Colorado Trip

(In which I talk about my personal life; if you don’t know me, you probably won’t be interested.)

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps?q=docs:%2F%2F0B8UgPT-5KBymZG5hXzV0MEZXNk0&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

I just got back from a trip to Colorado. J’s friend M got married on Friday, and we were invited to Silverthorne, Colorado for the ceremony.

We were (rightly, I think) concerned about the flooding in and around Denver, which probably explains how the car rental guy successfully upsold me a Ford Explorer. Pro: decent pickup, plenty of room, more features than I could count. Con: it’s the size of a battleship. I deliberately avoided visiting downtown Denver because I was afraid I’d have to maneuver it through an underground parking lot and scrape the roof off.

The trip out to Silverthorne went well. Bad traffic and rain, but no worse than some of the stuff I’ve seen on the Beltway.

Just for the record, Colorado is incredibly scenic. Even J, who normally doesn’t care for mountains, was enchanted, even if she had trouble breathing at ten thousand feet. I saw a moose outside our room, quietly ignoring us.

One highlight of the wedding was a replica TARDIS, built by the groom’s brother, and augmented with software written by the groom, that served as a photo booth. There was a table with silly hats, mustaches on sticks, and similar accessories. Guests could accouter themselves, then have their photo taken in the TARDIS, and these went into the wedding photo album.

The next day, we decided to avoid the floods in Denver by heading south into (more of) the mountains, via smaller-than-interstate roads, to Leadville and Colorado Springs.

It’s well known that Colorado Springs is home to the Air Force academy and NORAD, the Santa-tracking arm of the US military. But slightly less well known is the fact that Leadville is home to the Mining Hall of Fame and Museum.

The Hall of Fame part is eminently skippable, unless you’re in the mining industry and want to see plaques immortalizing so-and-so digging the first Germanium mine in Indiana or inventing a new drill or whatever, but the rest of the museum is more interesting than you’d expect, which is how it often goes with these things. It had some walk-through replicas of mines, to show you what conditions people worked in when the Colorado mines were first dug, as well as a section on the history of mining, which fits in nicely with the sort of westward-expansion history that I like.

There were also exhibits aimed at giving the visitor a proper appreciation for the role of mining in the world we inhabit. But I confess I only gave a cursory glance at the World of Molybdenum exhibit.

Most immature-giggle-producing item in the gift shop: the book Beyond the Glory Hole: A Memoir of A Climax Miner by James Ludwig. It probably helps to know that Climax, Colorado is a mining town, and that a glory hole is an opening at the top of a mine. But feel free to tee-hee anyway.

Having spent the night in Colorado Springs, we went to visit the Garden of the Gods park, but just as we were getting our bearings in the visitors’ center, they announced that the river through the park was rising due to the rain (see flooding, above) and that the park was being closed as a precautionary measure. We stuck around a bit to see if the sun would come out and make the powers that be change their mind, but it didn’t and they didn’t. So we moved on.

We did stop by Focus on Your Own Damn the Family headquarters. Apparently there are all sorts of activities that you can bring your Jesus-approved, one-man-one-woman family to, but on this Sunday they were observing the fourth commandment (or third, for you Catholic and Lutheran heathens) by being closed, so all we saw was a bunch of buildings in an office park.

Oh, except for one thing: a statue of three children, the eldest playing with and protecting the younger two, one of whom is reading a book that says:

Jesus is the Good Shepherd.
A good shepherd always takes care of his sheep.
Sheep say
Baa!
Baa!
Baa!.

And with that, onward and northward. It turns out that Denver is far flatter than we had expected, what with it being the mile-high city and all. But it’s right at the junction between the boring-as-Kansas plains, and the totally-not-flat Rockies. So you get to pick the kind of slope you want to live on.

We found the Soundwalk, an art installation in Denver consisting of a series of grates that play water sounds on a loop. Or more precisely, J found it by being startled by what sounded like a toilet flushing under her feet. Either way, it’s cool.

The following day, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I confess that the Smithsonian has spoiled me, and I was a bit taken aback at the thought of paying admission to a museum, but it was worth it. Especially if you have (or are) kids with a modicum of curiosity.

At the airport, I got a TSA Junior Officer from the first TSA inspector.

Me: Look what I got!
J: How’d you get that?
Me: Um, I asked for it.

The tram station at Denver airport has a series of posters of local celebrities. On one, I first saw the Hugo. Then I looked up and saw the face of Connie Willis. Then a pile of her books. And only then did I notice the text that said who the face belonged to. Yes, I successfully made my fanboy roll.

All in all, lots of fun. We need to go back, some time when it’s less floody. If things go as well as this first time, I might even get J to hate snow a little less.

Ow

BillDo is butthurt over the existence of the art-house movie Paradise: Faith, about an ultra-religious woman who wants to not just love Jesus, but make love to him.

It is not certain whether the filmmaker, Ulrich Seidl, who is Austrian, is related to another Austrian, Mr. Adolf Hitler, though he could be. Like Hitler, Seidl is a vicious anti-Catholic ex-Catholic.

Godwin! Now that he’s conceded the argument, we can all go back to not giving a rat’s ass what BillDo thinks. But in case you’re curious how he finishes this paragraph:

When questioned why it was necessary to show the “devout” Catholic woman profaning a sacred symbol, he said, “it is right to show her masturbating using a cross, as she is making love to Jesus. Just because it might be a taboo doesn’t mean I won’t show it.” But it depends: he won’t show a “devout” Jew masturbating with the Star of David. That would be disrespectful. And NPR and the New York Times would never approve.

Um, no. I think the reason may have nothing to do with NPR’s approval, and more to do with the fact that stars of David are pointy, like shuriken. So ow. Ow ow ow. This is in contrast to crosses, which are roughly dildo-shaped, and especially crucifixes, which are Textured for Her Pleasure.

The 95% Textbook

I’m a big fan of consensus, at least when it comes to figuring out whether something is true or not. If your doctor tells you have, say, ALS, well, that doctor might be wrong. But if you seek a second or third opinion, and those doctors independently come to the same conclusion, then the odds are that the diagnosis was correct. If you’ve ever participated in an interest-based community, be it crocheting or motorcycle racing or The Walking Dead fans or parakeet breeding or whatever, you’ll know that enthusiasts in these communities often have heated discussions on all sorts of topics, and will hash out the issues at length. So when it gets to the point where most everyone who knows the subject agrees on the answer to some question, that answer is most likely correct.

By way of counterexample: in the series Black Adder II, episode Potato, Blackadder has chartered the ship of Captain Rum, and discovered that there’s no crew:

Blackadder: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.

Rum: Opinion is divided on the subject.

Blackadder: Oh, really?

Rum: Yes. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn’t.

So I wondered, what if we wanted to write an utterly uncontroversial textbook on some subject, to introduce elementary or High School students to the subject. Uncontroversial because we’re not interested in presenting the controversies at the cutting edge of research; just present what’s been learned about the subject so far.

Read More

Orson Scott Card Wants You to Forget How Much He Hates Gays

Remember the heady days of 2008, when Orson Scott Card wrote:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

:

The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists — which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does — then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.

:

homosexuality is a pathological condition of the sexual system.

And back in 1990:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those whoflagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity’s ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships.

Good times. No, wait, not good times at all. What’s the expression I’m looking for? What a gigantic douchebag. Yeah, that’s it. And he’s been at it vocally and for a long time.

So anyway, for those who hadn’t heard, a movie version of Card’s novel Ender’s Game is coming out, and a group is calling for a boycott, what with Card being such a raging homophobe and all.

So here’s what Orson Scott Card told Entertainment Weekly (emphasis added):

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

For one thing, while I think the tide has turned on gay marriage, the issue is far from “moot”, as Card says. I’ll give him credit for recognizing that he’s on the losing side; I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s motivated by wanting people to see a piece of art that he had a hand in, and not because he stands to make money from it.

But really. That last paragraph. No. Just no. He doesn’t get to fight against gay rights for more than a decade, and then, when it’s clear that his side is losing, try to pretend like it never happened.

I’d argue that since gay-rights activists aren’t calling for him to be thrown in jail for having sex the way he likes it, they’re already showing him more tolerance than he himself has shown.

I’m sorry, but “why aren’t you more tolerant of my intolerance?” won’t wash. If you want people to play nice with you, you first have to play nice with them. And just for the record, “playing nice” includes things like not saying they must be the way they are because they were abused as children, and also not calling for them to be thrown in jail because you don’t approve of their partners.

(via Towleroad)

Now, I confess that I’m somewhat torn: I did enjoy Ender’s Game tremendously (first the novel, and then the short story that it was based on). It’s not all that political (as I recall, it leans more toward libertarianism than what’s called “conservative” in modern American politics), and I don’t remember any gay issues, or any sex-related issues at all. That book was written by pre-brain-eater Orson Scott Card.

And normally, I’d be content to leave it at that: I try to keep the artist separate from the work, and accept that people with political views I strongly disagree with can still write stories that I like.

But Card has been so extreme, so vitriolic, for so long, that he’s retroactively tainted my enjoyment of what he wrote back when he wasn’t yet a hate-filled ugly bag of mostly bile.

Overfitting

One of the things I learned in math is that a polynomial of degree N can pass through N+1 arbitrary points. A straight line goes through any two points, a parabola goes through any three points, and so forth. The practical upshot of this is that if your equation is complex enough, you can fit it to any data set.

That’s basically what happened to the geocentric model: it started out simple, with planets going around the Earth in circles. Except that some of the planets wobbled a bit. So they added more terms to the equations to account for the wobbles. Then there turned out to be more wobbles on top of the first wobbles, and more terms had to be added to the equations to take those into account, and so on until the theory collapsed under its own weight. There wasn’t any physical mechanism or cause behind the epicycles (as these wobbles were called). They were just mathematical artifacts. And so, one could argue that the theory was simpler when it had fewer epicycles and didn’t explain all of the data, but also was less wrong.

Take another example (adapted from Russell Glasser, who got it from his CS instructor): let’s say you and I order a pizza, and it comes with olives. I hate olives and you love them, so we want to cut it up in such a way that we both get slices of the same size, but your slice has as many of the olives as possible, and mine have as few as possible. (And don’t tell me we could just order a half-olive pizza; I’m using this as another example.)

We could take a photo of the pizza, feed it into an algorithm that’ll find the position of each olive and come up with the best way to slice the pizza fairly, but with a maximum of olives on your slices.

The problem is, this tells us nothing about how to slice the next such pizza that we order. Unless there’s some reason to think that the olives on the next pizza will be laid out in some similar way on the next pizza, we can’t tell the pizza parlor how to slice it up when we place our next order.

In contrast, imagine if we’d looked at the pizza and said, “Hm. Looks like the cook is sloppy, and just tossed a handful of olives on the left side, without bothering to spread them around.” Then we could ask the parlor slice to slice it into wedges, and we have good odds of winding up with three slices with extra olives and three with minimal olives. Or if we’d found that the cook puts the olives in the middle and doesn’t spread them around. Then we could ask the parlor to slice the pizza into a grid; you take the middle pieces, and I’ll take the outside ones.

But our original super-optimal algorithm doesn’t allow us to do that: by trying to perfectly account for every single olive in that one pizza, it doesn’t help us at all in trying to predict the next pizza.

In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver calls this overfitting. It’s often tempting to overfit, because then you can say, “See! My theory of Economic Epicycles explains 29 of the last 30 recessions, as well as 85% of the changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average!” But is this exciting new theory right? That is, does it help us figure out what the future holds; whether we’re looking at a slight economic dip, a recession, or a full-fledged depression?

We’ve probably all heard the one about how the Dow goes up and down along with skirt hems. Or that the performance of the Washington Redskins predicts the outcome of US presidential elections. Of course, there’s no reason to think that fashion designers control Wall Street, or that football players have special insight into politics. More importantly, it goes to show that if you dig long enough, you can find some data set that matches the one you’re looking at. And in this interconnected, online, googlable world, it’s easier than ever to find some data set that matches what you want to see.

These two examples are easy to see through, because there’s obviously no causal relationship between football and politics. But we humans are good at telling convincing stories. What if I told you that pizza sales (with or without olives) can help predict recessions? After all, when people have less spending money, they eat out less, and pizza sales suffer.

I just made this up, both the pizza example and the explanation. So it’s bogus, unless by some million-to-one chance I stumbled on something right. But it’s a lot more plausible than the skirt or football examples, and thus we need to be more careful before believing it.

Update: John Armstrong pointed out that the first paragraph should say “N+1”, not “N”.

Update 2: As if on cue, Wonkette helps demonstrate the problems with trying to explain too much in this post about Glenn Beck somehow managing to tie together John Kerry’s presence or absence on a boat, his wife’s seizure, and Hillary Clinton’s answering or not answering questions about Benghazi. Probably NSFW because hey, Wonkette. But also full of Glenn Beck-ey crazy.

Horrible Acts Too Horrible to Release

In the AP’s story about the Milwaukee diocese having to release its records of priestly sex abuse and shuffling priests around to protect Holy Mother Church, one part jumped out at me:

Listecki, who succeeded Dolan in Milwaukee, said Tuesday in his weekly email to priests, parish leaders and others that he hoped releasing the documents would allow the church to move forward. But he also warned that descriptions of abuse can be “ugly.”

“I worry about the reactions of abuse survivors when confronted again with this material and pray it doesn’t have a negative effect on them,” he wrote.

which I think translates to “the things we did to those people are so horrible, we don’t want to hurt them further by releasing the details of our horrible actions to the public.”

This deserves to be the the prime textbook example of a self-serving rationalization.

And here I thought confession was supposed to be good for the soul.

The Indian and the Ice: When to Believe Something

Imagine a woman living in India in the 18th or 19th century[1]. Her cousin, the sailor, has just returned from a trading voyage and, after being suitably plied with food and attention, tells his audience about distant lands where it is so cold that water becomes as hard as wood; you can break off a piece of water and hold it in two fingers.

The woman doesn’t believe him. His story seems utterly fantastical. In her experience, water is never hard. It’s always liquid or gas. As much as she wants to trust her beloved cousin, he’s also a sailor, just like the ones who have passed through town in the past, talking about mermaids and six-headed serpents.

[1] I got this analogy from The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten, by Julian Baggini. He, in turn credits it to David Hume’s On Miracles, though I gather that the analogy of the Indian and the ice didn’t actually appear in On Miracles, but rather arose out of criticism of that work.

Clearly, the Indian woman is wrong: there is such a thing as ice. But I’d argue that she’s wrong for the right reason: being too skeptical, rather than too gullible. And this is one of those cases where reality turns out to be weirder than she could imagine.

Forming an accurate understanding of the world is a balancing act: I don’t want to admit too many untrue ideas, but I don’t want to just disbelieve everything, because I also want to admit true ideas. And I also don’t want to spend my life on the fence about everything. So I use rules of thumb, which don’t always work. And so sometimes, I’m wrong.

Like other atheists and skeptics, I’ve been accused of being closed-minded. The analogy of the Indian woman and the ice is just the sort of thing a critic could point to. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that.

But for every such nugget of implausible truth, there are several metric tons of bullshit. The Indian sailor’s story of hard water sounds, to the woman, just like other stories about six-headed monsters, centaurs, mermaids, and floating mountains. And so she’s right to reject it, at least until such time as good evidence comes along.

The cost of believing too much is measured in money and in human lives. Tim Farley keeps a running tally at What’s the Harm?. The cost of believing too little seems, to me, much lower. So it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

Paul Taylor’s Fickle Exactness

Paul Taylor, who helps Eric Hovind run the family misinformation mill in the absence of his father Kent, accuses people who think Noah’s Ark was just a story of not having done our homework:

Question 1: How did they all fit on the boat and who put them in there? Don’t forget that there were two of each specie(sic) (male & female) 

[…] The questioner makes a more serious error, however, by not actually reading the Bible. If he had read the account in Genesis, then he would have realized that the biblical account does not even refer to “species.” Instead, it refers to kind. The Hebrew word for kind is mîn. For this reason, creation biologists have started to use their own technical term for this grouping of creatures—baramin. The Hebrew bara means “created,” so baramin is a created kind.

Got that, scoffers? Specific words have specific meanings, and unless you’re careful to use just the right word, you’re arguing against a straw man!

For example:

Question 4: Didn’t Noah have to wait for many years to get the snail on-board?

Noah did not take invertebrates onto the Ark, only animals with lungs (Genesis 7:15). Invertebrates can survive such conditions.

Spineless, lungless, eh, what’s the dif’?

Anatomical snail diagram
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Aside from the absence of a spine, note the presence of a rather large lung, which Taylor says doesn’t exist.

Of course, that’s just a diagram. That snail lung could be as fictitious as dragons and unicorns. How about a photo?

Snail lung. Photo by salyangoz, from here.

Yeah, but that’s ‘shopped. I can tell by the pixels. Pixels are scoffers. Well-known fact, that.

CNSNews Doesn’t Like Girls Learning About Their Naughty Parts

This tweet from @Defund_PP

led me to this article at CNSnews.com about girlshealth.gov, an HHS site offering information about sex, aimed at girls ages 10-16. They disapprove of it.

But the site also includes a glossary that explains anal sex and “mutual masturbation” and includes information about birth control and how to access everything from condoms to “emergency contraceptives.”

Let’s see what it says:

anal sex (say: AYN-uhl seks) = sex that involves putting the penis in the anus, or butt.

and

mutual masturbation (say: MYOO-chuh-wuhl mas-tur-BAY-shuhn) = when two people touch each other’s sex organs or genitals for sexual pleasure.

Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I don’t see the part where HHS is telling girls to go on a spree lesbian anal orgy-ness and how their parents can write off the KY as an educational expense. Likewise, on the page on contraception, I don’t see a 10%-off coupon on birth control pills, I see an explanation of the facts that tries to be clear and not tiptoe around the subject with twee euphemisms.

But apparently the author of this piece — and many times more so some of the commenters — doesn’t seem to understand the difference between sex ed and porn. Apparently it all goes into a big mental bucket marked “Sex. Don’t touch.”

I suspect that something like this also contributes to the popularity of the “abstinence-only” movement: many religions treat sex as a taboo subject, so if you just tell kids not to do it, then maybe you won’t have to talk about it.

No, I don’t think ten-year-olds should be having sex, and neither should sixteen-year-olds be getting pregnant. (And neither, probably, should they be reading that site without parental guidance.) But “don’t do it” sex ed is about as effective as “don’t do it” driver’s ed. And the prudish attitude exhibited above isn’t helping.

Removing Missing Podcast Episodes from iTunes

So I figured something out today.

I add and remove podcasts in iTunes all the time. And every so often, iTunes loses track of, er, tracks. This usually shows up in a smart playlist, where a podcast episode exists in iTunes’s database, but there’s no corresponding MP3 file on disk. You can’t manually delete entries from smart playlists; and if I’ve deleted the podcast, then I can’t even go back to the podcast list to delete the bogus episode. Nor does it show up in the “Music” list, since it’s a podcast episode.

What I finally figured out is that if you change the Media type from “Podcast” to “Music”, that’ll move the episode to the Music list, where you can delete it.

You can change the media type with “Get info” (⌘-I) → Options → “Media Kind”.

Unfortunately, if the file is missing, iTunes won’t let you edit the media kind. So first you need to associate the podcast episode with an MP3 file. The easiest way is to copy an existing MP3 file to /tmp/foo.mp3 or some such. Then, when you ⌘-I and iTunes says no such file and “Do you want to locate it?”, say yes, and point it at /tmp/foo.mp3. Then you can edit the media kind, and delete the file from the Music list.