Rosio Pavoris

Why do I manage to get four times as much traffic as Terru even when I don’t post at all?

Looks like the domain name expired, dunno when it’s supposed to be back up. Until then, connect via the IP: 65.23.154.10

(Channel is still #rotahall, or #pharyngula, depending on what you’re there for, obviously.)

I guess I never had a reason.

That’s actually kind of funny.

(Via Pam’s House Blend.)

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, could have been a reasonably interesting book, if only it hadn’t been written by a moron.
It purports to present a general overview of the state of our knowledge of the world around us, but it… doesn’t.

Bryson just jumped into a few specific fields, but it’s painfully obvious he doesn’t have a science background, and he doesn’t have any way to tell unimportant details and junk science from the real stuff. The former wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but the latter is absolutely fatal.
I’m not sure if Bryson thought he could do this because he was motivated by a genuine thirst for knowledge, or if he was just assuming that anything a scientist could do, he should be able to understand fully with ease (that is, this refusal to believe that some people are just smarter than others, which is characteristic of many, many stupid people), but somewhere along the way I think he realised he just didn’t understand what he was talking about, so he turned to human interest stories and sensationalistic catastrophism.

Don’t get me wrong—I like reading about people. Most works on popular science do tend to overlook scientists are human too, and just ignore the combination of situations that led up to important discoveries. In his eagerness to provide this “novel” view of things, though, Bryson is far too willing to just pull things out of his ass.

Still, that doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as his aforementioned catastrophism.
Maybe he felt the general public kicks on fear. Maybe he was right. Either way, after the first section, the entire book just collapses into a pile of FUD: asteroids are going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, Yellowstone is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, disease is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, we almost never existed thousands of times over, &c.
All of it is empty bullshit designed to grab people’s attention without having to bother with facts.

Because obviously, facts aren’t his strong point. He perpetuates some embarrassingly obvious myths (like the medieval flowing glass one, and one particularly painful creationist quotemine), and gets some easily-checked facts spectacularly wrong (including the definition of hominid, and a particularly bad one where he called the Spanish flu the worst epidemic in recorded history).
His chapter on climatology seems to be designed to feed global warming denialism, and the bit on human evolution seems designed to bolster supporters of special creation (or, at the very least, multiregionalists).

Even if you’re willing to put up with that, it’s painfully obvious that Bryson just doesn’t understand how science works.
Fully half of the book is devoted to “failings of science” (unafraid to invent some along the way), emphasising how little we know and how often we’ve “changed our minds”. We could use some books to point out limitations in our current knowledge, but Bryson seems to be attacking the very idea of scientific knowledge itself, again simply to get attention.
It’s more than pathetic: it’s harmful.

Bill Bryson probably did more harm to the cause of science with this one book than a thousand earnest creationists ever could.
The fact that it was so popular and got such good reviews indicates just how insidious its effects will turn out to be.

Bryson deserves as many public ridiculings as there are atoms in the period at the end of this sentence: over nine thousand.

(I’m not even tagging this as anything science-related.)

Occasionally Slashdot still carries an interesting story, reminding us why we (just barely) put up with their random endorsements of junk science (over and over again). In this case, it’s this reminder that people are still a very important weak link in any kind of security set-up.

Recently, as an experiment, I wrote from my Hotmail account to ten different hosting companies that were each hosting some of my Web sites, asking for logins to change the domain settings. Even though I never provided any proof that the messages from the Hotmail account were really coming from me (the address they all had on file for me was a different one), half of them replied back and gave me the logins that I needed.

It’s not exactly news, but it’s a thing we need to be reminded of from time to time, and this type of reminder is at least a great deal less harmful than first-hand experience.

(Along similar lines, this story also vaguely amused me.)

… Penn & Teller are wrong (on their show Bullshit!) at least as often as they’re right. They’re right about religion and creationism, of course, but beyond that, their ability to identify junk science has less to do with rationality than it does with their ridiculous political convictions.
They get the obvious ones, like ESP, ghosts, and Bigfoot, and they even manage to get some political ones, like the death penalty, but they completely miss anything they just don’t want to believe, like gun control, the dangers of second-hand smoke, recycling, minimum wage, even global fucking warming.

I appreciate the importance of getting the message out, as far as religion and some of the more ridiculous superstitions go, but too many people seem to be afraid to call them on their bullshit because “they’re on our side against a greater evil”.
Nobody should get a free pass to be irrational.

(See for yourself, BTW. These guys have a few episodes of Bullshit!, Google Video intermittently has a bunch more.)

(Jerry Falwell died, aged 73. No word on a resurrection yet. I guess he didn’t get his extra twenty years.)

A person’s beliefs are a reflection of the way he approaches evidence of the world around him. When considering someone for tenure, which is meant to protect controversial academic research (that is, acquisition and interpretation of evidence), you’d have to be an idiot not to consider them.
Obviously, part of the tenure decision is political as well, with considerations made regarding whether or not a person would just fit in with the institution and whatnot, so beliefs enter into that as well.

This whole persecution-complex-based argument is perilously close to declaring any random idiot should be able to do anything he wants to (such as achieve tenure or be taken seriously for books on scientific subjects when he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about), which is perhaps typically American rather than typically DI. It doesn’t matter.
Quit whining.

(I’m talking about Guillermo Gonzalez, of course, the IDiot astronomer and DI fellow who was denied tenure at Iowa State. He doesn’t seem to understand how the process works, and the Disco Institute is crying persecution, obv obv.
PZ summed it up quite neatly, as he is wont to do:

Complaining that one met all the requirements is like proposing marriage, getting turned down, and then protesting that one has a good job, a nice apartment, and excellent personal hygiene. That may be true, but it’s irrelevant. The university does not want a long-term, committed relationship with you–nothing personal, you can still be friends.

)

US military takes Iraq war to YouTube

The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.

Its 25 brief clips include footage of US soldiers firing at unseen snipers in Baghdad, handing out footballs to Iraqi children and rescuing an Iraqi family injured by an explosive device.

Or, as it used to be called, simple propaganda.

If they’re trying to pretend they’re not trying to paint an overly positive picture of Iraq, perhaps they shouldn’t be referring to this as “cyberspace battle space”. And since soldiers on the ground have been banned from YouTube (among others, and the only possible justification for this is to supress whistleblowers), it should be pretty obvious how heavily this is going to be screened and watched.

(Via Slashdot, obviously.)

I’m surprised how neatly the Republican candidates are clustered at the bottom. More proof a two-party system stifles political variety, especially if you consider the libertarian candidate is really just a Republican, and the Green candidate is a Democrat with a specific issue she feels more strongly about than the party at large.
I’ve mostly ignored Kucinich because they’re just no chance in hell he’s going to win the primary, so I wasn’t aware how solid he is on most important issues. Kudos to you, Kucinich.

(Via Larry Moran.)

This discussion is still going on, and it’s surprising how wrong some people who are otherwise quite intelligent manage to get it.

John Wilkins links to this opinion piece by a Washington Post writer (not one of the intelligent people I mentioned; we’ll get to those later). She argues that asking who believes in evolution was unfair and didn’t serve a purpose other than to make people look like idiots.

As debate audiences were pondering the meaning of Darwin in the Oval Office, McCain asked permission to elaborate. McCain then added: “I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.”

Note to George Tenet: This is what you call a slam dunk. McCain was able to acknowledge both science and religion — evolutionary theory and creationism — and make them mutually inclusive.

Except that’s not how most Republican voters will see, or how most rational people would. He managed to give an answer that would annoy both sides and appeal to the “moderate” religionists, a group whose size I think he greatly overestimates.

The truth is, each man took a calculated risk — or a courageous stand, depending on one’s view. To say “yes” would have been to betray many evangelical Christian voters, 73 percent of whom believe that human beings were created in their present form in the past 10,000 years or so.

Protip: presidents don’t get define reality, despite what the neocon movement seems to believe. If 73% of the people believe God created the universe 6,000 years ago, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not that’s true.
Of course, she means it more cynically than that: the people want a president who’s willing to lie to them and betray his own beliefs entirely in order to tell them what they want to hear. That’s a sad state of affairs, but the truth of it does not mean that’s the sort of president people need.

To these folks, “no” didn’t mean anti-science; it meant pro-God and conveyed a transcendent, nonmaterialistic view of the world.

Even to the worst of the appeasers, it should be obvious that in this case, that’s the exact same thing.
(I’d argue that it’s the exact same thing in any case, obviously.)

In a conversation after the debate, Huckabee said, “I wish life were so simple…. If I’d had time, I would have asked whether he meant macro or micro evolution.”

That’s a different sort of answer than what is inferred from a simple “no” forced by the manic pace of a 90-minute “debate” among 10 candidates, none of whom is qualified to seriously debate scientific theory.

Is it? Is it really?

Anyway, moving on.
Mitt Romney (that secksy, secky man-beast) casts himself as a theistic evolutionist, and people seem to be going nuts over it. I’m not sure how the conservative blogosphere is reacting (right-wing blogs tend to make me physically ill), but for the most part, our side thinks it’s great.

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

This of course is the standard theistic evolutionist response. Boilerplate, banal, and politically safe… but also essentially pro-science.

No, it really isn’t. On the face of it, it may look pro-science enough that it’ll cause future candidates to avoid any move towards publically accepting reality after Romney inevitably loses, but it’s still firmly in the anti-science camp.

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Translation: I’m not touching ID with a ten-foot pole.

… What?

“I don’t know what ID is, but I believe God guided evolution” translates to “not touching ID with a ten-foot pole”? If anything, it’s worse than standard ID positions, since they at least try not to invoke God a lot of the time.

You disappoint me, Panda’s Thumb.

PZ has more on this, including links to more disappointments.

To sum up: Republican candidates are still as anti-science as they’ve ever been. You could make a case that they’re trying to be more subtle about it, but they aren’t improving.
The sad part is, I’m not sure any of the Democratic candidates are any better, in this area.

Langue d’oc might annoy me almost as much as Québécois does.

People should have just stuck to Latin.

This guy has videos (and part 2 here).
The Nightline version itself seems to have been pulled (part 1, anyway), but from what I’ve heard, it’s heavily cut to make it looks like Comfort and Cameron actually had half a clue what they were trying to do anyway. Bashir’s own beliefs may have something to do with that.

I lied.

Though I guess most of you will already have seen everything Caturday-related I could post.

Literally while I was writing I couldn’t find those videos, thewayofthemaster was uploading them to YouTube. It doesn’t look like it’s exactly what ABC aired (it’s just Comfort and Cameron talking), but it’s close enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t seem to find a decent, embeddable version of the Comfort/RRS Nightline “debate”, but fortunately, there’s no shortage of inanity on the side of the Way of the Master. Most of you will have seen this one already.

Evidence in favor of God: non-slip surface, perforated wrapper, intuitive ripeness indicator, pull-tab, hand-and-mouth-fittery, ease of digestibility. Apparently.

Behold, Ray Comfort’s nightmare:

That’s a wild banana. It’s marginally edible, if you aren’t too picky, but that’s about it.
(Click for to make bigger; there’s another one here.)

The banana Comfort is waving around (a dessert banana) is the result of many, many generations of careful selective breeding, and even within the category of fruits that most people would consider to be a banana (that is, not including wild ones), there are plenty which are only worth eating after extensive preparation (the plantain comes to mind).
Comfort’s banana isn’t evidence of God so much as it is evidence of human ingenuity and, ironically, evolution.

Ah, but of course, they do believe in micro-evolution~

Incidentally, Nick Gisburne made a video response to the banana video. Included behind the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure you heard about how Philadelphia suddenly realised it had a law on the books that made fortune-telling for money a crime, leading to the shutting down of a bunch of random frauds.
Turns out they’re backing out.

The city backed off after Mitchell’s attorney, John Raimondi, filed a request last week for a restraining order and preliminary injunction on the ground that the statute could be invoked only in cases of fraud.

“What we said is the law is part of the crimes code. You have to prove that someone has been taken advantage of, and you can’t expect L&I to enforce that,” Raimondi said.

Before the case even reached a judge, he said, “we got a call Monday afternoon from the City Solicitor’s Office saying they were agreeing with us and advising L&I to discontinue.”

L&I being the Department of Licenses and Inspections, within whose purview this law is.
Over the next few years, one or two of the more egregious abusers might be shut down, but what this essentially means is that the vast majority of fortune tellers are now in the clear again.

Fail, Philadelphia. Fail.

(Via James Randi’s Swift.)

I may end up not skipping Besturingssystemen anymore. For some reason I’m always the first person to arrive to that class on Fridays (I usually get there at 8:15, and the class starts at 8:20; at 8:25, the teacher gets there, at 8:30, the rest of the class), and I usually pass the time by reading. A side effect of this is that teacher person thinks I’m a diligent student (and to be honest, the class doesn’t even tend to bore me), and that he’ll often strike up a conversation with me about random sciencey things.

He isn’t an expert on any topic, but he’s read a handful of popular science books, including, turns out, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. We spent fifteen minutes or so talking about that this morning, and somewhere along the way he lamented the anti-intellectualism of the student body in our hogescholen (as other students were coming in; he’s good at casually offending scores of people when he doesn’t intend to) and commended me for refusing to let higher education turn me into a one-track overspecialised idiot hermit, as it does so many people.
So yeah. I like that guy. And the class doesn’t tend to be incredibly boring, and I’m tired enough on Fridays that I can even put up with oversimplification.

This is some variety of spider. I thought it was a wolf spider, but it doesn’t look like it is. Identify it for me.