Pursuit of Happiness

Greta Christina
makes a great point:
if conservatives want to argue that gay marriage goes against the
principles that America was founded on, remind them of that founding
principle explicitly spelled out in the declaration of independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness.

If marrying the person you love isn’t pursuit of happiness, I don’t
know what is.

But don’t take my word for it. In the
Loving v. Virginia
decision, SCOTUS chief justice Warren wrote:

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of
the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of
happiness by free men.

Character Encodings Are a PITA

Character encoding schemes (UTF-8, ASCII, ISO-8859-1/-15,
Windows-1252, etc.) are an incredible source of headaches. Stay away
from them.

(Oh, and if you tell me I mean “raw character encoding” or “codepoint
set” some such, I’ll whack you upside the head with a thick Unicode
reference.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, I upgraded WordPress not too long ago.
Being the cautious sort, I did a dump of the back-end database before
doing so, as I’ve done every other time I upgraded. And, like every
other time, I noticed that some characters got mangled. This time
around, though, I decided to do something about it.

It turned out that when I originally set up the database, I told it to
use ISO-8859-1 as the default text encoding. But later, I told
WordPress to use UTF-8. And somewhere between dumping, restoring, and
WordPress’s upgrade of the schema, various characters got mangled. For
the most part, various ISO-8859-1 quotation marks got converted to
UTF-8, then interpreted as ISO-8859-1, and converted again. On top of
which, some commenters used retarded software to post comments, which
insisted on using cp1252 or cp1258 (and I even saw something which
might’ve been IBM-CP1133), which also got converted to and from UTF-8
and ISO-8859-1 or -15.

Obviously, with 13 Mb of data, I wasn’t going to correct it all by
hand; I needed to write a script. But that introduced additional
problems: a Perl script that’s basically “s/foo/bar/g” is
pretty simple, but when foo and bar are strings that
represent the same character using different encodings, things can get
hairy: what if bar is UTF-8, but Perl thinks that the file is
in ISO-8859-15?

On top of that, you have to keep track of which encoding Emacs is
using to show you any given file.

iconv turned out to be an invaluable forensic tool, but it has one
limitation: you can’t use it to simply decode UTF-8 (or if you can, I
wasn’t able to figure out how to do so). There were times when I
wanted to decode a snippet of text and look at it to see if I could
recognize the encoding. But iconv only allows you to convert from one
encoding to another; so if you try to convert from UTF-8 to
ISO-8859-1, and the resulting character isn’t defined in ISO-8859-1,
you get an error. Bleah.

The moral of the story is, use UTF-8 for everything. If the software
you’re using doesn’t give you UTF-8 as an option, ditch it and use
another package.

Foxholes and Shoe Leather

Carnival of the Godless
We’ve all heard the expression “There are no atheists in foxholes”. As I understand it, it means something like:

It’s easy to be self-reliant when everything’s going well. But when times are tough, when the situation is desperate, you will find that you’re not able to fix everything by yourself, and will need to turn to someone else for help. And in really dire straits, you will swallow your pride and turn to God.

Yes, in desperate times people resort to desperate measures. But they’re called desperate measures for a reason: they’re things you normally want to avoid doing.

If I collapse and my heart stops, I’ll be happy for the EMTs to beep-beep-beep-clear!-Zap! me back to life. But that doesn’t mean that I want people to go around zapping me with 1000 volts through the chest.

Starving people will eat anything that looks even vaguely edible, including tree bark and shoe leather. It even helps a little, in that they feel less empty. But that doesn’t mean we should stop eating apples in favor of apple tree bark (though I’m sure you could charge a pretty penny for it in certain boutiques).

The thing about desperate measures is that they come with huge down sides. In certain situations, amuptation, lobotomization, and even suicide may be the best available option. But it’s a good idea not to resort to them before you have to.

And those are just the desperate measures that work. Many desperation measures don’t. In the Middle Ages, plague-ridden towns would exterminate the local cat population, under the belief that said cats had to do with evil magic. And, of course, desperate people have always prayed to whichever gods they thought might help.

As a rule, “If I had no option but to do X, so I’ll do X when I do have other options” is not a good way to live one’s life. And while I’m not so arrogant to say “fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau” — who knows, I might one day resort to prayer in case there’s someone out there — in my right mind, I see no reason to believe that it does any good, and honesty compels me to atheism.

War on Christmas

Carnival of the Godless
Dear Fox News pundits and assorted wingnuts,

I assume that this year, as has become tradition, you will once again be talking up the War On Christmas™. Since I am a liberal godless atheist who supports both separation of church and state and the ACLU, presumably this makes us enemies in this war.

So I thought I’d let you know how I plan to wage war on Christmas.

Oh, I know, giving information to the enemy is usually treasonous, but Christmas is the season for giving, so what the hey. Pull up a yule log and I’ll tell you all my plans. I won’t even make you eggnog-board me.

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The Kids Are All Right

While walking back from lunch today, I saw a group of preachers in the
semicircular plaza in front of the student union. One had a big banner
telling people to repent their sins and come to Jesus Christ, and the
main ranter was wearing a sandwich board that said pretty much the
same thing in front. On the back, it had a list of people who should
beware the wrath of God, the merciful, the most compassionate. I’m
going to trust
Amanda Gibbs’s
transcript, because it sounds about right:

WARNING

Fornicators, drunkards, sodomists, pot smokers, gangster rappers, immodest women, darwinists, gamblers, feminists, socialists, abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, jihadists, dirty dancers, hypocrites

JUDGMENT IS COMING!!!!!

I walked around the back to read the whole thing. Broke out laughing.
Saw a bunch of smiles appear among the people in the front row.

It took me back to my own student days, when
Tom Short
would stand in front of the library and rant fundamentalist Christian
inanity for hours.

It gladdened this shriveled old cynical heart to see the reaction of
the students watching today’s spectacle. It ranged from outrage to
mild amusement to wild amusement. One woman ran out to get a piece of
chalk and draw pagan signs on the ground around Ranty Sandwich Board
Guy.

So it looks to me as if the young’uns are being pushed away from
right-wing crazy religion, and toward either moderate religion or no
religion.

I struck up a brief conversation with one of the students in
attendance, in which he told me that he too had been raised Russian
Orthodox, and had been pressed into service as an altar boy a few
times. So we laughed, shook hands, and swapped stories of abusing the
communion wine.

Yeah, I think they’ll be fine.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

A while back, I was visited by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At one
point, they resorted to argumentum ad wishful thinking: “Well,
don’t you want to live forever?”

They were very surprised when I said no.

Back in 2006, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, John Cleese
expressed
some of the thoughts that went into my answer (starts about 15:52 in):

I’ll tell you something sad, and it is this: as you get
older, I don’t think you laugh quite so much. The trouble is, there’s
only eight million jokes in the world. And when you’ve been doing it,
as I have, for forty-three years — I now know 7,980,000 of those
jokes. And even the ones I don’t know, I can kind of guess. I can
guess what the shape is.

I don’t laugh as much. Occasionally, when you’re young, at twenty,
you discover Buster Keaton, or in my case Peter Cook, or Woody Allen
and Steve Martin. These are great moments. But as you get older, it’s
not so frequent to be really excited by a new
discovery.

(Note: this is heavily edited for flow.)

And this is a problem with immortality: as you learn more and more,
especially in a given field, there’s less and less that’s really new,
and even that falls falls into known patterns..

I’m far from jaded, and I certainly don’t want to die just yet. But I
can see how, after two hundred years, or a thousand, or a million,
life would become dull. I don’t want to sound gloomy and pessimistic,
because there’s no cause to be. I’m sure that I’ll die regretting that
I lacked time to sample anything but the tiniest fraction of what life
has to offer. But at the same time, I can see where thing are going.

(Of course, since we’re talking about either magic or highly-advanced
technology, we can consider things like selective memory editing,
e.g., deliberately forgetting everything about Woody Allen so you can
discover him anew again. But I won’t go into that here.)

So if I were offered a shot at immortality, I’d demand an escape
clause. Better oblivion than eternal boredom.

Am I A Humanist? Definition vs. Allegiance

I don’t know whether I’m a Humanist.

I haven’t read any of the
Humanist manifestos,
but a while back, a podcast that I listen to had a show about
humanism, and discussed the main points of Humanist Manifesto III, the
most recent one. I agreed with points that were discussed, such as
that knowledge of the world comes from observing the world, and that
moral values are something that we humans have to work out for
ourselves.

But I don’t know whether I’m a humanist because I don’t know whether
it’s a matter of definition or of allegiance.

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What? Protests Change Minds?

When I
wrote
earlier about participating in the “No on Prop 8” demonstration at the
National Mall, I was rather dismissive of the notion that it might
affect anyone’s opinion.

However, SurveyUSA published a
poll
about Prop 8 with an interesting result. People who voted for Prop 8
were asked “Have the protesters changed your opinion on Prop 8?”. 8%
of them said yes.

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Props to Moderate Catholics

I give moderate theists
grief
when they fail to stand up and tell the Pat Robertsons and Jerry
Falwells of the world that they’re full of crap, so it’s only fair to
give credit where it’s due:
Catholics for Choice
has issued a
report
about Bill Donohue and the
Catholic League.

It provides a good overview of how BillDo operates, including
manufacturing controversy and bullying. The most interesting part (to
me) was the section about inflated membership numbers (p. 17).

(HT PZ.)

(Update: Fixed link to the report. Thanks to alert reader Fez.)

Minimal Electoral Map

During a discussion on whether the electoral college is still a good idea, someone brought up the point that it’s possible to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote, and pretty badly at that.

So I wrote a Perl script that used evolutionary computation to try to produce the most skewed electoral map possible. Here’s what it came up with:

Electoral Vote

(click to embiggen)

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