Practice Safe Sex!
By now you may have heard about the late Rev. Gary Aldridge, friend of Jerry Falwell, who was dead in his home, with… well, why don’t you just read the autopsy:
Should the Word “Atheist” Even Be Used?
In his talk at the Atheist Alliance convention this past weekend, Sam Harris decided to go all contrarian, and argue that we shouldn’t even use the word “atheist”. While he makes some good points, I feel that on the whole, he’s wrong.
Pattern Substitution as Funky Iterator
I have a project in which I have a row of cells, and a number of segments of given lengths, and I need to try out all of the ways in which the segments can fit into the row. If you like, think of it as: how many ways can “eye”, “zygote”, and “is” be placed, in that order, on a row of a Scrabble board?
I’m doing this in Perl, so naturally I’d like to play to Perl’s strengths (pattern matching and substitution) rather than its weaknesses (arithmetic). And I’ve discovered a nifty little hack.
Another Law of System Administration
Let me propose this law, to see if it grabs anyone:
There is no task, software package, or piece of equipment so simple that it cannot be made to require a dedicated admin.
There are supercomputing centers with so many RAIDs that normal failure rates and ordinary statistics show that there will be several disk failures per day, so they have a person whose job it is to go around and replace the disks that died overnight.
And a friend just found a job opening for a Subversion admin.
Christianity’s Ratings Falling
According to a report by the Barna Group, a Christian organization, young people’s perception of Christianity is lower now than it has been in past decades.
The study shows that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a “good impression” of Christianity.
Among young non-Christians, nine out of the top 12 perceptions were negative. Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%)
Interestingly, the study discovered a new image that has steadily grown in prominence over the last decade. Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is “anti-homosexual.” Overall, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity.
Gee, no shit, Sherlock.
The article does point out that this trend is due at least in part to the fact that a smaller percentage of the US population is Christian than in decades past. It also points out that this does not seem to be a youthful phase that people grow out of as they get older.
Comments after the jump.
Oh, Noes! Teh Gays Is Oppressing Us!
Over at Clown Hall, Kristen Fyfe—who is apparently training to become the next Ann Coulter—has a column that can be summarized as
Oh, no! Those filthy, hellbound faggots with their contagious gay cooties are displaying intolerance and denying good Christians basic human rights by parodying a religious picture! Will our oppression never end?! <clutches pearls>
Kent Hovind, Numerologist. Also, Ravens
It sounds as though Kent Hovind is bored out of his skull in prison. His latest posting, written in the form of a conversation between himself and a self-centered, self-quoting dick of a god, he points out that the Bible can be massaged into yielding various numerical coincidences, as well as the amusing tidbit that 13+53+33 = 153. I suppose that’s a more constructive use of his time than counting ceiling tiles.
He also gives God a line about “one of the greediest birds on earth, the raven”. On the principle that if Hovind says that says that 2+2=4, you should double-check before believing it, I ran a quick Google search and ran across this article at New Scientist. Evidently, if a young raven runs across a carcass in winter, it’ll emit a loud cry that attracts other ravens who join in the feast.
Of course, there’s no such thing as perfect altruism in biology. It turns out that older, mated ravens can defend their territory against ravens who might poach on their food. Younger ravens, on the other hand, don’t have a mate to help them, so they’re at a disadvantage compared to the married ones. So when they call out, what they’re really saying is “help me defend this food against anyone who might try to take it away, and in return, I’ll share with you.”
Retelling the Classics
Once, there was a man who had two children. One day, they said to each other, “You know what we should do? Make some movies and put them on the Internet, so everyone can see them.” So they built characters out of modeling clay, and sets out of cardboard. They made some stop-motion animations with a webcam they had lying around, and uploaded their shorts to YouTube. After a while, they learned quite a bit about how to make movies.
One day, their father surfed around the net to see his children’s movies and find out what they had been up to. It turned out that they had quite a lot of fans, including one person who worked in Hollywood and was trying to work out a deal for them to make a feature-length motion picture.
The father thought to himself, “Wow. If these kids can achieve so much with just a cheap camera and some clay, there’s nothing they won’t be able to do.”
So he took away his children’s modeling clay, burned the cardboard sets, and smashed their camera. So they stopped filming, and never did make that feature film.
(HT whoever for the original.)
Carnival of the Dembski
Bill “The Isaac Newton of Information Science” Dembski gave a talk at Oklahoma University in Norman, entitled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. But it appears that instead of the usual audience bussed in from local churches, the talk was attended by a lot of OU faculty and students. From all accounts, he gave a pretty standard presentation, but was ripped to shreds in the Q&A session.
Start by reading Golfvixen’s liveblogging of the talk. Then proceed to ERV’s account (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and/or this summary at Further Thoughts (or better yet, this
roundup of coverage of the event[1]).
And finally, a Christian who didn’t manage to get into the talk, but describes the Q& A and the goings-on outside.
Oh, and I would have liked to link to Dembski’s own account of how the evening went, but I can’t find one.
[1] Yes, he links here. When two carnivals link to each other, does it form a merry-go-round?
(Updated Sep. 21 to add another link to Further Thoughts.)