Bill Nye vs Sarah Palin? Nope, sorry to say, it’s not happening

All day long I’ve been hearing that Sarah Palin and Bill Nye were going to appear together on a panel to discuss climate change. I looked into it and didn’t believe it: it was going to be some one-night media blitz to promote a “documentary” about global warming by denialist Marc Morano, with an in-person introduction by a gang of bozos.

With welcoming remarks by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, cinema audiences will learn more about the topic through a panel discussion headlined by Sarah Palin, 2008 Republican Vice Presidential Candidate and Governor of Alaska from 2006-2009, moderated by Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the Media Research Center and including other notable experts. This riveting discussion will focus on climate change and issues brought up during the event.

Lamar Smith? Brent Bozell? Sarah Palin? I know Nye is willing to charge right into the lion’s den, but his name isn’t even mentioned there, and it would be total folly to leap into such a one-sided event.

Fortunately, it’s not going to happen. They’re going to play video clips of Bill Nye, no doubt so they can argue against him while he’s not there.

May I suggest, instead, that they put an empty chair on the stage? It’s a common Republican tactic, and it’s the only way they can win a debate on science.

On the absurdity of g

Since we’ve been talking about the biological basis of intelligence lately, this is appropriate Frans de Waal writes about animal intelligence. His whole point is that this thing we call “intelligence” is multi-dimensional and complex, and that other animals share properties of the brain with us. There are lots of ways an organism can be smart!

But think about it: How likely is it that the immense richness of nature fits on a single dimension? Isn’t it more likely that each animal has its own cognition, adapted to its own senses and natural history? It makes no sense to compare our cognition with one that is distributed over eight independently moving arms, each with its own neural supply, or one that enables a flying organism to catch mobile prey by picking up the echoes of its own shrieks. Clark’s nutcrackers (members of the crow family) recall the location of thousands of seeds that they have hidden half a year before, while I can’t even remember where I parked my car a few hours ago. Anyone who knows animals can come up with a few more cognitive comparisons that are not in our favor. Instead of a ladder, we are facing an enormous plurality of cognitions with many peaks of specialization. Somewhat paradoxically, these peaks have been called “magic wells” because the more scientists learn about them, the deeper the mystery gets.

I also very much like this illustration of the scala naturae that shows all the ways intelligence doesn’t fit neatly onto a progressive ladder (the only good use of the ol’ scala anymore is in debunking it).

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If Superman had a cat…

There’s something I’ve been missing in the superhero movie genre — characters who aren’t defined entirely by their superpowers. There’s always been some of that, of course: the whole point of Spiderman, for instance, is that he’s a teenager struggling with responsibilities, and Batman is the grim vigilante. Sometimes the personalities are getting lost in the milling crowd of magical abilities vying to be expressed in glorious CGI, though.

And what about Superman? He was vastly overpowered to the point where his multitude of unstoppable powers were utterly boring, and got in the way of the story. But the one thing that did make him interesting was that he was the personification of kindness and decency, something that’s been lost in the movies, at least since the Christopher Reeve version.

Sometimes the comics still remind us of that core of his character, though. So here’s a little story about Superman’s cat.

supercat

It’s not the superpowers, it’s what you do with them that makes for a good story.

Feminists are doomed…to laugh

ferengi

Someone mentioned me on Reddit, which is never a good thing, I’ve learned, but at least this time their comment is ironically funny. This person is announcing the imminent demise of feminism and America because human beings are apparently going extinct, to be replaced by cats.

They will trumpet nothing. They will not exist. They don’t tend to breed, having cats instead of kids, and even if they did the West will collapse soon. Occasionally some of these freaks do breed, like PZ Myers or Jessica Valenti, but those are rare exceptions. Plus PZ bred in the era before feminism completely destroyed America so I’m not sure how applicable his example is anyway.

Hey, I’m not that old! They make it sound like I was born in the paleolithic or something. Humanity is also not undergoing a population crash, so that argument is always kind of silly.

But what amused me is where this argument was made: feminists don’t breed, except for a few freakish outliers, says the guy on the Trucels subreddit.

The Truecels subreddit is an online community where involuntarily celibate males can vent and express their feelings and frustrations without fear of getting banned. The moderators of other online communities for incels (e.g. ForeverAlone) are often not so welcoming to the very people they are supposed to cater to. Females may post here too, but they will not be given any special treatment, and you will not be banned for disagreeing with one. This is a free speech subreddit.

If Jessica Valenti and I are freaks who have children (as do a great many feminists), we’re going to need a new word for people who are bitterly envious. Maybe incels ought to adopt a cat?

I’ll never be able to read Gay Talese without shuddering ever again

creepypeeper

Gay Talese said some stupid things lately, especially that he was never inspired by women journalists, but we’re not supposed to throw him under the bus, because he’s old, and he has written some good stuff. Both statements are true, although it’s not clear how these passes give anyone an out, or much more importantly, when you get them. Is this like the discount you get at the Sizzler for having an AARP card? You’re over 50, so you get 10% off the all-you-can-disgorge gaffe buffet?

But I agree, he should not be thrown under the bus for not reading or enjoying women writers. I suspect he was just being honest — he doesn’t. Was he supposed to lie and say he loved Diablo Cody and Lena Dunham? No! He’s a man of a certain age, uninfluenced by women’s words, and that is who he is.

Although, we might suggest that exploring the wider world of human experience might have been good for him, given his other remarkable publication lately. He’s written a story called “The Voyeur’s Motel”, and it is very well written — you’ll read the whole thing. The one problem is that there is an absence of humanity at its center. It’s as if the person writing it had so mastered the motions of clinical objectivity that he could calmly watch and participate in gross ethical violations of other people’s privacy because he was following a higher calling, the crystal clear rules of journalism, and could then dispassionately describe these activities as just things that happened. A sequence of events. Nothing more.

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Unintended technological consequences

US-Navy-Submarine

You never know what nefarious activity might be associated with your IP address — as it turns out, companies that try to map the physical locations of computers and electronic devices have a crude workaround for searches that don’t return a valid location. They instead return a default location, which is the geographic center of the country or state or county. The problem is that sometimes there are people living there, and suddenly the police trying to trace a stolen laptop are knocking on your door with a search warrant.

Back in the day when I was programming stuff, this was consider extremely lazy, sloppy programming. You were supposed to return a sentinel value or NaN for an invalid search, not throw in an arbitrary answer. This is a case where it’s a good idea to tell someone making a query “not found”, rather than making something up.

So now there’s a farmhouse in Kansas that is associated with 600 million IP addresses. The owner has an old Gateway computer that she uses to write Sunday School lessons, but apparently she’s the nexus of all the high-tech evil that goes on in America.

The company that sells this IP mapping service says they’re going to fix it.

Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes.

They’ve learned nothing. That’s not how you do it. I’m kind of shocked that these security companies should be taking advice from an old geezer biologist: don’t substitute in any fake map coordinates. Your functions ought to be returning an indication that the IP address does not have a known physical location.

Next unintended consequence: county police all over the country start lobbying homeland security for the money to buy military surplus submarines, because of the sudden rash of high-tech meth labs being built at the bottom of the lake in the old gravel pit, you know, the one down the road near the center of the county? Yeah, that one. There are a million computers installed in that facility, so you better make sure you get us a nucyuler sub, with the best torpedos and missile tubes.

I thought this was going to be a useful list

Vox-Day

Vox Day started to make a list of all SJWs — he calls it a complete catalog. Well, good, I thought, it could be handy to know who all the decent people are. Unfortunately, it’s very short, so I think he’s missing a lot of people, and also, weirdly, it includes people like Ben Shapiro, far right fanatic and former editor at Breitbart.

So it’s more of a list of people Vox Day doesn’t like.

It is kind of a strange obsession that some of the worst people on the internet have, of maintaining Enemies Lists and threatening to put people on it if they get out of line, as if anyone has ever been intimidated by such a fate, and as if being put on a List was significant. Anyone remember the List Lord of Talk.Origins, Peter Nyikos? I think I was on a few of his Lists. It was mainly good for a laugh.

The governor of Florida creates an attack ad…against a constituent?

I had no idea Cara Jennings was running against Governor Scott, or was so powerful and influential that she must be crushed, but I guess she is. Or maybe that public rebuke in a coffee shop was so painful that he had to relieve himself of some bile.

Here’s Rick Scott’s reply to a citizen:

I learned one thing from that ad.

Rick Scott is weak and afraid.

Good.

What I would say to Bernie and Hillary, if they cared about my opinion

amicabledivorce

Remember the long game.

In a few months, the Democratic party will hold a convention and pick a nominee. It will be one of you. Go ahead, imagine that it’s you.

You are then going to turn to the second place finisher and ask them to continue their campaigning and help you defeat the abomination that is going to lurch out of the Republican convention. You want them to agree to do so. Put everything you say now into that future context, please.

I say the same thing to all the Bernie and Hillary supporters.

I would also say something special to Bill: your wife is doing a fine job without you. Stop “helping”.