Archives February 2007

Shortage of Wingnut Presidential Candidates?

The NYT
reports
that the religious right is unhappy with the current set of Republican presidential candidates. McCain once called fundies “agents of intolerance”, Mitt Romney is too liberal, and Giuliani has — gasp! — been married three times.

Call me an optimist, but maybe this marks the beginning of an overhaul of the Republican party: perhaps even Republican candidates have to distance themselves from the fundie wingnuts in order to be electable.

(HT Renew America, of all places.)

Doctors Don’t Like the Word “Evolution”

I’m guessing that some researcher wondered aloud in the cafeteria, “How come medical researchers don’t talk about the evolution of antibiotic resistance? I mean sure, they talk about it, but they don’t call it evolution.”
This article
in PLoS Biology attempts to measure this observation.

In a nutshell, they found that biology journals say that antibiotic resistance “evolves”, whereas medical journals say that it “emerges” or “arises”.

Read More

One of These Things Is Just Like the Other

This story
(from Captain’s Quarters)
was posted at Free Republic last month:

Muslim Taxi Showdown In The Twin Cities (Muslim cabbies to transport people with alcohol in luggage)

The refusal of a large number of Islamic cabbies to transport passengers with alcohol in their luggage or service dogs for the blind and handicapped, and the local fatwa on which they rely for their position, has led to a showdown with the Metropolitan Airport Commission

Even excluding the “All Muslims are terrorists” lunatic fringe, the general consensus in the comments seems to be, “Tough. Taxis are a public service, and if a customer is doing something legal but repugnant to you, suck it up, that’s too bad. Deal with it.”

Next, there’s this story from last year:

Pharmacists Don’t Want to Sell Morning After Pill Despite FDA Approval

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The Food and Drug Administration may have approved sales of the morning after pill over the counter, but some pharmacists are reluctant to sell the drug. The agency’s move to sell Plan B without a prescription may expand the nationwide debate about a conscience clause for pharmacists to allow them to opt out of dispensing the drug.

Here, the reaction is a bit more mixed: there are those complaining about government interfering with private business, the ones confusing Plan B with RU-486 and spreading misinformation about both, and the ones imagining the ACLU, NARAL, and NOW having a cow over this. But the majority opinion seems to be that pharmacists shouldn’t have to sell a pill that personally offends them.

So which is it, Freepers? Is it okay for someone to refuse service to customers who offend their moral or cultural values, or isn’t it? Is it okay for an atheist cabbie to refuse to drive people to church? Is it okay for a vegan cashier to refuse to ring up your steak? Is it okay for a nurse to refuse to take care of a woman who’s having her period?

Happy 20th Anniversary, SN1987A!




On this day in 1987,
SN1987A,
my favoritest supernova ever, blew up. According to
this diagram at the
University of Virginia,
the star started burning neon in 1971, oxygen in 1983, silicon in 1987, and blew up ten days after that. Let that be a lesson to you, young stars: neon is a gateway drug that leads to inevitable self-destruction.

How to Prevent Lines from Wrapping in Emacs

By default, Emacs’s buffer list truncates lines at the right edge of the screen: if you’re editing a file with a long name, it doesn’t wrap around; you have to use C-x < and C-x > to scroll the viewport left and right.

I’d always wondered how to do that, since it can be useful when editing files like ~/.ssh/known_hosts, where the useful information is at the beginning of the line, and the wrapped keys get in the way.

Now I know:

(setq truncate-lines t)
And This Is Why the First Amendment Is a Good Thing ™

One more thing to be grateful for
if you live in a country with freedom of speech:

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — An Alexandria court convicted an Egyptian blogger on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced him to four years in jail over his writings on the Internet.
…

One of Suleiman’s articles said that al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the most prominent seats of Sunni Muslim learning, was promoting extreme ideas. Another article, headlined “The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it”, accused Muslims of savagery during clashes between Muslims and Christians in Alexandria in 2005.

He has also described some of the companions of the Muslim prophet Mohammad as “terrorists”, and has likened Mubarak to dictatorial pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt.

“I was hoping that he would get a harsher sentence because he presented to the world a bad image of Egypt. There are things that one should not talk about, like religion and politics. He should have got a 10-year sentence,” said lawyer Nizar Habib, who attended the trial as a member of the public.

Point duh-one: freedom of speech is not there to protect popular speech. It’s for unpopular speech.

Point duh-two: an idea that needs legislative protection from criticism is one that can’t stand on its own. I’m sorry Mr. Habib doesn’t like the fact that Suleiman aired Egypt’s dirty laundry in public (any more than I like it when an American makes the US look bad in the eyes of the world), but frankly, the way to deal with this is to fix the problem, not shoot the messenger.

And if there needs to be a law against criticism of Islam, doesn’t that pretty much mean that there’s no rational reason to believe in Islam? What kind of god needs to be protected, like an endangered species?

Flock of Dodos Meme

I went to see Flock of Dodos for its Darwin Day showing on Thursday.

At one point, Randy Olson, the filmmaker, points out that the Intelligent Design movement has lots of points that fit on a bumper sticker, such as “no transitionals” (or “not enough transitional fossils”), “teach the controversy”, and so forth, while proponents of evolution, especially scientists, can’t seem to express any point in less than a paragraph. And while this may indicate that scientists are careful to make well-thought-out, nuanced statements and avoid oversimplification, it makes for bad PR.

Later on, perhaps unintentionally, Olson does present an anti-ID slogan of his own: ID never rises above the level of intuition. For instance, as IDists like to point out, it’s obvious that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t carved by erosion and tectonic forces. Okay, fair enough. But that’s just the first step. Now they need to quantify this intuitive feeling, and come up with an objective metric of “designedness” or something, so that two people in different parts of the world, with different backgrounds can look at the same phenomenon and independently arrive at the same “designedness” number.

Likewise, creationists of all stripes are fond of saying that certain structures are too complex to have arisen by chance. Setting aside the obvious fact that natural selection is the very opposite of chance, one can still easily imagine a person to whom it’s intuitively obvious that human eyes are too complex to have arisen through the action of natural laws, without an intelligent guiding hand.

But again, that’s just a first step. How do you turn this intuition into something objective and quantifiable? I would expect someone to write a paper showing that natural laws can produce X amount of complexity in such-and-such amount of time, but that human eyes have X+100 complexity. X+100 > X, ergo human eyes are too complex to have arisen naturally.

The first step toward this would be to come up with a definition of complexity in biological systems, and a way of measuring it (and people like Bill Dembski do refer to the work of Shannon, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin in this area). The next would be to estimate the upper limit of complexity that natural processes can generate (which creationists have never done competently and honestly) and measure the amount of complexity in a biological structure (which, again, they’ve never done. Dembski has been asked several times to produce such a calculation, but has never done so, to my knowledge).

So when the Discovery Institute, trying to avoid getting sucked into the Dover trial, said that ID wasn’t ready to be taught in classrooms, they were right. ID has yet to rise above the level of intuition and gut feeling. And until it does, it has no right to be taken seriously as science.

Addendum: Another bumper-sticker-sized slogan for evolution I’ve run across is that we are risen apes, not fallen angels.

The Cruelest Line

While working on the Dover trial podcast, I think we’ve found one of the most cruel lines one can inflict on an actor:

Their names here, just for a couple of
examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really
unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania.
Again, the names are unimportant.

By the way, if anyone knows how to pronounce these words, please let me know.

PZ Steals My Thunder

Looking through my httpd logs, I ran across this post over at Teleological Blog:

Our friends at The Panda’s Thumb are planning a re-enactment podcast of the

Dover trial and are looking for voice talent. Imagine my surprise when I
received this e-mail today from someone named Lee Bowman:

Are you a voice talent? Andrew Arensburger is looking for volunteers!
http://www.ooblick.com/pandas/

Casting director is PZ Myers (self appointed).

PZ is the “self-appointed” director. You gotta give PZ points for Chuzpah!!

I suspect that’s this Lee Bowman, simply because a person by that name is listed as a contributor to Bill Dembski’s little circle jerk.

So let’s see. I asked PZ to advertise this little project, since he has a large audience and I don’t. Bowman sees it at either Pharyngula or the Panda’s Thumb. He follows the links and looks around and finds my name, but manages to miss the fact that PZ isn’t mentioned anywhere and has nothing to do with this project. But hey, he first read about it in a post by PZ, so PZ is clearly in charge!

And then DonaldM at Teleological Blog gets mail “from someone named Lee Bowman”, doesn’t check a goddamn thing in it for himself, and proceeds to chide PZ for his chutzpah. So maybe this should really be entitled “Creationists Steal My Thunder, Drop It On PZ’s Porch”. Or maybe “ID researchers announce absence of word `gullible’ in dictionary, according to sources.” Psst! Donald! Wanna buy a bridge in Manhattan? How ’bout some Iraqi WMDs?

Anyway, just to bring this back on topic for the Pandas podcast: if you’re playing a creationist, please don’t try to play them as idiots. The script does quite a good job of that on its own.

Secondly, just to make things clear for the copro- and lithocephalics: PZ Myers has nothing to do with this project. It’d be cool if he did, but he doesn’t.

Thirdly, Lee Bowman and DonaldM are clearly asshats (drink!) who need to learn some critical thinking (not to mention reading for comprehension) skills. Seriously, guys. If you want to be taken seriously, why don’t you act like it? I hate to think ill of anyone, but you leave me no choice.

Picking Up Steam

I love the Internet.

After PZ
mentioned
this project on Pharyngula, I got replies from several people, from places as far away as Texas and California, and several demos.

I’ve also installed Audacity 1.3. This is, unfortunately, a beta version, but it has an important new feature: the ability to have multiple “clips” per audio track, and slide them around. This makes it much easier to take two voice tracks and splice them together into a coherent dialog.

I still need more voices, though. Lawyers in particular (odd, during the trial I thought Eric Rothschild was a hero), and no one seems to want to be judge Jones (maybe nobody wants to play a liberal activist). There are plenty of short parts, too, if anyone wants them.