection yet, but don't dismiss Joan Roughgarden's ideas, either.
Update: A study on the influence of social selection just came out. Click here.

Warped Morality

Couple of stories of note (via Feministe):

A) A young woman in Iran was recently sentenced to death by hanging for defending herself and her 16 year old niece from would-be rapists:
As the girls tried to escape, the men once again attacked them, and at this point, Nazanin said, she stabbed one of the men in the chest. The teenage girl, however, broke down in tears in court as she explained that she had no intention of killing the man but was merely defending herself and her younger niece from rape, the report said.
B) Pakistani cleric Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi has offered a $1,000,000 bounty for the killing of cartoonists responsible for the Mohammed cartoons (see earlier post):
This is a unanimous decision by all imams of Islam that whoever insults the prophets deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize.
Firstly, I seriously doubt that this was really “a unanimous decision by all imams of Islam.” Secondly, I wonder what would happen if Sean Hannity offered a $1,000,000 prize for the killing of Ted Rall on the basis that he insulted Generalissimo El Busho. Qureshi should be jailed. Instead of “deserves to be killed” I think the strongest consequence they should be able to demand is “deserves to be excommunicated” considering the nature of the offense.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Stats Attack 1

A few select stats from the wonderful Numeric Life:

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

British Soldiers Beating Video

The only place I could find the raw video was break.com.
Watch the video (WMV), and listen to the commentary by the corporal who's filming the incident (yes, yesss, yyesssss ... dieeee), now that's hate.


Update: On a related note, TalkLeft has posted some of the new Abu Ghraib photos. They're arguably worse than the ones most of us have seen so far. If you've had enough already then don't bother with these though.

Multi-User Touch Interface

Over at Vic Divecha's Tech Blog there's a post mentioning that Apple has patented some multi-user interface technology developed at NYU:



For a video of the technology being demoed check out the homepage for the project (QT) or an alternate link here (Flash 8).

Monday, February 13, 2006

These Are My Moms

I noticed an October 2005 update (PDF) of the National Lesbian Family Study (NLFS) that follows the progress of children being raised by gay parents (N=74). The results for these kids show that, at 10 years of age, they've turned out completely normal so far:
In social and psychological development, the NLFS children were comparable to children raised in heterosexual families. The NLFS girls demonstrated fewer behavioral problems than age-matched peers. These findings are consistent with other studies demonstrating a high degree of emotional well-being in children of lesbian families (Anderssen et al., 2002; Bliss & Harris, 1999; Golombok et al., 2003).
One notable difference is that half of these children have experienced homophobia from their peers. One child writes:
last year a girl told me my moms were going to hell.
Something that caught my attention was their citation of a previous result that describes the children's character. To me these characteristics seem consistent with a child who is (a) teased by homophobes and (b) has attentive and caring parents:
Teachers in a New Mexico survey (Bliss & Harris, 1999) described children raised by lesbian and gay parents as having more problematic social interactions yet more self-confidence, maturity, and tolerance than their peers.
What everyone's dying to hear is more evidence relevant to nature versus nurture when it comes to homosexuality. Naturally I have my own assumptions on this, but unfortunately we'll have to wait another 7 years before this particular study gets a follow-up <sigh>. We're all curious I suppose but, really, “can parents turn kids gay?” and “can people choose to be straight?” should be completely irrelevant questions—unless you start from the premise that homosexuality is somehow bad.

Grrrr religion.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Atheism == Ø?

Found an excellent comment at the JREF Archives. An anonymous submitter writes:
I saw a quote I like, to rebuke the assertion that atheism is just another religion:
"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby"
It reminds me of something a friend said to me recently: [approx]
Religions are like a set of beliefs, so atheism is just an empty set, but it's still a belief system so it's fundamentally no better.
I guess I can see why atheism seems hypocritical from that point of view, but it seems like an excuse to be dismissive rather than a genuine observation. Consider an analogous [hypothetical] argument:
Faith-healing and medical science are both ways to heal people, so neither approach to healing is fundamentally better.
My point is that if two ideas are related then, well, they're related, and reducing things to the point where they have something in common is not a meaningful observation.

Deep down I'm sure Christians don't equate their religion with Scientology on any meaningful level—they probably view Scientology as a fraud, like most people do; well, atheists tend to look at all religion in a similar light, so who's being hypocritical?

Update: Turns out Majikthise has a related post.

I want to storm your love palace...

Jill at Feministe had a great thread a while back called Worst Pick-Up Line Ever. It's a gold mine I tellsya!
Guy: You girls smell really clean!
Girl: What kind of a line is that?
Guy: An honest line, man! You girls smell like you take a lot of baths.
And my personal favourite:
You must be a grain of sand between 62.5 and 125 μm because, according to the Wentworth scale of sediment size, you are fine

Is it conceivable for a grown man...

A brave woman, via MEMRI-TV...
Let me tell you what "pleasure from sexual contact with her thighs" means...
Ghada Jamshir
Women's Rights Activist
Click here to watch her interview.

Don't Worry, They Divorced

MEMRI-TV has an interview with a daughter of Anwar Sadat who was forced to marry when she was 12 years old and was subsequently beaten and impregnated.
My childhood was completely ruined, because they began to treat me as a woman.
Camelia Sadat

Click here to watch the interview, or go to the favourites section of MEMRI-TV for other interesting videos from the Middle East.

Free as in Speech

A brief survey of recent MEMRI-TV clips has turned up a nice collection of, how-you-say, presumptuous fundamentalist hatemongers. It turns out that the Mohammed cartoons were a Zionist plot all along. Very related to the last quote in my previous Dawkins post.

Pick your poison...
"It is the responsibility of the heads of state in the World Muslim Congress to demand legislation, that will be binding on the press and the media in the West, that will prevent the humiliation of our Prophet"
Hassan Nasrallah
Hizbullah Secretary-General
"This is a Crusader Zionist campaign, which is led by the extremist pro-Zionist right, headed by George Bush in America"
Ali Muhi Al-Din Al-Qardaghi
Statistician (not!)
"That's what this is about. This is the handiwork of the Zionists"

Ali Khamenei
Leader of Iran
Coming soon: Nukes!

I think Ali Khamenei may have had the Faurisson affair in mind when he implied that "the West" is hypocritical when it comes to free speech.

Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who for some reason decided to publish the cartoons in the first place, is facing numerous threats on his life. When asked whether he now regrets the decision, he responded:
That is a hypothetical question. I would say that I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque.
I see what he's trying to say, but it's a bit repulsive to compare his situation to that of a rape victim.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Richard Dawkins on BBC Radio

BBC Radio recently interviewed Professor Richard Dawkins regarding religion and his new documentary The Root of All Evil? It's always been clear to me that faith, in and of itself, is not a virtue, so I found myself nodding in agreement with this incisive comment by Dawkins:
What I think is special about religion is not that it's sometimes good and sometimes bad in what it does (which is certainly true, I mean there are good religious people and bad religious people), but it's the evil effects of, specifically, faith, which does not have to be defended, by evidence, by substantiation; faith by its very nature—and you're actually praised for this—you believe something just because you believe it and you don't have to provide a justification and you actually win brownie points if you do believe something without there being any justification. That I think is what's peculiarly dangerous about religion.
I think charity is much more worthy of the title virtue (since charity implies action), and the bible seems to agree:

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity" [1 Corinthians 13:13]

Not long ago I managed to really offend a friend of mine by suggesting that his beliefs might be different had he not been indoctrinated into Catholicism at such an early age. I didn't expect him to be offended, though, because it never occurred to me that this was even debatable—children are impressionable, and will absorb just about any belief you choose to reinforce. For example I suspect that, if a community repeatedly tought their children that dreams and nightmares are actually real and take place in an alternate universe, the children would be very inclined to continue believing this nonsense even as an adult—after all, I doubt you could explain dreams to their satisfaction otherwise, and how can you prove them wrong? White supremacy is real-life example (ever heard of Prussian Blue?). A relevant excerpt from the Dawkins interview:
I think that children should be taught religion at any age you like; the more religions the merrier. What they should not be taught is that you belong to this religion—you are a Catholic child, you are a Protestant child. Instead they should be taught religion in the sort of way that an anthropologist might look at religion: as a phenomenon of human belief. That is absolutely fine and it would have the advantage that they would pick up—because they're not stupid—they would pick up the contradictions between the different religions. I'm all for teaching religion. What I'm passionately against is labelling children: that child is a Catholic child, that child is a Muslim child, that child is a Protestant child; that I think is actually quite wicked.
Given the uproar and death threats incited by the recent Mohammed cartoons (Stop, stop! we ran out of virgins!), I thought this point was rather appropriate:
I think we've been respectful [of religion] for an awful long time. I think that religion does lay claim to a very large measure of respect which no other kind of opinion does. I think perhaps it's time to be a bit less respectful because, really, why should religious opinion be any more off-limits to critics than any other opinion? We don't back off from criticising someone else's political opinions or their economic opinions; why should we be expected to back off from criticising their religious opinions?
You can listen to the entire interview online (20 min).

Update: Panopticist has posted the Pastor Ted Haggard video segment from The Root of All Evil? that happens to correspond to the audio used in the BBC interview. The video is available right here (7 min, QT).

Overheard in NY

The site Overheard in NY is full of thought-provoking conversations:

Girl #1: There are like, so many orthodox Jews at the law school. Why would they come to a Jesuit school if they're orthodox Jews?
Girl #2: Well, it's not like everyone else is Catholic.
Girl #1: But Jews are like the opposite of Catholics, they're, like, not even close.
Girl #2: You're a slut; that's not very Catholic.

--Fordham University, Lincoln Center

I don't know what Girl #2 is basing that on.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Chuka-Cannon

The Japanese are so awesome. I swear I've seen this before in my dreams.


I wonder what a "chuka" might be...

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Separate But Equal is Not Equal

Harper's Magazine recently published an essay by Jonathan Kozol entitled Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid. As I read the stories from teachers and students inside NYC public schools, my jaw must've dropped a dozen times and I remember saying a few no-f**king-ways out loud.

Kozol explores the inequity faced by inner-city public schools and he reveals the hypocrisy of privileged parents and officials who promote standardized testing as fair while giving their own children an unfair advantage. At one point Kozol follows a teacher who reluctantly subjects her 4th grade students to a newly mandated system of regimentation and control over children's behaviour:
Suddenly, with a seeming surge of restlessness and irritation—with herself, as it appeared, and with her own effective use of all the tricks that she had learned—she turned to me and said, "I can do this with my dog."
Equally disturbing are the ways in which politicians and school officials defend the introduction of these demoralizing policies into public schools:
The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes."
You can find a copy of Kozol's essay online right here.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Numero Uno

Here we go! My first post will link to some blogs that, as of this fine snowy day in 2006, I tend to find worthwhile: