Category Miscellaneous

If You Could Never Leave the Milky Way, Would You Call it Imprisonment?

Frank Pastore has a rather moronic column over at Clownhall. If you’ve got your anti-stupid goggles on, you can read the whole thing, but one paragraph isn’t addressed in the comments. Here, he is ostensibly reading from the atheist playbook:

Avoid the pesky problem of freewill. If atheism is true, if all that exists is mere matter and energy, then I don’t have a brain, I am my brain. But if the brain is exhaustively physical, then it is just as incapable of acting freely as a computer or any other machine. Which is why the idea of Artificial Intelligence makes for such fun science fiction – the more peo-ple believe that a computer can become a person, the less likely they will have need to believe they were created in God’s image. Thus, more AI, less theism – that’s the game plan. Same with the search for ET. Find life elsewhere so we can dismiss Genesis.

(emphasis added)

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What’s A News Octet?

One of my peeves is the phrase “news byte”.

A “news bite”, I can understand: it’s a bite-sized, i.e., small piece of news; something that fits on a napkin.

But a “news byte”? What is that? A news item that can only take on one of 256 values and fits into a C char?

The same goes for “sound bite” and “sound byte”, by the way.

Too Much Packaging

I think I like the idea of a tax on packaging more and more. Not a punitive tax aimed at discouraging the activity altogether, like taxes on tobacco, but just enough to make people stop and think, “Do I actually need this particular bit of packaging?”

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Conservapedia Now Slightly Less Fun

Readers of talk.origins may remember Ray Martinez, a particularly dense and combative young-earth creationist. I’d been having fun this past week or so reading his antics at Conservapedia.

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If You Don’t Comment, the Terrorists Win


Paper Napkin has declared the second week of January to be De-lurking Week.

So if you’ve been reading this weblog but haven’t commented in a while, or ever (FSVO “been reading” and “in a while”), please leave a comment. Half of the bandwidth you use will be donated to a frivolous cause.

(HT, with apologies to Tom Lehrer:

I got it from PZ
He got it from Janet
We all agree it must have been
Liz who gave it to her.

)

(Yes, I know the image says “National De-Lurking Week”, but the Net cares not about political boundaries, so hello everyone from around the world, and any extraterrestrials who may be listening in.)

iTunes Podcast Problem Solved

I’d been having an annoying problem in iTunes 7.0.2: although I’d set the podcast preferences to “Keep: Last 5 episodes”, it was still keeping old episodes around, long after they should have been deleted.

After rooting around in Apple’s discussion fora, the solution turned out to be:

  1. Select “Podcasts” in the left bar
  2. Select everything with Apple-A
  3. Right-click (or Ctrl-click, for a one-button mouse) on the mass of selected episodes, and select “Allow Auto Delete”

When I next updated the podcasts, it deleted the old episodes, just as it should have. Presumably some podcasts or episodes got marked as “Do Not Auto Delete” somehow, perhaps when I upgraded iTunes, or moved stuff from the old Mac.

The annoying part is that there’s no indication in iTunes that Auto Delete has been disabled. That seems like just the sort of UI thing that Apple would have added, given that there are a zillion other status indicators.

Update, Dec. 2, 2006: Apparently when you click the “Get” button to manually download a podcast episode, it is automatically (and invisibly) marked as “do no auto delete”.

Typically this happens to me when I subscribe to a new podcast: iTunes downloads the latest episode automatically, but I normally download several more, in case I like it. Those episodes don’t get deleted automatically.

Hovind Prison Update

On Monday, a
new post
appeared on Kent Hovind’s weblog, describing life in jail. As you might expect, he plays the Christian persecution card. He also has a list of reasons God allowed him to be sent to jail. Oddly enough, neither “I’m guilty” nor “there are no gods” is on the list.

He also writes,

If the case is not reversed, I face anywhere from parole to 7 to 12 years.

This is a man who believes that the Earth is 6000 years old when in fact it’s 4.5 billion years old. So presumably that means that he’s looking at between 5.25 and 9 million years in prison.

The Evolutionary Basis of Religion and Consciousness

Daniel Dennett has proposed what he calls the
intentional stance, which is basically the way that when we interact with other people or animals (and sometimes things), we act as if there’s a mind there that intends to behave in a certain way. If confronted with an angry dog, we behave as if that dog is an agent that intends to do us harm or to chase us off of its property, rather than, say as if it were a machine for barking.

We humans are good at this. In fact, one of the things our minds are very good at is modeling other minds. It’s easy to see why this would have arisen: it’s very useful to be able to predict how elements of one’s environment are going to behave, whether those elements are bricks, trees, tigers, or other people. Animals, whether predators, prey, domestic animals, or companions, often behave as if they have a mind that wants things, pursues goals, and avoids harm. This is even more true of people. So being able to predict how a herd of antelope will react to a sudden noise, or how a woman will react to a gift, provides an evolutionary advantage, and would have been selected for.

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Those Who Do Not Remember the Dictionary Definition Are Condemned to Mangle It

I’ve started hearing the phrase “actionable
intelligence”
being used as a five-dollar synonym for “useful information”, particularly in the context of the debate on how to rebrand torture to make it seem acceptable.

Am I the only one to have noticed the irony here? In case everyone forgot, the first definition of
“actionable”
means “something you can get sued over”. This is not generally considered a Good Thing.

Two Story Ideas

Feel free to steal, though if anything comes of it I’d be interested in hearing about it:

Neurobiologists investigate the biological causes behind religious ecstasy, and geneticists and developmental biologists identify the genes involved in building this phenomenon and the areas of the brain responsible for it. A CAT or PET scan can reveal people in whom this area is not well-formed, and a genetic test can identify fetuses that will grow up into adults incapable of achieving this ecstatic state.

Religious extremist (Taliban?) consider such a condition a sign that the person has been cursed with separation from God, and start killing the people and aborting fetuses with “cursed” genes.

Scientists come up with not one, but two Theories of Everything. They explain all known physical phenomena equally well, but are not equivalent. Further, more refined experiments fail to falsify either theory.

Eventually, it turns out that this is a feature, not a bug. One can imagine playing Conway’s game of Life with different sets of rules. Some allow too much or too little growth, and the board quickly dissolves into either all black or all white. Other sets of rules bring about too much flipping, and the board becomes chaotic, with no permanent structures. The rich, interesting game that we know strikes a balance between order and chaos.

Likewise, in order for the laws of physics to allow a universe as rich and complex as ours, they have to fulfill a set of mathematical constraints. One of these, it turns out, is that not only must the laws be balanced between order (an empty universe or a big crunch) and chaos (lack of stable structures like protons, molecules, or galaxies), but that there will always be at least two models that explain all phenomena, and no test carried out inside the universe can ever differentiate the two.