I despise quote-miners so much

We got one in the comments, a pompous ass named Darin Reisler who popped in to announce of evolution that “When the evidence is looked at beyond the surface level- it fails,” and to back this up he offered a string of quotes from “prominent evolutionists”.

Man, Darin is a contemptible liar, and incompetent on top of that. It’s one of the things that annoys me most about creationists: they are anti-scholars, people who lie and distort to reinforce prior erroneous conceptions, and they really think they’re scoring points by pretending that great minds in biology agree with them, when they don’t.

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Stupid cinema nightmares

We actually own a television now, installed right in our living room. In the past, I’ve gotten by with an adapter for my laptop that lets me see the occasional interesting program, but now I can actually tune in to cable stations and flip through what’s being broadcast. It has not been a worthy effort, since most of what’s being shown is dreck.

So I turned to the video store for DVDs. When I want to slack off, I’ve long been a fan of science fiction and horror movies — I grew up in the days of Hammer Films and Vincent Price and many of the cheesy classics of old school SF and creature features, and that kind of entertaining story telling is what I look for in my light entertainment. So I was rather disappointed in my browsing to discover what passes for a horror movie nowadays: an entirely predictable plot with no character, each new movie vying with each other to achieve greater and greater levels of violent torture, usually of young, attractive women, and no genuine creativity at all.

I have to agree with Trish Wilson: these movies aren’t horror or thriller movies at all, they’re torture porn. What is wrong with people that sexuality has been jumbled up with the idea of the graphic inflection of mindless torment on women? Who wants to see a movie that consists of nothing but scenes of humiliation and pain and that always seem to celebrate the monstrous rapist/murderer as some kind of franchise hero?

Trish mentions an excellent example of a movie that does mix sex and horror in an interesting and genuinely frightening way: Cat People, which really does express a terrifying conflict without degrading people as a matter of course. Where are those interesting horror movies nowadays? Any recommendations? I don’t want to see Rob Zombie’s crap or any of those one-word gore-fests like Saw or Hostel or Captivity.

Anthropology of war

Last weekend’s bloggingheads was an interesting discussion between John Horgan and Brian Ferguson on the unfortunate misconception many people have about human evolution — the simplistic idea that evolution is always about selection for individuals who are better at killing their competitors. It doesn’t work that way! Ferguson discusses the interesting and obvious idea that the data does not back up the notion that being a great warrior is generally a good strategy, because being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead.

Evolution is about whatever works, and often cooperation is a winning tactic.

“There’s an underground church that the world has no idea exists”

That’s a quote from Lou Engle in this video — and it’s actually kind of true. He thinks it will be a wonderful thing when people see this, and there probably are a lot of Americans who think the events portrayed are perfectly ordinary, and even commendable.

I see nothing but madness.

By picking Sarah Palin for a running mate, John McCain has turned over a rock to expose a festering, primitive insanity in our country. Look on the squirming horror, world, and learn that it does exist!

A further indictment: Juan Cole sees Palin through the lens of his expertise on the Islamic world.

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

Dazzling the innumerate

I was sent the following argument by email.

A new breed of ID is in the process of supplanting the former fact-free versions on U.S. university
campuses. The new breed looks like this (from recent lectures on several University of California
campuses):

The following design argument does not require evolution to produce a specific result. It calculates the probability that evolution reaches a certain level of biological complexity (measured in terms of the number of protein-coding genes) and compares this probability with the number of trials available for evolution to that level.

Any of the thousands of extant vertebrate species possesses at least 10,000 more protein-coding genes than the primordial single-celled organism from which all these vertebrate species evolved. Thus, at least 10,000 protein-coding genes must have been added during the course of vertebrate evolution. Assuming that the probability is 10-3 that a new gene useful for vertebrate evolution came into existence, the probability that evolution just happened to produce any one of the vertebrate species is 10-3 multiplied by itself 10,000 times, which equals 10-30,000.

To avoid concluding that God exists, 1030,000 evolution-supporting planets must now exist or have existed in the past, which requires: (A) a single large universe with that many planets, each of which exhibits some stage of evolution from the primordial soup up to vertebrates, or (B) nearly that many small universes, each of which has a few such planets, or (C) a small universe with a few such planets that had undergone nearly that many Big Crunches and subsequent Big Bangs. Regarding (A), only a few hundred extra-solar planets have been detected so far. Since it becomes more difficult to detect a planet the further from the earth it is, we can safely conclude that there is no way that even an insignificant fraction of 1030,000 evolution-supporting planets will be detected within the next few decades. The speed at which light reaches us and the speed at which electrons move through semiconductors in our computers impose fundamental limits on the speed at which even the best equipment can operate. Suppose this equipment can identify a new planet every pico-second (10-12 seconds), which is an outrageous rate far beyond present or conceivable technology. This still means that we must wait 1029,980 years to identify the number of planets needed for the chance hypothesis. Regarding (B), the unambiguous detection of a few other universes is presently considered difficult work, if it can be done at all, not to mention observing life on planets within those universes (Aguirre A. et al, “Towards Observable Signatures of Other Bubble Universes,” E-published 20 September 2007, Physical Review D.). Even if we had equipment capable of identifying a suitable planet in another universe every pico-second, we would still have to wait 1029,980 years to verify the existence of the number of evolution-supporting planets required for the chance hypothesis. Regarding (C), even if each pico-second we could verify that our universe had, in the past, undergone a cycle of Big Crunch and subsequent Big Bang, we would still have to wait 1029,980 years to verify the existence of the number of cycles required for the chance hypothesis. This means that the chance hypothesis is effectively unverifiable.

It’s pathetically bogus. Shall we take it apart?

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No, this Gloria

I am shocked — people mistook my reference to “Gloria” in the last post for some cheesy 80s dreck, instead of one of the greatest rock songs of all time. So here, for those who are confused, here’s an education:

Laura Branigan? Girlfriend, please.

Apparently, we hate Wisconsin even worse than the Dakotas

One of the quirks of this small town is the music I sometimes hear in the local grocery store. We don’t get the usual boring muzak that was screened by some beancounter to maximize inoffensiveness — I was quite charmed the first time I went shopping there, and instead of boring old 1001 Strings soft-soaping pop, I actually heard them playing Patti Smith belting out “Gloria”. Now it usually isn’t so transcendently magnificent — in fact, it’s still usually the kind of thing you might hear on a soft-rock or easy-listening or country station — but at least now and then you get to hear something with character.

Which isn’t always good.

So this afternoon I zipped over to pick up some fresh tomatoes and provolone for dinner, step in the door, and hear this horrible adenoidal voice with a Minnesota accent singing this:

Beating on the cheeseHEADS!
Beating on the cheeseHEADS!
We are all rejoicing
Beating on the cheeseHEADS!

Not just once, not twice, but over and over again, for the entire duration of my visit (which was short: there may be something to this idea that background music can influence market behavior.) It was incredibly annoying, but everyone else in the store was going about their business in a perfectly normal fashion. Weird.

I guess there is some football game tonight that has the region riled up. There’s nothing quite like bizarre, understated Minnesota patriotism to highlight some of the strangeness of local culture.