Archives February 2008

How Do I Know This Isn’t Garbage?

I’ve said elsewhere that science can be distilled down to two questions: “What is the world like?” and “How do I know this isn’t garbage?” Richard Feynman stated the second question as:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

(Emphasis added.)

Over the years, scientists have discovered a great many ways to fool yourself and others. So It’s nice to read by Peter Norvig, listing some that even professionals get tripped up on. It gives the distinct impression that the hardest part of doing an experiment is not the business with the test tubes or telescopes or particle accelerators or what have you, but simply avoiding all of the mistakes that others have made before you, that could invalidate your results.

He has an equally good companion piece that analyzes a bunch of studies on the effect of intercessory prayer. (Summary: the experiments can be divided into two main groups: those that show no effect, and those that are flawed.) Most interesting for believers is the way that he points out exactly what the flaws in the papers are. Well worth reading.

(HT PZ for the link.)

Tuesday Playlist
  • Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight), Abba
  • Money, Money, Money, Abba
  • Sell Sell Sell, Barenaked Ladies, Maroon
  • Nag Nag Nag, Cabaret Voltaire
  • Tora! Tora! Tora!, Depeche Mode, Speak & Spell
  • Blah-Blah-Blah, Iggy Pop, Blah-Blah-Blah
  • Kiss Kiss Kiss, Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy
  • Well Well Well, The Woodentops
  • Mini Mini Mini, KMFDM, Hau Ruck
  • Die Die Die (Completely Dead Version), Leæther Strip, Double or Nothing
  • Bloc Bloc Bloc, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Crush
  • Yuri Yuri Yuri – Cantar de xesta, Os Resentidos, Surfin’ CCCP
  • Hmm Hmm Hmm, Serge Gainsbourg, Love on the Beat
  • Long, Long, Long, The Beatles, The White Album
  • Hot Hot Hot !!!, The Cure, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
  • Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow
  • Run Run Run, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol
  • Spam Spam Spam, Tom Smith, Plugged
  • Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here, Buffalo Tom, Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks
  • Zix Zix Zix (666 Mix), Velvet Acid Christ, Calling ov the Dead
  • Spiderbaby (Yeah-Yeah-Yeah), White Zombie, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1
Alan Parsons and Roger Waters Walk Into a Bar…

Mashups are nothing new. Witness, for instance, Pink Project’s 1982 combination of Alan Parsons Project’s Mammagamma and Sirius with Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAmMvFNyJr8&rel=1]

Fractal Wrongness

I just ran across a wonderful term that must be propagated further:

fractal wrongness

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person’s opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet–in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums–your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

Ben Stein Deteriorates Into Bad Self-Parody

Pop quiz: one of these quotations was written years ago by a young-earth creationist so ignorant that other YECs have tried to distance themselves from him. The other was published today, by a proponent of Intelligent Design (which, we are told, is Totally Not Creationism, Nuh-Uh) who enjoys respect within the ID community. Can you guess which is which and who the authors are?

Evolution is presented in our public school textbooks as a process that:

  1. Brought time, space, and matter into existence from nothing.
  2. Organized that matter into the galaxies, stars, and at least nine planets around the sun. (This process is often referred to as cosmic evolution.)
  3. Created the life that exists on at least one of those planets from nonliving matter (chemical evolution).
  4. Caused the living creatures to be capable of and interested in reproducing themselves.
  5. Caused that first life form to spontaneously diversify into different forms of living things, such as the plants and animals on the earth today (biological evolution).

Just a few tiny, insignificant little questions.

* How did the universe start?

* Where did matter come from?

* Where did energy come from?

* Where did the laws of motion, thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, come from?

* Where did gravity come from?

* How did inorganic matter, that is, lifeless matter such as dirt and rocks, become living beings?

* Has anyone ever observed beyond doubt the evolution of a new mammalian or aviary species, as opposed to changes within a species?

These teeny weeny little questions are just some of the issues as to which Darwin and Darwinism have absolutely no verifiable answers.

Answers after the jump. Read More

Where Are all the Reflective Christians?
Carnival of the Godless

One recurring criticism of Dawkins’s The God Delusion (and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, Victor Stenger’s God: the Failed Hypothesis, and others) is that these authors attack a simplistic conception of God, one that no intelligent, educated person believes in anyway.

Plantinga, for instance, writes:

According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that this is the sort of semantically empty babbling that I’ve complained about before, and take him at his word. Plantinga and Dawkins could agree on a great number of things: God is not a magic bearded man in the sky. God does not whisper to you where you found your car keys. Chemotherapy works better than prayer at curing cancer. Jesus will not descend from the clouds by next Thursday at the latest and whisk all the unbelievers up in a flash of special effects to live forever in happy-cloud-land.

But why is it up to atheists to point this out?

Read More

McChurch

Christianity Today has an article about the latest thing in religion:

Eddie Johnson, the lead pastor of Cumberland Church, espouses the franchising concept when it comes to the relationship between his church in Nashville, Tennessee, and North Point Community Church in metro Atlanta. On his blog, he states, “Just like a Chick-fil-A, my church is a ‘franchise,’ and I proudly serve as the local owner/operator.”

According to Johnson, his job is to “establish a local, autonomous church that has the same beliefs, values, mission, and strategy as North Point.” He completed a three-month internship at North Point and continues to receive training and support. He claims to rarely deviate from the “training manual.”

“Just like that Chick-fil-A owner/operator,” he says, “I’m here in Nashville to open up our franchise and run it right. I believe in my company and what they are trying to ‘sell.'”

Read More

Google Maps Illustrates How Averages Can Fail

Call me easily amused, but I thought it was funny that if you search Google Maps for Florida, the green arrow points at the Gulf of Mexico (and the one for Michigan points at Lake Michigan).

Even better, if you search for Maryland, the arrow points at Virginia.

Read More

Huckabee at UMD

I was going to write up Mike Huckabee’s visit to UMD, but Ariel Alexovich than I would have. Plus, her article has a photo that might plausibly have me in it (the second guy on the rent-a-cop’s shoulder).

Mike Huckabee at UMD
(Photo: Chris Maddaloni for The New York Times)

Okay, a few comments below the fold.

Read More

Classy, Mitt. Real Classy.

Mitt Romney, bowing out of the race:

Now, if I fight on, in my campaign, all the way to the convention … I want you to know, I’ve given this a lot of thought – I’d forestall the launch of a national campaign and, frankly, I’d make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.

Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Asshat. Is fearmongering really all the Republicans have left?