Ray Kurzweil is in a snit

I have heard that he is absolutely furious about that Newsweek article on him — he’s harrassing the editors and staff, is demanding that they print his full rebuttal, and is particularly upset that they would question his amazing powers of prognostication. He has put a letter online, in which he claims that all his wrong predictions were actually correct. Near as I can tell, he likes to make vague claims of the inevitable, and doesn’t like it when it’s pointed out that the details (which are the only testable parts of his predictions) turn out to be false.

Delectations for twisted fundagelicals

I am informed by Joshua Zelinsky that two new Chick tracts are available. They are, as expected, completely insane. Here are my summaries.

Now you don’t need to bother reading them.

But you’re going to anyway, aren’t you?

Another clue to the identity of the Anti-Christ

He will be gay.

But will the Antichrist be a homosexual? Having seen what the Bible says of sodomy, we have no further to look than the book of Daniel, chapter 11 to find our answer. It says, “Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard… the desire of women….” As I said at the onset, I am not the first to draw attention to this, but the verbiage is clear.

…

But consider this: The time is ripe for such a leader. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the one who is against everything Biblical and Christian should be a partaker of so great a sin; there is no greater way to reject the Creator than to reject your gender and his design for it. And at what other time have we seen such perversion come out of the closets onto our streets, threatening violence if we do not accept their ways?

I never trust Christians and creationists when they use ellipses, so here’s the whole passage from the book of Daniel:

   36And the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.

   37Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.

   38But in his estate shall he honour the God of forces: and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.

It’s a bit ambiguous, as it’s not really saying anything about his sexual interests since it’s equating his disregard for the attentions of women to his disregard for gods, and unless Christianity has gotten really kinky, I don’t think honoring a god is the same as having physical desire for it. It seems to be saying he’s going to be very vain, instead; it seems to me that an argument could be made here that the anti-christ will be an atheist metrosexual.

It doesn’t matter, though. The anti-christ could be reading Pharyngula right now, since we’re pretty open to all those positions! Come on, if you’re reading, you should speak up and leave a comment — we’d like to know more about you!

By the way, the original article also accepts comments, and the majority right now are scathing. It’s very refreshing.

I think this is what is called ‘framing’

Only this is the good kind, addressing a problem with power and honesty, and providing a personal connection. This is the testimony of a victim of the Irish Catholic workhouse system, and the brutal pedophilia of corrupt priests.

I found this on the blog of one of the creators of the Father Ted series, Graham Linehan, who wrote of this:

If all copies and records of ‘Father Ted’ were somehow wiped, I would find it impossible to summon up the affection with which Arthur and I initially wrote the show. Somehow, these days, The Irish Catholic Church seems a lot less cuddly.

Holier than thou

I may have sold Francis Collins short. He may be a useful agent in the battle against creationism, but not in the way he probably intends.

The Discovery Institute – the Seattle-based headquarters of the intelligent design movement – has just launched a new website, Faith and Evolution, which asks, can one be a Christian and accept evolution? The answer, as far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, is a resounding: No.

The new website appears to be a response to the recent launch of the BioLogos Foundation, the brainchild of geneticist Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and rumoured Obama appointee-to-be for head of the National Institutes of Health. Along with “a team of scientists who believe in God” and some cash from the Templeton Foundation, Collins, an evangelical Christian who is also a staunch proponent of evolution, is on a crusade to convince believers that faith and science need not be at odds. He is promoting “theistic evolution” – the belief that God (the prayer-listening, proactive, personal God of Christianity) chose to create life by way of evolution.

Hmmm. So two titans of the credulous and ignorant are battling it out for turf? This may be Collins’ true strength here, that he speaks the language of the gullible as a native.

I know that in the past the Discovery Institute has been particularly damning of Ken Miller: he also speaks that same language, and is in competition for the same niche as the DI fellows. Collins is apparently even worse, since he has now driven the DI to flamboyantly and publicly admit that their whole scheme is aimed at shilling for religion, and that their argument is that evolution, even the hobbled version of Collins and Miller, is incompatible with god-belief.

I hope the NCSE and various lawyers have snapped an archival copy of the entire “Faith and Evolution” website — it will be so useful in the next ID trial.

It’s an aggressively dishonest site, too. It consists of lots of people claiming that modern scientific evidence points more strongly than ever to a cosmic designer, which is a flat lie — finding natural mechanisms for complex processes means their designer god is increasingly superfluous. And Wells, that fraudulent pseudo-scholar, trots out the idiotic ‘we believe in microevolution, the rest has no evidence’ argument. That’s long been the hallmark of ignorant people who know nothing of the wealth of evidence beyond a few small scale, well-documented instances. It’s also nothing but a rhetorical ploy, where they concede a few points to appear more reasonable in their denial of other, equally well supported cases.

O brave new world! That has such baloney in’t!

Some days, I think other people must be aliens. Or I must be. For instance, there’s a lot of noise right now about this article analyzing the future of information and media that, if you read the comments, you will discover that people are praising to an astonishing degree. I looked at it and saw this graph:

i-43bb0f926617fb0a4afee89390f139dd-makeup-graph.jpg

And my bullshit detector went insane. It’s supposed to be saying something about where people are and will be getting their information, but there’s no information about where this information came from, and it’s meaningless!

Way back in high school, I had this excellent chemistry teacher, Mr Thompson, who taught me the only worthwhile stuff I got out of my science classes in those years. He was really big on thinking — I know, a real radical — and he didn’t have us simply plug-and-chug through basic chemistry problems, he forced us to work out why we were doing what we were doing. For instance, he did simple things like make us put away our slide rules (that’s how long ago this was) and pencils and think through a problem, getting a ballpark estimate in our heads for the magnitude of the answer, and then we’d work through the details of the solution. (Come to think of it, using slide rules was a real advantage for this kind of reasoning.) We were always doing back-of-the-envelope estimates for problems he’d throw at us.

The other thing he did was introduce us to unit analysis. If we thought we had a way to figure out the answer, forget the numbers for a minute, just work through the units and see that it actually makes sense. If you’re trying to figure out grams/liter of a solution you’re making, and when you work out the units and discover it’s coming out liters/mole, you know you’re doing it wrong.

Simple, basic stuff. You ought to have absorbed this into your bones in grade school if you want to be a scientist.

So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if the inconsistency of the intervals is extremely annoying. But what are the units of the Y axis? What’s being measured? I have no idea. I presume it’s a stacked percentage of something, but that’s unclear. Information produced? Absorbed? Thrown at a wall and forgotten? What kind of information? It’s all lumped together and unspecified. Could we have some units, please? And can you really categorize a single unit of information that applies appropriately to what comes from a newspaper and what comes from a social networking site?

The other data we’re missing is a source and methodology. If it’s saying that someone in 2009 is getting 10% of their “information”, nebulous as that means in this context, from blogs, how was that determined, and where are the raw data that was used to compile this chart?

Surprise — there isn’t any. This whole chart was built out of some guy’s impressions. There are no numbers and no sources and no measurements were made. It puts up a colorful pretense of being quantitative, but there’s nothing but vapor and handwaving there. Mr Thompson would have been horrified.

And then this imaginary data is used to extrapolate imaginary trends into an imaginary future and make unbelievable predictions, which everybody seems to believe. I really don’t get it. If a student put this kind of garbage on my desk, I’d at least draw big red X’s across the pages and slap an “F” on it; I’d be tempted to set it on fire, throw it in my trash can, and piss on it. You cannot build plausible predictions from garbage data.

So, I must be an alien, because no one else seems to be expressing visceral disgust at this kind of nonsense, except for Larry Moran, who probably is also an alien. I’ll have to see how many extraterrestrials are lurking in my comments section now.

The graph has been much improved.