All posts by Andrew Arensburger

No Bong Hits 4 Jesus!

The Bong Hits 4 Jesus case has been decided. The Supreme Court found that the student was in the wrong, 5-4.

Quick recap: in 2002, when the Olympic torch was passing through Juneau, Joseph Frederick’s High School class went across the street to watch. Frederick unfurled a sign that said “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS”. The principal confiscated the sign, and later suspended Frederick, for encouraging students to use drugs.

Obviously, easy cases don’t make it to the Supreme Court, but I thought this one was particularly hairy: yes, the banner was silly. But the First Amendment gives you the right to say silly things. Except that Frederick was a student, and students’ First Amendment rights are limited. Except that this wasn’t done on school property. Except that it was done during a school-sponsored event (effectively a field trip across the street). Except that political speech has strong protection (so that a school with a no-drug policy can’t punish you for arguing that marijuana should be legalized). Except that “Bong hits 4 Jesus” isn’t obviously political speech.

Roberts’s majority opinion says that this isn’t about free speech, but really about advocating drug use. So there you have it.

Update: In other legal news, Court finds missing pants not worth $54M.

AIG’s Creation Museum

I’ve finally written up my visit to the Creation Museum.

Is This Really What Passes for Thinking Among Theologians?

dlighe pointed me at an article in Christianity Today by Alvin Plantinga, The Dawkins Confusion. He seemed to find it interesting, and there are a lot of links to it from the blogosphere, and they seem to agree that it’s a good, solid refutation of Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

To which I can only say, WTF?

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Evolution of Morality

The Post has an interesting article about the origin of morality (HT ). It talks about research showing that various moral impulses are hardwired into our brains by evolution.

This dovetails nicely with another bit of research I stumbled upon recently (but can’t find now) that showed that, when posed with a moral problem, people from all over the world pretty much agree on what the right answer is, though they offer different explanations.

What this suggests is that we dislike stealing because we’re wired that way, and any explanation, be it “It goes against the 8th Commandment” or something involving Rousseau’s social contract, is post-hoc justification of a chosen conclusion.

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Islamic Bicycles

This is for real, as far as I can tell:

Iran plans to make special bicycles designed for women that will be compatible with Islamic regulations and not expose their body movements while riding.

The new bicycle would have a cabin to cover half of a rider’s body, the newspaper Iran quoted project manager Elaheh Sofali as saying.

Jesus and Mo has the perfect T-shirt for this:
Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust

Seriously, what’s these people’s hangup about sex? The cynic in me thinks that if you take a bunch of normal young males and try to get them to suppress the sexual urges bequeathed them by half a billion years’ worth of evolution, of course they’re going to become neurotic and pliant.

These people really need to have a glass of wine, get laid, and just chill out.

Why Name A Newspaper After an Insect?

One question that’s been bugging me (sorry for the pun) is why any newspaper would call itself the “Town Name Bee”. Thankfully, the Sacramento Bee has an explanation (summary: the bee represents industry, as in “busy as a bee”).

Naturally, if I point out that there’s a town in Arkansas called De Queen, you won’t be surprised to learn that its newspaper is De Queen Bee.

Well, That Didn’t Take Long…

Falwell In Hell

Why Everything Good Is Bad for You

Imagine an animal that requires some substance, but that substance is scarce. Say, a mountain goat that needs salt, but lives in mountains where there’s hardly any around, unlike the seashore. In such an environment, it’ll need all the salt it can get, and natural selection will favor those goats that find salt tasty, since they’ll seek it out.

Obviously, it’s possible to have too much salt in one’s body, so ideally there ought to be a biological function that switches off this craving for salt. But in practice, if salt is that scarce, there’s no such thing as too much salt, so the mechanism that switches off salt’s tastiness can be horribly miscalibrated and still not be selected against.

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This Article Is About Self-Reference and Complexity (but This Title Isn’t)

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop, and there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me.

In Chapter 4, he discusses his fascination with self-reference and feedback loops of all kinds. He talks about the operation of a toilet, in which water enters the tank, which raises the floater, which in turn cuts off the intake valve. The toilet can be said to “want” to be full. He then asks,

Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand seem appealing to us for a system endowed with feedback, but not so appealing for a less structured system?

(italics in the original.)

He seems to be saying that feedback ⇔ teleology (or intentionality, which is what I think Dennett and other philosophers might call it). In this, I think he’s wrong, though in an interesting way. Read More

Latte Art

Maybe I just don’t hang out at the right coffee houses, but I don’t think I’ve seen this before:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5N6f7Ry1Xo]

Coffee Geek has a guide on how to do this sort of stuff.