… that anyone who doesn’t understand there’s a difference between “I know there is no God” and “I do not believe in God” is an idiot, and that anyone who answers “agnostic” when asked about his religious beliefs hasn’t understood the question.
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think is a collection of essays by various people who have been influenced by Richard Dawkins, some famous, some less so. Well, maybe they’re all famous; I recognised about half of them, anyway, including Marian Stamp Dawkins (his first wife), Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Matt Ridley, and Philip Pullman.
Mostly the essays try to explain why Dawkins has been so influential, and some of them predictably border on the masturbatory.
By necessity, a book titled after a famous scientist who’s been in the news a lot recently, and with his face on the cover, is bound to primarily attract the audience of people who lack the attention span or the mental capacity to actually read Dawkins’ works themselves (he may be excellent at making thing accessible, but he still assumes his readers have a working brain), but who still want to appear erudite to their equally vapid friends—I have a fair number of these people in my immediate family—and the contents of many of these essays reflect that.
Still, at least two or three of them are quite interesting, but only insofar as they actually touch on new research inspired by Dawkins’ work (which, for the purposes of these essays, mostly seems to be just The Selfish Gene). They’re a poor substitute for Dawkins himself, but if you don’t have the time to actually read real books, these essays are short enough to at least convey some general impressions.
On the whole, though, I wouldn’t recommend picking this one up.
I took SWBHG down, and it’ll stay down. For “undisclosed vulnerabilities”, is all I’ll say.
(By which I mean, a retarded chimpanzee could code a more secure application.
At least we won’t be going over our allotted webspace as quickly in the future.)
Update: Alright, it should be patched now. I’ve brought it back provisionally, but I’ll be watching it closely.
Regarding the webspace, the SWBHG vulnerability wasn’t the cause of it, apparently, though it could have been used to do the exact same thing. Still, that was something else, and that, too, has been taken care of now.)
Went to get my grades today, turned out pretty much as expected.
It’s looking unlikely I’ll be switching to the KUL next year, even though I’d be getting my Master’s in the same year (Bachelor’s degree in Applied Computer Science requires an extra year to catch up, compared to a regular Computer Science degree; if I went with the shortened program, I’d be getting my Bachelor’s in Computer Science in the same year I’d be getting my Bachelor’s in Applied CS if I didn’t switch, and I’d be getting my Master’s a year earlier).
Also, I bought Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, because it occured to me I’d never read anything by Sir Rushdie, and Philip Roth’s Everyman, because I had a 12 € discount card, and Shalimar was less than that.
It’s odd how much cheaper fiction is than non-fiction. The average fiction book seems to cost about 10 €, which includes a 21% luxury tax, while non-fiction (of comparable size, so mostly popular science, not textbooks) tends to start at 20 €, even though taxes on them are much lower.
Maybe it’s because there are a lot of domestic publishers willing to print fiction in English, but almost none willing to print non-fiction, so I’ve been buying imported books.
I’ll look into that.
Albino animals are awesome. So are animals with “cock” in their names.
THE 1981 census documented the fact that 88 per cent of the Australian nation held some form of religious belief. By 2001, the proportion of “believers” had dropped to 83 per cent. Yesterday’s release of the 2006 census results places the proportion of those with a faith at 79 per cent. Non-believers have gained nine percentage points in market share in 25 years.
Believers evaporated from this nation at a rate of five percentage points over the final 20 years of the 20th century. But in the first five years of the new century, this group yielded yet another four percentage points. Godlessness, it would seem, is on the up and gathering momentum.
Yes, yes, good news, and whatnot.
Still, it keeps surprising me how the entire English-speaking world is essentially insane.
Australia seems to have the excuse of mostly consisting of the descendents of prisoners (which, as you know, are statistically more likely to be religious), and the US has the whole religious persecution thing, driving fundies away from Europe and into the Americas.
Canada is just the US’ little brother (Québec, interestingly, is the least religious part of Canada; most of Canada has a level of creationism more or less in line with the US, but Québec could almost pass for a European country, so not another bad word about the Frenchies), but I’m not sure what excuse the UK has. Cultural protectivism seems to lead to incestuous degradation, I guess.
Perhaps you’re already familiar with the idea behind METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL; it’s a simple program designed by Dawkins to demonstrate the enormous power of Darwinian evolution. He originally mentioned it in his book The Blind Watchmaker, and gave a demonstration of it in the accompanying BBC programme.
He also explains it in this shorter video (using a different phrase, but the idea is obviously the same):
(Earning that Public Understanding of Science badge. Near the end he also explains the title of another one of his books, Climbing Mount Improbable.)
Because I was bored, I’ve written a similar program (bytecode here, if you’re too lazy to compile) just now. It differs from Dawkins’ original design in a few ways.
First off, there’s only one offspring per generation, and rather than picking the best of the pool of kids, it simply picks the best of the kid or the parent.
Secondly, rather than each letter having a given chance to mutate, it just changes one letter per generation. This slows down the improvements early on, but it reduces the chances of reproduction severely messing up a nearly-correct string (my first test using random mutations took over six thousand generations just to get the final letter right; real evolution doesn’t work towards a goal it needs to get just right, so it’s not under that kind of restriction).
Thirdly, it actually kind of sucks, because you can’t really see it change as it goes. It just dumps data into the output window, and it scrolls too fast to actually follow. Still, you can scroll back a bit once it’s done.
I ran it a few times, and it seems to take about two or three thousand generations (that is, a few seconds; since this is kind of like bacterial asexual reproduction, that’s actually next to no time at all) to get from the random starting string to METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. I could calculate how long it takes on average, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
At this point, I can switch between both views relatively easily, but it took much longer than it should have.
(Between this and the Caturday picture, the main page is about half a megabyte larger than usual. Apologies to anyone on dial-up.
Also, you disgust me.)
This time a little too close to home. Not Flanders yet, no. It’s the Dutchie Bible Belt again.
I’m not sure why fundies are so obsessed with children’s literature; that’s perhaps the only thing parents have complete control over. Still, after Harry Potter (obviously), they’ve now gone after a Flemish writer’s new book.
The writer I’m talking about is, of course, Marc de Bel.
De Bel has always been the only Dutch-language author I’ve been able to read. The first real book I ever read was Blinker en het Bagbag-Juweel, when I was five (though I think the target audience was twelve-year-olds).
He never treated his readers like idiots just because they were loli, and he didn’t ignore “naughty” topics if they made sense. So yes, his books had kissing occasionally, and death, and the recurring minor villains in at least one of his series were regular drug users.
But now the Dutch fundamentalists think he’s gone too far! And why?
Because a main character in his newest book might be… an ALIEN!
The Flemish title of the book (which is cowritten with Guy Didelez and aimed at ten-year-olds) is Alien (pronounced “ah-LEEN”; it’s the name of aforementioned main character), and it’s apparently about a guy who wonders if one of his friends is an extra-terrestrial.
But the Bible says extra-terrestrials don’t exist, apparently!
As such, the censors tried to take the book apart. They got de Bel to replace all instances of the blasphemous “godverdomme” (”goddammit”) with “verdikke” (closer to “darn” in connotation) and “shit” (which was apparently fine by them), and the Dutch release title will be Ik moet je iets vertellen (”I have to tell you something”).
They also tried to change the romantic relationship between the main character and Alien to a “just friends” one, but at that point, de Bel predictably told them to go fuck themselves (politely, I’d think).
I wish I could say this sort of thing was unexpected. At least it raised awareness of the dangers of ignoring fundamentalism for too long, and I think that’s why de Bel allowed them to change the title at all.
Hey, remember when Flanders used to be the backwater nest of religiosity, and the Netherlands were a beacon of progressive openmindedness?
(Yes, a handful of benighted idiots getting more vocal doesn’t necessarily constitute a threat to civilisation. Still, though.)
People have been talking about this recently, mostly sparked by some creationists calling it an example of Darwinian fundamentalism, followed by some atheist evolutionary biologists going “lol i dont believe it”.
Let me start by saying that evolutionary psychology, as it stands today, is indeed almost entirely pseudoscientific bullshit. This seems to be because psychology in general is pseudoscientific bullshit, and this is because people don’t really seem to know how to approach cognitive science.
The most obvious bullshit in psychology seems to derive from Freud and Jung, which is quite embarrassing, since their flaws should be immediately apparent to anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of sitting through a lecture on their ideas.
I’m not saying (Scientology-style) that psychologists are necessarily useless because of this, and that people should instead rely on dianetics/prayer/meditation/magic potions. Psychologists have value as a person for people with genuine problems to talk to, which helps more than most people realise, and like it or not, psychology is still the best we have, even if it isn’t very good.
Evolutionary psychology, of course, is doomed to inherit these flaws.
I do believe, however, that if we are ever going to make sense of human behavior, it has to be through the lens of our evolutionary history.
Obviously, I’m not a strict genetic determinist; some animal species’ behavior is clearly directly influenced by their genes (the case-building of caddisflies is a classic example, but there are countless more, and not just in the insect world), but humans are by their very nature generalists. There is very little behavior that’s hardwired (PZ wrote about this earlier, though he seems to be attacking a straw man at one point), and most specifically human behavior seems to be taught, not inherited.
This is (part of) the nature versus nurture debate again.
But it’s insane to deny that our genes play a very large part in determining who we are and what motivates us. Things like the desire to reproduce and raise children aren’t taught, and they’re a very fundamental part of what it means to be human; and they’re inescapable.
I know there are always those who want to pretend evolution doesn’t apply to humans, and that we stand outside nature, but that’s just chauvinistic nonsense.
There’s always a danger in making sweeping generalisations and jumping to conclusions (I’ll be the first to admit that my own foray into this area a while ago was an embarrassing failure), but knee-jerk dismissals of anything that looks like evolutionary psychology seem to me to be far more harmful than a few well-intentioned but ultimately ill-advised assertions.
I don’t know. Maybe there are fewer people disagreeing with this than seems to be the case, and I’m just preaching to the choir, but I wanted to get this out in the open just in case. Comments plz.
South Africa, arguably the least pathetic of the African nations, has a new prophet: 17-year-old Francesca Zackey.
She was in the news a few weeks ago because she claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary (which is surprisingly common, as far as cries for attention among young girls go), and rather than being turned over to a psychiatrist, she’s been visited by hundreds of idiots believers, because clearly she’s magic.
So now she’s been telling people that if they want to see the Virgin Mary themselves, they should stare into the sun.
Guess what happened.
Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.
Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.
“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.
It’s just like Jesus, except the other way around!
Apparently the Catholic Church (well, the South African Council of Churches, which goes by a delightful acronym) has paid her a visit as well, and ordered her to stop talking to people while they’re “investigating” her “visions”.
Maybe they’re afraid her blindness-striking powers mean she’s the Antichrist.
(Via Pharyngula.)
I finished these ages ago, but I never got around to reviewing them.
John Allen Paulos is the guy who wrote Innumeracy, as I’m sure you’ll remember.
Once Upon A Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories talks about the relation between statistics and storytelling, in a rather loose sense. He discusses the difference between information and meaning, and how logic and language hang together.
It’s hard to describe, obviously, but quite entertaining to read. It’s sprinkled liberally with random math problems, and along the way he also talks about how probability affects religion, which was a nice unexpected bonus (Paulos, like most intelligent, educated people, is an atheist).
The book’s only about two hundred pages, but it’s definitely worth picking up. It’s not as good or important as Innumeracy, but still quite awesome.
A Mathematician Plays the Market (one edition is titled “A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market”, for some reason) is a completely different book. It describes Paulos’ real-life experience with the stock market, and how he lost a significant sum of money in the WorldCom debacle in 2002, due to a combination of poor planning, bad luck, and ignoring his own advice.
He explores the psychological driving forces behind human decision-making when it comes to probability in general, and how they apply to the stock market itself.
Along the way, he explains some things about how the stock market itself works, and why stock market analysts are a boil on the face of society, and economists are mostly idiots.
Well, maybe he didn’t intend to say that, but it’s quite clear from his writing.
Of course, there are the usual mathematical problems as well, but significant parts of them (as well as his plot suggestion for a movie centered around probability) have just been lifted from Once Upon a Number, which was disappointing.
Still, it’s a very interesting book, and it’s one that should be required reading for anyone planning on buying some stock.
Posting about a dog—a mathematicsing Jesus dog no less—on Caturday? Surely there are laws against that!
Also! Apparently I never posted about lolcode? Look into it. I found out about it a few weeks ago, but I guess I wasn’t posting at the time.
I also wrote a Fibonacci number thing, but due to changes to the language, that isn’t even valid code anymore. Lolgacy, as it were~
Maybe I’ll write a compiler for it eventually. At this point, it’d still just be a simple search-and-replace preprocessor, I guess.
It’s sad, isn’t it, how so many member states view the EU as something from which their own country can gain, and nothing else; how their only consideration is their immediate personal gain, and their power and influence, rather than the good of Europe in general.
In this case, I’m obviously talking about Poland. They already have a disproportionally large number of votes in the European Parliament (going by population; if you want to go by economic influence, as some idiots are proposing, it’s considerably worse), and they blocked talks on the new treaty recently because they want even more influence, especially compared to Germany (the current president of the EU, and easily the largest and wealthiest (by GDP) country in it).
When a compromise was finally reached, it gave in to Poland’s fucktarded demands so much six other countries (Belgium among them) wanted to block it.
Eventually an acceptable compromise was reached (after Germany threatened to just move on without Poland), and the new treaty should greatly reduce the ability of individual countries to suck so hard, but fuck.
Poland’s accession in 2004 was, by all accounts, an act of charity on the part of the EU. EU membership brought relaxed immigration agreements with it, so now other EU countries are having to deal with tons of Polish immigrants fleeing its collapsed economy (at least we had the sense not to allow them into the Eurozone until they clean that up; it’s expected they’ll be able to do that by somewhere between 2009 and 2013).
Poland’s self-centered assholery is an abuse of that generosity, and it’s harming the EU as a whole.
(The UK, incidentally, also threatened to stop talks unless they got opt-out clauses on essentially everything that matter, but we’re used to that. At least they aren’t a drain on the EU’s resources.)
It’s one thing to disagree on what the EU is supposed to be (Belgium, for example, wants it to evolve to a kind of United States of Europe, with an overarching constitution and a single European army, while the Netherlands, on the whole, just want a basic economic union), but treating the EU like a cash cow to be milked for your own benefit isn’t something we should put up with. If Poland keeps this shit up, I say we kick them out.
(Maybe we should kick them out anyway. The Kaczyński brothers are making a mockery of democracy and free society.)
Those of you who follow Slashdot (for whatever reason) have probably heard of this by now: Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has a blog, someone posted a comment to the effect that wiping out all Palestinians would solve the Middle East problems, and Sweden has anti-hate-speech laws, and it holds “publishers” responsible for the contents of their website, even if it’s created by other people.
The Slashdot article claims a “leftist blogger” reported the comment, and now Carl Bildt is being investigated. Cue the right-wing dogpile in the Slashdot comments.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that.
First of all, the article linked to from the Slashdot article isn’t even about this case, and Bildt’s blog post, also linked, is in Swedish, which I don’t speak very well.
It seems to me, though, that the person who reported the comment isn’t identified anywhere, and the comments on Bildt’s post are only speculating that it’s someone on the left. As in, FUD.
Slashdot commenters seem to be latching on to the idea that this is a left-wing conspiracy, though, with the first comment suggesting the hypothetical leftist was also the one who posted the genocidal comment appearing within five minutes of the article being posted.
(Of course, the person reporting it must have been Swedish, and it’s a fair bet to say any given Swede is left of the center. If you look at it this way, then yes, I suppose it probably was a leftist.)
One way or the other, note that Bildt is only being investigated; hate speech laws only apply to incitement to violence. It’s not illegal to just express a goddamn opinion, even in Sweden.
Secondly, it’s very obvious those laws are bullshit, and I don’t think anyone really disagrees on this point. The only way to get them repealed, though, is to challenge them in court. And the only way to do that is by being sued under them.
It’s a shitty system, but that’s the way it works in most of the world.
So, far from this being a vast left-wing plot to undermine a poor conservative, it seems to me that this could just as easily be an attempt to get retarded laws repealed through a high-profile case.
If it was a leftist, it’s possible Bildt was picked specifically because he’s a conservative with a popular blog, so even if he loses, “it’s not a big deal”, but I really doubt that was the main consideration.
Either way, more quality journalism from Slashdot.
Based on three instances of “fucking”, two instances of “suck”, two of “sex”, two of “vagina, and one each of “bastard”, “pain”, “ass”, “torture”, and “kill”. I’m surprised it’s not worse than that. I guess I need to write about religion even more~
(Via people.)
I don’t think I’ve posted this before. Carl Sagan on evolution and selection both artificial and natural. (06:24)
Later today, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain will be officially launched, sponsored by the British Humanist Association and Britain’s National Secular Society. Britain isn’t the first country with a Council of Ex-Muslims (Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all have one, and they’ve apparently been an astonishing success; the founders of many of them have, of course, received death threats), but in a country with 1.6 million Muslims, I’d say one is needed.
This British branch will be led by Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born rights activist.
It’s worth keeping in mind that under Sharia law, apostasy is punishable by death. Britain’s Sharia courts aren’t, of course, allowed to pass that kind of sentence, much less carry it out, but then, they technically require permission of all parties involved before they pass any kind of sentence, and that hasn’t stopped them in the past.
Either way, this sort of thing takes courage, and should be encouraged.
(Via RichardDawkins.net.)
So much for my Webdesign exam. I got complimented for my writing style in both Dutch and English, which was unexpected. I guess it’s easy to look good if everyone else is sub-par.
That was my last exam. Not sure when we get our results, and I don’t particularly care.
Speaking of things I finished, Verhofstadt fails at grammar.
Pleidooi voor een Open Samenleving is too short to deserve a full review, so I’ll just say that while he does make some interesting points (including a decent argumentation in favor of getting rid of income tax, which I’m not sure was intentional), he’s also wrong a lot (though not as often as most of his opponents). The thing that really bothered me, though, was the complete lack of proofreading. I realise a lot of people don’t understand how commas, periods, and semicolons (which he seemed to be mortally afraid of) work, but that’s why we have editors.
And writing CO2 as CO2 doesn’t really convince people you know what you’re talking about on the topic of climate change, even if you do happen to be right.
Happysnake is happy like :B
