Archives November 2007

Rain Magic

Every so often, sophisticated theists will say that Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. misrepresent religion, that God is not an invisible sky-daddy who grants wishes, but some ineffable essence working within the laws of nature, or some such (see here, here, here).

And then something like this comes along:

That would be Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has asked Georgians to pray for rain today, and at lunchtime will convene with various religious and political leaders on the steps of the state Capitol to seek divine intervention in the state’s months-long drought.

There’s probably a polite way to say this, but I won’t (maybe I’m just cranky because it’s raining in Maryland, rather than in Georgia where they could use it): these people believe in magic. Primitive, superstitious magic, where if you say the right words and make the right gestures, the great sky spirit will grant you your wish.

Right here, in the United States, at the dawn of the 21st century. In the sixties, people thought we’d have flying cars. Instead, we have rain dances.

And this isn’t some fringe group. Not only does Governor Perdue believe that rain dances work, enough of his constituents do that he hasn’t been laughed out of office.

So, all you sensible theists out there, why aren’t you policing your own? Why aren’t you pointing out to these superstitious fools that what they’re doing is no different from spreading mistletoe on the ground and chanting? Pastors, why aren’t you educating your congregations and telling them that no, God doesn’t work that way?

In a recent speech, Daniel Dennett suggested referring to non-brights as “supers”, because they believe in the supernatural. But perhaps “super” is short for “superstitious” as well.

The “I’m #1 on Google” Meme

The World’s Fair proposed a meme where you have to find Google search terms that return your weblog as the #1 hit. Here’s one set that I just discovered, that I’m rather happy with:

Now That’s A Big Box!

Amusing programming error o’ the day:

Big box screen shot

This is the Amazon page for a program to teach piano. When I saw the dimensions, I thought maybe they threw in a grand piano along with the CD. But at 30m × 25m × 3.5m, there’s room for not just the grand piano, but the rest of the Philharmonic as well.

If you look at the ASIN, you’ll see whom to blame: those damn Ewoks!

Update: The volume of the box is 91527 cubic feet. According to Engineering Toolbox, a cubic foot of air at 70°F weighs 7.492×10-2lb/ft3. So if the box were filled with air, it would weigh 6857 lbs. But it only weighs 120 lbs, which means it floats like a balloon. That must be why the shipping weight is 1 lb: the Post Office lumps all packages that weigh less than a pound together.

Bad Pharyngula

In which I get PZ Myers to sign Phil Plait’s book, starting a trend.

Phil Plait and PZ Myers are in town for a Americans United thing, so they organized a meetup tonight. Naturally, I had to go.

Phil and PZ

As you can tell, I have a ways to go as a photographer. But this picture clearly shows that PZ does not breathe fire. In actuality, he shoots lasers out of his eyes. (Update, Nov. 11: see here for why Phil’s eyes are closed.)

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The Mainstream Media’s Fluff Bias

If you watch TV news, you may have found yourself wondering why they’re going on and on and on about Paris or Britney or Lindsey or whoever, instead of, like, news that you care about.

Russell Glasser, a student at U Texas at Austin, is currently writing a thesis on this subject. His basic approach was to data-mine both Google News and Digg, the idea being that the former gives a representative sample of what the news media are talking about, and the latter gives insight into what people are actually interested in. You can read more about this, as well as a draft of the thesis, here.

The basic idea is fairly simple: let’s say that in a given month, there are 99 news stories about Britney Spears and one about Tiger Woods; but on Digg, a lot of people recommend the one Tiger Woods story and ignore the 99 Britney Spears stories. It seems reasonable to conclude that the news-reading public cares a lot more about Tiger than about Britney.

And, in fact, his conclusion is that there’s a definite bias towards fluff in the media.

The whole thing is also an interesting exercise in teasing information out of noisy data: any given datum could easily be wrong: someone might Digg every story he reads; or a newspaper might run two Paris Hilton stories in one day because the news editor and entertainment editor didn’t realize that the other one was already covering the story. But if you have a lot of such noisy data (and nowadays, thanks to the Spew, we do), then you can still tease information out of it.

The Mozart Argument

Over at Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert links to the lecture notes for a talk by Alvin Plantinga listing half a dozen (or so) arguments for the existence of God.

Down in the comments, someone asks why atheists snigger at Plantinga.

To answer that question, scroll down Plantinga’s talk to “(U) The Mozart Argument”. As far as I can tell, it’s basically:

  1. I like Mozart’s music
  2. If evolution had taken a different course, Metallica’s music would have been considered beautiful
  3. But it’s not
  4. Therefore, God exists

As Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “That’s an argument?” To answer the commenter’s question, the reason I have such a low opinion of Plantinga is that any time I read him, he’s in one of two modes: 1) full-on obscurantism and bafflegab, or 2) tripe like the above.

Obviously, just because I don’t understand something doesn’t imply that it’s meaningless. Maybe if I put in the time to understand high-falutin’ Plantinga, it would make sense. But bullshit-drivel Plantinga makes me seriously doubt that possibility. If I may steal a line from Sam Clemens (only steal from the best!), it ain’t the parts of Plantinga that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.

Word O’ the Day

Pomaceous: pertaining to apples. A nice autumnal word.

Figuring out the Trilemma of Evil

I’d never been quite satisfied with the problem of evil (if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, how can there be evil?) because it looked like a false trilemma, like C.S. Lewis’s liar, lunatic, or lord.

Lewis’s trilemma fails because it doesn’t account for all possibilities (e.g., a fourth possibility is “legend”). So how do we know that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence cover all possibilities in the problem of evil? Granted, the fact that a lot of very smart people have looked at it for millennia, so it’s probably solid, but it always bothered me that I hadn’t seen a good demonstration that it wasn’t a false trilemma.

But then I reasoned thusly:

  1. If there is evil in the world, and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
  2. If God knows about evil, and is omnibenevolent, then God wants to fix it.
  3. If God wants to fix evil, and is omnipotent, then God can fix it.

I like this formulation because the three parts of the argument flow from each other.

Another Amusing Linguistic Quirk

I just ran across this comment:

First Amendment notwithstanding, there are such things under the law as harmful speech that can be sanctioned.

“Sanction” has two meanings, which are opposites of each other: it can mean either “official permission” or “penalty” (or, as a verb, either “to give official permission” or “to impose a penalty”). In this case, since the topic is the first amendment, which permits people to say things that have historically been banned, it’s even more confusing.

David at Mental Floss calls such words “contronyms” or “antagonyms”. Take your pick.