Here's yer sign!

This morning I got an email from a new reader commenting on my blog profile:

Like you, I am a self-professed overeducated liberal atheist. Imagine my surprise (and disappointment), therefore, to find you touting your astrological sign as a prime aspect of introduction on your web page. Do you think astrology makes more sense than God cults? (I don't.)

Naturally, I had to reply:

Let me set your mind at ease: I didn't tout my astrological sign at all. Blogger.com asks you to enter your birthday when you first sign up, and it automatically computes your sign and proudly displays it for you. I have no more truck with that nonsense than you do. In fact, I'm looking at the blogger options right now to see if I can find a way to turn it off, and I can't.

Let me take an opportunity to tell a funny story about astrology. It's a story I tell often when the subject comes up, but somehow it has escaped getting the blog treatment until now.

When I was but a wee nerd in college, I used to love a local San Diego morning radio show called "Dave, Shelly and Chainsaw." In fact, I loved it so much that I volunteered to do some of their web content for them, and if you poke around the site you'll still find some things I wrote (though uncredited). That experience helped me get a background in HTML, which led to harder drugs like Javascript and CGI programming, etc.

Anyway (tangent!) in addition to the three hosts, there is a guy named Chris Boyer. As far as I could tell, his main jobs were to play drum fills after jokes, make annoying comments, and get ridiculed by the primary folks.

So one day, the DSC show was graced with the presence of A Famous Astrologer. Dave, Shelly, and Chainsaw all seem to have bought into astrology hook line and sinker. Boyer was the one who was skeptical of astrology, and the others gave him no end of grief about it. They kept insisting that this lady was so good that he'd become a believer. In fact, they decided amongst themselves that the first thing they would do was make her do a reading on Boyer.

So the astrologer arrived, they explained the situation to her, and she laughed and said she would do it. She began by asking Boyer for his birthday. Then she proceeded to tell Boyer all sorts of details about his personality.

The other three were just eating it up. They were chortling and punctuating every sentence with "That's Boyer EXACTLY!" "You're getting this absolutely right!" and so on. Chris just sat there and took it like a trooper, politely accepting everything she told him.

Finally, after a few minutes, he asked, "Are you finished?" She said "That's all." Boyer calmly concluded: "That wasn't really my birthday."

Wooooo, check me out, I'm famous!

First PZ Myers starts regularly linking my posts on the The Atheist Experience, now Dilbert creator Scott Adams links an old post of mine.

FYI, that's original work -- after noticing a certain creepy aspect about Pope Benedict, I spent quite a bit of time googling up pictures that were posed just right to highlight the similarity between Benedict and Palpatine.

Thoughts on home schooling

I am writing this post partly to respond to "government school scabs", a post on Fiery Ewok's blog, and the ensuing discussion. In this post, a person named Russ showed up to eloquently express his strong support for home schooling, and was roundly cheered on by the posters. My wife and I have had a long-standing disagreement about this topic, and so she asked me to read his post. It triggered a rather unproductive argument, and I don't think that I've ever completely laid out my point of view on the subject here. So I'm writing this post to try to get my views on home schooling into a coherent structure.

First of all, let me make clear my background. This is a bit long and personal, so I've put a bold text heading down below so you can skip to the part where I lay out my views. Still, this is going to be relevant background.

I have been the beneficiary of both public and private schools, as well as parents who really cared about my education at all stages. Both my parents worked. I went to preschool as a young child, then went to early school in Auburn, Alabama until about fourth grade. After that, we moved to Santa Fe, where I was in private school until high school age -- about four years. Then I commuted from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, where I went to LAHS for all four years, taking a number of AP classes before ultimately getting accepted into the UC college system. In my family, it was never really a question of whether I would go to college or not; the only question was where. My parents are both Ph.D's, and they were really active in keeping an eye on my school performance.

Obviously, in many ways I had an atypical public school environment. Los Alamos High has a reputation as a truly excellent high school. I don't remember what my school in Auburn (Cary Woods Elementary) was like academically, but I do remember liking most of my teachers and having good memories. And of course, I got to spend the junior high years in private school, which I hear are pretty bad years for some people, including my sister.

Like many kids, I was picked on sometimes, at every stage, including private schools. At the time it seemed like I was picked on a lot. Looking back, it may have been relatively mild treatment, especially considering my status as an outspoken atheist. I remember being punched on more than one occasion, but I never got into any major fights. I particularly remember that when I was a teenager at summer camp, and during my first year of high school, a lot of people made it clear that they really didn't like me. I had to do a lot of self-reflection, centered around whether I really cared if people liked me, and I decided that I did. I made an effort to change the way I approached people.

You can see this effort gradually paying off if you read my high school yearbooks. In freshman year, I didn't even bother to get a yearbook. In sophomore year, I had a smattering of signatures on mostly lonely pages, some of the comments not particularly flattering. In junior year, I had a lot more signatures, and one senior girl even left a sloppy lipstick kiss on one page. My senior yearbook is crammed with signatures, many of them saying that they'll miss me a lot, and some younger students saying they considered me an inspiration. It was a warm feeling, because it was something I struggled to accomplish. I also remember a seminal moment, which I think occurred during the All-State chorus trip, where I made up with someone I had once considered a nemesis as a freshmen (a particularly snarky girl named Kim Coulter). Kim and I hugged, I was sorry for being such a dork to her, she was sorry for being rude to me, and we were kind-of friends right up to graduation day.

I can't say I was ever really a popular kid, even in college, and perhaps also to this day. But still, social skills ARE something that I came to grips with as a result of being in public school. I learned some things about how to talk so that people will listen, and listen so people will talk. I learned the value of getting involved in community activities, which at the time meant things like the debate team and French club. I learned how to make people laugh with me instead of at me (most of the time) and how to stand up for myself and make sure I got noticed.

Besides that, I had a number of teachers I liked. I also had a number of teachers I didn't like. But the ones I didn't like are growing dimmer in my memory, and the ones I liked are among the important people who shaped the way I am today.

And now, finally, thoughts on home schooling

I'm of two minds about home schooling. On the one hand, I don't see anything especially wrong with the concept, if it is done right. Engage your kids, get them a curriculum, work with them every day, and teach them what they need to know. I don't see why you, as a dedicated parent, should be worse at it than professional teachers. If nothing else, you've got an unusually small class size on your side. That's a huge benefit.

But education is something I take very seriously. The world is a huge, complicated place, full of scientific ideas and confusing technology that didn't exist a hundred years ago. The goal of an effective education is to get you up to speed with correct information on subjects you need to know about. That also includes understanding history and literature, how to construct a personal essay or an original argument, and how to read anything from a few paragraphs to a novel and extract meaning and value out of it.

Being a teacher is a hard job. A good teacher is someone who understands their subject, not just a little better than his or her students, but so much better that they understand both the subject and the best way to get it across. Of course not all teachers are good teachers, but I both know personally and have been the beneficiary of many good teachers, and I can say that their value in kids' lives as both mentors and role models cannot be overstated.

And of course, many parents are also potentially good teachers. And if those parents are willing to dedicate the kind of hours that teachers put in, then that's great for them. But some parents have other interests outside of their kids. There is nothing wrong with that. I didn't pick a career in teaching, and I'd much rather go to work with adults every day than spend twelve years focusing primarily on passing on knowledge to a single student. One reason is that it seems like an inefficient use of my time. I can understand a stay-at-home parent finding it enjoyable to put in the time and effort. But even stay-at-home parents don't always find it stimulating to spend three to six hours a day teaching arithmetic and simple reading. (I've guessed at that range because school lasts six hours, but home schoolers are quick to point out that not all of those hours consist of productive learning time. I've heard many argue that much less than half the time is spent learning; all I can say is that this has never remotely matched my own experience.)

Let me stress that there is nothing wrong with not wanting to put in the time. If I enjoy doing something else that helps me grow as a person, then I shouldn't be forced to spend that time on what I've already said is a difficult and sometimes tedious task. That's one important reason why I appreciate the fact that the state has thoughtfully set up a massive infrastructure, for which we all share the costs, and which provides trained professionals to do the work if I haven't got the time. Frankly, it would seem a little silly for me to feel trapped into doing something I don't want to do if I've already paid for somebody else to do that thing for me.

Public schools receive a lot of criticism, and some of it is justified. I've felt for several years that the public school system has been systematically underfunded. In addition, at least since Bush took office, a lot of ineffective programs have been put in place, such as standardized testing, which has the effect of forcing even good teachers to move towards rote memorization of concepts instead of exposing kids to the exciting parts of absorbing new materials.

Yet as a self-avowed liberal, I do not regard this as the inevitable result of state funding. People who have a more libertarian bent than I do often casually denigrate public schools as "government schools," as if invoking the big, bad boogeyman of government should automatically make it obvious what the problem is.

I reject this completely. I think I can't do much better here than to repeat a point in a post I wrote last year, entitled Why I Am Not a Libertarian:

"...libertarians argue that we should do away with our public school system because it's broken. But what are they comparing it to? Which are the countries that outperform us in math and science? Countries like Japan, Canada, and Germany. Do these countries model the libertarian ideal? Of course not. Like us, they have public schools with national standards. They do the same thing we do, but better. Are there ANY examples around the world of the voucher program being successful?"

It is worth noting that in response to that post, I received a number of examples of countries that had non-traditional school systems, but none of them were what I'd describe as a desirable role models. Instead, I heard a lot about third world countries where poor kids got a bare minimum education.

This post isn't about school vouchers and poor kids; this is about home schooling and YOUR kids. The thing is, though, it's hard for me to take seriously that "government" is what's wrong with all the schools, when I got what I consider to be a damn fine government education at several stages. I didn't get the creativity beaten out of me. I got some bad teachers, and they made me dislike certain subjects, but even in those cases I often had enough appreciation for learning that I later went on to revisit those same subjects and understand them.

Home schooling advocates argue that it's important for parents to be actively involved in their kids' education, and to keep an eye on what they're learning, and I agree. But of course, having this approach to parenting does not exclude also letting your kids learn elsewhere, even if their teachers might get paid by "the government." By all means, keep tabs on your child's homework. Engage in discussion with him or her. Find out how homework is going, and which subjects are interesting. If you're not willing to put in that much effort -- an hour in the evenings each day -- then you certainly aren't ready to be a full time teacher.

Besides the defense of traditional schools that I've just tried to lay out, I have a few more specific concerns about home schooling. I will lay these out briefly in the remainder of this post.

First, there's the issue of getting different perspectives from different people. The simple fact is that no one person knows everything. I certainly don't. Neither, of course, does any one teacher. But if your kid is going to school for twelve years, he or she will be meeting a lot of different teachers who know a lot of different subjects -- some of them (believe it or not) quite well. Now some home schoolers join communities where the kids work with many different parents, in their neighborhood or elsewhere, and that seems like a good move to me. But others do not. If you are your child's only teacher for the vast majority of the time, they'll only be getting one person's perspective throughout most of their education. If there are areas where your own knowledge is weak and you don't realize it, you risk passing on bad information throughout your child's education. If you are bad at (for example) art, your child is never going to get new perspectives from a teacher who is good at art.

For an extreme example, consider the home schooling scenes in Jesus Camp. Levi's mother is feeding her son all kinds of bad information about science, but she has no idea that this is the case because she doesn't understand science and only speaks to other people who don't understand science. She isn't trying to deliberately subvert Levi's knowledge, but she simply isn't in a position to explain something that she doesn't know.

Which brings me to my second major concern about home schooling: The tendency to put your kids in a bubble. The Jesus Camp parents do it on purpose, and of course many well-meaning parents do not. Despite this, I think that the effect can easily be the same whether you intend it or not. Being your child's main teacher is a great way to make sure that he gets your point of view almost exclusively. While this sounds like a good idea in the short term, in the long term it has the potential to be harmful.

What I said earlier about teachers also applies to people in general. People are social animals. We gain knowledge and experience by being around each other. Coming in contact with a lot of people broadens your chance of meeting more really great folks who will influence your life positively. And the ones who aren't so great... well, life is full of those anyway. If you don't learn how to deal with them when you're a kid, it will be that much harder to learn when you're an adult.

It might help to think of it like inoculation to diseases. If you are afraid of germs, then you might want to spend your life in a literal bubble, using sanitary wipes all the time and avoiding direct contact with anyone who might be carrying a disease. The problem is that if you start using that as a way to stay healthy, then you pretty much have to adopt that strategy for the rest of your life. Once you step out of that bubble, all the diseases that you never built up an immunity to will be there, just waiting to get you. On the other hand, if you get those diseases early, under safer conditions, then later on you won't have to worry about those diseases doing more serious damage.

I don't mean to say that people are diseases, of course. I just want to make the point that the more people you meet, the more you figure out how to approach them. You learn that some situations call for a friendly, diplomatic approach to gain trust, while other situations call for caution to avoid being taken advantage of. Again, you either learn this early or you learn it late.


In summary, there are several things that schools provide, and these should not be taken lightly. They provide exposure to a wide variety of people, both students and teachers, many of whom are potentially positive people who will expand your children's horizons. They provide an early chance to deal with challenges, whether they are social or academic, in an environment that is generally more forgiving of mistakes than real life. They provide years of access to dozens of paid professionals who have been doing the job of teaching for a long time and are familiar with the issues of students from all walks of life.

None of this should be taken as an indication that I am fundamentally opposed to home schooling. I believe that there are ways of doing it correctly, which can provide all of the above advantages while strengthening the parent-child relationship. But I wish to repeat, one last time, that teaching is hard work. It is easy to be an armchair quarterback and believe that "government schools" are messing up your kids, if you're not already getting involved with the school and the work yourself.

Thomas Edison is often tossed out as an example of a child who thrived in a home schooling environment. While this is true, the example is somewhat misleading. Edison's mother had been a professional teacher already, and was already especially qualified to teach her son. That doesn't mean that you need strong credentials in order to be a successful teacher, but knowledge and experience shouldn't be scoffed at as valuable tools.

Of course public schools aren't perfect. But they're not perfectly awful, either. In Fiery Ewok's thread, some people were damning school with faint praise by saying: Maybe school helps you by making your life so miserable that your scars make you a stronger person. And that may be consistent with what I've said in this post, but only in a glass-is-half-empty kind of way. There are a lot of things we do in life when we'd rather be doing something else: practice a musical instrument, work out at the gym, take proficiency exams. Sometimes those activities are not so fun, but we do them anyway. Do we do them because we are proud of our ability to withstand unpleasantness and accept scars? No, we do them because they make us better at things we want to be able to do. We do those things because we are smart people who can delay gratification in order improve our lives in the future.

School isn't just bad times for everybody. We meet new people, we learn new information. That's a big part of why I went back to graduate school. When I finished my Bachelor's degree, I felt at the time like I never wanted to go to school again. But after years of not going to school, I had nostalgic feelings about sitting in a room full of people who were discovering information that they never new before, from somebody who knows the subject and is dedicated to passing it on. I don't go to school because I love taking tests and pulling Frappucino-fueled all-nighters and having nightmares when I finally go to sleep; I go because going through the rigors of studying and taking tests and doing homework help me reach new levels of self-actualization.

That's what education means to me, and I hope that you home schoolers out there are working hard to give your kids the experiences they deserve.

Hey Orson Scott Card fans! Not disillusioned yet?

Every once in a while, I can't help rubbernecking the hideous wreckage that is Orson Scott Card's personality. Card wrote some sci-fi books that I greatly enjoyed (Ender's Game and Pastwatch being my favorites, along with some great dialogue for adventure games). Even though Card is a devout Mormon, some of his work even contains highly believable and empathetic atheist characters. The messages are generally interesting and Ender's Game, while being primarily about a war to wipe out an entire species, still manages to put forth the notion that war should be an absolute last resort, and aggression should only be initiated when there is no way to defend yourself through communication.

Besides that, Jeff Dee once loaned me an audio tape of Card imitating a preacher in the very funny and poignant presentation, "Secular Humanist Revival." He praised the value of secularism in American culture, and warned against takeover by rampant fundamentalism.

But either I totally misunderstood his philosophy through his fiction and public speaking, or at some point in his life he just made a palpable shift from being lovable and entertaining "Uncle Orson" to being a batshit crazy theocrat who spouts right wing talking points. Card now does a column called "War Watch" in which he regularly jabbers about how people oppose the war because they hate America, Democrats are worse appeasers than Neville Chamberlain, etc.

A few days ago, somebody drew my attention to some recent comments that he made, reminding everyone that atheism is one of the most terrifying threats to American culture today. Responding to some Christian author who asked whether Mormons are "true Christians," he replied:

We Mormons don’t agree with you on many vital points of doctrine. But I hope we all agree with each other about this: In a time when a vigorous atheist movement is trying to exclude religious people from participating in American public life unless they promise never to mention or think about their religion while in office, why are we arguing with each other?

Oh noes! Teh angry athiests r going 2 pwnz0r teh xian nation! Mwa ha ha ha, all ur churches r belong 2 us!

This, of course, led me to check out Card's personal site to see what other mischief he's getting into lately. I discovered he's decided to go back in time and retroactively defile his own beloved series with his newfound hilarious paranoia. Check it out.

Coming This Fall: A War of Gifts

Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender's first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn't see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn't exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student's shoe.

This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.

Yes, Merry Christmas, Ender fans. In a time when hostile bug-eyed aliens threaten to wipe out humanity for good, the biggest battle will be... The War over Santa Claus.

Honestly, it's almost like Present Orson, the hack neocon blogger, read some material by Past Orson, the talented science fiction author, and decided to write some extremely bad fan fiction that imitated his hero while completely missing the point.

Hey, that would make a good sci-fi story. You could incorporate a time machine and one of those flashy memory erasers from Men In Black. Somebody should write that. Can anybody go dig up Past Orson and see if he's doing anything?

Pwned

Scooter goes free

When I first heard the news that Scooter Libby escaped from jail, my first impulse -- apart from the obvious disgust -- was just apathy. Eh. Libby is a small potato. He was put away for obstruction of justice, and not the main perpetrator of the crime. They should have kept following the trail until it reached Rove, Cheney, or Bush.

But then I realized: The crime of outing Valerie Plame is the ONLY crime that has been prosecuted in the service of investigating going to war based on lies. And Scooter Libby is the ONLY person who has received any kind of punishment for this crime. And now he's gotten off, with a mere word from the president.

Yeah, now I'm pissed. This wasn't a pardon of some "family man" based on a bunch of whiny commentators feeling sorry for his kids. This was the Bush administration brazenly pardoning themselves and ducking responsibility for their actions yet again.

I've been tagged

As Ginny pointed out, she and I are both now two times removed from PZ Myers: Possum Momma got tagged by him to write 8 random facts about herself, and we got tagged by her. So here you are.

The obligatory rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
   
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog

1. I am a really good skier, or at least I used to be. It's easy to get the practice when you spend eight years living ten minutes from the base of a popular ski mountain. I've skied numerous trails rated double black diamond, and I loved moguls. I don't think I've skied in about ten years, although I still have my my own skis stashed in my garage. They are red and significantly taller than I am. The better you are, the bigger skis you use (adds speed but reduces maneuverability).

2. At one of my first real jobs in college, I worked in a La Jolla office that had a big window overlooking the beach. At the time, I didn't fully appreciate how unusually awesome that is.

3. I hardly drank alcohol at all until I was of legal age. I didn't have a major moral objection, I just didn't much like drinking and saw too many people thinking they were being witty and interesting while they were drunk and I was sober. There were ten guys living in my freshman dorm suite, and only two of us never drank. The other one was a Mormon.

4. I almost injured myself very badly while climbing down a fairly treacherous path cutting through a cliff to Black's Beach in San Diego. I made the trip pretty often. This one time, I was trying to hang down over a low drop, but I lost my grip. I fell a short distance and would have hit my head on a rock, but instead my head landed on my backpack, which had a towel inside. And yet I still don't believe in God.

5. At my bar mitzvah, the Torah portion that I read in Hebrew and gave a speech about was the passage containing "An eye for an eye."

6. The first girl I ever loved had been my friend since we were born two weeks apart in the same hospital. The friendship ended the day I said I was in love with her, because she didn't take that information well. Today she is a TV actress, who gets a lot of bit parts on popular shows. I've seen her on three or four shows but I'm long since over her.

7. I once got roughly yanked away from a museum display case by a guard in Paris, because I couldn't understand him when he told me I was standing too close.

8. I can't stand football, but I used to live in Auburn, Alabama, where college football is a major focus of the residents' social lives. My parents and I used to drive around fraternity row during the days leading up to football games, so we could look at all the incredibly elaborate motorized paper mache sculptures of Aubie the Tiger who was brutalizing the opposing team's mascot somehow (i.e., cooking them in a pot, running over them with a car, etc).

Now I'm supposed to tag some more people, but since most of the bloggers I know have already been tagged, there won't be too many. Sorry, but some of these require membership or special access.

1. Keryn
2. Gil (he doesn't seem to have a blog yet, but since one is available, it's high time he used it)
3. Jeff Dee
4. Martin Wagner
5. Azzurra
   

If I forgot that I know more untagged people with blogs, please don't feel slighted, just email me! There's room for a few more.

Evolutionary tradeoffs

And now it's time for: Ask Dr. Layman about evolution! A recently posed question about evolution at TMF:

Why didnt mammals ever evolve the ability to fly? Bats and flying squirrels dont count - they are odd. I mean real birdlike mammals. Flying with the eagles. Pecking with the pigeons.

After all they did evolve swimming like fish (dolphins and whales).

The answer, of course, is that they did. (Bats don't count? Whyever not?) But as the discussion progressed, the poster started reworking his question to ask why MOST mammals can't fly. He went on to point out the many advantages of flight (moving quicker to food, getting away from enemies, getting away from bad weather, etc) and concluded that there are no major down sides to flight. When someone pointed out that flying requires lighter bones and stronger muscles, and such additional adaptations, he asked why mammals don't just go ahead and evolve those things.

Of course no law prevents this from happening, as should be obvious by the fact that bats did evolve in exactly that way. But just because flight is good for some animals doesn't mean it's good for all animals. Not every feature which is helpful in some way should be assumed universally available. Every species has strengths and weaknesses, and the effect of evolution is that it sort of naturally "chooses" an area of specialization.

It's sort of like if you asked your dentist why he doesn't know how to do open heart surgery. You might say "Why couldn't you learn open heart surgery? Don't you think that would be a valuable skill for you to have?" No one would say that it's not a valuable skill, but based on his personal circumstances and choices, he's a dentist. He has a career in that. It wouldn't HURT to know about open heart surgery as well, but the payoff would not be good enough to justify the extra time and effort that goes into learning it.

Similarly, it's not bad for an animal to be able to fly. But it wouldn't be very useful for, say, a grizzly bear to evolve into a flying animal. Because moving in a direction that makes flight feasible would require certain features to change that would make it less good at being a grizzly bear.

While flight is a cool feature, so is being gigantic and strong. Cool features don't come for free; every cool feature you have requires higher intake of food (unless of course the cool feature is a highly efficient energy processing system). At some point, the set of features you have is already useful enough that adding one more cool feature is not useful enough to justify the energy cost. When that happens, your species doesn't get to keep the new mutations. Evolution works in small steps, and any trade-off which proves to be a bad one in the short term gets eliminated.

Meanwhile, in gaming news...

Two words: Starcraft 2!!!!!!!

I didn't bother posting it earlier, but I might as well bring up the "Hell Yeah" moment I experienced a few weeks ago when it was announced. Like many gamers, Starcraft is an old, old love of mine, and I look forward to revisiting it next year.

In other gaming news, those of you who tried Kingdom of Loathing in the past should probably give it another look next week, when the NS13 update rolls out. The game's getting longer and tougher, the Naughty Sorceress is getting bigger and meaner.

But back to Starcraft. Ginny and I used to play cooperative games on our network all the time. We weren't world class but we were a competent team, sometimes taking on three or four computer opponents at a time. Even so, her own excitement at the announcement of Starcraft 2 surprised me, since she had hardly played games at all since Ben was born. I showed her the cinematic video of the marine getting armored up, and then later I got the gameplay video, which looks extremely cool.

Now she's interested again, and we've played a bunch of Starcraft 1, shaking the rust off our abilities. Yay! Blizzard is saving my marriage.

Just kidding honey! Not that it needed saving. :)

Criticizing Islam

One very frequently asked question asked of us on The Atheist Experience goes something like this: "Every time I watch you guys, you always seem to be bad-mouthing Christianity. There's lots of other bad religions out there. Why don't you criticize Islam more?" This question was asked again on last week's show, and then repeated in email, sparking a small internal debate on whether we should in fact be focusing more on Islam.

I contributed this to the discussion:

Please tell me, when was the last time that anyone called and tried to defend Islam as a true and correct worldview? When, in the entire history of our show, have we EVER been asked to defend atheism from Islam?

I imagine it has happened once or twice, though I can't personally remember a single time in the show's entire history. That's a history that goes back a good 10 years or so.

We don't spend time on Islam because nobody freakin' believes Islam. There are people in the world who do believe Islam, but those people mostly aren't watching our show. If they did, and they called or wrote to us, we'd take them on. Just like we take on every silly idea that
comes our way.

But the fact remains that it is a complete waste of time to go out of our way debunking something that everybody already knows isn't true. It would be amusing, but it wouldn't be any more relevant than spending an entire show debunking Santa Claus. It would be like spending an entire show explaining why putting your cat in the microwave is a bad idea. To all but a very, very tiny percentage of our audience, it would just be reaffirming something that's totally obvious to them.

Disclaimer: Not putting Islam on the same moral footing as a cat in a microwave, one way or the other.

I want to add that this is very different from me saying that Islam is not a serious threat to our culture. Sam Harris has pointed out many times that liberals have a tendency to overemphasize religious tolerance, and underplay the role of religion in inspiring people to do some really crazy stuff.

But our show is outreach. It's aimed at communicating with a culture that is largely dominated by Christianity. It is about dealing with things that we face on a daily basis here in the United States. Of course there's a lot of focus on Christianity; Christianity is what our culture wants to talk about.

What, you want more?

Several people have brought to my attention the fact that my blog is suffering from severe lack of updates.

Since the original reason for this blog's existence was to archive things that I wrote for the Motley Fool, I guess I'll return to my roots and browse for likely things to repost. Expect several updates in the next day or too.

Happy now?

Sar-doo-what?

I heard this on the Rachel Maddow Show and found it amusing at the time.

A kid in the national spelling bee was asked to spell the word "Sardoodledom," which apparently means "melodramatic plot." The 11 year old kid couldn't spell the word until he stopped giggling about it.

The story was posted in several places, but Rachel Maddow's show is the only place where I could find the audio. That's why I cut out the audio portion of their coverage so you could listen to the audio here. It's cute.

Coulter vs. Coulter

Bet you never thought you'd hear Ann Coulter call president Bush "stupid," did you?

Ann Coulter, 5/30/07:

"Americans -- at least really stupid Americans like George Bush -- believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law and a robust democratic economy. On this view, most of the existing world and almost all of world history is a freakish aberration."

Gosh, what are we to make of American citizens who don't support our dear president? Oh, I know!

Ann Coulter, 6/23/04:

COLMES: "Are all the American people that don't support him dumb?"
COULTER: "No. I think, as I indicated in my last book, they're traitors."

Git a rope.

Sweet dreams are not made of these

This is another one of those school posts, so you can skip it if you don't read those...

I had another one of those dreams last night. It's the last week of school; I'm almost ready for finals. Then somebody asks me how I did on my homework in another class, and I realize this is
a class that I was originally taking at the beginning of the semester, but I have forgotten to attend for the last month or two. There are two such classes -- I thought I was taking just two classes for the semester, but I suddenly remember that it used to be four. There has already been a homework that I have missed in each class, and I'm woefully unprepared for both finals.

The really funny part is that in my dream, I'm thinking: "Oh no, this is just like one of those dreams I'm always having! Only this time it's real!" And then I woke up, and it still took me a few more minutes to realize it wasn't.

Also at another point in my dream, I was using my laptop on a stove because there were no other convenient surfaces to work on. I just had a shallow frying pan sitting on the stove, and the laptop was resting inside it, and I had a chair pulled up to the counter. So I'm working for a while when suddenly I realize that (of course!) the burner's been on. I think "Well, maybe I caught it in time." But when I turn the computer over and look, the bottom is all melted off and there's a big mess of singed wires and stuff underneath.

By the way, as for my ACTUAL finals, they went just fine. One of them was fairly easy and straightforward, and I feel pretty sure of an A in the class. The other one was hard, almost unfairly so. But the entire class, out in the hall afterwards, ALL looked miserable and we all had a good bitch session about how unfairly hard it was. That's good news for the curve, and this professor has been generous with some grading in the past, so I feel reasonably optimistic on the whole.

I mostly have these nightmares after school is over and I don't have as many real things to worry about. Although I did have another dream during finals week, where my high school teacher Mr. Laeser showed up and told me that I was going to have to work on another large project for HIM during the last six months while I try to get my thesis ready.

UPDATE:

This just in: I got an A in Real-Time Systems, the class with the brutal final. I got a 54 out of 70 on the final; the class average was 44. Yes, I AM that guy who ruins the curve for everyone. :)

Party time!

One thing I have to say about Dr. Mok, he gives really bad assignments and tests, but he makes up for it by being ridiculously generous with the grading. I had no clue what I was doing on half those questions, and there is no way I really deserved a 54. But hey, I'm not complaining. Seriously.

Another meaningless gaming milestone reached!

Go, me! Through dedication, hard work, and entirely too much time wasted, I have acquired all six pieces of the best outfit in the Kingdom of Loathing! Check me out.

Nobody will care except those people whom I have introduced to this idiotic game, but this suit gives me an additional 60% stats, plus extra hit points and mana, plus huge amounts of extra combat damage and spell damage, more adventures, and elemental resistance. It also makes me more likely to get the first shot in combat, helps me find more items after each fight, increases the effectiveness of my pets, and lets me hum four songs in my head! Goody!

Oh god, I've wasted my life. :)

Spring semester home stretch

I'm completely done with one homework, 90% done with the other! I'm also about 75% prepared for both of my tests this Saturday. It feels pretty good and reasonably non-panicky, compared with the ends of other semesters.

Then, this Sunday: Six Flags! (Ben is over 42" tall now, which means he gets to ride on the not-totally-sucky rides.)

Saturday after that: Performing Schubert and Bach! (I just hope I can get through the show without totally screwing up my fellow tenors. I had to skip two rehearsals this week on account of exams. I DID warn the director ahead of time, and asked him if he wanted me to sit out this performance as a result. He said "Stay in... you seem to be pretty solid on your part right now." Okay, who am I to argue?)

Coming next: Summer class on web servers! I get serious about my Master's Thesis!

My first Jehovah's Witnesses!

As a break from my preparation for final exams yesterday, my wife brought me a nice little present: Jehovah's Witnesses at the door.

I have heard many stories about JWs bothering people at home, but I've never had the good fortune to be visited by any myself. When the doorbell rang, Ginny peered out the window and said "Oh Russell, you'd better get that." "Really? Who is it?" I asked.

She explained that she'd been visited by this little old lady a few weeks ago. After telling the nice lady that we were atheists, Ginny received an edition of "Watchtower" (which I remember rifling through and chuckling at, but not reading all the way through). This time, the little old lady brought her (50ish) daughter along with her as reinforcements.

I opened the door with my most polite smile, and then I introduced myself. They said they'd heard I was an atheist, and I immediately said I was an OUTSPOKEN atheist, and that they should watch The Atheist Experience on Sundays.

The younger woman immediately launched into a prepared shpiel about how she probably agrees with each other that people who do not understand TRUE Christianity do very bad things in the name of their religion, and their religion is not like that at all... I cut her off and let her know that, while I sometimes don't care for the practices of religion, that has almost no bearing on why I am an atheist. I am an atheist because I don't believe in any evidence for God.

At that point, as you might expect, we started to bounce around from topic to topic at a furious pace. The younger lady was doing most of the arguing (albeit in a nice, friendly tone), while the older lady's role appeared to be periodically brandishing the Bible that she clutched like a security blank, and occasionally either alluding to a passage within it or looking it up and reading it to me. I kept reminding her that that was nice and all, but I don't believe that the Bible has any special status as an accurate source of information, so reading those quotes means little more to me than quoting "The Odyssey."

The younger woman would ask, for instance: "If there's no God, then where do you think morality comes from?" I replied quite matter-of-factly that morality comes from human perceptions, and develops over time as societies do. The older woman said "Oh, but our societal morals are so much worse now!" "Not at all," I replied. In many ways, it is better. For instance, I said, during the time of the Bible, people supported slavery as a good idea. Now they don't. There you go: the perception changed, and it was an improvement over the Bible.

Naturally, they started to mount a defense of how "Biblical" slavery is different from slavery as we know it, which I headed off by asking if it would be a good idea to bring back Biblical slavery in modern times. It was a roundabout discussion, but eventually the answer (to my somewhat surprise) was "yes." So I said "I guess that's one way that my understanding of morality differs from the Bible. I believe that slavery is wrong, and clearly you do not."

Then they started trying to talk about how we are enslaved in OTHER ways even today, and I said "Even so, I believe that metaphorical enslavement is a big step up from explicit, instituional slavery." Then the mother started talking about how the devil enslaves us all. "Yes, I understand that you believe that," I said. "But you see, I don't believe in the devil, so that doesn't bother me."

The daughter stressed several times that they were not going around trying to convince anybody of anything. "Really?" I asked, acting surprised. "Why not? It's okay if you DO want to convince me; that wouldn't bother me at all." But again, she insisted that she had no desire to make me change my mind. "But why not?" I asked. "Don't you believe that unbelievers will be tormented in the afterlife? If I believed that, I'D probably want to convince other people to change their minds."

No no no, said the daughter. That's those other, FALSE Christians who believe that stuff. "Oh," I said. "Then please explain to me what your religion says will happen to people who don't come around to your point of view." She hedged and waffled a bit, first saying it's not only Jehovah's Witnesses who are saved. "Yes, but what about an atheist like me?" I asked, keeping her on topic. She said "Well we can't judge you, only God does that. Perhaps you'll be saved anyway." "Yes, but what if I'm not?" I persisted. "Then you will be destroyed." "Oh, *I* see!" I concluded, trying to grasp the fine points of a religion that says my punishment is merely to be destroyed rather than tormented, and yet live eternally apart from God. "So again, why don't you want to convince me? You don't want me to be destroyed, do you?" Of course, she said that's really up to me, and shortly thereafter we changed the subject.

From there we moved on to how I can't be frightened by threats when I have no good reason to believe in the threats. There are thousands of religions to choose from. Perhaps you're going to hell too, if it turns out that Islam is correct. All these Christians whom you say are false Christians, maybe they're right and you're wrong. I have no basis for choosing between all these religions except your word, which is based on your holy book, which you assume is correct but I have no reason to share this assumption.

Then she started telling me how the modern Bible so perfectly predicts all the findings of modern science, and I said "Oh really, what about a six day creation?" I wanted to feel out whether she was a young earther, and it turned out she wasn't. So I asked why not. "There's certainly nothing in the Bible to indicate anything other than a six day creation, and if you're right then what's up with all Christians who use the Bible to justify a six-day creation?" She explained why the Bible COULD support a reading of non-literal days. "But that's not the Bible being accurate about science," I objected. "That's science making discoveries, and religion being reinterpreted to match the facts afterwards." She insisted that this was not the case, and so I asked why it was that people never realized that the earth was billions of years old just from reading the Bible. Science had to come along FIRST and discover the age of the earth, and only then could the Bible be interpreted to support what scientists had already found out.

She didn't know the answer to that one, but then she changed the subject to the inaccuracy of evolution. So I asked if she could explain to me how evolution works, because I was pretty sure she didn't understand it. She said defensively, why don't you tell me?" So I did. Luckily I had just had a bunch of practice talking about the subject on The Atheist Experience last week.

But before long, of course, we shifted away from evolution to abiogenesis and then -- when it was apparent that I had some knowledge of that too (I started explain Stuart Kaufmann's autocatalytic cycles) we almost immediately moved to first cause. As I recall, when I explained that the natural workings of physics behave in a consistent way, she said "Thank you!" in a smug finalized way, as if she'd proved something. "You're welcome," I said. "So what?" And she told me that natural laws require a designer, and we were off on the argument from design.

So she started gesturing at my house, telling me that it was so orderly that it must be designed. "Unlike, say, a pile of random rocks in the desert," I replied. "Exactly!" "But according to you, the pile of random rocks also requires a designer. So this thing about design being recognizable in order is a red herring. Your religion teaches that disordered things are ALSO evidence of design." Then she started trying to explain why a random pile of rocks in the desert is also a very intricately ordered pattern... and I said "If I thought the way you do, then I might as well just go live in a pile of rocks, because they're just as well designed as my house."

So eventually we moved on to religion's last resort of trying to prey on fear of death. She asked where I expect to be when I'm 90. "Well," I said, "If I'm still alive..." "Aha!" said the older one. "But that's the point! What if you're not still alive? Then what?" So I said: "Then I'll be dead." "But then what after that?" "Then I'll still be dead."

But, they blustered, you can't possibly believe THAT. Doesn't that bother you? Sure it bothers me, I said. But there are lots of things that bother me that I can't change. It's better to recognize and accep those things than to make up comforting stories about why they aren't really true.

Then the mother told me a very odd story about her grandson, who accidentally killed a bird with a BB gun and was just torn up with sadness over it. He came in and asked what would happen to the bird, and they said that for the bird death was final, and that made him extremely sad.

"So," I said, "That means you think birds don't go to heaven." "Of course not," they told me. "Well, what happens to them after that?" "They just decompose." "Well there you go," I said. "I have no reason to believe that what happens to the bird will not also happen to me."

Eventually they asked if they could leave another "Watchtower" with me, which I said was fine, but it's unlikely that I would read it because I'm busy with grad school. They gave it to me anyway, and then they kindly invited me to attend their Bible study. (Because clearly, outnumbering me by two to one isn't nearly enough. :) I, in turn, told them when to watch the show and encouraged them to call in if they wanted to.

So anyway, that was a fun diversion. Since I'm on hiatus from the Non-Prophets, I wouldn't mind getting my own Jehovah's Witnesses to play with more often.

So this is what real journalism looks like

This is two hours of must-see TV.

Bill Moyers reports on the behavior of the media as it helped the administration make its case for war in Iraq in 2002. It's about an hour and a half to watch it online, but it is riveting if you have the time.

Operation: Help Me With My Thesis - episode 2

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for Master's Thesis ideas. As I mentioned in the comments section, I'm planning to do some news analysis using sites like Digg.com, reddit.com, and perhaps del.icio.us.

I like to say that the this topic is partly inspired by Anna Nicole Smith, since around the time I thought of it, Smith died and for some reason completely monopolized cable news for several weeks. I kept wondering: Why in the world do they think people care about her? People die all the time. As celebrities go, she wasn't particularly interesting. Do people actually read this stuff?

Web 2.0 can give sort of a handle on answering this question. At Digg.com and similar sites, people actually rate the news by voting it up or down. A given news item will get an overall "score" for how many people voted for and against it.

Now suppose you take the average rating of a news story on a given subject -- let's stick with Anna Nicole Smith as the example -- and compare it to the number of times that that subject story appeared in the news, across all news sites. The first number would tell you what people want to read about. The second number would tell you what is being presented most often as news. We could probably normalize this by what section of the newspaper it appears in -- for example, a story that appears on the front page is considered more important than one that doesn't; a long story may be more important than a short one.

So the question at hand is: how successful are news sources at generating information that people want? Are readers really treating their news as entertainment, or do they recommend hard hitting investigative reporters much more heavily? And what about media bias, either liberal or conservative?

In theory, it may be possible to quickly identify stories as leaning towards a liberal or conservative position, perhaps by cross-referencing them with the people who recommend them. Then what? Well, suppose it turns out that there are more liberal stories than conservative ones in the media... but suppose also that the liberal stories tend to be rated higher and read by more people than the conservative ones. That might indicate that, for instance, the idea of what "liberal" means is out of sync with the political center. Of course, it could go either way, and I'll be interested to try to come up with a measurement that doesn't bias the results.

There are tons of flaws with this topic, and I'll acknowledge some of them up front. For starters, those who subscribe to Digg almost certainly do not constitute a representative sample of all people in the country who read the news. So there's no way I can think of to justify any claims about all people nationwide. However, just investigating this cross section of people, and seeing what they like, could be useful and interesting in various ways that I haven't thought of yet.

When I talked about this topic with Dr. Ghosh, who will be my adviser, he said I shouldn't get sidetracked by that kind of problem, because it's not unusual for a research paper to be limited in scope. In fact, he recommended that I deliberately limit the scope to around five news sources, so that I have interesting things to say about just articles from those sites. I was thinking of picking three somewhat "mainstream" media sites (for example, NY Times, Washington Post, and CNN); then pick a liberal feed (perhaps Daily Kos) and a conservative feed (Fox News? Washington Times? WorldNet Daily?) to compare against.

Guns and crime in Virginia

In the midst of all this talk about the Virginia school shootings, a lot of commentators have seized the opportunity to talk about gun control, either for or against. Gun control advocates are saying that this is obvious proof that guns are too prevalent. Anti gun control types are just as certain that this proves we need MORE guns, because some cool headed Rambo might have blown away the perpetrator if only guns had been allowed on campus.

This seems like as good a time as any to dredge up the term paper that I did with Chip Killmar for Data Mining last year. I'm at least somewhat familiar with the politics of gun control, although it's one of the positions that I doggedly refuse to take a firm position on it.

Many people cite statistics that claim to show that states which allow concealed weapons have less violent crime than states that do not. In fact, there are a lot more factors which contribute to violent crime rates. The most often cited expert in favor of concealed-carry laws is John Lott, who has written several books under titles like More Guns, Less Crime. However, Lott's methods are extremely suspect and generally not very convincing, for reasons we go into in the paper.

Density of population is the leading contributor to overall violence levels. States with large, crowded cities tend to have much higher populations than those with mostly small, rural areas. Not (necessarily) coincidentally, small rural areas are much more likely to have a strong NRA presence, and those are the states that tend to pass Shall-Issue Right-To-Carry laws, giving nearly all citizens easy access to permits that allow them to pack a concealed weapon, barring criminal records and other extreme circumstances.

As a result, people who claim that gun-friendly laws are successful often point to raw crime statistics, correctly stating that states with RTC laws have less gun violence on average, but failing to note the other significant factors such as density.

Also, throughout the 1990's, crime decreased nationwide. Since previous studies of the effectiveness of RTC laws mostly occurred during the 90's, they showed crime decreasing AFTER the passage of these laws, and invoked the common "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy to say that the laws themselves were the cause of reduced crime. Yet crime also went down in areas that didn't institute such laws, often (though not always) even more than in pro-gun states.

Currently 37 of the 50 states have shall-issue laws, with more than half having been instituted after 1987, when Florida become a leader in doing so. Our project compared cities across the US and factored out the population size of each city. Anecdotally, some of the highest crime rates in the country are found in cities like Miami, Dallas, and San Antonio: all of which are very large cities which happen to exist in states (Florida and Texas) with long-standing RTC laws. By contrast, New York City, which is frequently associated with high crime, actually has some of the lowest violent crime of any major city, and New York State remains one of the states that has not issued any law favoring concealed weapons.

Our final results were inconclusive, because the error bars are very high and it's difficult to do a reliable city-by-city comparison without knowing more about the contributing factors. However, the data tentatively indicates that there is indeed a somewhat significant increase (mostly around 10-20%) of murder and rape in the few years following the institution of a RTC law, over a city of similar size which did not issue that law over the next several years.

By the way, Virginia has a shall-issue law. They have since 1995. In many ways the state of Virginia is a shining example of what kind of laws that the NRA would like to see instituted nationwide. I've read that even in RTC states, very few people actually carry concealed weapons. So often the theory is floated that in a state with an RTC law, crime is deterred because criminals are SCARED that they'll get shot. Clearly this was not the case yesterday, nor is it surprising that a lunatic going on a shooting rampage is unlikely to consider the finer points of state laws.

Am I in favor of banning guns? No. Even if it were conclusively proved that a certain level of crime were caused by guns, I think the case can be made that constitutional principles override an outright ban. After all, even freedom of speech and the press certainly causes harm, but we believe that the principles of free speech and press are often more important than a little additional safety. On the other hand, I don't see any serious problem with making people jump through more hoops than they currently do before they can use a gun, just as we make people get driver's licenses and it's possible to revoke those licenses.

Could a pistol-packing student have prevented the massacre in Virginia? Nothing's impossible, but consider that this was an extremely rare event. In order to create a happier ending, a heroic student would have needed to be present, who happened to be packing that day, had the presence of mind to shoot the guy, didn't get himself shot first, and didn't make the situation worse by shooting innocent bystanders in the process.

Furthermore, suppose that there are TWO heroic students, who each hear the shot and whip out their concealed weapons. They don't know who's firing, but they see each other holding a loaded firearm. How do we know they don't shoot each other? When the police arrive, how do they know that they are not accomplices to the crime, and gun them down? Now multiply this risk by the number of days that numerous students are walking around campus with loaded guns, and a particularly crazy guy is NOT walking around campus (i.e., almost every day, in every university). Are we really saying that all these extra guns create no additional opportunities for more incidents?

I don't know the answer to that, of course, but neither does the NRA. That's why I'm mostly for people's right to own as many personal firearms as they wish in their houses, preferably with some kind of mandatory training; but I'm still extremely dubious about these concealed weapon laws.

Sleep GOOD! Coffee BAD!

What's on the agenda tonight:

1. Go out to dinner with Ginny and Ben.
2. Come home.
   
3. Bed at around, oh, 7:30.

Yargh, Saturday afternoons in class are the worst. All homework is turned in, all the recent lack of sleep is catching up with me, creeping inexorably through the haze of Coke and coffee, and even information that may well prove critical on the final exam next month seems utterly useless and trivial at the moment.

Sandy, sitting in front of me, is browsing shoe sales online. So I'm not the only one who is using the internet to escape paying attention to detailed explanations of the syntax of RTCTL. I'll pick it up later in the lecture slides and future study groups, at least I hope I will.

Next month, worse than two months ago, I am responsible for TWO homeworks and TWO tests. The good news is that unlike two months ago, I have four weeks to prepare instead of three; the Requirements homework is meant to be easy, and the Real-Time Systems homework involves playing with a computer program, something I'm pretty good at.

I haven't been excited about my classes this semester, but I seem to be doing well in them based on a slew of returned assignments where I beat the class average. I may get some more A's under my belt. Next semester I'll be taking a summer topic on Web Server programming. There's something I should have learned a long time ago.

In other news, I spoke with Dr. Ghosh (my old data mining professor) today, and he likes my idea for a Master's Thesis. I will soon post an update to Operation: Help me with my thesis. I want to thank everybody who contributed ideas in the comments; your feedback was very valuable and helped me come up with the germ of a topic. It needs a lot of fleshing out still, but Ghosh is sufficiently interested to be my adviser, and he told me he'd put me in touch with some of his former students who work at Yahoo and know how to do the kind of text-spidering that I'm going to need to start doing in the coming few months. More details later. In any case, it can't hurt to have contacts at Yahoo, since this is a topic of interest to me.

Funny story about lunch today. We get an hour between classes for lunch time. A group of people decided to head for a new California Pizza Kitchen that had just opened. Well, that was a mistake. The place was packed and slow. We didn't manage to leave until ten minutes after class had started. We got our pizzas to go, but one person (not in my class) grabbed the bag and took all the pizzas. I met him during the first break, but it was after 2:00 before I got to enjoy my barbecue chicken pizza, at which point it was lukewarm. Still pretty good though.

Yawn. Still going to be a long two hours. Okay, Dr. Mok says that the rank of several nodes in this graph is infinity, because you rank it by the maximum path length and you have the option of going into an infinite loop. Yeah, whatever.

Glug glug

I hate to say it, but I'm becoming quite addicted to bottled vanilla Frappuccino. During the weeks when I've been regularly staying up late on homework, such as this week, it has been my caffeinated beverage of choice. My dad has been brewing his own coffee every morning since I was a kid, so he's kind of a connoisseur, and I bet he'd be disappointed in me. I have simpler tastes, though: you buy the bottle and you drink it.

It's not a very frugal choice compared to, say, Mountain Dew. But it is both cheaper and easier than actually going to Starbucks or Seattle's Best down the street and buying something from them.

Of course, as everyone knows, Starbucks is evil. I guess I should start feeling guilty now.

Rick Miller performs Bohemian Rhapsody

My sister sent this video to me. I rarely post plain old silly stuff here, but I thought this performance was really outstanding, and I appreciate a guy who uses his obvious musical talents for comedy purposes.

Also, Ben is a big fan of the Weird Al version ("Bohemian Polka"), which is by far his most requested song, so of course he loves this video too.

Blog against theocracy

Over at the Atheist Experience blog, I've written a post as part of the "Blog Against Theocracy" blogswarm. Excerpt:

Usually when anyone complains about government observation of religion, they are accused of persecuting Christians by preventing them from freely exercising their own religion. ... But as we can see, the same Christians who insist on their right to express themselves are not willing to afford the same "right" to Muslims, and that's the point where they fall back on declaring that only Christian prayers have a place at the table.

Go read the rest here.

John McCain has some big, dumb shoes to fill

I've just had to explain this story to two people, so I thought I'd better blog it before I have to tell it again.

Now that George Bush is a lame duck, oh who will be brave enough to come out and tell us how great things are going in Iraq? Answer: John McCain to the rescue!

Last week, McCain goes on Wolf Blitzer's show and snidely admonishes Wolf for suggesting that things are not going so well over there. McCain lectures Wolf, saying:

"You know, that's why you ought to catch up on things, Wolf. General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee. You want to -- I think you ought to catch up. You see, you are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don't get it through the filter of some of the media.

Later in that same show, Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware responds:

"No way on earth can a westerner, particularly an American, stroll any street of this capital of more than five million people.

I mean, if al Qaeda doesn't get wind of you, or if one of the Sunni insurgent groups don't descend upon you, or if someone doesn't tip off a Shia militia, then the nearest criminal gang is just going to see dollar signs and scoop you up. Honestly, Wolf, you'd barely last 20 minutes out there.

I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad."

You can watch the video of Ware berating McCain, it's great fun. Michael Ware sounds a bit like the late Steve Irwin, and Possum Momma mentioned that she kept expecting him to yell "CRIKEY!" and leap on top of McCain. Except, of course, that they were half a world apart at the time.

Anyway, the comedy could have just ended there. But obviously McCain never learned the rule that you always leave the audience wanting more. So what did he do? He gave us more.

Earlier this week, McCain and fellow Republican Senator Lindsay Graham went on a field trip to Neverland. As the intrepid Senators proved, it's perfectly safe for a couple of high ranking members of the U.S. Government to walk around freely in a perfectly ordinary Iraqi marketplace. Graham later gushed: "We went to the market and were just really warmly welcomed. I bought five rugs for five bucks. And people were engaging."

So as you can see, it is easy to walk around unharmed... as long as everyone involved is wearing bulletproof vests.

AND...

surrounded by 100 American soldiers as bodyguards.

AND...

escorted by 3 Blackhawk helicopters.

OH YEAH, AND ALSO...

2 Apache gunships.

Yep, perfectly safe. At least until after all those troops left. The next day, the marketplace was bombed, killing 14.

By the way, if you're looking for an ideal hot spot for your next vacation, why not consider a visit to scenic Baghdad?

Operation: Help Me With My Thesis - episode 1

Well, here we go. In about nine months, assuming everything goes well, I will be the proud bearer of one Master's Degree in software engineering. And it's time to start thinking about... (cue the sinister music) the Master's Thesis. It's not due until November, but I've seen hollow-eyed fellow students rushing to get it done in their last few months while simultaneously studying for finals and doing class projects. Based on the stress levels I've already experienced, this is not for me, so I need a topic and a start ASAP.

Here's my plan. I really liked my course in data mining, so much that I've been planning for a while to ask Dr. Ghosh to be my adviser. He says he's very busy through the summer, but we can meet in May and get me started. So basically, that's how long I have to really start fleshing out an idea for a project that involves data mining... something.

As I've mentioned before, I'm very interested in the whole Web 2.0 paradigm. People-powered encyclopedias. People-powered politics. People-powered news. People organizing the internet. And oh yeah, blogs. All those blogs.

All those people are generating literally tons of data, which I'm sure needs to be mined in some new way that hasn't been tried before, to figure out some new and surprising bit of internet psychology. I don't know what that is yet. My idea right goes something like this.

Step 1: Web 2.0
Step 2: Data mining
...
Step 4: A completed master's thesis

I think I may be missing a step, so help me out! What could be more fitting than to ask for a people-powered topic? Post a comment, leave a suggestion. If you know people who do work in web 2.0 or mining or are even interested in those topics, please mail them a link to this post. The future of the free world may depend on it!

Well, not really. But I'd sure like to graduate.

What is objective reality?

Over on The Motley Fool atheist board, someone recently posted the question: "Could somebody please explain the term 'objective reality' to me?"

We don't view the world as it really is; we interpret it with our senses and filter it through existing patterns in our brains. For instance, when I think that I see a blue racquetball, I am not really perceiving the ball directly. White light is striking the surface of that ball, all the wavelengths are absorbed except for those that we recognize at the color blue, and then the light bounces back to the surface of our eyes. The cells in our eyes transmit the pattern of photons back to our brain, which then looks at the pattern of light and dark shading, interprets the slightly different information from each eye to estimate distance, and then creates sort of a computer simulated model of a ball. Your brain tells you "That's a blue ball!" and that's what you think you see.

But senses can be fooled or misled, and your brain's program can screw up and misinterpret what it's reading. Then you can get a false impression of what you are seeing in the world.

Furthermore, you interpret a lot of things based on your memories of things that have happened to you in the past. If you see or hear about something that conflicts with the world model that was already in your head, you might reject the new information or file it wrong in your memory, because your brain doesn't like to completely reorganize its existing patterns every time it sees something a bit odd.

So there's a "real world" out there, outside your brain; and then there's the "virtual world" that has been built inside your brain. The real and the virtual world never match up completely, but they can correspond to a greater or lesser degree. When you see a blue ball, you can be pretty confident that there really is a ball and it really has the property of being blue. The color blue is not really a "thing"; it is just a word that we use to label light at a certain wavelength. But there really is light, and it really has different wavelengths, and it really does bounce off of things like balls to show you the color blue.

When we talk about "objective reality", we are talking about the world that's really there, unfiltered, outside your mind. Our beliefs do not change the world, except to the extent that they lead to actions that alter reality. So I can, if I try hard enough, go around all day sincerely believing things like "That blue ball is actually an orange artichoke" or "There's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day" or "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But if those things are not correct statements about the real world, then no amount of belief will change that.

I'm a cowboy;on a steel horse I ride

Fine. Every other blogger is hyping this stupid test, so why shouldn't I?

Cowboy Lawman

You scored 6 Honor, 7 Justice, 7 Adventure, and 3 Individuality!

You don't just want to explore the open plains, you want to tame it. You're a person with scruples and the steel nerves to back them up. You'd fit well with gunslingers like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. You're a Cowboy Lawman.

Wear your star and sixgun proud, Marshall. You're gonna do just fine!

This test tracked 4 variables. How the score compared to the other people's:

	Higher than 26% on Ninjinuity
	Higher than 83% on Knightlyness
	Higher than 55% on Cowboiosity
	Higher than 11% on Piratical Bent

In Which My Loserdom Is Sadly Exposed

For those of you who knew me in the days when I was "all fired up" about ridiculing/exposing Amway, here's a LONG overdue commentary.

You wouldn't know it to look at my page, but I still get email about Amway several times every week. I gave up updating the mail page around 2000. Although I made some half-hearted attempts to go through and HTML-ize my mail a few times since then, the problem isn't formatting the mails for the web... it's going through every single piece of mail and stripping out the names to protect their identities. After eleven years of seeing these emails, they do start to get repetitive. A bit more than half of them say "Thanks so much for saving me from a mistake!" or "Right on! Amway sucks!" The other half respectfully dissent by letting me know that I'm a pathetic loser and will never amount to anything.

I know that many of these people pour their hearts into the mail they've written to me, but I've read those words a great many times already, and I'm no longer that motivated to read it all twice. Occasionally I'll reply to one when the mood strikes, but rarely. Sorry, emailers. One of these days, I suppose I really should install a guest book or something so they can write their own messages.

Update: Good idea, past self! I took your advice and created a Perils of Amway Guestbook. Knock yourselves out, folks.

But this letter from "Binoy" really takes the cake, and I thought it would be a terrible thing not to share it.

Subject: Hi plz read - Binoy

i can understand ur situation cos i was der but den i decided i woud rather make money than give xcuses for my own shortcommings
Jus bcos u faild dosnt mean everyone fails u idiot

if john cestena recomends dis business den u gotta have sume nuts loose.

i earn a hell lot than i ever cud and so do 17 of my downlines. u should hav seen the poverty that they hav been lifted from.

if u want money get in make some and den talk.
quiters never win dude.
u r jus cryin bcos u wer un successful.
a lot of people are cos u don hav wat it takes to be rich u re jus a sore looser
if it was a bogus den it coudnt hav survived for 47 years.
wud u rather make money or complain.
i can understand ur situation cos i was der but den i decided i woud rather make money than give xcuses for my own shortcommings

Oh, there are sooo many things to enjoy about this letter. I mean, I hate to shoot at fish in a barrel, but this wildly successful businessman does appear to be functionally illiterate. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume from his interesting name that English is not his native language. However, I'm not so sure that is the case because I don't think I've ever seen foreigners make such heavy use of internet slang like "u r." Or say "dude."

Another thing that amuses me about this letter is the reference to John Sestina -- whom Binoy must respect very much to so creatively mangle the spelling of his name. John Sestina was the "big shot" who Amway was waving around as their street cred eleven years ago. Am I to understand that in all that time, they have not found one single new financial guy to endorse them? That's the worst track record I ever heard of. Even the creationists are constantly being joined by new "scientist" voices.

How well known is John Sestina these days? Well, my google search provides these hits on the name:

1. John Sestina's company's web site.
2. An anti-Amway page
3. Another anti-Amway page
4. John Sestina's book on Amazon
5. My anti-Amway page
6. A citysearch page for John Sestina's company
7. A page where you can purchase and download John Sestina's tapes.

That's all there is on page one. Searching Google News today yields one hit that has the word "John" and talks about the sestina form of poetry, whatever that is. No reference to the world famous investment guy. I have nothing against John; I'm sure he's a fine financial advisor and all, but based on my search, I am pretty well convinced that he is known first and foremost as an Amway shill, far beyond being known for anything else. And again... they couldn't find a new spokesman after eleven years???

The last thing I wanted to highlight about this letter was "if it was a bogus den it coudnt hav survived for 47 years." Awww gee, you're right, I can't think of one single other enterprise that promises to deliver great wealth, fails to provide it for any but a very few people, and has lasted for more than a few decades. Nope, not one.

Cargo cult comedy

At last, the long-awaited Daily Show rip-off has arrived on Fox News. Produced by 24 producer Joel Surnow, The 1/2 Hour News Hour runs with the tagline: "Unfair. Unbalanced. Unserious."

Apparently they should have added "Unfunny" as well. The kindest review I've seen so far comes from the Washington Post, which declares:

"In a nutshell: It isn't terrible."

Wow, high praise. Other than that, reaction seems to be universally bad, even from right wing blogs like this one:

"It is SO not funny. And it should have been hysterical. There are so many brilliant, funny conservatives. How did they pick this bunch?"

And this one:

"Finally, while there is work to be done to make the show 'workable', the initial offerings or 'taste tests' have left a very sour taste in my mouth as well I'm sure many others. If I were the head of FOXNews I would strongly consider pulling the show and working out some of the kinks before launching a show that appears to be an amateur offering."

Here's a bit of fun pigpiling from the left side...

Not surprisingly, the second biggest (fake?) laughter of the show came in reaction to the title of a spoof magazine called BO: Barack Obama Magazine. I just snarfed, because B.O. is too funny. Here's a perfect example of how Republicans don't understand satire. If Senator Obama was known to have body odor, then the joke would've been funnier. But to my knowledge, he doesn't. Then again, he is a black and they're usually all stinky and black-smelling, aren't they? Seriously, it's a terrible joke.

So why use it? Because body odor is funny. If you're six or, evidently, a Republican.

Here's a clip for you:

When I first saw this, my immediate thought was "They're doing cargo cult comedy."

A refresher on cargo cults, as told by Wikipedia:

The classic period of cargo cult activity was in the years during and after World War II. The vast amounts of war matériel that were airdropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Japanese before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers — and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war the airbases were abandoned, and "cargo" was no longer being dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cultists thought that the foreigners had some special connection to their own ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

Like a cargo cult, Fox News is imitating the form that produces results, and they hope that the results will naturally follow. The show LOOKS very much like The Daily Show, the hosts use the same style of wry smarminess that works so well for Jon Stewart, and there is laughter. But there aren't any jokes, just sarcasm.

Why do they keep insulting our troops?

Three times yesterday, I turned on C-SPAN while futzing around in the kitchen. All three times, there was a sanctimonious legislator giving a speech -- once in an interview, twice on the Senate floor. All three had an "R" next to their name, and all three were saying something nearly identical. It went something like this:

"My Democrat [sic] colleagues are destroying troop morale by arguing against this war. The biggest enemy our troops have is not foreign fighters, but lack of resolve at home. Every time we discuss plans to end the war, we are helping the terrorists win."

After pondering this for a while, I have decided that one of two things must be true:

1. They think that our troops are complete cowards. It would seem that the troops can face a hostile foreign populace, car bombs, and IEDs, but they run away screaming when they hear a Democrat say "The president has not handled this war well."
2. They think the troops are not very bright or cannot handle debate. No matter how the war is actually going, the troops should be shielded from any frank discussion of progress, unless the news is good.

The thing is, I don't think any of these speakers has attempted to produce a serious case that the war has not been badly botched, nor an actual plan for winning apart from "We'll throw 15% more troops at the region and then all the problems will miraculously clear up." A few months ago supposedly we'd "never been stay the course". Now apparently we are again.

So they haven't actually done anything to make the war either go better or end; their only tactic is to react in shock, horror, and indignation when somebody says that the war is not going well. They're not concerned about fucking up; but they're deathly afraid of hearing someone say that they fucked up.

And one more thing. What's up with all the comparisons to Vietnam by Republicans? Years ago, anyone who suggested that the war was anything like Vietnam was automatically dubbed as narrow minded and shallow at best, or more usually an anti-American idiot. Today, the Republicans are falling all over themselves to say that Iraq is Vietnam all over again. "Didn't we learn anything from Vietnam?" they ask. But instead of learning the lesson that you should pick your battles intelligently, apparently the "lesson" of Vietnam is that no one should criticize any action taken by a sitting president, ever. Because, you see, the right thing for people to do is smile and go along quietly for a 16 year war, and even if things look bad after all that time, you'd better smile and accept the possibility that it could continue indefinitely. Clearly wars are never lost except by popular opinion. Historians take note.

I guess what I'm asking is, why do Republicans hate America so much?

The Machine is Us

I totally dig this video about web 2.0.

People will try anything

I've often said that arguing with fundamentalists is like trying to nail jello to a wall. However, I never expected anyone to actually try doing that.

See Al Run

Run, Al, Run!

On Monday, Al Franken announced that his show's last episode will be February 14. Air America is still rolling under new management, and not expected to go down any time soon despite the recent bankruptcy filing. Thom Hartmann will be filling Al's time slot.

At that point, Franken was still being coy about his intentions, saying: "If I make a decision before the show ends, I'll make sure you, my listeners, are the first to know... after Frannie. And my kids. Okay, my listeners will be the eighth to know."

I expected this day to come, and I wish him great success in his campaign. I am, however, a bit saddened. Franken frequently comments on his show "We have to repeat things sometimes because we know that nobody listens to all three hours." Ironically, I have heard this comment over and over, because I do listen to all three hours via podcast. In fact, I don't believe there have been any episodes since the show's inception that I have not heard at least a part of. It is the only daily show that I make a point of not missing. I also had the pleasure of seeing the show produced live a couple of years ago, with guest Molly Ivins, who sadly just died yesterday.

So long, Al, and give Norm Coleman hell.