This is how big a nerd I am

In Fox Trot this weekend, there was a comic where Jason creates a paint by number. But since Jason is a little math geek, he doesn't just write in the numbers; he writes large numbers that are either divisible by 13, 17, or 19, or else they're prime.

Based on the caption, I figured it must be a picture of his sister Paige, but I couldn't just let it go without a solution. So I wrote a quick Perl program to interpret the numbers for me so I wouldn't need a calculator, and then I solved it in MS Paint.

Here you go.



Update (4/11)
I emailed Bill Amend to let him know I solved his puzzle. He wrote back today.

"The 2261 space should've been orange, not red. Not your fault. See the
note about the ambiguity on my web page.

Bill Amend"

Also, somebody else added the correctly colored puzzle to Bill's own blog.

Damn it!!!

Why I Am Not A Libertarian

Hi. I'm a liberal.

No, really. I mean it. I'm a liberal.

For some reason, a lot of people hear that and they feel compelled to say "Oh, you don't really mean that. If you believe in freedom then you should be a libertarian." They're wrong. I'm still a liberal.

I've occasionally touched on libertarianism during my time talking on The Non-Prophets and The Atheist Experience, but whenever this happens I feel the urge to tread lightly. These shows (especially the TV show) are targeted at a general atheist audience, and so I don't want to get into liberal/conservative issues more than necessary, because I don't necessarily want to alienate right wing and libertarian atheists. Also, I am friends with a few libertarians, though not that many.

There aren't many atheist Republicans, but there sure are a lot of atheist libertarians. I suspect that this is because libertarians share much of their economic philosophy with Republicans, and yet recognize that the Republican party is hugely dependent on the religious right. Hence, people who want to be Republicans but can't stomach the Bible thumpers wind up as libertarians.

In principle, libertarians believe that they incorporate the most "pro-freedom" elements of both parties. From liberals, they believe in social freedoms such as the right to read and watch whatever you want, and have sex with whomever you want. From conservatives, they believe in the freedom to "keep your own money" and not pay for any social programs. Libertarians believe that all taxation is theft, taken at gunpoint. I prefer to think of taxes as a cost of living in a civilized world. Since I'm a liberal, I apparently hate your freedom.

I believe that we are better off for having a government that actually does stuff. Not that I think the government is in good hands right now; I think that we are being run by a bunch of insane bunglers who are incapable of long term planning. Nevertheless, I believe that a government, run by competent and rational people, is critical for managing aspects of a decent society that the free market doesn't address. That's right, there are things that the free market does not, never has, and cannot do.

Galt's Imaginary Gulch

I've read Atlas Shrugged. I quite liked it on first reading. For those who don't know about this book, I'm going to provide spoilers but you have to read them anyway.

Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical novel written by Ayn Rand, who is in many ways a hero to libertarians and the originator of many ideas within the movement. In the story, the world is increasingly run by stupid and lazy people, and clearly going to hell in a handbasket. The stupid people believe in "altruism", which in Rand's world always means "forcing productive people to give their hard earned money to people who don't deserve it."

The productive people feel more and more powerless as time goes on, and one by one they seem to disappear off the face of the planet. Finally it is revealed that they are living in Galt's Gulch, a hidden libertarian utopia where only productive geniuses (inventors and manufacturers and such) are allowed to stay. They hide in their little corner of the world until the hero, John Galt, decides the time is right; then they break out, Galt makes a speech that lasts roughly 100 pages, and the competent people take over the world again.

There were many reasons why I liked the book. For one, I appreciate the view that smart and competent people are the ones who ought to run things, and that often doesn't happen. Overall, I agree with the message that "selfishness" is not always wrong, nor in conflict with the greater good. And I like the emphasis that Rand places on individualism and creativity.

At the same time, there were a few things that bothered me about the book, but I couldn't put my finger on them until later. One of the key "villains" was a scientist, who was doing his "altruistic" research on government money. Why, this scoundrel couldn't even prove that his work was PROFITABLE enough to deserve private money, and in the Rand universe, not being profitable is the worst sin imaginable.

Here's the problem: in a nutshell, that's my dad. My dad does fusion research, and relies on the existence of a government that values the pursuit of scientific knowledge in order to generate long term benefits. If my dad and his colleagues are successful in their work, fusion could someday provide cheap energy for everyone in the world, and drastically reduce our dependence on oil.

Fusion research requires a massive amount of research dollars, over a period of decades, with no guarantee of ever recovering enough profit to justify an individual investment. This isn't the way the business world works. Stockholders who are obsessed with a three month profit and loss sheet simply don't recognize concepts such as "decades". Furthermore, it's not necessarily clear how a private company could turn an exclusive profit even if they did unlock the gateway to easily produced fusion energy. Such a momentous scientific discovery could benefit humanity best if the knowledge were freely available to everyone, and sooner or later, it would be. The long term benefit of CHEAP energy should be obvious to everyone, but "cheap" and "profitable" don't always go together.

The other problem with Rand's universe was pointed out to me by a friend whom I met only after finishing the book. Think of any child character (let's say under the age of 12) who is portrayed in a positive light in any of Ayn Rand's books.

Go on, I'm waiting.

There aren't any. And here's my theory about why there aren't any: Children are leeches on society. They don't turn a profit for their parents. Occasionally, a child will grow up and take care of his parents when they are old and feeble, but this is the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, most parents pour a lot more time and money into a child's upbringing than they get out of it, and parenting is its own nebulous reward, with financial incentives being very hard to see.

Of course, I understand that Ayn Rand, along with many other people I know, remained childless by choice. And hey, that's okay by me. If you're deliberately child-free, then all I can say is, thank you! I'm acutely aware of overpopulation. I'm a step-dad twice and a dad once. The fewer kids other people have, the more resources will be available to my descendants.

But that's not the issue. The issue is that there are billions of kids in the world, and kids aren't self-sufficient. It's not because they're lazy, it's not because they're leeches, it's because they are physically and mentally incapable of taking care of themselves. As a parent, my job is to provide the kids' physical needs to the extent that they can't provide for themselves, and supply sufficient mental and philosophical guidance so that they hopefully become the kinds of functioning adult that a Randist utopia would require.

There's more to it than that. Rand libertarians naively imagine that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" fairly and equitably distributes money purely on the basis of merit. If you're poor, it's because you're lazy and stupid and you deserve to be poor. If you're rich, it's because you are hard working and smart.

Right. And I have some beachfront property to sell you in Las Vegas.

Of course innate smarts and diligence matter, but what also matters is being in the right place at the right time. I am a moderately successful guy, and I like to think of myself as pretty smart and at least occasionally hard working. I support a family as the sole income earner, and I expect to make more after I get my Master's Degree in two years. It would be easy for me to arrogantly assume that I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and accomplished everything on my own.

But I didn't. I am lucky to have been born to a middle class family in twentieth century America. Had I been born in Rwanda, all the smarts and dedication in the world wouldn't have brought me the amount of food, shelter and comfort that I enjoy today. Had I been born in medieval Europe, it's overwhelmingly likely that my parents would have been peasants, which doesn't afford a kid much social mobility.

Furthermore, I had the benefit of two remarkably smart and dedicated parents, who valued education and pushed me to go farther than I could have without their help. I've lived in good neighborhoods. I went to some good schools, both public and private. I commuted to one of the best public high school districts for miles around. And I got to earn my Bachelor's degree without having to pay for college myself. I had inspiring teachers, and my dad used some pull help me get my first job, though I was only in it for about a year before moving on to better things.

I'd have to be one smug, pompous son of a bitch to sit here and say that "I made it on my own, with no help from anyone." I made it to where I am partly by being smart. But it only mattered because I was working within a remarkably effective system where people thrive. Hardly anybody really "makes it on their own."

But that's what I get from libertarians. They dismiss the carefully crafted government system we have, with its public works like schools and roads and zoning laws, with its cleverly constructed system of checks and balances. All this they call the tools of a tyrannical society that wants to rob you of your hard earned money. The assumption is that if you have money and success, then it's because you earned it.

Clearly this is not the case. Just look at Paris Hilton. Is there any reason in the world why she should be famous, other than her daddy's money? She's not especially talented, her looks are mostly the result of surgery and expensive makeup, and she has one of the most abrasive personalities I've ever seen. Yet people can't seem to stop being fascinated with her life. Clearly she has top-notch PR people. But PR people cost money.

This isn't an anti-rich people rant, by any means. But the economic system we have is known as "capitalism", which means that what you get rewarded for is HAVING capital. We don't live under a strict meritocracy. Often, happily, the two systems coincide with each other, so that the brightest and most deserving are rewarded with great wealth. I'm all for that, which is why I am basically a fan of capitalism over most of the alternatives.

But there's a dark side to capitalism: capital amplifies itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to get. There's an old joke: How do you make a small fortune in the stock market? Start with a large fortune. That's funny but true, and not just true of stocks. If you start with a huge pile of money, your successes amplify that money while your mistakes don't wipe you out. If you start out with nothing, a few people will be good enough to scrabble their way to the top, but most also end up with nothing. This is a simple fact of life, which any effective system of government has to take into account and deal with.

For example, what is one of the best predictors of how well a student will do in school? How well their parents did, according to a study done by the Educational Research Service. Which makes sense, of course. If your parents are smart and educated, as mine were, they'll drill into you the importance of getting your own education, and this in turn will affect the way you approach your studies. If your parents are dropouts, often they'll convey the message, whether intentionally or subliminally, that school isn't worthwhile.

We Don't Need No Public Education

One key cause célèbre for Libertarians is their opposition to public schools. This is a point where I happen to fundamentally disagree with Libertarianism, and it serves to illustrate why I disagree with the whole concept.

As everyone knows, our public primary and secondary school system is not the envy of the world. We routinely see studies lamenting how far American kids are behind kids in other countries, when it comes to subjects like math and science. Libertarians use this common knowledge as a talking point to promote their desire to ultimately eliminate the public school system altogether, replacing it with a school voucher system. The new system would give everyone a certain amount of money in vouchers, which they could then spend at the private school of their choice. Vouchers, they argue, would spur schools on to ever more excellent performance. The laws of natural selection would weed out the underperforming schools, and the great schools would thrive.

In a sense, they're probably right. Given extra funding from the government, a lot of really good private schools WOULD thrive and improve. Then they'd become more competitive, and the best and richest students would have a top notch education.

But wait a minute. The best and richest students can ALREADY get a top notch education at private schools. It's just that they don't get extra government funding on top of the money they already have. The point of funding public education is not to give an extra edge to the rich kids; it's to make sure that the poor kids also have access to a decent education, thus leveling the playing field.

The thing about free markets is that they're very efficient at giving people exactly what they can pay for. If you're rich and hungry, you can go get a steak prepared by a world class chef and served by a polite and attentive waiter. If you're not rich but still hungry, you can get a Big Mac served by a surly teenager. If you're barely scraping by, you can eat Ramen every day until the all-carb diet eventually leads you to an early death. There's simply no profit in serving you decent food.

The question that we need to face is whether we want poor people to get the educational equivalent of Ramen at every meal. That's what we'll ultimately get with the voucher system. Those who can afford to pay for great private schools, will do so and use their vouchers to pay a bit less. Those who have nothing but the vouchers, will be paying the bare minimum and going to whatever schools they can get into. Chances are very good that the best publicly supported schools will be better than they are now, and the worst schools will be much worse once their funding is yanked and only the poorest people go there.

So what do I care? you might ask. If I'm a reasonably affluent parent, then MY kid is going to get a good education, using MY money. I don't want to pay extra for some poor kid's education; that's theft. Worse yet, I might be one of those childless-by-choice adults, in which case I'm paying for other kids' education but getting nothing out of it. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Here's where that logic goes wrong. You do get something out of funding education for the kids of other people. You get to buy the privilege of living in a society where people are not completely uneducated morons. And in that society, other people's kids grow up to be more intelligent and productive, which benefits everybody. The educated kids are also, statistically, much less likely to commit crimes, and that also benefits you.

And this is what really gets to the heart of where I disagree with libertarianism. None of us live in a vacuum. We have to deal with other people on a daily basis, whether we like it or not. Unless you're planning to become one of those society hating hermits who lives out in the mountains with a personal arsenal of assault weapons, the things you do affect me. If you don't get a decent education and that turns you into a violent thug, that affects me. If you dump crap in the water I'm trying to drink out of, that affects me.

And as for taxes? I pay for the things that make up the societal infrastructure that makes me comfortable, thanks very much. Schools that educate kids. Roads that allow me to go from place to place. A post office that delivers EVERYWHERE, even those middle of nowhere places that wouldn't turn a profit if they were privatized. Law enforcement for everyone, not just those who can afford to hire private guards and live in gated communities.

Me paying for those things is not theft. On the other hand, if you decide to be one of those "protestors" who refuse to pay their taxes, while you still enjoy the benefits of the roads and low crime that I'm paying for? That's theft.

America is not a pure libertarian society and never has been. Yet people who live here generally believe that they are living in the greatest country on earth. We didn't get to be a great country without taxes and government work. In fact, many of the things we take for granted today, we have BECAUSE of the system of government and regulated economics that are in place.

Getting back to school vouchers, 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?

Like so many features of libertarianism, the answer is no. So many of the concepts in a libertarian utopia have never been pulled off in any successful country. Thus, it is simply a matter of faith that creating a true libertarian society would actually work. There's no evidence to measure against. Of course, they say "If only somebody would TRY creating a society based on Libertarian ideals, it would quickly be clear how successful the theory is." Sure. That's what Communists say about their system, which has never been tried either. It's easy to make such claims when there's no evidence either way.

Losing That Loving Feeling

A story appeared in the news a few weeks ago about some libertarians who want to take over Loving County, Texas. Why Loving County? Because it's one of the most sparsely populated areas in the country, boasting a population of 71. The highest concentration of people in the county live in the "big city" of Mentone; 16 people live there. Their plan is to move en masse into Loving County so that they can set up a libertarian utopia -- a mini version of Galt's Gulch, if you will. According to the article:

The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians "to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling."

Yeah, that's right: cannibalism! Because if there's one thing that's a threat to my personal liberty, it's the damn government sticking its intrusive laws in the way of my right to eat people!

But seriously. Why do the libertarians feel the need to take over a county of 71 people? If their ideas are so great, why don't they just do a PR campaign in a normal sized town, saying "Let's repeal all these laws! Why just imagine our town in ten years. You can duel me for insulting your honor, and if I lose, you can eat me!"

I'll tell you why they don't do it that way: because they'd lose. Badly. Know why? Because people LIKE having laws against cannibalism. And dueling. And price-gouging. And so on. Those laws, along with the many other laws we have, are there to maintain a stable, sane community. The things that these libertarians want... they AREN'T POPULAR.

And in a way, that's the paradox of libertarianism. If people are free to do what they want, the people will speak and they'll vote themselves laws that regulate what their fellow citizens can and can't do.

And that's a good thing.

My secret thespian life

I've neglected to post anything for a while. I'm working on a post called "Why I Am Not a Libertarian", but it's fairly long already and I'm having a hard time getting everything I want to say come out right. In the meantime, here's some randomly embarrassing information that you didn't know about me.

I've always been kind of into theater. In fact I've always been something of a ham, which is why I found it so natural to become the host of a public access TV show and set up a radio show. I could never make it as a real actor, though.

The first time I can remember acting was when I was somewhere around age 6-8, and I played Haman in my Jewish school play. I didn't want to play the bad guy, but my mom convinced me that it would be fun. She made me a cordouroy beard, I sneered and ranted, and at the end of the play I was physically dragged away from the king by the kids playing guards. It was a terrific time.

When I was about eleven, my parents signed me up to be part of an enormous cast of kids in a local Santa Fe production of "Oliver!" I didn't get the title role, and I think that's all that might have been open to a kid my age. I didn't even get to be one of Fagin's kids, who were very prominent on stage. Nope, I was a street vendor. I did get to sing as part of a large chorus of other kids and adults in a lot of musical numbers, though, and my favorite part was dramatically trembling in fear as Bill Sykes stormed across the stage. I had a rocky time with some kids that I didn't get along with, but I also made a couple of good friends, and one girl (I learned secondhand) had a crush on me. I never did anything about it.

The biggest impact I got from that experience, though, was professional training in how to do a cockney accent from a professional director. It opened my eyes to all the different ways people talk, and from that day on I started privately rehearsing all the accents I ran into. Southern, French, New York, Upper Class Twit, Irish, German, Surfer Dude... I worked on them all for my own amusement. I also enjoyed watching My Fair Lady, which we'd recorded off the Disney Channel.

My dad also took me to a local performance of HMS Pinafore that year, and that triggered a lifelong fandom of Gilbert and Sullivan. In fact we enjoyed the performance so much that dad hired the director, Manos Clements, to direct my family in a performance of The Mikado for my bar mitzvah two years later.

In high school, I also learned to juggle and I picked up a book on ventroliquism. I did a ventriloquist act one year at summer camp with a monkey puppet. I think it bombed, but then again, at least half the acts were preteen girls with lame choreography dancing to cassette tapes, so any comedy routine was a welcome break. I also participated in a lot of other skits at camp.

In high school I considered being in the acting club, which was called Olions. Basically I did one very poor audition in sophomore year, got offered a part as an extra, snottily decided I didn't want to do it if I couldn't be in a main part, and didn't bother trying out again. Thus did my career focus shift to professional geekdom. I did, however, join the speech team, and I participated regularly in an event known as "humorous interpretation", where I would do one man skits involving multiple characters. It was a bit like standup comedy working off someone else's scripts. I did a Monty Python bit called "The Bookseller" one year, and I killed. I should have kept doing that one the next year, but I switched to a Sherlock Holmes spoof called "The Defective Detective" which still did pretty well, but my Python was better. I still have most of it memorized.

I also got involved in French class skits for several years in a row. In my senior year, we did a skit based on "The Wizard of Oz." I was the witch. And not to be modest about it, I think I was personally responsible for nearly all the funniest material in it. In the first scene where I met Dorothy, when I couldn't get the ruby slippers, I whipped out a pair of sunglasses, folded my arms, and said in my best Terminator voice: "Je serais de rentre." ("I'll be back.") Near the end of the skit, when they throw water on me, I scream for a few seconds, then laugh, then open my cloak and reveal that I'm wearing a clear plastic thing. "J'ai une veste impermeable!" I cackle ("I have a waterproof vest"). In rehearsals, they always pretended to throw water on me. In the live version, the bucket was full. Needless to say, some of my screams were real.

In my senior year, I joined the school chorus and learned to sight read music pretty easily. I started out in the general purpose chorus -- I think the title of the class was "I'll pretend to like singing for an easy A." However, I took to it so easily that halfway through the year, I qualified for the All-State concert and then was promoted to the much smaller, elite chorus class, "Encore".

I continued singing through college. I took a class called "Symphonic Chorus", which I discovered was a student gateway into the community chorus, where I remained for all four years. I got to perform in some incredible pieces, including two versions of Carmina Burana, one time fully choreographed with professional dancers. The dancers were hot, but I didn't get to watch them much because I had to focus on the conductor. Nor did I hook up with any of them.

As I approached my last year of college, it was clear that I would have to be in school for an extra year, but I would easily meet the requirements of my Computer Science degree in that fifth year. I had some extra cushion time, so I started considering what sort of blow-off classes I would take. I wound up taking Acting 1, Acting 2 (summer session), Playwriting 101, and Set Design. I hated set design, so I dropped it. 3d games were a new thing then, and I was playing with the Duke Nukem 3d level editor, so I had an idea that set design would help me learn more about constructing 3d worlds and lighting. Ultimately I decided that wasn't where my interest lay, and of course I wound up not in games but in web development. Which is fun too, and more secure.

Anyway, my acting classes were when I knew for sure that acting would never be more than a fun diversion for me. The teachers had an awful time getting me to stop smiling during serious scenes that I was entertained by. I discovered that it's easy to memorize dialogue and understand the mood, but very hard to convince people that you're actually a character instead of an audience member. I also had a chat with my Acting 1 teacher who told me what a miserable life it is to be an actor unless you are one of the incredibly rare and lucky few who hit the big time. I'm not much of a gambler, so I decided that I'll stick with computers, thanks.

I do have something to show for my playwriting class, though. Here's the play I wrote for my final class project. And I gained a greater appreciation for storytelling and movies, which has stayed with me.

My theatrical "career" pretty much ended when I graduated. I joined another community chorus in San Jose, but then I moved to Santa Cruz after just a few months, and it wasn't practical to commute all the way back. So I didn't do any more performance until years later, when I discovered the joys of being on The Atheist Experience.

One last thing I still do is read to the driver on long car trips. I love reading books out loud, and I have an opportunity to do it with my wife, Ginny, and my sister Keryn. I still do characters and accents. Right now, Ginny and I are reading A Clash of Kings, second in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, which is just about the most awesome fantasy series I've ever read. It's slow progress, which is frustrating because I'd like to just read the whole thing, but I enjoy the experience more with my wife. To Keryn I'm reading Ender's Game, which I've already read many times before, but it's new to her.

I've discovered that my favorite character to voice in the "Ice and Fire" books is Tyrion Lannister, the brilliant angry dwarf. My favorite Ender character to voice is Bonzo Madrid. After all these years, I still love playing evil. Thanks, mom.

So if you kept reading this far, you must be just fascinated by my life, so thanks for listening. But I'll get back to politics and religion soon, I swear. Stay tuned for "Why I Am Not a Libertarian".

The knowledgeable world view

I haven't blogged any atheist thoughts for a while, so I thought I'd dredge up a board post that I wrote last October.

Christians like to frame things in terms of "world views", saying that being a Christian changes the way that you think about everything, which is why they have such specific views on "moral" issues like abortion and homosexuality and so on. Of course, many liberal Christians don't align with those views, but that's okay; fundamentalist Christians just write them off as not True Christians^TM who are duped by worldliness.

I kind of believe in "world views", but I don't believe they are caused by religion. I think a major component of your world view, INCLUDING how seriously you take your religion, is influenced by the way in which you regard the concept of knowledge.

Whether there is a god or not, human knowledge is imperfect. Everybody realizes that, or ought to. Theists generally believe that there is a god, and their god knows everything. Therefore, True Knowledge is obtained by listening to what God says.

The problem with that is that, even if their god is real, he isn't down here issuing public statements on the issues that we deal with right now. Take abortion, for instance. Anti-choice Christians will point to portions of the Bible which they say clearly prohibits abortion. But on the other hand, pro-choice Christians will just as easily point out passages in the Bible that supports THEIR position as well. I suppose the god could have clearly said in the Bible "don't commit abortion" or "abortion is a-OK with me!" But it probably wasn't known in those exact terms back then, and it's been a while (2000 years) since he supposedly communicated with us.

So even if you personally know an omnipotent being, that doesn't really do you much good unless he tells you clearly what he thinks. And the Bible sure ain't it. Hence we have the concept of "faith", which is believing things sincerely without evidence, just because it makes you feel better.

Now, "faith" may well be an excellent way to become personally fulfilled and at peace, but historically it has proved to be a notoriously bad way to actually know things. Even accepting the idea that there is a particular kind of faith which is right, and which will reveal the absolute truth, that still leaves open the sticky question of what to have faith in.

There are thousands of religions in the world now, as well as thousands more historical religions that are now defunct. It's hard to be objectively certain that you're not simply participating in a religion that will, hundreds of years from now, be studied with the same kind of bemused curiosity with which we currently regard the ancient Greeks. Furthermore, these religions can't all be right, because many of them hold as a fundamental tenet that the other religions must be wrong.

The fact that there have been a lot of false religions doesn't PROVE that any particular religion is wrong. But it does illustrate that people put their faith in an awful lot of things that turn out to be false. If you were an educated person born in ancient Greece, chances are good that you'd probably believe in Zeus. Being born in 21st century America, chances are almost nil that you'll believe in Zeus.

What changed? Did Zeus once exist and then disappear to make room for Jesus? No. We know for pretty certain that Zeus doesn't exist and never did. But as an ancient Greek, you wouldn't KNOW you were wrong, because you wouldn't have the perspective that hundreds of years later, everybody would "know" that Zeus is a silly idea. Whereas the idea of a man who was born of a virgin, walked on water, and rose from the dead is a far more sophisticated idea that represents the real truth.

In short: really, truly BELIEVING something is a bad yardstick for verifying what's actually true.

So if faith isn't the way to go, then how do we go about the business of actually finding things out and being pretty sure you know the things that are true? I think that at some point, clearly the answer has to be that you come up with unemotionally applied tests that can be repeated by everyone. You have to be able to admit that you don't know what you don't know, and apply what you do know to form an overall informed opinion of the world.

Unfortunately, sometimes even your most informed opinions will be wrong. There's no way to escape this because, as I said before, all human knowledge is imperfect. But the ability to recognize and admit when you're wrong is actually a strength, not a weakness. Because every time you understand that you have been wrong, it allows you to switch to a position that is (more likely to be) right. And there's a word for the process of investigating things and trying to weed out wrong ideas. It's science.

I think that even the most die hard young earth creationists understand the value of science in principle, because that's what religious apologetics are all about. At their best, apologetics are meant to be logically sound arguments that persuade the listener to objectively accept their opinion as true. If faith were enough to really know truth, then apologetics would be a waste of time, because logic would be irrelevant.

And I know that the promoters of Intelligent Design (or "stealth creationism" as some prefer to call it) recognize the value of science as a way of understanding the world, because that is after all what ID is theoretically about. It is an effort to meld a belief in God with the respectable objectivity of the scientific method. Again, if faith were enough to go on, there would be no need to make scientific arguments, and ID would not have come to be in the first place.

In a sense, I applaud the concept of ID. Although I happen to not believe in any sort of intelligent designer, I understand that many people believe it very seriously. And if there is one, I want to know about it. I would like nothing better than to see the question settled once and for all from a scientific perspective.

Where I have a beef with Intelligent Design is not their goal to marry science with God; it's their unfortunate tendency to repeatedly declare victory before they've actually accomplished anything at all. If you really want to put science and religion in harmony, then I say throw money at research. But you have to be sure that your money is actually funding RESEARCH, and not a PR campaign. Not lawsuits. Not politicians. Not school boards. Tell them to stop trying to buy respectability by getting museums to show designer-friendly movies.

Really, I think everyone who truly cares about ID should be DEMANDING that the Discovery Institute start spending their donations on hiring brilliant minds to do genuinely original research, instead of more lawyers. I think it would be a great day for science if that happened.

Peak oil worries

I'm not normally someone given to paranoid ravings about the end of the world. I sneered at Y2K panickers, and I regularly laugh at fundamentalists who believe the rapture is coming THIS year... no, NEXT year... no, this time for SURE...

Recently though, the very real prospect of the world's oil supply mostly drying up within our lifetimes has begun to hit me hard. Some scattered readings on the subject:

Collapse by Jared Diamond, describing past civilizations that crumbled, and why it happened. I managed to read about half this book before giving up because it was so depressing. Diamond paints a very vivid picture of what it's probably like to be one of the people living at the end of a civilization, and it's not pretty.

If you don't plan to read Collapse, this post by Adam Cadre is a very good but morbid high level summary of it. Adam (whom I know mostly as an author of very excellent short interactive fiction) is taking this end of the world stuff seriously. He writes:

Reading Collapse along with some rather dire predictions for 2006 put me in a weird mental space as I went down to the Whole Foods to stock my refrigerator. I felt like I'd beamed in Twelve Monkeys-style from a dystopian future and was appalled at the decadent excess I saw before me. I watched people poking through a tastefully presented basket of satsuma oranges and wondered, how will you look back on this evening a few years from now when, like the Anasazi, you are scrabbling in the dirt for mice to pop the heads off of and eat whole?

There is a board on The Motley Fool called Peak Oil Party (membership required) dedicated to this subject. I've started lurking there to learn more about it.

Through this board, I read this half creepy, half hopeful series of editorials called, simply, "Things to Come". Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. The author is of the opinion that a sharp reduction in oil availability is beginning within the next few years. He tries to soften the blow and speculate how we will continue to get by in a post oil world.

My dad is a fusion research physicist, so naturally I'm biased towards the eventual development of safe nuclear energy as a way of somehow saving us before things get really bad. My dad is of the opinion that science research is pretty much crippled by politics in this country, but he's cautiously hopeful that other countries will beat us to finishing the research.

I brought this up with Ginny, so now she's paranoid about it too. She thinks we should be making emergency plans for when it happens.

Goodbye World of Warcraft

Hey everybody, it's time for another geek post that very few people will care about!

My subscription to World of Warcraft expired yesterday. I have twice paid the fee of $77 to keep playing for six months, but I was using an old credit card that got replaced, so they weren't able to charge me again. It would be a simple matter to enter my new card number and renew, but I didn't. I just let it lapse.

Those two $77 charges plus the initial purchase price of $50 add up to a whopping total of $204 that I paid to play just one game. Do I regret wasting that much money? No, because I've gotten an incredible amount of play time out of WoW. As a gaming buff, I usually buy a new $50 game every month or two. Since I started playing WoW, I can only think of three games that I bought. And they were used. As entertainment value per dollar goes, $13 a month for an hour or two of play each day is quite a lot, especially when you compare it to, say, renting a 2 hour movie for $5.

It's not that I don't play anymore; just the opposite. I still play very regularly. And in a way, that's the problem. Now that I'm in grad school while still being the sole household income provider, I've already got less time to spend with my family and I'm feeling it. The last thing I need is a bunch of online people craving my attention as well.

I love playing World of Warcraft. Lately it's been more of a single player game than a multiplayer one for me, because I play at odd hours and don't have the time to dedicate to playing long group sessions. But I'm leaving behind a level 60 human priest with 200 gold, a level 47 Tauren Hunter, and numerous smaller characters who range from level 34 on down.

I've also gained great enjoyment from my guild, The Motley Fools, all of whom are members of the Fool message board community and many of whom would not have joined without my glowing recommendations of the game. It was always nice to log in and see another 20 friends online, get greeted with a friendly "Hey Kazim!", and know that I have buddies available to go questing with or give me items I might need.

Still, real life beckons. Without the temptation of my Warcraft account, I will still play other games, but probably not quite as much.

At least not until I buy the expansion pack.

Outstanding post on education

I don't often post just to link somebody else's blog, but this post at Pharyngula deserves special attention.

Somebody at the Washington post wrote a stunningly ignorant editorial about how completely unimportant it is to have a decent math education in order to be well rounded. PZ Myers just ripped him apart.

You suck because you know stuff

Here we go again...

The Education Oversight Committee voted Monday to reject curriculum standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution.

The school reform panel wants the Board of Education to rewrite a portion of the standards to encourage high school students to critically analyze evolution.

Scientists who support teaching evolution reject the idea of adding the phrase "critical analysis" to the curriculum. They call it an effort by evolution critics to introduce creationism and intelligent design in the classroom.

State Senator Mike Fair says the change is necessary because science is always changing.

Both the oversight committee and the board of education must agree on the standards. Monday's 8-2 vote sends the issue back to the board of education.

"Critical analysis?" I thought that going through the rigors of the scientific method WAS critical analysis.

You know, it occurs to me that what's really at the heart of the "teach both 'theories'" movement -- and indeed, the heart of the whole fundamentalist/neocon rise to power -- is outright hostility to the notion that some people know more than other people.

Scientists are treated as "elitists" or "not in touch with the common people", as if it's a bad thing to spend a lot of time studying a subject and becoming informed on it. Meanwhile, the opinion of "common people" is treated as somehow more "pure" because their minds are unfettered by specific education.

By extension, in today's exciting world of neocon rule, generals who actually study war aren't the ones who plan our wars. Disaster management experts who study disasters aren't the ones put in charge of national disaster management agencies. Brilliant legal minds who have offered respected opinions aren't the ones who are put forth as the best supreme court candidates. Instead, we get people whose major qualification is that they are ordinary people who happen to be well connected. And then people who know things are slandered and ridiculed for being snobs.

Being called "ignorant" about something shouldn't necessarily be considered an insult. I'm ignorant about cars, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. There are guys who change their own oil and diagnose their own car troubles, but I am not one of those guys. When I have car troubles, I pay somebody who works on cars for a living to fix it. I try to understand as much as I can so as not to get ripped off, but in the end there's a point where I agree with the mechanic by default because he's interested in cars and I'm not.

People who approach their lives with the perspective that everything is "faith based" hate to admit that somebody knows more than they do (other than God, perhaps). Their point of view is that no one knows everything, therefore no one knows anything, therefore all opinions are equally valid. And if you claim to know more than they do about a subject, that's an attack, and you must have a sinister motive.

An Alito Filibuster?

So, it looks like John Kerry might be leading the charge to filibuster Alito. Good for him. Alito is a creep. The whole "unitary executive" spiel freaks me out, but there's more to it than that.

A few months ago, I wrote that the discussion of Harriet Miers was bothering me because the main argument in favor of her was "She MIGHT succeed despite her complete lack of credentials." No, that's not the point. We shouldn't have to guess whether a nominee will make a good Supreme Court candidate or not. The point of having hearings is so that Congress can ask questions and the nominee can answer them.

I watched some of the Alito hearings and they pissed me off. I am sick of this stupid game that all the Bush nominees have played -- a game called "Guess how to make me talk." Whenever Congress asks a direct question like "How would you be likely to rule on this issue?" we get one of these canned responses:

1. "I can't answer that because it might reveal what I think before I actually rule on it."
2. "That's already been ruled on, so it's been settled and I can't answer it."
3. "You can't read what I said I think as an indication of what I actually think."
   

You know how it goes...

Senator: "Judge Alito, you once wrote that you personally feel that abortion is the world's greatest evil and should be destroyed with extreme prejudice the moment we have the chance to do God's bidding."
Alito: "Well, first of all, I was only writing what my former bosses told me to write. And second of all, even if I ever did feel that way, it was a long time ago."
Senator: "Okay. How do you feel about it now?"
Alito: "Stare decisis. My opinion isn't relevant."

Can you imagine any other job interview where a candidate gets to act like this?

Interviewer: "How would you handle this hypothetical situation if we hired you for this position?"
Candidate: "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question because it might have some relevance to how I would do this job."

For all the interviewer knows, this person MIGHT be supremely competent at handling the job. But there's no point in waiting to find out, because the candidate is an asshole, and the interviewer is completely justified in showing him the door.

And that's what I wish Congress would do. And keep doing it. And send a message to the president: "I'm sorry, but this idiot will not talk to us. If you're serious about getting a nominee approved, please send us someone who will answer the questions."

Alito should damn well SAY: "No, I changed my mind about this unitary executive stuff. I don't believe it, and if the president overstepped his boundaries, I would rule against him." And if he won't say it, after being pointedly asked, then there's no reason not to assume the worst.

If Bush and Co. want an anti-abortion candidate badly enough, can't they at least be honest about it? Let them send a guy who will say "I disapprove of Roe v Wade and I mean to do all I can to undermine it, if not overturn it." If they want somebody who will assign the absolute power of a monarch to the president, let them send a guy who will say that.

He'll lose, of course. But he deserves to lose if he can't get 60 votes. As I said about Miers, the vast majority of people have NO business being on the highest court in the land, and the nominee gets the burden of proof on whether he is one of those uniquely qualified individuals.

Unlike Harriet Miers, Judge Alito is not a clueless groupie. He knows the law. But that's not enough. I want the guy who will serve on the Supreme Court for most of the rest of my life to have at least two qualifications. I want him to be competent, AND not evil. One or the other doesn't cut it.

I don't think that's a high bar to set. Nor do I think it's unreasonable to expect the candidate to openly and honestly demonstrate that he meets those expectations.

Classes start tomorrow

In case anyone is interested, I'm beginning classes towards my Master's degree tomorrow at the university of Texas. Check out my program at the Center for Lifelong Engineering.

My classes will meet once a month, all day Friday and Saturday. On both days, my schedule will be:

8am - 12pm
Data Mining EE 380L
Basic concepts of data mining, in parallel with a practical track involving hands-on experience with industrial strength software and a term project will be covered.
Instructor: Joydeep Ghosh

1pm - 5pm
Verification and Validation EE 382C.3
This course covers various traditional and state-of-the-art techniques for software validation, a process that includes reasoning about (the correctness of) programs and testing programs. The course content will include both techniques for dynamic analysis, such as glass-box and black-box testing, equivalence partitioning, test strategy and automation, regression testing and debugging, and techniques for static analysis, such as symbolic execution, and also techniques for software model checking including those that employ artificial intelligence based heuristics.
Instructor: Sarfraz Khurshid

Review of "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe

Ten years after the publication of Darwin's Black Box, I finally took it upon myself to read the thing. I felt that I was pretty familiar with author Michael J. Behe already, having followed the intelligent design movement for years, read his arguments online, read detailed criticism on other sites, and listened to his testimony in front of the Texas State Board of Education in 2003.

Still, I'd never picked up his book until now. There's this Old Earth Creationist / Intelligent Designist on the message board I frequent, and he's always taunted me as being closed minded for not reading Behe. So I read the book, not so much because I thought I would actually get any new information, but because I wanted to stop having that be a part of our arguments.

Here were my preconceptions about the book. As I understood it, Behe is probably the smartest person in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. He is a real, actual biochemist. He has published peer-reviewed scientific papers, although not on the subject of ID. He knows science and scientific language. He also, not coincidentally, differs hugely from self-professed creationists in the sense that he accepts evolution almost in its entirety. He believes, or at least doesn't contradict, that macro-evolution occurs and that the earth is billions of years old.

Although Behe thinks that evolution is reasonable, he disagrees with mainstream biologists in the sense that he denies that evolutionary processes alone -- random mutation combined with natural selection -- are enough to account for all the diversity of life on earth. He believes that certain biochemical systems exhibit what he refers to as "irreducible complexity". Irreducibly complex things cannot have evolved, proposes Behe, and that leaves the alternative that they were "designed". Behe picks several systems as examples of irreducible complexity, which should be well-known by most who have followed the ID political movement: blood clotting, the cilium, etc.

All this is what I knew before reading the book. Early reading bore me out in these impressions. In Behe's own words:

"For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world." (pg 5)

So as far as Behe's concerned, it's fine to think that everything is descended from a common ancestor; so humans do indeed share genes with chimpanzees, with apes, with all mammals, with all vertebrates, and so on.

Furthermore, evolution operates just fine on the macroscopic level, for most things. Here is Behe on the evolution of the famous Darwinian bugaboo, the eye:

"Somehow, for evolution to be believable, Darwin had to convince the public that complex organs could be formed in a step-by-step process.

He succeeded brilliantly. Cleverly, Darwin didn't try to discover a real pathway that evolution might have used to make the eye. Rather, he pointed to modern animals with different kinds of eyes (ranging from the simple to the complex) and suggested that the evolution of the human eye might have involved similar organs as intermediates.

[Behe then recaps Darwin's example.]

Using reasoning like this, Darwin convinced many of his readers that an evolutionary pathway leads from the simplest light-sensitive spot to the sophisticated camera-eye of man. But the question of how vision began remained unanswered." (pg 16)

After this, Behe gives a fairly technical biochemical explanation of vision in terms of photons and proteins and such. His point as I understand it is this: on a macroscopic scale, sure, evolution can account for the construction of complex machinery from chemical parts. But the existence of the chemical parts themselves are a mystery beyond the reach of blind natural processes.

This is what the "black box" means in the title. The cell is treated as a black box by evolutionists. In math and computer programming lingo, a "black box" is a routine that does a certain job reliably. You stick something in, and you get something out. You don't necessarily know HOW the routine does its job, because it's hidden inside the box. But as long as it gives you the right results, you don't care.

So Behe means that the cell might as well be magic as far as macrobiologists are concerned. And that's what he builds his case on. As a biochemist, Behe says he's uniquely qualified to see that, in a nutshell, the cell IS magic. You look inside the cell, you see all this intricate machinery that couldn't have evolved, so you marvel at the brilliance and foresight of an "intelligent designer" who must have planned the thing.

Before looking at his arguments, I'd like to take a moment to address the style of the book. It's a little bewildering. Much of the book is written in a highly patronizing simplistic manner. Behe illustrates his points with analogies to Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, Foghorn Leghorn predicaments, Rube Goldberg machines, and hugely tedious detailed descriptions of everyday activities. Don't get me wrong, often a book on a complicated subject can benefit from the occasional light-hearted cartoon or cutesy analogy. But Behe doesn't just throw out the cutesy analogy and move on; he spends page upon page explaining his analogies in insulting baby talk. For example, in chapter 3, he writes about the process of swimming:

"Suppose, on a summer day, you find yourself taking a trip to the neighborhood pool for a bit of exercise. After slathering on the sunblock, you lie on a towel reading the latest issue of Nucleic Acids Research and wait for the adult swim period to begin. When at long last the whistle blows and the overly energetic younger crowd clears the water, you gingerly dip your toes in. Slowly, painfully, you lower the rest of your body into the surprisingly cold water. Because it would not be dignified, you will not do any cannonballs or fancy dives from the diving board, nor play water volleyball with the younger adults. Rather, you will swim laps.

Pushing off from the side, you bring your right arm up over your head and plunge it into the water, completing one stroke. During the stroke, nerve impulses travel from your brain to your arm muscles, stimulating them to contract in a specific order..." (pgs 57-58)

Behe goes on for three pages like this. And then when he finishes this drivel, he takes another two pages to explain that what he meant to say was, "You may think that the act of swimming is simple, but it's not."

But interspersed with these obnoxiously simplistic passages, there are plenty of passages stuffed full of dense, unreadable technical language like this:

"Conversion of plasminogen to plasmin is catalyzed by a protein called t-PA. There are also other proteins that control clot dissolution, including α₂-antiplasmin, which binds to plasmin, preventing it from destroying fibrin clots." (pg 88)

Or this:

"Enzyme I requires an ATP energy pellet to transform ribose-5-phosphate (the foundation) into Intermediate II. The enzyme has an area on its surface that can bind either ADP or GDP when there is an excess of those chemicals in the cell. The binding of ADP or GDP requires a valve, decreasing the activity of the enzyme and slowing the synthesis of AMP." (pgs 157-158)

Now, I'm not scientifically illiterate. It's just that biochemistry happens to be way outside my field. If you're going to go with a level of description that requires the use of Greek letters, then count on losing a significant chunk of your audience.

This leads me to wonder: who is Behe's intended audience? If this were a biochemical treatise meant for biochemists, then he could have submitted it to a scientific journal, but he didn't. I've never heard the book promoted anywhere except on daytime Christian talk shows and in right wing columns. No offense intended to those forms of media, but most of their audience is probably not going to have any more luck deciphering "ADP" and "GDP" and "alpha-sub-2" than I did. And anyway, if he were going after very scientifically literate readers, then he would have done well to scrap the lengthy explanations of Calvin and Hobbes, as biochemists who know the material would certainly find them as pointless as I do.

But if the readers don't already get biochemistry, then he clearly does not expect them to follow the scientific lingo. In fact, it looks to me like he actually wants most readers to skip over the technical stuff. Whenever he slips into technical mode, he sets off the entire section with little boxes at both ends. The first time he uses this technique, he makes the following comment:

"The following five paragraphs give a biochemical sketch of the eye's operation. (Note: These technical paragraphs are set off by [] at the beginning and end.) Don't be put off by the strange names of the components. They're just labels, no more esoteric than carburetor or differential are to someone reading a car manual for the first time. Readers with an appetite for detail can find more information in many biochemistry textbooks; others may wish to tread lightly, and/or refer to Figures 1-2 and 1-3 for the gist." (pg 18)

Also, at various points in the book he writes things like "I assume I've lost most readers in the labyrinth by now..." (pg 149) And at one point he actually ridicules those who attempt to give understandable explanations to a lay audience.

"I apologize in advance for the complexity of the material, but it is inherent in the point I wish to make. Richard Dawkins can simplify to his heart's content, because he wants to convince his readers that Darwinian evolution is 'a breeze.' In order to understand the barriers to evolution, however, we have to bite the bullet of complexity." (pg 48)

Balderdash. I've read a fair portion of what Dawkins has written, and at no point do I remember him saying that evolution is "a breeze". I have no doubt that Dawkins has written some equally dense papers for his colleagues. My subject is computer programming, which is very far off from the work that Behe does. If I were going to write a book on programming, I could easily lose casual readers with detailed explanations of recursive search algorithms, segmented CSB+-trees, and context-free grammars. I could even, if I chose, use Greek letters. But if I were trying to reach an audience of interested novices, I probably wouldn't do that.

What I'm saying is that there's a simple way to explain a subject and a complex way to explain the same. Behe intentionally chose to go the incomprehensible route. If he did it for the reason I think he did -- to prove that biochemistry is a hard subject that requires a lot of specialized schooling to follow -- then he was wasting his time. I already believe that biochemistry is hard. If I thought it was easy then I might have become a biochemist. Instead of filling up pages of diagrams that most people would only glance at, he could have devoted some of that page space to fleshing out his arguments better.

But I suspect that there is something else going on here. I think Behe really does NOT expect most people to read the parts in boxes, but merely to be impressed by the big words and fancy abbreviations. The average reader would just look at the technical parts and say "Gee whiz, you're smart, Dr. Behe!" Most of the main thrust of his arguments are by analogy, and the GeeWhiz passages are just meant to convey the impression that the analogies are valid because they were made by someone smart.

Back to the substance of the book. To make the case that "black boxes" (cells) require a designer, he fleshes out his notion of "Irreducible Complexity", with one example in each of chapters 3-6. Since I'm not a biochemist or anything close to one, I'm just not very qualified to speak about whether Behe is right that the evolution of these systems is really as big a mystery as he says they are. Luckily, people who are qualified have long since stepped up to the plate to write at length about Behe's examples, so I'll defer to their explanations.

Chapter 3: The cilium
Chapter 4: Blood clotting
Chapter 5: Vesicular transport (search the page for "vesicular")
Chapter 6: The immune system

Each link gives a biologist's response to the stated claim. Note that the link for chapter 5 is actually a pretty lengthy deconstruction of the whole book.

Since the "irreducibly complex" (IC) nature of these particular systems has already been addressed very capably on other sites, I want to address Behe's overall concept of IC as the test for design. In its simplest form, the argument runs like this: Consider a system X that has dependent parts A and B. If you remove part A, then X will cease to function. If you remove part B, then X will also cease to function. Since either A or B must have evolved first, it stands to reason that at some point, X must have existed without one or the other. The resulting system would be useless. Therefore, it cannot have evolved in steps. It must be designed.

To really emphasize how silly the argument is, let's suppose that "X" = "The human body", "A" = "head", and "B" = "torso". Logically, the IC argument means "If the human body evolved, then at some point in history it must have been either a blundering torso with no head, or a disembodied head with no torso. How preposterous! Neither of those could survive! Since there cannot be a head with no torso or a torso with no head, God must have planned the head AND the torso to work together from the beginning!"

In this form, it should be pretty obvious where the fallacy is. The head and body coevolved. At an early enough point, you don't find a body with no head; you find a body that performs the functions of the head with no clear separation between them. Earlier than that, you reach organisms that just don't do head-like things like seeing, hearing, or thinking, yet they survive just fine.

So it's not enough to say "You can't remove parts A or B." To prove the case of irreducible complexity, you also have to prove that there is no simpler form of A or B that does the same job, only a bit worse. And beyond that, there's the scaffolding issue, i.e., some body types had features that supported the adaptation of other features, but then went away.

Obviously no one would bother denying that there are a great many complex systems that exist in living organisms. That is exactly why the theory of evolution exists: because it explains the very complexity we observe, better and more thoroughly than any other concept proposed. Does evolution also explain complex chemical compounds such as those that make up the cell? Almost certainly, according to the theory of auto-catalytic cycles proposed by Stuart Kauffman and others. According to this principle, a large enough variety of chemicals may be almost guaranteed to produce complex systems that continue to create more copies of themselves. It also shouldn't be overlooked that prokaryotic (simple) cells had about a 2.8 billion year headstart on evolution before the first eukaryotic (complex) cells arrived on earth. That's more than twice as long as the rest of all evolutionary history.


There was one analogy in the book that particularly didn't sit right with me. Behe tries to explain that even though one complex system may appear to be a "descendant" of another system, there is no logical path to get from one to the other. For example, you could say that motorcycles are just juiced up bicycles. But there are no small, incremental changes that could be made to bicycles that would turn them into motorcycles.

Well, Behe is absolutely right to say this. Motorcycles didn't evolve from bicycles. For one thing, a motorcycle has a gasoline powered motor. The gas powered motor wasn't specifically made for motorcycles; it was invented separately and has been applied to all kinds of other inventions that share no intellectual ancestry with the motorcycle. Another example that Behe didn't mention would be the computer chip. Today, you find ridiculously powerful computer chips in appliances like thermostats and alarm clocks. The power of those chips is largely wasted in such appliances, but they are used there anyway because they can be cheaply mass-produced, now that the development has already been done for computers.

That's one way that motorcycles and alarm clocks are different from living organisms. Designers transfer parts from one invention to another easily, but that just doesn't happen in nature, as far as we've observed. Far from being a problem with evolution, this is one of the ways that evolution has been confirmed. The theory predicts that no such borrowing of spare parts will occur. Different animals can receive the same feature from a common ancestor, or they can separately evolve apparently similar body parts. But they cannot transfer precise information across the family tree if the common ancestor didn't have that information. If an animal had a feature that was clearly co-opted from an unrelated species -- such as, if an ostrich suddenly gained a perfect copy of human hands with opposable thumbs -- that would tend to discredit evolution. But we don't see that sort of thing happen. This is one of the ways that evolution is falsifiable, which is one of the reasons why it's a legitimate science.

So finally we get to the idea of Intelligent Design, in a chapter which is surely the precursor to a lot of the pro-ID arguments that we've heard in the last ten years. In one of the most famous passages in the book, Behe says:

"Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the room next to the body stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm's legs as they crawl, and never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must 'get their man,' so they never consider elephants.

There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life. The elephant is labeled 'intelligent design.'" (pgs 192-193)

That is all well and good, except that it is a patently bogus bit of sleight-of-hand. At no point in Behe's book does he ever actually produce any elephants. Instead, he just insists "Now that I've ruled out the mainstream scientific explanation, the only alternative is elephants."

Worse, Behe never offers any reason to suspect that his elephant (the "intelligent designer") actually exists. A more appropriate analogy would be if the detectives were swarming around a 23rd story apartment in New York, with a mysterious murder but no visible signs of an elephant whatsoever. While the detectives are trying to do their job, Behe is saying "See, I told you that theory would hit a dead end. It must be elephants that did it!" And "THAT clue didn't pan out either, did it? Why don't you just admit that it's elephants?" When the detectives point out that no witnesses have seen an elephant, and that there is no clear way that an elephant could have gotten up the stairwell or elevator in the first place, he accuses them of anti-elephant bias.

In this situation, the burden of proof is clearly on Behe to give a reason why elephants should be even considered as a hypothesis. It's not that the detectives have ruled out elephants entirely; it's just that until there is compelling evidence to suggest that an elephant was there, "getting their man" is a much simpler approach to the crime.

In order to make a case for a designer, Behe has to do more than reject natural selection as an explanation; he has to actually provide a reason to think that a designer was available at the scene. In one passage, Behe writes about genetic engineering, saying,

"The fact that biochemical systems can be designed by intelligent agents for their own purposes is conceded by all scientists, even Richard Dawkins... Since Dawkins agrees that biochemical systems can be designed, and that people who did not see or hear about the designing can nonetheless detect it, then the question of whether a given biochemical system was designed boils down simply to adducing evidence to support design." (pg 203)

That is hardly a "concession" at all. I can't imagine anybody disagreeing that intelligent beings like us CAN use our intelligence and our current state of technology to alter a gene, or that this ability will be further enhanced in the future.

It is, however, a complete red herring. From "some genes can be designed" Behe makes the logical leap to "all genes were designed." This is like saying that because some vegetables are grown by farmers, it logically follows that ALL vegetables are grown by farmers, and none of them grown in the wild.

What is missing from Behe's argument is the fact that people can design genes, but only if there are any people around to do it. A hundred years ago, the capability to "intelligently design" genes did not exist, at least among humans. And obviously people could not have designed the genes of the first life. So the burden of proof is on Behe to show that there existed any "designer" back then who was capable of genetic engineering. He asserts that there was, but he's begging the question. Since Behe refuses to speculate on the identity of this designer, we're back to square one. Either present evidence that such a universal gene-tinkerer exists, or just acknowledge the fact that natural explanations are all we have to go on at this time.

Although Behe taunted scientists for letting the cell remain a "black box", Behe's solution to the matter is to propose that a particular kind of pre-human intelligence exists -- certainly not a trivial claim in any way. This intelligence is older than the oldest multi-celled life on earth, and is capable of performing genetic engineering on a scale far beyond any human ingenuity so far. How does this designer work? Where did it come from? How do we explain the inherent complexity involved in the designer's existence? We don't know, and it's not our business to ask questions about it. So to get rid of these tiny black boxes, Behe just creates the biggest black box of all out of nothing.

Classic Daily Show shot

I ripped this picture off the Comedy Central web site.

I have nothing in particular to say about it, just saving it for posterity.

Clarification for those who don't watch the Daily Show:

The picture is of Jon Stewart doing his usual very bad -- yet oddly hilarious -- impression of Bush.

Draft of a press release for ACA

On December 20, 2005, judge John E. Jones III issued a 139 page ruling on the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, stating that a rule requiring teachers to present Intelligent Design (ID) as a scientific alternative to evolution is unconstitutional. In Judge Jones' own words:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

We in the Atheist Community of Austin applaud this ruling. We have been saying for many years that Intelligent Design is not science, but merely biblical creationism dressed up with the trappings of science.

Since the introduction of the Wedge Strategy in 1990's, it has been embarassingly clear that Intelligent Design is a front for a group of individuals whose ultimate goal is to undermine scientific knowledge and shoehorn religion into public schools. They have done no original research, produced no scientific results, and accomplished little more than a massive and relentless public relations campaign for their ideas. Their strategy has been to repeatedly infiltrate school districts in individual towns across the country, instituting changes in local education standards, in the hopes that ID might eventually receive a facade of credibility if they win enough political battles.

Our home city of Austin received a taste of this campaign in 2003, when the neo-creationist road show came to Texas to demand that misleading statements about evolution be added to the state's textbooks. In that instance, as in this one, they were resoundingly defeated.

Unless Judge Jones' ruling is appealed, it will only directly affect Pennsylvania school districts. However, because the ruling is so thorough, it will likely serve as a legal template for any future decisions on the topic of ID in schools. Judge Jones minced no words regarding the scientific uselessness of Intelligent Design, also stating:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

The issue of creationism affects education throughout the country. It is not a matter of atheists against Christians. It is a matter of good science, backed by decades of evidence, against a nonscientific political crusade. It is about religion masquerading as science, trying to sidestep the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state that exists in this country. This week, a major blow was struck against this agenda.

Note: If you receive this blog via the RSS feed, please check the original source page for revised versions that will follow.

Mockery

This post I wrote was deemed (by ongoing vote) the number one best post on the Motley Fool message board system for about four hours yesterday.

The discussion was about a college professor who had ridiculed creationism in private email. Another poster wrote, "Mocking someone else's beliefs is just plain ugly".

I replied:

That is a load of bunk and I will now mock you for having this belief.

(Waggling my finger) Mock, mock, mock.

All beliefs are created equal, but some become harder and harder to maintain with a straight face over time. Anyone in the 21st century who believes, for instance, that the earth is flat, deserves all the ridicule they can be subjected to for this belief. I mock them now.

Mock, mock, mock.

Fundamentalist Muslims believe that women are the property of their husbands and fathers, that they should not be out in public without male escorts and veils, and that they must never speak their mind or contradict their men. For holding those beliefs, I mock fundamentalist Muslims.

Mock, mock, mock.

As recently as 50 years ago, a large number of people in certain areas of this very country believed that blacks were inferior human beings, and that they should not be allowed to sit at the same tables as white people or share the same drinking fountains, and if they tried to marry white women, they deserved to be lynched. Those people were jackasses, and I mock them.

Mock, mock, mock.

You can sit around and come up with rational arguments to use against cretins who believe the holocaust never happened. And you SHOULD be familiar with those arguments, if you want to be solid in the real facts. But at a certain point, you don't legitimize holocaust deniers by giving them equal time in history classes and giving students the opportunity to decide for themselves. You tell them what the best evidence of history points to, and you rightly say that holocaust deniers are morons who have no leg to stand on.

Mock, mock, mock.

Don't get me wrong, I hold that everyone's right to BELIEVE their own ridiculous ideas is sacred, or as close to "sacred" as an atheist can muster. But to tell me that I have no right to POINT OUT that their beliefs really are ridiculous is outrageous. Many ideas are not just stupid, they are downright harmful to a society and the innocent people who live there. And since I do not believe in censorship, the best way to effectively combat these beliefs is to mercilessly mock bad, outmoded, and wrongheaded ideas every chance I get.

Mock, mock, mock.

It is not only GOOD to mock obviously bad ideas for being bad. I argue that it is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to shoot them down whenever possible. Otherwise, ideas that are completely unreasonable start to sound reasonable to an uneducated populace who never learned how to tell the difference between fact and opinion. And the folks who cynically take advantage of other people's bad education to hoodwink them into believing things, so they can steal their money and commandeer their lives, are the lowest scum of the earth. They should be exposed. And then mocked.

Mock, mock, mock.

Republicans against creationism

Two recent articles by conservatives criticize Intelligent Design, one by George Will and one by Charles Krauthammer.

In a nutshell, Will and Krauthammer are extending a plea to the religious zealot wing of the Republican party: "Hey guys, could you please shut up about the intelligent design thing? You're hurting us and making us look dumb."

My opinion? It's not so much a problem with a small fringe group as it is with the way that the Republican party has intentionally chosen to structure themselves. You have the economic nerd wing of the Republican party, such as Will and Krauthammer, as well as probably guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney. Smart guys with a political philosophy that can be summed up as "screw the poor."

Then you have the religious zealots, who are intent on demolishing the rift between church and state -- many of whom ARE poor.

The economic nerds are the guys who aspire to power, and are smart enough to get it. But to do that, they need to get a majority of voters on their side, and they fill out their base by pandering to the zealot wing. These are people who probably wouldn't vote Republican if it weren't for the lip service they received to their agenda (i.e., overturn Roe v Wade, stop them uppity queers, and teach kids their religion in disguise as ID). I'm not saying they would vote for Democrats if these things were not on the table, but in all probability many of them simply wouldn't vote.

So those like Will and Krauthammer have a real problem. Their financial ideas (like supply-side economics, which is essentially the economist's version of creationism) have gained some measure of perceived respectability, but they simply aren't popular enough to win elections on their own without the support of the religious right. But then the religious right goes around making themselves highly visible and making the nerd wing look ridiculous.

Part of me wants to cheer for the Republicans who are now telling creationists to go jump in a lake. Then there's another part of me that says that their image problems are of their own making, so let's grab some popcorn and enjoy the fallout.

Please, Bill, put me on your enemies list!

To: Bill O'Reilly [oreilly@foxnews.com]

Dear Bill O'Reilly,

Please put me on your enemies list.

I am an atheist and I want to STEAL CHRISTMAS! Bwahahahahahahaaaaa!

Sincerely,
Russell Glasser
http://kazimskorner.blogspot.com

I'm a grad student

Well, almost.

Russell –

The Software Engineering (SW) program admissions committee has reviewed your application and is recommending your admission to the Graduate School. The next phase will be for the graduate school to review your file and finalize the admission decision. This should only take a couple of weeks if not less before you receive a letter in the mail from the graduate school with their final decision.

[snip]

Congratulations again – we are looking forward to working with you over the next two years. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

Thanks,
Nicole *****
Graduate Program Coordinator
UT Austin - Center for Lifelong Engineering Education

Update: I got the official acceptance letter and accompanying bill (yikes!) a few days later. I start in mid-January.

The Truth (With Jokes)

I bought Al Franken's new book, The Truth (With Jokes) today at Barnes & Noble before lunch. Wouldn't even wait a few days to get it shipped from Amazon. I believe it came out yesterday. I'm such a fanboy.

I haven't been reading nonfiction for the last several months. I was enjoying it for a while, but then it started to depress me. The last nonfiction I was reading was Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is REALLY depressing. I think I quit reading shortly after learning that the residents of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico turned to digging up corpses and eating them when farming could no longer sustain them.

That book now graces my bathroom, where I can take it in small doses of two or three pages at a time. In its place, I've been dividing my time between Shadow of the Hegemon by Card, and the long slog that is the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King. (I kept hearing that this is something you're supposed to read. So far, at 3/4 through the first book, I'm not sure if I'm impressed enough to get the next one.)

Anyway, these will take a back seat as I'm already a couple of chapter's into "The Truth" since lunch. I didn't much enjoy reading a recap of election day, but he did manage to make it both dramatic and funny. He even laid out bits of the script they had planned for the next morning, based on the arrogant assumption that Kerry would definitely win by a lot.

An excerpt from that chapter:

A clap of thunder rumbled in the distance. Ah, I thought. A good omen. Mother Earth was about to be replenished, just like our drought stricken political culture.

My phone rang. Felt. Mark Felt.

(Footnote: "Mark Felt" is the alias I'm using in order to protect the identity of my real source, Judith Miller.)

Later in the book there's an entire chapter devoted to Terri Schiavo. That should be interesting.

The war against objectivity

"Some people today would say that there is no true reality, only perceptions and opinions.

...Today we often hear phrases like 'that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.' To those that hold that there is no absolute truth, truth is seen as nothing more than a personal preference or a perception and therefore cannot extend beyond a person’s boundaries."

Thus sayeth Josh McDowell - Christian apologist, youth minister, and author of popular religious books such as "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" and "More Than a Carpenter". As a masochistic listener to Christian radio, I've heard him and many like-minded Christians repeat this charge many times over the years, generally following it up immediately with an assertion that this is bad news for religion and undermines faith.

What surprises me is how much I agree with the underlying principle. There ARE a lot of people who seem to think that truth is nothing more than opinion, and it is a serious problem for everyone who likes to deal with logical debate. Where I disagree with Josh is that I don't think the cause is atheism. On the contrary, subjective reality is fundamentally a faith based proposition.

The dictionary definition of "faith" in the religious sense is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." The Bible declares that "faith is he substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Mark Twain, through the mouth of Pudd'nhead Wilson, said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." Any way you slice it, having faith means coming to a conclusion first, and then filtering the facts to match your expectations.

I argue on message boards a lot, and I notice a trend among certain types of people. Often I go to considerable trouble to research an argument, make sure there are no holes in my reasoning, and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that I am making a solid case. Yet hours of work are tossed aside with a single dismissive comment, such as, "Well, that's some pretty good research, but I still believe what I believe. You're welcome to your opinion, though."

Or, "You can't trust polls / mainstream news sites / that website, they're biased!"

That's depressing because there's no real response to it without getting into a whole metaphysical argument about what constitutes evidence, and whether there really is a difference between fact and opinion. I expect to have to deal with mistakes on my part. I expect to be taken to task for my own misinterpretation of the facts. At the very least I want some kind of canned response to refute my points. But instead, I get "thanks for sharing, that's just your opinion." Or as one of Josh McDowell's students might say, "That may be true for you, but it's not true for me."

Except these aren't liberals I argue with (most of the time). They're Christian conservatives. Hence, they've made up their mind, and even acknowledging any serious flaw in their argument would be tantamount to heresy or treason, depending on the subject.

I think this is an absolutely poisonous attitude that goes beyond some bandwidth wasted on a message board or blog; it's something that infests our national debate. One way that it manifests itself is in the way they attempt to undermine the perceived accuracy of any and all forms of media.

Sometimes even a relatively straightforward link to a reference site, such as Wikipedia will lead into a whole can of worms about how everything Wikipedia says is automatically wrong because it's "open source". Now, I think that every skeptical person should be at least aware of what Wikipedia is, and not take everything they say as gospel. It's important to be aware of the review process, and make sure to check out their secondary sources, and use your own critical judgment to recognize the difference between fact and opinion. But those are general concerns that everyone should have about every source: some are less reliable than others, do your homework.

That's not how this kind of person argues, though. They don't argue with the contents of a particular article, or explain why they find a particular claim to be likely untrue. They just dismiss the source outright, and refuse to read any further.

Now hang on just a second. I realize, of course, that NOTHING written by human beings is ever going to be 100% objective. That's a basic principle of scientific thought. But if everything in Wikipedia can be dismissed because there are multiple authors... and everything we read in newspapers can be dismissed because it's "liberal"... and (according to creationists) everything coming out of the "scientific establishment" can be dismissed because it's advancing the agenda of the scientists... what are we supposed to do?

Is it seriously the position of these people that there is NO WAY to know anything at all with even a tiny bit of confidence? Is it then absolutely impossible to arrive at something that we can refer to as "The Truth"? Is it a waste of time to even try?

This attitude comes pretty darn close to solipsism. Solipsism is defined as "The view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing really existent." I might call it weak solipsism, because they don't necessarily believe that the self is "the only thing really existent." But if you took their arguments seriously, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that they think there is no truth or reality that extends beyond themselves.

Is that what they really believe? Well, probably not. I think that they believe in objective truth, or at least they believe that they believe it. What they really want is to overthrow research and investigation as a legitimate way of arriving at the truth. What does that leave? The answer can be summed up in a word: FAITH.

Faith in an ancient holy book. Faith in the administration. Faith in the fundamental and unshakable goodness of everyone whom they, personally, hold to be good and right. That is truth to them. Facts are fickle; they have this nasty habit of not supporting your most cherished opinions. But faith can never be undermined unless you want it to.

But, yikes! If there was EVER a method of knowledge that could be called subjective, it's faith. To judge the reality of the universe based on what you have decided is true, regardless of any sort of study or skepticism? Not only does that make no sense, but I would say that the odds are astronomically stacked against any pre-conceived belief system just happening to be the one that is in tune with reality.

What it does do is entrench power. If I can't hope to decide for myself what is real, then my only choice is to go down to my friendly neighborhood priest and ask him what to think. Then he'll be happy to open up his holy book, point to chapter and verse, and tell me that this sentence here is absolutely true and the answer to all your moral dilemmas. I can also go to the rabbi or mullah next door, and get a totally different answer that is also absolutely true. Ultimately, though, the sect with the most power will amplify itself and crush out the other absolute truths, until it's the only one left.

Unless we recognize the fact that there is such a thing as reality, which is not changed by our little beliefs. Unless we recognize that it is our job to FIGURE OUT and INTERPRET the available evidence, so that our beliefs might become more in tune with what's really out there beyond ourselves -- not rewrite the facts so that they better fit into what we believe.

Look, I know that all information-gathering organizations make mistakes, and many times even lie. The New York Times had their Jayson Blair incident. Dan Rather should have checked his sources better. But the solution to that is not to say "From now on, I shall never again believe anything that the New York Times or any other news source say, about ANYTHING AT ALL, just because they have printed it and they have been wrong." The solution is to treat each story with an appropriate level skepticism, try to cross-check and cross-reference their information, get as close to you can to the original sources, and accept that everything you know is tentative to a greater or lesser degree. But when all's said and done, you have to recognize that basing your beliefs on the evidence you can get is a better way of knowing things than basing your beliefs on your beliefs themselves.

In my opinion, the whole problem with our national discourse right now is how much people are buying into the idea that there are no facts that can be learned through observation; there are only opinions, and YOUR opinion is the one that matters. It cuts to the heart of the problem with batshit crazy fundamentalist types. It is on display every time we see another press conference in front of a pre-screened audience. It explains how people can hear about Terri Schiavo being brain dead and blind, and then immediately start off another quest to indict Michael instead of saying "Oh my God, we were wrong about her condition!!!" And it's why people hear reports of people being tortured by Americans, and they simultaneously say "That's not true" and "They deserve it!"