Archives 2007

The Mainstream Media’s Fluff Bias

If you watch TV news, you may have found yourself wondering why they’re going on and on and on about Paris or Britney or Lindsey or whoever, instead of, like, news that you care about.

Russell Glasser, a student at U Texas at Austin, is currently writing a thesis on this subject. His basic approach was to data-mine both Google News and Digg, the idea being that the former gives a representative sample of what the news media are talking about, and the latter gives insight into what people are actually interested in. You can read more about this, as well as a draft of the thesis, here.

The basic idea is fairly simple: let’s say that in a given month, there are 99 news stories about Britney Spears and one about Tiger Woods; but on Digg, a lot of people recommend the one Tiger Woods story and ignore the 99 Britney Spears stories. It seems reasonable to conclude that the news-reading public cares a lot more about Tiger than about Britney.

And, in fact, his conclusion is that there’s a definite bias towards fluff in the media.

The whole thing is also an interesting exercise in teasing information out of noisy data: any given datum could easily be wrong: someone might Digg every story he reads; or a newspaper might run two Paris Hilton stories in one day because the news editor and entertainment editor didn’t realize that the other one was already covering the story. But if you have a lot of such noisy data (and nowadays, thanks to the Spew, we do), then you can still tease information out of it.

The Mozart Argument

Over at Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert links to the lecture notes for a talk by Alvin Plantinga listing half a dozen (or so) arguments for the existence of God.

Down in the comments, someone asks why atheists snigger at Plantinga.

To answer that question, scroll down Plantinga’s talk to “(U) The Mozart Argument”. As far as I can tell, it’s basically:

  1. I like Mozart’s music
  2. If evolution had taken a different course, Metallica’s music would have been considered beautiful
  3. But it’s not
  4. Therefore, God exists

As Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “That’s an argument?” To answer the commenter’s question, the reason I have such a low opinion of Plantinga is that any time I read him, he’s in one of two modes: 1) full-on obscurantism and bafflegab, or 2) tripe like the above.

Obviously, just because I don’t understand something doesn’t imply that it’s meaningless. Maybe if I put in the time to understand high-falutin’ Plantinga, it would make sense. But bullshit-drivel Plantinga makes me seriously doubt that possibility. If I may steal a line from Sam Clemens (only steal from the best!), it ain’t the parts of Plantinga that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.

Word O’ the Day

Pomaceous: pertaining to apples. A nice autumnal word.

Figuring out the Trilemma of Evil

I’d never been quite satisfied with the problem of evil (if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, how can there be evil?) because it looked like a false trilemma, like C.S. Lewis’s liar, lunatic, or lord.

Lewis’s trilemma fails because it doesn’t account for all possibilities (e.g., a fourth possibility is “legend”). So how do we know that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence cover all possibilities in the problem of evil? Granted, the fact that a lot of very smart people have looked at it for millennia, so it’s probably solid, but it always bothered me that I hadn’t seen a good demonstration that it wasn’t a false trilemma.

But then I reasoned thusly:

  1. If there is evil in the world, and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
  2. If God knows about evil, and is omnibenevolent, then God wants to fix it.
  3. If God wants to fix evil, and is omnipotent, then God can fix it.

I like this formulation because the three parts of the argument flow from each other.

Another Amusing Linguistic Quirk

I just ran across this comment:

First Amendment notwithstanding, there are such things under the law as harmful speech that can be sanctioned.

“Sanction” has two meanings, which are opposites of each other: it can mean either “official permission” or “penalty” (or, as a verb, either “to give official permission” or “to impose a penalty”). In this case, since the topic is the first amendment, which permits people to say things that have historically been banned, it’s even more confusing.

David at Mental Floss calls such words “contronyms” or “antagonyms”. Take your pick.

The GOP Is Getting Predictable

EDGE Boston gives us the setup:

[Richard] Curtis, elected to the [Washington] state House three years ago, voted in the spring against a measure to provide domestic partnerships to gays and lesbians.

In 2006, Curtis came out against an anti-discrimination bill to protect GLBT people from being discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality.

I’m sure you can guess the punchline. Check your answer below the fold. Read More

Tenth Anniversary

I didn’t notice it at the time, but last week was ooblick.com’s tenth anniversary. Woot!

If you have time to waste, you can browse the Wayback Machine’s archive of crap I used to have.

Knowing Like A Crossword Puzzle

If you enjoy solving crossword puzzles, you may have found yourself in the same position as I did the other day:
Crossword puzzle

“Thug” is “GOON”, obviously: the O’s fit “OIL” and “NOTONYOURLIFE”. As for the G, well, I know nothing about ballet, so for all I know there’s someone named Twyla T. Garp out there.

I didn’t know what “With feet all askew” could be, but worked on filling in the words that intersected it, until eventually it became obvious that “_IGEONTOEN” couldn’t be right. The problem lay either in “GOON” or in “_IGEONTOEN”, but both were connected to other words: fixing one might unravel a whole section of a puzzle that seemed to fit together quite well. I wasn’t sure about “Zubin of music” → “MEHTA”, but other than that, my answers seemed pretty solid.

Eventually, of course, I figured out that “With feet all askew” was “PIGEONTOED”, and “Thug” was “HOOD” (though the name Twyla Tharp still doesn’t ring any bells).

And this strikes me as a good metaphor for how we understand the world.

Read More

A Step Closer to Good Electronic Books

I got to play with a Sony PRS-505 digital reader at a bookstore today. Basically, it’s an electronic device about the size of a slim paperback, with a big screen on which to read electronic books. According to the signs, it allows you to read plain text (it found a README file on the SD card I stuck in it), PDF files, and whatever proprietary DRM-hobbled format Sony’s pushing this year.

I think I could stick it in my back pocket like a paperback, but at $300, I wouldn’t want to accidentally sit on it.

The most impressive thing about it, in my opinion, is the screen. It was hard to judge with uniform neon lights, but as far as I could tell, the screen was reflective, like paper; not light-emitting, like cell phone and PDA screens. If you’ve ever struggled to read a PDA screen in bright sunlight, and like reading at the beach, you’ll appreciate the difference. The screen is also nice and crisp, with good resolution. It’s not quite like reading a book, but it’s up beyond 8-pin-printer and into cheap-ass laser printer quality. In fact, for a moment I was fooled into thinking that instead of a working model, they’d displayed a mock-up with a printed sheet of paper to show what the display would look like.

The device doesn’t have a touch screen, but there’s a row of ten buttons down the side to allow you to quickly select one of ten menu items. There are also buttons in different locations that allow you to turn pages, depending on how you want to hold the book.

Either the controls or the display seemed sluggish, though. This may be a limitation of the technology used for the display.

All in all, it seems a reasonable device that I could see myself using to actually read books. Even if I don’t want to shell out for proprietary-format books, Project Gutenberg still has a ton of good stuff, and there are lots of things on the web that are easily convertible to PDF. To say nothing of possibilities like uploading RSS feeds and whatnot.

Stepping back for a moment, though, this device (and others like it) seems to suffer from the same problem as MP3s: you can take the attitude that what matters in a book is the text, just as what matters in an album is the music. So you don’t need the physical book any more than you need the physical CD and booklet.

But books and albums are still, well, physical objects. Back in the days of LPs, album covers were often intricate works of art. CDs don’t give artists as much room to work with, but there’s still a lot that can be done to make the physical album an interesting object (like the Lego-textured jewel case for Very). Books often have cutouts in the cover, or fold-out pages (like the maps in the back of Lord of the Rings), or bleeds, or textured paper, and other elements that don’t lend translate well to bits. So while I concede that what matters is the content (and boy do I sometimes wish my O’Reilly bookshelf were greppable), sometimes it’s nice to hold a cool object.

Ben Stein vs. Daniel Dennett

There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God.
[…]

Scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator.

— Ben Stein in the teaser trailer to Expelled

There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest investigative lights on religion.

Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.

— Daniel Dennett, summaries of chapter 2 of Breaking the Spell, pp. 28, 53

Then there’s Victor Stenger’s book, God: the Failed Hypothesis, which considers the proposition that God exists as a testable hypothesis. Oh, and Dawkins dedicates a chapter to the God hypothesis as well in The God Delusion.

So who are these scientists that Stein is going on about, the ones who want to “keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God”? Call me cynical, but I wonder if they aren’t the ones who are afraid that science would either disprove God or make him irrelevant.