Priest Off!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9uAWXUOeeU&rel=1&border=0]
Innate Social Skills
CNN has a story about an experiment that suggests that 6- to 10-month-old infants have at least some innate social skills:
The infants watched a googly eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with.
Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one.
The babies also chose neutral toys — ones that didn’t help or hinder — over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones.
Obviously, this needs to be confirmed by other researchers, and one shouldn’t place too much trust in the result of one experiment, but it’s still interesting: it suggests that babies have an innate sense of “this person is friendly” and “that person is unfriendly”, based on observation of people’s behavior.
Now, this does not mean that babies or young children have any idea of “I should be friendly”, nor does it suggest that these babies can judge whether they themselves are being friendly.
The article does mention, though, that
A study last year out of Germany showed that babies as young as 18 months old overwhelmingly helped out when they could, such as by picking up toys that researchers dropped.
Note the 8-month difference between this study and the German one: presumably in that time, children learn that if they act in a friendly or helpful way, then others will be friendly in return.
So if confirmed, this should form a fairly solid basis for morality as an emergent phenomenon. We’re social creatures who want to be liked by those around us. This experiment suggests that we’re born with the ability to figure out whom to like (or at least can work it out at a very early age). We can also start modeling other people’s minds (in the sense of “if I do X, will it please that person?”) early on as well. In short, we have the capability to work out a set of behaviors that will allow us to get along, as well as the desire to do so.
Now, it’s true that we also want base self-gratification (e.g., “I want to play with that toy, so I’m going to take it away from you, and I don’t care whether it annoys you or not”). But wanting to get along with others plays a part as well. And of course children tend to believe what their parents tell them, and presumably the parents tend to teach children their own values, like playing nice with others.
So it’s a noisy and chaotic process, but over time, people can figure out what sorts of moral rules work and which ones don’t, and improve morality.
It’s sort of like Wikipedia, in which lots and lots of people making changes, some good and some bad, can nonetheless gradually improve.
(HT Martin Wagner for the link.)
I See A Pattern
Remember Conservapædia, the neocon alternative to Wikipedia’s liberal bias?
Here’s a snapshot of today’s list of today’s top ten most viewed pages. See if you can notice a pattern.
(HT Wonkette.)
How Not to Lose Disks
Have you ever upgraded a machine, only to find that during the upgrade, your device names got rearranged, so that your filesystems aren’t where they used to be, and you can’t mount anything?
This happened to us at work: we upgraded a fileserver with a hundred or so filesystems on a SAN. The driver software silently shuffled the devices around, so after the upgrade, nothing got mounted where it beloned. We had to ask the users to look through the filesystems and tell us where they should have been mounted.
To prevent this sort of thing in the future, we adopted a simple trick: on each filesystem, create a file called mountpoint that says where the filesystem ought to be mounted.
Yes, this is pretty much the same as labeling each partition, as some OSes allow you to do. Except that it’s arguably more robust, because you don’t need to rely on different versions of the OS being able to read the partition label. Besides, it’s simpler, and survives backups, replication, and so forth.
Automating all of this is left as an exercise for the student.
Australia Starts the War on Christmas
According to News.com.au, Nov. 11:
SANTAS working in shopping centres across Australia have been banned from bellowing “ho ho ho” because it might frighten children.
[…]“The reason behind that is we find that in some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ‘ho, ho, hos’ and we ask them to be mindful of keeping their voices to a lower level,” [Westaff national operations manager Glen Jansz] said.
According to AFP,
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.
Thankfully, today we have:
Recruitment firm Westaff, which supplies hundreds of Santas for events around Australia, has backed down from its ban on the traditional greeting following a backlash from employees.
The company wanted to ban “Ho, ho, ho” for fear it might scare some of the children.
A Myer spokesman said store management believed the expression was an important Christmas tradition.
Phillip Johnson on “Judgment Day”
On Monday, Phillip Johnson appeared on the ID the Future podcast, and talked about being interviewed for
Judgment Day, the Nova episode about Intelligent Design and the Dover trial.
He said that while the producer and crew were pleasant enough, but expressed concern that the interview would be mangled in editing, possibly to make it sound as if he were saying something he didn’t mean.
So I looked him up and asked him. He replied:
I didn’t spot any misquotation, but my interview was edited almost down to nothing (not by the team that interviewed me). I guess that is good. If I had said some silly things that the senior staff at WGBH could have used to discredit ID, those moments would have been shown on the program. If I could have picked the parts of the interview to be broadcast, I could have added a little more balance to a one-sided program.
(posted with permission.)
So no obvious quote-mining or distortion. I’ll be curious to see how this compares to PZ Myers’s interview for Crossroads Win Ben Stein’s Scorn Expelled.
Rain Magic
Every so often, sophisticated theists will say that Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. misrepresent religion, that God is not an invisible sky-daddy who grants wishes, but some ineffable essence working within the laws of nature, or some such (see here, here, here).
And then something like this comes along:
That would be Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has asked Georgians to pray for rain today, and at lunchtime will convene with various religious and political leaders on the steps of the state Capitol to seek divine intervention in the state’s months-long drought.
There’s probably a polite way to say this, but I won’t (maybe I’m just cranky because it’s raining in Maryland, rather than in Georgia where they could use it): these people believe in magic. Primitive, superstitious magic, where if you say the right words and make the right gestures, the great sky spirit will grant you your wish.
Right here, in the United States, at the dawn of the 21st century. In the sixties, people thought we’d have flying cars. Instead, we have rain dances.
And this isn’t some fringe group. Not only does Governor Perdue believe that rain dances work, enough of his constituents do that he hasn’t been laughed out of office.
So, all you sensible theists out there, why aren’t you policing your own? Why aren’t you pointing out to these superstitious fools that what they’re doing is no different from spreading mistletoe on the ground and chanting? Pastors, why aren’t you educating your congregations and telling them that no, God doesn’t work that way?
In a recent speech, Daniel Dennett suggested referring to non-brights as “supers”, because they believe in the supernatural. But perhaps “super” is short for “superstitious” as well.
The “I’m #1 on Google” Meme
The World’s Fair proposed a meme where you have to find Google search terms that return your weblog as the #1 hit. Here’s one set that I just discovered, that I’m rather happy with:
Now That’s A Big Box!
Amusing programming error o’ the day:
This is the Amazon page for a program to teach piano. When I saw the dimensions, I thought maybe they threw in a grand piano along with the CD. But at 30m × 25m × 3.5m, there’s room for not just the grand piano, but the rest of the Philharmonic as well.
If you look at the ASIN, you’ll see whom to blame: those damn Ewoks!
Update: The volume of the box is 91527 cubic feet. According to Engineering Toolbox, a cubic foot of air at 70°F weighs 7.492×10-2lb/ft3. So if the box were filled with air, it would weigh 6857 lbs. But it only weighs 120 lbs, which means it floats like a balloon. That must be why the shipping weight is 1 lb: the Post Office lumps all packages that weigh less than a pound together.
Bad Pharyngula
In which I get PZ Myers to sign Phil Plait’s book, starting a trend.
Phil Plait and PZ Myers are in town for a Americans United thing, so they organized a meetup tonight. Naturally, I had to go.
As you can tell, I have a ways to go as a photographer. But this picture clearly shows that PZ does not breathe fire. In actuality, he shoots lasers out of his eyes. (Update, Nov. 11: see here for why Phil’s eyes are closed.)