Two movies

I just wanted to share a couple of funny movies I ran into. Not all audiences will get them, but I think they're both brilliant.

Minesweeper: The Movie




Mementos
If you've seen the movie AND the commercials, you should get it; if you haven't then you'll probably be confused.

What's in the pipeline

This is just a "what's going on" type of post, because I'm trying to blog more often but I have this bad habit of starting big, long posts and then letting them languish for weeks, not willing to pull the trigger until they're complete.

For the last month or so I've been dividing my time between writing a twelve page term paper on the topic of Web Tagging (due by email tonight) and a program for my thesis project (which is due in November). It's a wee bit scary. My stepdaughter Caitlin has moved to Colorado to live with her aunt on a ranch and train horses for a year. I've turned her bedroom into a makeshift "office" by plugging a wireless adapter into my computer and setting it up on a card table. The main advantage of this is that the door locks and I can hide from my very demanding five year old. And if I'm pulling a most-of-the-nighter, I can go to sleep on the bed in here without disturbing Ginny in the middle of the night. It's a good arrangement, but it makes my family miss me and vice versa. This is grad school crunch time -- doubly so when the fall semester starts -- and will likely remain so until December. Wish me luck.

I'm also getting a new laptop soon, maybe this weekend. I might go work at a coffee shop more often, once I have worked out the best scheme for keeping my project synced.

I do have a few posts in the works, namely:

1. I'll post my term paper after it's turned in, and nobody can accuse me of helping anyone else cheat.
2. I've been meaning to go back and reply to johngalt666 on the homeschooling thread comments. This would be an example of me starting a long post and letting it sit for a while.
3. I've been kicking around the idea of writing something longish on the annoyance of those 9/11 Truth disciples who are always calling in to the Atheist Experience, C-Span, various Air America shows, and everything else. I have a few things in mind to say, but not much written yet. Short version: The notion that there is a massive cover-up of the U.S. government personally organizing terrorist groups or firing missiles into the World Trade Center or whatever, for me ranks pretty close to Scientology in terms of credibility. More later.

Anyway, sorry I'm not more talkative lately; stay tuned.

I loves me some Chris Dodd

Hmmm, never cared about him that much before, but I gotta give Chris Dodd props for his utter smoothness in facing down Bill "O'Really?"

If you haven't been following this wacky controversy, Bill's been looking for ways to smear the political blog Daily Kos, and hit on the brilliant strategy of highlighting a bad photoshop image posted in the one of the thousands of comments they get every day. Now he's trying to intimidate presidential candidates into staying away from the Yearly Kos convention. Dodd wasn't having any of it.

To me, the funniest part of the video is when Dodd calls O'Reilly to task for saying hateful things on his own show, like talking about al Qaeda bombing San Francisco. Bill loudly denies that he EVER SAID ANY SUCH THING: "You don't know what the hell I said! You got it from Media Matters!!!"

Well, of course, that story is on Media Matters, among other places. There's also an audio clip of him saying it. So in addition to all the other "smearing" that Media Matters does, they apparently have an incredibly convincing Bill O'Reilly impersonator on the staff!

The Daily Show blows a comic opportunity

I was waiting in eager anticipation for last night's "Daily Show," since they didn't discuss the YouTube Democratic debate on the night of the debate itself.

In one sense I wasn't disappointed, because they focused the first 2/3 of the show on the debate and it was funny. But they focused mostly on the form of the debate, and very little on the candidates' responses. For my money, easily the most mockable moment in the entire debate was when someone asked the question "How many of you arrived on a private jet?"

Several candidates (mainly Clinton, Obama) confidently put their hands up, at least being honest about the question. Bill Richardson put his hand halfway up, glanced nervously around at the others to see who else was copping to it, and then sheepishly raised his hand the rest of the way. That had my home audience busting up. Unfortunately, Team Stewart must not have seen the comedy potential in that incident.

The Motley Fool reopens its doors

Here's something I forgot to mention earlier. For years I've been a dedicated member of the Motley Fool message board community. In fact, part of the reason I created this blog was to archive some of my favorite posts that I had written there. In 2002, the boards became a paid service, so you could no longer read or post there if you did not cough up $30 per year. Admittedly, this has helped somewhat in keeping out the riff-raff and having some smart discussions, but it is also frustrating, since I can't just send non-members a link to some good discussions.

I'm happy to say that a couple of weeks ago, TMF reopened their doors. Now, anyone at all can read the boards, but you still need to be a member to post. However, memberships no longer require money; you can join if you know a current member. Since I happen to be a current member, anyone who knows me well can get a guaranteed invite. Just email me.

Here's my profile, which links to recent posts of mine. Be sure to check out my two favorite hangouts, Atheist Fools (a board I sort of helped to start, way back in the day) and Computer and Video Gamers. Great conversations with cool people.

Clarification/update:

Actually, the event does not occur until a few weeks from now, I don't know exactly when. Also, my total number of invitations is limited to 20. I don't necessarily expect to use them all anyway.

Here's yer sign!

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

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

Naturally, I had to reply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooooo, check me out, I'm famous!

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

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

Thoughts on home schooling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, finally, thoughts on home schooling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey Orson Scott Card fans! Not disillusioned yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming This Fall: A War of Gifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pwned

Scooter goes free

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

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

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

I've been tagged

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

The obligatory rules:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolutionary tradeoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in gaming news...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticizing Islam

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

I contributed this to the discussion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, you want more?

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

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

Happy now?

Sar-doo-what?

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

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

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

Coulter vs. Coulter

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

Ann Coulter, 5/30/07:

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

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

Ann Coulter, 6/23/04:

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

Git a rope.

Sweet dreams are not made of these

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

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

Party time!

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

Another meaningless gaming milestone reached!

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

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

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