I could have continued the last edition of the unstoppable thread with the hot topic of the moment — race — but thought maybe promoting another controversial subject would fill up the thread far too quickly. So the other subject people were talking about is my birthday.
Gee, people, I’m not that old. IT ISN’T MY BIRTHDAY TODAY. Do I look 53 or something?
My birthday is tomorrow. I’m celebrating it by folding myself up into a narrow little airplane seat and sitting there for 19 hours. And then spending a week and a half in Australia with spasms.
This is how we spend all our birthdays after the 50th, in case you young whippersnappers had no idea.
Spending your birthday painfully contorted into an economy class airplane seat doesn’t sound terribly celebratory, PZ.
Never heard Aussies called that before.
In that case,
A Merry Merry Unbirthday tooOOOO YOU!
My parents have a lot of explaining to do.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear tentacled overlord, happy birth day to you…
Make sure you get up and walk around a bit on the plane.
***
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
That was my fault for bringing it up, because I can’t distinguish between the words “Today” and “Tuesday”. I say we just make it birthday party WEEK.
Where the curmudgeonly observer sings the praises of Pharyngula, in defiance of the recent tone-wars.
People are discussing what defines race. Other people are discussing the virtues (or lack thereof) of prostitution.
People are disagreeing here and there. They make reasoned arguments to support their claims.
I enjoy reading the exchanges and following up on particular points where I have questions by looking for references via the internet.
Fuck the Intersection.
(Oh, and Happy Early Birthday, Prof. Myers.)
You mean the Trophy WifeTM isn’t baking/buying you a cake for tonight?
You’re Squidward today, birthday boy tomorrow?
Happy Easter!
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Happy BDPZ.
If the spasms are back muscle cramps, I recommend medication containing methocarbamol. Robaxiwhatever. But buy the store-brand, same drugs for half the price. Fuck Big Pharma!
(store-brand generic meds are made by elves)
SC, OM,
From that quote:
This may be particularly problematic in forensic anthropology. Ancestry determination is an integral part of individuation in forensic anthro, and people have been discussing using DNA to do it for some time and with much enthusiasm. The discordant phenotype is a big problem, though, since the goal (of the forensic anthropologist) is to identify which social race people would identify an individual as belonging to.
SC: I am not following you at all, maybe because I haven’t been involved in a year long conversation…just picked up in Episode XXXIII. If you could summarize, what is your central contention here?
19 hours? My flight over there was only 14…
Hmm. I was thinking about this. I’m just guessing, but it seems like it would only really be useful in a situation in which you had like a mass grave or with people from all different places and were trying to trace where the victims were from. Or other kinds of historical work.
Which reminds me that I started reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost back in 2006 and never finished it…
Last time I flew the Pacific it was 14 hours from LA to Auckland. PZ has a bit further to fly both ends.
Oh right, I forgot where he lives.
Curses. I must now kick myself once for each letter that contributed to my wrongness.
(I haven’t caught up with all of the previous Thread, but I typed this out, dammit, and I’m gonna post it!)
Getting your vehicle to burn to the ground may involve less in the way of pyrotechnics than you might think. My anecdote:
My husband and I were driving through Oklahoma at 4:30 one fine spring morning, when our van caught fire. Arguably, there are at least two things wrong right there (apart from the fire, that is), but I feel that both being in OK, and driving through it at 4:30 A.M., were justified by the fact that we were on our way to a funeral. Our left rear tire blew out (at 70 m.p.h.), and by the time we pulled hard-over onto the shoulder to change the tire, the flames were already rushing forward.
We bailed out; I fell down a ditch, and was wondering if the words “blast radius” were about to become a matter of crucial interest. Luckily, cars in RL aren’t quite as instantly explosive as they are in movies.
Vans look much shorter without their feet.
Eyewitness testimony from the couple behind us in the lane was that when our tire blew, the steel belt somehow was flapping loose. It whipped up and tore a hole in the gas tank, and struck sparks off the pavement every time it came around, causing us to leave a firey trail.
They seemed impressed.
I hope those Aussie spasms greet you with a cake when you get of the plane.
Wait a minute! I was supposed to go spend a week in Australia last fall? Why didn’t anyone TELL me?
Hell, I’m impressed.
Also planes fly slower than they used to even ten years ago.
Mach .82 used to be a typical cruising speed crossing an Ocean, now .80 is more typical.
SC,
Not necessarily. Many cases that reach the point where forensic anthropologists are called in have very little identifying information with the remains. Individuation is the process of narrowing down the list of missing persons that the remains could be. In the USA, ancestry is important because we have a huge cross-section of human variation represented in our population. Being able to say this set of remains is an African-American female allows the forensic anthropologist to focus on traits that vary among missing African-American females, while ignoring males and females from other populations. Also, an accurate determination of ancestry allows for more accurate assessment of stature and, if necessary, more accurate tissue depths for facial reconstruction.
For interesting arguments, ask a forensic graduate student how to identify “Hispanic” ancestry in skeletonized remains. It’s fun to watch them squirm :)
Oh neat, your birthday is the same as my sister’s. Now I finally have a good reason to remember when she was born. =D
Walton, I want to start with the outright falsehood, just to get it out of the way.
This is false. I understand you’re not deliberately constructing this falsehood to slander me, but you’re once again being careless in summarizing what I actually say. Somehow I wonder how you manage it.
First of all, I never accuse someone of being a white supremacist for talking about “giving power back to the states” unless the specific power in question concerns racial discrimination. I have spoken approvingly of decentralization, localization, devolution, whathaveyou, and I do not suggest that there is something inherently wrong with these tactics no matter the circumstance.
I do take issue with the very specific phrase “states’ rights,” because it is a white supremacist slogan — one which libertarians of all people ought to condemn, since the concept was invented to steal rights from individuals and transfer them to states.
Even so, I do not accuse people of being white supremacists simply for using those words. What their use does indicate is that the speaker has been learning from white supremacists. And I do offer this specific criticism — “you have been learning from white supremacists, and you are willing to promote white supremacist talking points” — quite liberally, in the hope of embarrassing those people into ceasing to use the phrase. Because it is an illiberal phrase serving only illiberal ends, and would be even if American chattel slavery had never occurred. The sooner we are freed from the distortions of such ominous Orwellian language, the better.
But by seeking to embarrass, I rely on the assumption that the speaker actually has some decency, and would be troubled to realize that they have been influenced by white supremacists. Of course this is not always the case. Fucko the president of the Canadian chapter of the David Duke fan club has no shame or decency. But mfd512 might, and has made no subsequent attempt to justify the use of that phrase. That’s all I’m asking for.
By assuming the speaker has such decency, even if only privately expressed or implied by subsequent silence, I am not at all assuming the worst of them. Rather I am assuming that they do not want to cause harm, and that they can grow.
strange gods @#25: I apologise. Looking back through your actual comments, I was unfair to you on that point. In my defence, I was very tired last night when I wrote that reply.
Its March 9th in India now,
so Happy Bday PZ !!
That human “races” are a social construction without scientific (but with obvious political) usefulness.
Do you have a response to the video or to the Graves piece I linked to above?
Ah. I see.
Happy B-day, PZ — here’s a little present!
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Darwins-Doubters-Get/64457/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Thank you, Comrade. I will have to take more time to respond to the rest of your critiques, which require more nuanced consideration.
Badgersdaughter from previous thread:
I can’t either. I get my hair done because other people make me passively by the fact that not getting my hair cut could cause me to be perceived as too much of an outlier and cost me.
My hairdresser trained for that profession and could enter another profession if they wish. They are a part of a system to maintain socially accepted appearances.
A prostitute answers to a private need not a public one demand enforced on others. I really can’t imagine a situation where people might complain about my unprofessional appearance because I don’t regularly visit a prostitute.
I don’t *need* my hair cut, and I don’t even care whether my hair gets cut. Maybe I would feel differently if I had my hair cut for pleasure, but I don’t. If I had my way I’d just keep it shaved as hair has no use to me except maybe in winter or under direct sun.
Now, I am not the same as other people about my hair but that is that.
I am also not the same about sex as other people. Is there any “same” anyway?
I would never have a need for sex that would drive me to engage in a professional sexual relationship to get it.
Now perhaps I am the sort of person that might have become a prostitute. Not because I like sex but because I am largely indifferent to it and yet willing to do whatever floats the other person’s boat short of cutting myself or breaking my bones.
I suppose if enough money was involved and the completely shattering consequences were removed I could do it. Disassociating myself from my body and from the people I have to have contact with and seeing myself as a sort of pleasure room people come in and out of and myself as living some where adjacent to it and perhaps tending bar there on the weekends. Remember my own sexual needs would never enter into it. It’s all about the client.
And then picking a price point at which that amount of personal sacrifice would be worthwhile… not to mention the fact that every encounter has the potential to end my life or infect me with dangerous diseases.
Personally I like or love some of the people I’ve had sex with, but sex was never the objective. It’s just something I enjoy doing for extra special people or that I liked to do just then for some reason.
Otherwise it has happened because of a sense of obligation or because I perceived myself as having little choice in the matter and it is easier to have sex with some one and then slink away than to face the consequences of not having sex with them if those consequences seem immediate and pressing.
So the analogy really only works if you already have a specific view and need for sex.
Besides sex has a lot of real risk that the analogy completely ignores.
Sex may be like getting your hair cut to PaulW but it is not like that to me.
Rather to me it is more like donating blood in a place that may re-use needles.
happy pre-birthday, PZ.
No. I have been kind of busy with work and reading scientific papers on human population genetics. Maybe I’ll get to reading those tonight. Is it your contention that phenotypic traits that have been used historically to diagnose “race” (the social construct) have no correlation with geography?
Re: burning cars. I’ve seen it happen once. I was walking home from work in Salt Lake City one very hot summer day, when a car driving uphill passed through an intersection and then suddenly died. The driver was a little old lady who looked completely baffled, and kept fumbling about trying to get it started.
Then wisps of smoke started to rise up from the hood.
Some people ran up to the car and at first tried to help her figure out was going on, then the flames started coming up out of the hood and grill. They got her out of there, and then the dashboard caught fire, then the seats, and within the space of 2 or 3 minutes, the whole car was just ablaze. It was like a bonfire in the middle of the street.
The driver had the most surprised and stunned look I’ve ever seen. She was fine, but one minute driving, the next watching the car burn to the ground…I’m sure she was in shock.
Hear the engines roll now
Hear the engines roll now
Hear the engines roll now
Hear the engines roll now
Hear the engines roll
Wheels on fire
Burning rubber tires
* yes… I’m leaving rape out of the above statement. I don’t believe it belongs well in the camp of sex and yet some of my reasons for sex do slide gently and seamlessly into the dynamics by were sex stops being sex and begins to resemble rape or rather where rape ends sex as sex in the perception of the victim, or changes the relationship to sex in some.
In reality though these things don’t separate so easily, at least not in my mind. I mean that the perceived experiences *do* run together in a very real way.
@#34 PZ Myers, Clearly the cars insides had alchemically converted to thermite for no other reason than because it was awesome.
PZ, you don’t look a day over 52.
I heard a neighbor’s car down the block being blown up by a car bomb once—a “car bomb” in the US sense, of a small bomb to blow up the car and the person inside, not a big bomb in a car, used blow up surrounding people—with him inside.
My neighbor survived—astonishingly, without massive injuries—but the car sure burned good.
By the time I got there, a few minutes later, the guy was sitting in a lawn chair and had been covered with a blanket, having divested himself of his burning clothes.
The car was gutted and smoldering, and the smoldering was apparently emitting explosive gases, but slowly.
About every 10 minutes the gases would build up to a sufficient concentration and ignite, making a FOOM noise, and sending people scurrying away. Then they’d get closer and closer over the next ten minutes, only to have it happen again. I watched that three or four times, and then went to school.
I don’t care how many cars you sacrifice, it’s not going to make the bucket to Aussieland any more comfortable, or the spams (and other Aussies) any more tolerable.
GOATSCARS ON FIRE!http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman/
***
No.
We watched a car burn when we lived in Naples. It was during the height of the garbage strike a few years ago. Streets had become landfills.
Occasionally, someone would toss a lit cigarette into the trash on the street, reducing the size of the debris pile at the cost of the air pollution. As we stopped at a light one day, we watched a burning pile of trash engulf a parked car. Someone had parked a little too close to the pile. The flames caught on the tire closest to the curb, and worked their way up. Being “Bella Napoli,” the people on the sidewalk barely gave it a glance.
Too bad you arn’t flying back to the US on your birthday, instead of flying there.
My wife and I returned from Aus on her birthday. Chasing the timezones on the return flight meant that her birthday lasted 37 hours. Flying to Aus, your entire birthday should only last 12 hours total.
At least you will get it all over with quicker this way.
Cloudless day again! And frozen. Even the soil is frozen. Really not the kind of weather I expect for early March in Paris. ~:-|
Sort of. Arguably. :-]
I, for one, still haven’t bothered watching the video :-]
:-S
But is he interested in the kinds of personalities that go to those kinds of “place or event”…?
And just think about the amount of self-confidence it requires to let that kind of pick-up line loose without blushing and, at best, stammering.
Problem is, I won’t be here in May anymore. Or anytime between the end of March and sometime during the 1st half of September.
:-(
Anyone coming to Vienna…? Or to Aix-en-Provence in early June (I’ll have to pass via Paris, because almost all travel through France passes via Paris)? Or to Pittsburgh in mid-October?
This includes hunter-gatherer societies as well as the agricultural ones in the highlands of New Guinea.
I don’t think he said anything against other people doing it.
That would be myself! I’m doing my PhD thesis! :-) I don’t teach – theses are supposed to be done in just 3 years over here, and there doesn’t seem to be a crass shortage of teachers… or, rather, there’s no money* to do anything about such a shortage if one existed, which in fact it may.
* = political will
<trying very hard to move along and look straight ahead>
<straight ahead>
Is there a deadline?
In Austria, professors can take months to grade stuff, and usually they do.
There’s no question whatsoever that
I should read gnxp a lot more often than I dothe day should have twice as many hours…:.-(
:-D
IE8 works.
Sometimes (unpredictably!) it pretends to not have worked and doesn’t display your freshly posted comment. In that case, click on the link to the main page (the name of the blog at the top of the page), click on the comments again, and see that it has miraculously appeared.
Also, after you’ve entered the captcha, it goes back to showing you the comment window (with your comment in it). Don’t click on “submit” again, the comment is loading.
Oh, and, then there’s the occasional and unpredictable 503 error which eats your comment. Copy it before submitting – the comment, not the error.
Only !, ?, :, ;, and « inside quotation marks » which always look like this.
Rorschach has largely stopped not putting a space behind commas and periods. (Though there’s a relapse in comment 634.) No language I’m aware of doesn’t put a space there (…OK, it’s difficult to tell for Chinese & Japanese).
While we’re talking about orthography… that accent is English-only, and it’s there for the same reason as the diaeresis on Emily Brontë. The word is Italian, not French, and doesn’t bear any accent in the original; the e is pronounced anyway, simply because it’s there.
:-D
I simply don’t consider talking to people a sign of respect. :-| I don’t really like arguing with anyone – I just have SIWOTI syndrome. I have all that knowledge, and it spills out.
Perhaps it’s an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I don’t seek out such situations, but when I find myself in one ( = happen to read an ignorant comment), I can’t stop myself. :-)
Just to repeat myself, I’m not saying anything is wrong. I just have problems even imagining the situation.
I also wouldn’t propose playing tennis to a random stranger (unless already standing in a tennis court, which doesn’t happen). Not “I’d want to, but I’d repress myself”; not even “I have almost never played tennis, no experience, hardly any knowledge of the rules” (which would be the case); just “the very idea simply wouldn’t occur to me”.
Finally, yes, there are a lot more people I’d play tennis with than I’d fuck (for reasons along these lines). By several orders of magnitude. Some people are picky, get over it :-)
To be fair, perhaps the ‘s part attaches not to women, but to a lot of women? English can be ambiguous that way.
:-D
:-D
PZ, I hope your fellow passengers have been suitably informed of the risk they take flying with you.
Why, passengers on a completely different airline flying to Brazil might be smited in an effort to eliminate your blasphemy. (The divine aim isn’t so good as it was in the Olden Days…)
I’m having a bowl of oyster stew for lunch, made with a recipe I adapted from the seasoning of the grilled oysters justly famed in New Orleans (I must have eaten six dozen on a three-day business trip). The traditional thread recipe has not been posted to the thread yet, and this one is not bacon, but it is deliciously non-kosher, anyway.
New Orleans Cajun Grilled Oysters
By the way, I’ve never met a Cajun I didn’t like.
Leave the oysters on the half shell. Place a dab of crushed fresh garlic on each, cover that with finely grated Parmesan, and top that with a pat of dairy butter (I do mean a whole pat, folks). Put the oysters shell side down in a barbecue about a hand’s breadth from the coals, close the lid, and cook for a few minutes until they are done. Carefully open the lid and remove the hellishly hot oysters (DON’T SPILL THE JUICE!) to oyster platters or pans filled with rock salt to hold them upright. Sprinkle with chopped green onions. Each diner will put a few drops of Tabasco sauce (Louisiana hot sauce) on each oyster, and squeeze a lemon wedge over the lot, before digging in. (Or they’ll do as I do; absentmindedly shake the hot sauce bottle upside down over my food until people decide my father must have been the Devil.)
I have successfully done this with a mini muffin pan sprayed with non-stick spray in place of the oyster shells, supermarket oysters, and the oven broiler. It’s not AS good, but hoo-raw, it is still DAMN good.
The stew is just standard oyster stew made with cream, and with some extra butter, garlic, Tabasco, and Parmesan, with a sprinkle of chopped green onion.
Behold!
I have seen the anti-Walton and he is us.
SC: Nothing novel there…of course “race” as a social construct is often a poor descriptor of the underlying genetics of human populations. Has anyone here suggested otherwise? Hopefully the links that you keep pointing out are more insightful.
Don’t worry. I don’t think virulent racists are reading Heredity or Evolution as a matter of course.
How late were you, if I may ask…?
Does living in the general area count?
I fucking knew it!
Down with Big Elf!!
–o–
Anyone have an opinion on http://www.linkedin.com ? (space added to avoid smushing) Would any Pharyngulistas speak kindly of me, should I advertise myself there? Or would I now like that kinda praise?
I have never been a part of these endless threads as they move way too fast for me (must be my age). Just wanted to wish PZ a happy birthday for tomorrow and just let him know that his quick trip to OZ was a lot faster than my trip from OZ to Finland. I was in transit for 31 hours. I was messed up for a good two weeks. Enjoy OZ and don’t drink any Fosters! Cascade is good. :) Cheers mate!
How unfortunate for me :(
Oh how empty Paris will seem knowing you are no longer in it!!!!
lol
Many Happy Returns to you, PZ!
You’re joking, right?
I think I’m done interacting with you, arrogant ass. I don’t care how insightful you find any links. You haven’t made any points at all about race or variation that I can see. You haven’t responded meaningfully to anything I’ve provided, just said that you don’t grasp the relevance to a conversation that you jumped into. Either stop telling me what the argument is and address the substance or stop addressing your comments to me.
You’re stunningly naïve.
badgersdaughter if you’re ever in Charelston during the fall / winter I’ll have to take you to an old fashion Lowcountry oyster roast.
10mg of valium and a couple of cocktails early on will do a lot to alleviate that. It certainly made trips of a similar length bearable for me.
Never seen a goat on fire, but I’ve seen burning cars twice. The first time, I was maybe 8 years old, with my extended family on the way to a family picnic when my grandfather’s engine caught fire. My grandfather had the presence of mind to quench the blaze with the orangeade my grandmother had brought for the picnic.
The second time, the insurance company wasn’t so lucky. I had just moved into a rented house in South Hell A (Los Angeles) and had not yet been joined by my wife. I was puttering around the house when I heard a THUMP on the front window. Thinking some kid had maybe bounced a basketball off of it, I went out to put the fear of dog into him and saw the car across the street engulfed in flames. No one was hurt, luckily, and there was little we could do, so people materialized in the street and watched the car burn. An interesting way to meet one’s neighbors, especially since I learned that the bombing was the result of a spat between the dope dealers who owned the car and the meth lab down the street. Nice, typical Hell A neighborhood.
I’ve never figured out what the point is. I (mostly) ignore my account there, which was started only on the recommendation of a trusted colleague. I don’t recall now what argument was used to convince me to start one, but it was in a pub, which may be sufficient explanation…? I did once get a job interview via contacts made there, but other than that, I cannot think of anything it’s helped with—no wait, that’s not quite correct, one or two old friends/colleagues that I lost contact with have contacted me via it, so I suppose that’s something. Unfortunately, so have lots of other people who I was happy to lose contact with, plus a few scammers; fortunately, it’s easy to ignore the bozos.
Oooh-er. I’ve also never met an oyster I didn’t like. :D
I know being boring is one of the cardinal sins here (the other is fuzzy thinking, I suspect), but please, please, please go over to Making Light and check out our own Cuttlefish’s contributions. Or if you don’t want to go there, read them at Cuttlefish’s own site – they’re truly charming.
The only time I have seen a car of fire is when I worked for the civil service and car burst into flames in the car park.
At the time the IRA was active and we had the bomb squad and anti-terrorist police swarming all over the place until they found out the car was set on fire by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of the woman who owned it.
I can remember there being some kind of furore because the Union discovered that whilst most staff had windows without any protection, those above a certain rank had net curtains designed to prevent glass flying around the place in the event of an explosion. Why only senior managers were considered worthy of such protection was never explained to us minions.
Me either.
That dose of Valium plus a couple of cocktails would make me sleep through an auto-da-fé.
I’m not so good at roman numerals…but how did we lose so many sections of endless thread? I remember seeing XXXV, now we are down to XXVII?
Or did I miss a comment about renumbering somewhere? On vacation, finding a new apt for my daughter so not constantly auditing the endless thread.
Sorry, but that is incorrect. Many of the racists thinkers of the colonial period did use “evolution” to justify treating other people as inferior. (That isn’t to say creationists are any less racist *cough*Ham*cough*Caine*cough.)
Anyways, Hey PZ, it’s your pre-birthday. Say ahh!
I hope it’s not a sad birthday.
Paris is colder than ND*? In March? Sign of the apocalypse, I tell ya
this I have to second.
Paul W, you cannot make a honest argument when you’re using gender essentialism and shifting blame for lack of casual sex on women’s hangups (regardless whether you meant that as “lots of hangups women have”, or “lots of women have hangups”, especially considering that these hangups don’t just magically spring from having an uterus. they come from the consequences that sex, and casual sex especially, can have for women, thus rendering it significantly less appealing to them, even if they might not have problems with it in principle.
Like I said, the more testosterone poisoning a scene suffers, the less likely you are to find women who like casual sex. This is not caused by women somehow inherently being less likely to want it.
Incidentally, early in my current relationship I had to explain this “women have hangups” idiocy to the boyfriend, too. He kept on making nasty comments about women in general, based on his experience with certain women from around here (who are indeed not the people you want filling your entire dating pool), and then when I’d ask him if he feels that way about me too, he’d say “but you’re diffrent”. Took me a while to explain that I’m not more different than all other women are different, and that it’s not surprising the women he dislikes so much have developed the personalities they have, considering the environment they’ve grown up in; using his brother and our former roommate as examples of this environment made my point beautifully.
——
*it’s thawing here, with large puddles of snowmelt everywhere
Me also neither. (Applies to quite a lot of seafood, actually…!)
Prostitution is legal and regulated in some counties in the state of Nevada in the USA.
In fact, new to the legal brothels, is Nevada’s first male prostitute.
FWIW
Do what I do: slip a few coins in the waistband of your undies before walking through the metal detector. The rubdown you’ll get from the security personnel will keep you limber and relaxed for the hours ahead. Direct them to spots needing more attention by saying things like, “I think I’m carrying over 100 ml of tension in my trapezius”, and “Why yes, it’s entirely possible I may have left these tight calf muscles unattended for just a few minutes on the concourse.” While generally not required, you may show your appreciation for an exceptionally thorough search with a dollar or two gratuity. Use your discretion.
Happy Birthday, PZ.
Mythical Magicman also seems to have problems in his temporal control. He’s just as likely to sink a trireme in the 5th century BCE.
Well, from a part where it’s almost but not completely the ninth of march: Happy Goddamn Birthday!
on a different note, we did end up making one key lime pie with the original recipe (because my boyfriend is an even bigger nut for traditional cooking, and because I don’t think it’s humanly possible to resist a well-executed “sad puppy” face). On the one hand, I’d forgotten how utterly vile condensed milk is. On the other, I’m very pleasantly surprised that key lime pie made with it doesn’t taste like condensed milk at all, for some reason :-)
Dairy butter, as opposed to what butter?
<shudder>
Bloody Ray Comfort is at it again…
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/3421162/Creationists-views-to-be-distributed-after-liaison
I guess it might be significant that this is listed under entertainment news?
P.S. Happy Birthday :)
as opposed to what butter
Thank goodness they offer that in tubs
If I recall correctly, Ronnie Soak carries alligator butter.
A car in front of me on I-66 near downtown DC had a tire pop and immediately catch fire. I stopped to help the little old lady who was driving. Myself and another gentleman emptied our tiny fire extinguishers on the tire to no avail. In my opinion, she had probably been driving with the parking brake on for some distance and the heat buildup on the brake drum was the cause of the fire and also the reason it wouldn’t go out easily. The entire car went up before the FD got there. The amazing part to me was how quickly traffic backed up for as far as the eye could see. We don’t get them thare kinda jams in Alabama.
Anyway, back up at #18: your circumstances sound much like the accident that brought down the Concorde. You are to be commended for bringing her down without a loss of life.
Ah, PZ’s birthday falls on the day of St Dominic Salvio, Patron saint of alter boys and the falsely accused.
Coincidence, I think not….
http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=43
Me too.
To my own, unfortunately.
Add to that that it was a VW van with 7 teenagers in the back, at a petrol station in Yugoslavia, and you will see it was no picknick…:-)
Filled her up, then turned ignition, and immediately flames came through the air vent thingie,whole engine(in the back of the car)was in flames.
There was just time to evacuate the car before it blew up.
Burned out completely.
I suspect to this day someone manipulated the engine, but who knows !
PZ Myers :
Nothing a little Valium can’t fix, maybe not quite 10mg, we want you awake at the
ConventionPharyngufest…:-)Pygmy Loris,
This Hispanic has seen many people with confused faces followed by the remark “What are you?”. The more tactful try to work my ancestry into the conversation.
I’ve said this before here but I’ve had people take me for almost every nationality or race. Hispanic, Greek, Spanish, Southern European, Arab, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Indian (New World), Indian (Old World), Asian, black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and just plain white.
I can’t believe it’s not tigerbutter. Your wife couldn’t tell it from a dead crab!
I have seen a car on fire while it was driving, the driver apparently unaware. The fire was in the trunk.
Other than that though I’ve seen no burning cars.
I will echo the public service announcement to wear seat belts though.
A couple years ago I witnessed a terrible accident on the highway in which failure to use a seat belt allowed a person to be thrown out of their truck by the force of the accident.
It was very awful. They did not survive the accident.
So wear your seatbelts people and if you see massive clouds of black smoke obscuring your rearview no matter where you go, please be aware that it may be your own car burning.
TimeNumber dilation. The internets are being sucked into Teh Thread. This motion in an intense commentary field is causing observers to see other numbers as being in error. You see XXVII, whilst from Teh Thread’s point-of-view (PoV) its numbering is Ok—it’s your numbering which is off.Or someone turned on the Infinite Improbability Drive.
Let me be about the 84th person on thread to wish you an early happy birthday, PZ.
And eventually, maybe, when I have the time, I will respond to some stuff from the previous incarnations of the thread that I feel I should have commented on. I was a busy, busy boy this weekend. No time for comments! No time! :P
KJ
I see the Thread has found its theme for the next 500 posts. I’m looking forward to seeing what video PeeZed finds for burning cars – if need be we’ll have to send David to the ‘burbs for some original footage.
Does this mean we need to light 53 cars on fire tomorrow for the CEO to blow out?
So will the guy on the front test like butter upon application?
I’ll get me coat.
Arrggghhhh!!!1! Up at @68 I typo’ed: Me also
neithereither. Me too, fecking feck it, me too either—I’ve also never met an oyster I didn’t like.(And I typo’ed so much in writing the above methinks it’s time I went to bed…)
Hell, they’re using it right now. Try searching Stormfront or VDARE for J. Philippe Rushton.
Happy Birthday, PZ! Years ago, I saw a car burn up. A man pulled over on the freeway, his 2 day old caddy had stalled out. The engine caught fire, and it wasn’t long before it was bye-bye new car. The owner was livid, I remember that much.
Has anyone else read The Swarm by Frank Schatzing? I’ve started it and I’m enjoying, but I’m wondering how sound the science is – it’s not an area I have much knowledge in.
I dunno if this will count as a goat-fire story, but:
While gassing up in a southwestern state on a month-long road trip back in ’89, my brother-in-law managed to ignite the vapours coming out of the gas pump nozzle. The home-built motorhome he and my sister bought suffered from a few design flaws, one of which being the compartment housing the gas tank insert thingy was surrounded by 1/4″ thick plywood and was not sealed in any way. On the other side of the plywood was the gas stove, complete with pilot light waiting to ignite any accumulating vapours. Watching someone try to wave out a flaming gas pump nozzle from a metre or two away will most certainly raise your heart rate a little.
I myself had no trouble with the gas. Unfortunately, I did have first-hand experience with another design flaw: the septic tank connection was prone to decoupling and splashing back on occasion.
All this talk about burning cars. When I lived in MA I would listen to the evening rush hour reports on a Rhode Island rock station. Every couple of weeks there would be a car on fire, which the DJs referred to as a “car-B-Q”. I still use that term…
What do you know, we have the same birthday. Even though I know that is absolutely meaningless and the chances of you having the same birthday as one of your readers is extraordinarily high, I still think it’s cool. So suck it everyone who is thinking, “man, what a dork.”
iambilly @484 (previous subthread):
Um, I think you should consider adjusting your humour meter slightly. I was making a joke!
A pilot light? In a vehicle? Shudders…
Oh, I can personally attest to that. Had I not been wearing my seatbelt, I would not have survived this.
Ah, PZ, I’ve had several more birthdays than you and I’ve never spend a birthday flying for 19 hours.
I have spent a birthday sailing for 24 hours, but that’s not anywhere close to being similar.
Not that high, actually the chance that 2 commenters here have the same birthday is over 50% for just 23 people.
Birthday Paradox
Wow, Celtic Evolution, what happened? Did you fail to heed a “yield to oncoming giant invading robots” sign or something?
Sarah Palin has explained the writing of notes on her hand by comparing herself to God. And she continues to write notes on her palm to remind her of her topics.
Probably just asking for a kick to the yarbles here…
SC#28 said:
My reading of Sven’s point and several of the papers that he has linked is that human phenotype variation is distributed as a function of geography.
I am convinced that both of these are correct.
What is the problem?
SC: I read the Graves piece, and it also contains nothing objectionable–but again, nothing stupifyingly novel. Scientists have been using fixation indices as a summary of population structure since the 1930’s. The partitioning of phenotypic variance into environmental and genetic components dates to the 1940s.
I can’t figure out the context of any of the links you have provided, and I don’t grasp the relevance of them (the latter we agree on).
Or what? You’ll call me names?
Anyway, I haven’t told you what the argument is. I have asked you what it is. And if you don’t want comments addressed to you, stop making them yourself.
Sorry, the reflex to specify what kind of butter is a relic of my mother’s cooking. She used margarine wherever she thought she could get away with it, which was everywhere once the price of butter consistently rose above the price of congealed hydrogenated artificially flavored and colored vegetable oil. You do well to shudder, my dear. I no longer allow the toxic waste in my house.
Ummm… more accurately, when deciding to play “chicken”, it’s important to remember that the trees always win.
re 99;
But the comment was not about any two people having the same birthday, but the odds of members of a group having a specific birthday (i.e. PZ’s birthday).
Not to change the subject, or anything…
Found a most interesting abstract that points to the statement that religiosity implies racism.
Just thought you’d want to know.
Yes, Rorschach, but DanielR specified the chances that some commenter had the same birthday as PZ.
More accurately, the trees never lose. Am I correct in assuming you’re relatively unhurt/healed? I hope so.
[blockquote]Not that high, actually the chance that 2 commenters here have the same birthday is over 50% for just 23 people.
Birthday Paradox[/blockquote]
I was thinking the chances of there being at least one reader with the same birthday. Not the chances of it being me.
Broken sternum and ribs, badly mangled left arm and leg… I’m on the mend now (it was early Feb) but I missed nearly all of February’s endless threads, so that was the real issue.
What the hell, I just mixed forum style quotes with html.
Bunkie @ 79:
All the credit has to go to my husband; he was driving, I was drowsing (until the tire went off), and when we stopped, I had no idea we were aflame. He saw it in the rear-view mirror, and told me, “We’re on fire; bail!” as he killed the engine. He has the most awesome emergency reflexes; I usually lose a moment to being stunned/impressed by the gravity of the situation/stupidity on display.
The best thing about the whole incident is that our son had opted to give the funeral a miss, and therefore wasn’t asleep in the back.
(The engine burned with lovely blue and green flames. It was aesthetically pleasing, set as it was against a backdrop of the more conventional red and yellow flames from the rest of the van.)
(Oh—and we laughed, perhaps a trifle hysterically, when the fire extinguisher under the front seat exploded. Poor thing; it never had a chance!)
Rorschach’s linked wiki page gives the formula q(n)=1-((365-1)/365)n, so he’d have to have at least 253 regular readers for there to be a greater than 50% chance that at least one shares his birthday.
In today’s odd episode of ‘life imitates the web’…
So I’m at this local Mexican place I like. Run by this guy outta California. Great stuff, there… good rellenos. I love rellenos…
I’m there because the meeting from hell that just went by has left me vaguely homicidal and distinctly hungry. The former because, as previously mentioned somewhere in one of these threads, I really hate explaining the same thing more than like about, oh, say, once… And there’s this gent present who’s just really not getting why the architecture I’m doing does what it does the way it does… Ah, screw it, it’s a lot to explain… But suffice to say, I had to explain some things more than twice, more than three times, more than ten, on account of him actually making decisions, and having to understand things, and it was getting to the point where I wished I could somehow physically squeeze my body through the phone line down to Phoenix to strangle said dude…
… Anyway, and the latter–the hungry thing–because said meeting kept getting extended while I tried to explain, and went well past lunch…
So anyway, I’m in there, having a beer and some flautas, breathing deeply, decompressing, coming up with novel ways of finishing the day without adding a criminal charge to my personal history. And I’m reading Pharyngula on the phone, ‘cos this, too, generally helps…
And this conversation starts up at the bar (myself not precisely there, and in no way involved) about some sports character or other who’s some nutbar Christian–and it being the middle of the day, everyone’s had a few, and the prevailing attitude is this wonderful ‘What the fuck is wrong with those fucking morons, anyway… What, do they really believe this shit?…’
Validating, I tells ya. Because you don’t always hear that in meatspace, even here. I felt a little saner, just hearing it. Got to thinking: yes, there are places in this world where being a stupid dick does, in fact, get roundly and publicly mocked, and one of them is right here. And I get to thinking: this world isn’t completely cracked, anyway…
… and then at the next table, there’s this odd young couple, the female of the pair extensively tatooed…
And they’re talking about Aspergers… and whether they, technically, might have it…
And I got to thinking: Pharyngula has crawled out of this phone, into this restaurant. And I’m really okay with that.
(/End anecdote. Update: so far, no new criminal charges this diurnal cycle… Which, I guess, is good.)
As a biologist, I can definitely say that trees aren’t chicken.
(Glad you’re ok! And also for everyone else with these stories being ok!)
tl;dr
If you come to town. I’ll come by train, so I can’t move out.
B-)
Once it’s heated enough, all milk is identical. I found out last winter and spring when I lived elsewhere and didn’t have a fridge.
And what is that?
He goes on to state that the variation of different genes is correlated in a statistically significant way. That’s… less clear.
condensed milk has only passing resemblance with milk to begin with. and the taste changes even before baking (and technically, really really original key lime pie doesn’t need the filling to even be baked)
Pedants…..;)
AJ Milne:
Easier just to reach through the phone line, grab the dude, yank him through the line and strangle him (maybe with the phone cord, if you’re using a land line), then stuff the body back through to his office. Less in the way of incriminating evidence, and no-one but Fox Mulder could possibly suspect you.
David M.:
Ronnie Soak is one of Terry Prachett’s characters, from Thief of Time, one of his Discworld books. He’s the Ultimate Dairyman; because he has to use up the cold somehow.
/deliberately quasi-cryptic
PZ:
Boy are you ever wrong. Your birthday has been moved. If you don’t like the new day, tough beans.
Nothing like a walk on the beach to lift your mood! Aaaaah.
This is so general as to be useless. Does that variation fall out into race-like groupings? Is any race concept useful for understanding genetic variation? If so, what is it?
I’ll ignore you. I asked if you had anything to contribute to a discussion about race and human genetic variation beyond a general “variation exists” (and specifically a concept of race or its equivalent that is scientifically valid and useful), and evidently you don’t.
Ignoring you now.
I’ve read way, way, way too few Terry Pratchett books. I’ll try to go to bed soon so I can cry myself to sleep. :.-(
Ok, I haven’t had a chance to read the other thread or even all of this but someone mentioned that prostitution and racial definitions were hot topics.*
Let me guess the conclusions thus far: prostiution is good, all other races than mine (where “mine” = the poster’s race) are bad and were all off to a brothel for a multi-ethnic gangbang?**
What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day, right? Right?
Hey, why are you hitting me? Owwww! I was only kidding! Owwww! NOT THE FACE!!!! NOT THE FACE!!!
Louis
*Although my reasons are much less important than Celtic Evolution’s. Damn! I am glad to hear you are on the mend.
**Anyone who thinks that I think this is a genuine Pharynguloid Conclusion, or that I would endorse such, needs their fucking head read. Just a standard humour disclaimer for the challenged on the web.
*checks calendar*
See? It’s clearly marked:
PZ’S BIRTHDAY – OBSERVED
So nyahh.
David, don’t cry, just read more Discworld books. :) Thief of Time is a fabulous read.
‘Tis Himself, OM | March 8, 2010 4:43 PM:
Sailing is flying sideways.
Speaking of things burning and blowing up, I just got back from walking my dog past my terrorist neighbor’s burned-out house.
He was the tax protester loon who went into the local IRS office in his airplane.
Terrorist? He wasn’t brown and didn’t have a funny name. Don’t you mean “freedom fighter”?
</snark>
Interesting neighbors you have there, Paul W.
My best birthday spent on a plane was a flight to Brisbane 11 or so years ago from Germany for holiday purposes, I finally stepped out onto the beach down the coast at 830 in the morning on my birthday, into beautiful sun, clear sky and crisp air, and drank a 6-pack.
Unforgettable.
Condensed milk is only nice if you put the tin in a pan of simmering water and keep it there for about 4 hours. It turns into a wonderfully fudgy goo.
Do make sure you do not let the water boil dry, else you might need a new kitchen.
Oh, that’s the least of it. The Unabomber targeted my department—IIRC, a couple of my colleagues were in the next 5 people on his list when they caught him. We’d been kinda expecting to get hit and were really glad that they nabbed him.
Then a few years later I was going to dinner with a friend and his wife, and another couple, and was warned not to bring up that particular subject. Turned out the guy of that other couple was the Unabomber’s brother, who realized that it was his brother and told the Feds.
Dodged a faux pas there.
Why is his house burnt out ?
And yes, interesting neighborhood you have there…:-)
Random YouTube music video time (staring Christopher Walken):
Oh, and here is the link to last night’s episode of Q&A on the ABC, where Richard Dawkins wiped the floor with some of Australia’s dumbo politicians.
Q&A March 8
Paul W, have you considered moving? ;p
“Alligator butter?”
-“I didn’t say it was easy.”
I’ve seen the result of that; it’s quite spectacular. Fortunately (for me), the kitchen involved wasn’t mine.
My best birthday was either my 22nd or my 30th.
The former I got very stoned and was given a carton of Guinness stubbies covered in chocolate icing and studded with those re-lighting candles; in an addled state those are literally endless fun. There are photos of me from that night; my face is literally purple from laughing too much and breathing too little.
The latter wasn’t quite so unusual, but a few dozen of my friends were there and I went home drunk and clutching (amongst other things) a very nice cab sav, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and – continuing the HP theme – a Harry Potter pencilcase featuring a picture of Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley where he and I look scarily alike (in terms of expression).
Paul W., your #671 is so full of strawmen and cliched assumptions about your opponents that I’m tempted to make a Bingo card.
I want prostitution to be legalized.
I have no problem with casual sex, no-strings-attached sex, random sex, sex with friends, sex with acquaintances, sex with coworkers, sex with strangers.
I have made zero judgments about any man’s sexual desire for particular sexual acts, nor any woman’s, and neither did Amanda Marcotte in the Pandagon article I linked.
The best part was this:
I have a rather high opinion of myself, thanks for asking.
I don’t see anything in your comment that isn’t reliant on these simplistic and false assumptions.
I lived there too!
Seriously, while I was living in Austin… and my parents moved out there although they rent the house now.
But when I saw the neighborhood it freaked me out :(
Rorschach:
He set it on fire before he went to the airport.
Gotta feel really sorry for his wife and kids. He was tens of thousands of dollars in debt to the IRS, then he burned the house down. (And insurance doesn’t generally pay in case of arson, especially by the owner.)
From the discussion on the ABC boards after the Q&A :
More here
The one car fire I saw wasn’t impressive for it’s volume but it length. Driving through a very arid area of Arizona we noticed little smoldering fires along the highway, a bush here, a bit of grass there. Now, we’d passed large burned areas before, but we just couldn’t explain the frequency of all these tiny fires. Until a good three miles later we came to a car pulling a small trailer with one of it’s tires on fire. It had been throwing little pieces of burning rubber for miles without anyone noticing. Luckily he’d been pulled over by a cop (who also had a decent size fire extinguisher) since it was pre-universal cell phone coverage and we’d had no way to actually report on the “long” fire.
Rorschach @135: Thanks for the link. Audiences in Australia can be raucous! Loved the look on Dawkins’ face when the creationist was speaking. It seems to me that almost everyone on the panel, (the exception being Dawkins), are accustomed to spouting catch phrases, and well-acquainted with truncating their intellectual processes in order to accommodate religion. Any one of the Pharyngula regulars could have slapped some of those comments down.
Dawkins was at his best, in good humor, and capable of giving answers that were succinct.
What butter?
Ron Sullivan
He set it on fire before he left for the airport.
The female Rabbi on the panel: “If you grapple with the God, you are automatically limiting God.” I think she was bringing up the old ineffable argument, and adding a hidden warning which equals Don’t Question.
Link repeat
But wheeeeeeen… <sob>
I already can’t keep up! I’m only in the first quarter of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology from December, even though I (obviously) only read the interesting parts! The January issue has come out, and the March one will soon!
(This is the first year with 6 instead of 4 issues per year. The thickness of each issue didn’t change.)
<sniff>
Julie Bishop (woman in white suit at the right end of the panel), is dangerous. She’s a well-spoken politician and she sounds reasonable at first glance, but she’s scientifically illiterate.
~:-|
I watched Q&A last night and, as I noted on the previous thread, I’m very embarrassed by the people who’ve somehow managed to get elected in this country despite being demonstrably poor thinkers.
Poor Richard. He did look pained, didn’t he? I think maybe he expected that it would be different from appearing with American politicians; sadly, while ours might be a little less obviously woo-soaked, there’s still enough Jesus in them to turn their brains to mush.
In a way it’s a good sign. Now atheists in Australia are starting to stand up and oppose the Christian free-riding on public policy, it’s going to be easy to make their representatives look like fools in front of the voters.
What that panel needed was an Aboriginal rep who stood up to Fielding and said that by claiming the earth is only 10,000 years old he was being strident and offensive and intolerant regarding their religion and culture.
Then we’d have seen uncomfortable.
WowbaggerOM @ 151:
One of the nastiest effects of religion is that politicians (especially in the U.S.) cannot afford to leave good ol’ god out of things. Even when a religious group isn’t a majority, if they don’t get their lip service they are insanely strident and frothy.
25 minutes in.
Jacqueline Ninio is the embodiment of what Sastra often talks about.
Steve Fielding. Whoa.
Dawkins is great.
The only car I have seen on fire was a compact sedan with flames shooting out from from underneath near the rear wheels. The people in it noticed the smoke, pulled up on the side of the road right next to our office, and got out and walked away.
We called the fire brigade and watched for a while until we figured that standing in front of a plate glass window with a car that might (depending on circumstances) blow up parked a few metres away, was probably not a smart idea.
llewelly #126
Sometimes sailing is sailing sideways.
Ol’Greg@674 (in the previous episode):
Well, duh, Ol’ Greg. I’ve tried to be pretty clear about what I do and don’t mean, and it seems to me that you are nonetheless jumping to conclusions I’ve pretty well ruled out.
I find that really tiresome.
I’ve said repeatedly that I’m talking about statistical differences in the distributions of
attitudes between men and women.
I’ve also tried to make it clear that I think there’s a lot of overlap in those distributions.
I intentionally brought up the supply/demand issue and imbalance create surpluses or deficits in the numbers of people with certain values, from the point of view of some people with different values.
I did that precisely to make it clear that I think that relatively small but significant satististical differences in distributions can create relatively large effects in terms of shortages and surpluses. A market-like assortation mechanism amplifies smaller statistical differences into bigger ones.
I’ve tried to reinforce that understanding by frequently talkign about “some,” many, “too many for certain people’s tastes,” etc.
No, you are idiotic to assume that in that context I mean all women or all men, when I’ve made it clear over and over again that that is not the kind of thing I’m talking about.
I call bullshit on your charge of sexist bullshit, at least with respect to that.
Apply the principle of charity just a little bit and give me just a little bit of benefit of the doubt, at least to the point of asking what the fuck I mean rather than assuming I means something inconsistent and stupid, and calling it sexist bullshit.
And don’t point out the dead obvious, assuming that I haven’t noticed it.
Do you think I haven’t noticed that there are women in this thread, like you and SC and Jadehawk, who don’t have some of the attitudes I’m talking about? (E.g., being okay with casual sex or whatever?) Do you think I haven’t noticed that there are some men who seem to? (E.g., being averse to casual sex or whatever.)
Do you think I’m brain-dead enough not to notice that that contradicts any generalization about all women or men along those lines? And you think I think that despite my explicitly saying that I don’t, and frequently talking about differing proportions, etc?
Holy cow.
If anybody’s being that simplistically sexist here, I get the feeling it isn’t me. You seem to have cast me into a sexist stereotype into which I do not fit, maybe for sexist reasons—e.g., assuming that a man who disagrees about certain kinds and degrees of alleged sexism is just a sexist pig like all the rest.
Stop it. Pay attention to what I’m actually saying, and take it seriously—I don’t write those long careful tl;dr posts for nothing. I do it largely so that
(a) I make it pretty clear what I’m talking about, (b) people won’t jump to conclusions about what I mean that are inconsistent with that general outlook, and
(c) if that does happen, I have something to refer back to to show pretty clearly I was saying something different than what I’ve been accused of saying.
If you can’t give me a little benefit of the doubt, and ask nicely what I do actually mean before labeling it sexist bullshit, you can just fuck off.
Maybe I’m a sexist pig, somehow, and I need my consciousness raised—I’m open to that idea—but you’re going to have to work a little harder at it than that.
In NSW, VIC and Tas its currently 11:00 am on Tuesday 9th March. So are far as we are concerned it is your Birthday, unless you wish to submit that you were born on Wednesday the 10th ;-)
SO Happy Birthday
Watching Rorschach’s video @ #135 (PZ should start a thread about it). That Steve Fielding guy is a moron.
I know I posted the picture in #155 recently but I couldn’t resist using it again.
It’s now past midnight here, so happy birthday, Professor Myers.
strange gods, I want you to know that despite my occasional bluster and our frequent disagreements, I do, honestly, really like you. And I’m sorry if I’m sometimes more obnoxious than I should be.
Well you might consider I only have your words to go by.
So for all I know you may be that dumb because you certainly have made some terrible arguments, and yes you really do sound that dumb.
No, it’s not my job to read whatever you say in the best possible light if you aren’t capable of saying what you mean clearly. Being verbose isn’t helping you.
You still wrote a giant strawman and supported it with basically nothing and defended it with classic male privileged bullshit. You have not answered anything specific or even tried to clarify. And now you’re mad at me. Boo hoo.
You can fuck right off too.
‘Tis Himself @155 – enjoyable the second time around. Great shot of extreme sailing.
Wowbagger, good point about the aboriginals in Australia. Why weren’t they represented on the panel?
SC @153, I noticed the attack on Richard Dawkins, with panelists called him on his tone, accusing Dawkins of “attacking” and of not respecting religion. But… they never responded to the actual points Dawkins made, except to tell him not to make the points.
Ah, some OT bashing from Julie “People Should Respect Others’ Views” Bishop. Nice. Will the rabbi respond?
“It’s not my birthday”. And you kids get off my lawn!
You were born and so you’re free, so happy birthday!
Indeed. But Australians who don’t agree with his religious idiocy aren’t as critical of it as, say, the equivalents in the US; over there it’s far more strongly polarised than it is here, even though we’ve got a much lower rate of religiosity.
Here it’s covert rather than overt. So, a lot of people, even though they aren’t religious in the slightest, don’t realise that there is a problem that needs to be addressed – and they think anyone pointing it out is whining about nothing.
That’s something we need to change – and I’d like to think the GAC is a place where the seeds of such change can be planted. Australian atheists need to be shown exactly how much Jesus-freaks are determining public policy; if they become aware of it maybe they’ll do more about it.
Happy B’day yungin’ I turn 56 on the 10th and I don’t appreciate whipper snappers like you givin’ any shit. So be sure to change your diaper a couple of times during the flight and remember….
I WISH I COULD BE IN AUSTRALIA TO…
OOOO.
BOO HOOO OOO OOO.
SNIF.
happy b’day keep fighting the good fight.
Please.
Julie was a self-righteous twit when it came to the discussion about morality.
I was glad to see the creationist guy next to Dawkins squirm. He basically refused to answer most questions. In one case he even claimed that it was not right to ask him the very questions he was there to answer. And why? Because he does not do that to other people, that is, he does not go up to another politician, pull a bible out of his pocket and start lecturing. Yet he thinks it’s perfectly okay to run a school (Waverly, I think) that injects god and biblical creationism into children’s brains. I guess it’s just not okay to ask questions about religion in public forums because religion is personal and private. Hogwash.
Who the fuck is using ‘race’ as a predictor of genetic variation here? Sven didn’t. I didn’t. Who did? Why do you have such a hard-on for this particular result? Does genetic variation have to fall into “race-like” groupings for it to be useful*?
If one can guess something about a persons geographical ancestry with accuracy that is better than random, does that mean that one recognizes “race” (the shitty Archie Bunker social construct) as a valid scientific hypothesis? Does it have to be one way or the other? If a scientist should find that neutral markers indicate 6 main human population clusters that are geographically correlated, does that indicate racist intent? Or what if its phenotypic-geographic correlation such as lactose intolerance, or that sickle cell resistance to malaria evolved independently in Asia and Africa? What if someone identified genes responsible for differences in melanin deposition across a latitudinal gradient? Does that somehow support racism?
From your post above (#55) I get the impression that you either believe that a cabal of human geneticists is expressly intent on promoting a racist ideology by selectively reporting findings of human genetic differences, or that they are unwittingly providing fuel for those intent on the same nefarious goal. I don’t think either is true. If I am wrong, I am naïve. If this is what you actually think (and I admit that I am having a tough time parsing your thinking), and you are wrong, you are a kook.
*In investigating genetic disease, forensics, understanding human evolution & cetera.
**I will deny later that I found anything interesting about human evolution at all.
Thief of Time was the first Discworld book I read, and it’s still my favorite.
*boggles*
I like you too, Walton, independently of how pissed I am about the Iain Dale nonsense.
Links in #168 are dead.
geographically correlated = http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070
lactose intolerance = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance
sickle-cell resistance to malaria = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1683923/pdf/ajhg00144-0083.pdf
genes responsible for differences in melanin deposition across a latitudinal gradient = http://157.27.14.113/didattica/genmed/skin%20pigmentation.pdf
By the way… If I can’t “ask you nicely” what you mean?
I called an argument idiotic and you called me an idiot, but you deserve to be *asked nicely* for all the ways you’re really right and I’m just to dumb to see it through your long winded crap laden diatribe?
Whatever.
Go to the intersection if you want your ass kissed. I’m not the only one who takes issue with your argument.
Happy Birthday, PZ!
Meh. I’ve just been out to dinner with some friends, am mildly drunk and am now listening to Pachelbel’s Canon, so I feel like being a little more candid than usual.
My best justification for supporting the Conservatives is that the UK has essentially a two-party political system – that is to say, only two parties have any prospect of forming a majority government. (The Lib Dems might hope, at best, to be the minority party in a coalition.) For the reasons I have repeatedly outlined, the New Labour government is authoritarian, incompetent and thoroughly discredited. The only other party with a prospect of forming a majority government is the Conservatives. The Conservatives are less authoritarian, and, on balance, probably less incompetent.
I will, however, certainly cease to support the Conservatives if the next Conservative government repeals the Human Rights Act and replaces it with some toothless alternative.
I’m really put off watching it now.
On a related note, it really does show why there needs to be people like Dawkins speaking out. These books, articles, podcasts, etc. by the “new atheists” are meant to be water off a duck’s back, yet the almost universal response is to get indignant about it. And response to the criticism? They claim the arguments don’t represent them, even if you use the very arguments they give.
An amusing take on gender stereotypes in advertising.
I pledge to post at least one Mitchell and Webb video a day from now on, and spend less time blithering aimlessly about my rapidly-mutating political views. :-)
Excepting the bit about Australia (mmmm… Australia), it took you nearly until the age of 53 to get there? Wow.
Happy Birthday!
Carlie @ 169:
Reaper Man is my absolute favourite. I like so many of them though, lots of favourite characters. Death, Vetinari, Angua, Sam Vimes…and on and on and on. On various forums, my sig line is from Reaper Man: “OH. DRAMA.” – Death
Happy Birthday PZed.
I am drinking calvados in your honour. Well, I’m drinking calvados and any excuse is good.
Louis
Has anyone seen this yet about the reigning Queen of hypocrisy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/palin-crossed-border-for_n_490080.html
That’s made me think of a good slogan to use against people like this: if your religious views are personal and private, don’t attempt to insert them into PUBLIC policy!
Really, I don’t care what these morons believe; I do, however, care when they want other people to live by the social/ethical/moral standards drawn from their beliefs.
Jesus. Just how candid are we aiming for?
Nightwatch is Terry’s finest. Anyone who says different should be shot. Hard. Until it hurts.
Schism?
Louis
Happy Birthday *tomorrow* PZ!
I turned 59 in February, you hot, young snapperwhipper….snipperwhapper….uh….whatever (I forget).
The problem here is more subversive religious influence. Morons like Stephen (F I S K A L) Fielding or Tony Abbott are openly religious in regard to their policy decisions and that’s an easy enough source of ire. The whole RU486 debate when Abbott was health minister led to that great rhyme “keep your rosaries off my ovaries”. Yet Stephen Conroy who is trying to censor the internet is extremely socially conservative, he just uses secular language to push his religious agenda. And he’s not the only one either, it’s just many on the Australian political left have learnt to mask it behind a wall of rhetorical fuzziness.
Antiochus Epiphanes,
The objection that SC has to the arguments being made wrt human biological diversity is that race is not the way to describe it. I said before that the term race has a specific meaning in biology, sub-species. Human genetic diversity isn’t great enough to warrant the use of the term race.
No one is arguing that people do not vary. That would be patently false. The argument is that race is a poor explanatory tool for the pattern of human genetic diversity. Here Relethford relates human genetic diversity to an isolation by distance model. That is, human populations that are most genetically distant are also the most geographically distant. The patterning of genetic difference is gradual though. For race to be a proper framework to discuss the pattern of human genetic variation, we would have to see clearly defined clusters of traits with rather sharp edges demarcating the “races.” This simply isn’t the situation.
Yes, the genetic differences follow geographic patterns, though often these patterns are conflicting (skin color clines and blood group clines are not the same), but that doesn’t mean the pattern is racial in the biological sense of the word.
Regarding the Q&A with Dawkins:
I am forever astounded at how people who might not agree on anything else – including their particular flavor of religious gelato – suddenly get very, very stiff and upset and unite together in defense of faith – ANY faith. You could almost feel the temperature drop when Dawkins refuted the concept of the “good” New Testament god. And I didn’t hear any real defense of the cherry-picking that goes on with the Bible.
And yes, it all came down to “tone” again – “You are showing disrespect.” The fear that motivates the believers makes them very, very sensitive, it seems.
A good showing by Richard Dawkins. I fear, however, that whatever he does, and no matter how he speaks, he will always be as welcome as the Red Death was to the masque. The revelers get very agitated (and apparently insulted) when you try to stop the dance…
gxp (Sven’s and your link), first sentence:
It goes on, of course, to argue that it does.
Did you notice what the SSRC discussion was about? Did you notice that Sven argued that the critiques of Leroi, in a discussion explicitly about race, in which Leroi was explicitly promoting race, were unconvincing?
*eyeroll*
How utterly confused you are.
See, this is where you’re not understanding the discussion you’re entering into, which has been, for a year or more, about race.
There was a test of this.
Watch the fucking video.
How do you possibly not see the relevance of Morning here?
Look, it is very clear what people like Leroi and Razib (and Sven, though I can’t say how strongly at this point) are arguing about race, from their own writings. Either you agree with them about race, in which case I’m asking that you put forth the concept of race that is scientifically valid and useful, or you don’t, in which case you agree with me.
Do you honestly think that “race science” is somehow outside politics? You’re the kook.
As Morning says:
Ol’ Greg:
Yeah, including the words where I explicitly say that I’m talking about differences in statistical distributions, and their effects, and a bunch of places where I explicitly acknowledge differences within the sexes and sexual orientations.
Hyeesh.
I think you’ve misunderstood some of my arguments, and what points they were and were not making.
From my point of view, your ability to interpret me as saying the opposite of what I’m quite explicitly saying, and then blame it on me, is not making me sound dumb.
I think this is a hairy subject, and I don’t know how to discuss it without spelling out a fair number of things. Otherwise I think I’ll be misunderstood. But if that’s just dismissed as ”
“too long,” and all my fault if it’s misunderstood, and I get called names for that… well, fuck that.
BTW, one of the things that I think you’ve misunderstood about what I’m saying is that I’m making a distinction between active, intentional misogyny, by people who literally dislike women and are happy to make them suffer, and weaker forms of misogyny, of which there are several gradations. (E.g. being insufficiently sensitive to the fact just that not being the former doesn’t make you still part of the problem.)
Another think I think you’ve misunderstood is why I talked about an idealized form of prostitution in a better possible world. It is not irrelevant, given some of the things some people have said, including stuff in the Pandagon posting that strange gods linked to, and seemed to agree wholeheartedly with.
Some people do think that even in such a world, a willingness to pay for sex reveals a fundamental depravity and misogyny. The fact that you don’t seem to think so doesn’t mean that I’m making an irrelevant point, or that I’m doing it for some nefarious reason to support an illegitimate argument. It just means that I’m not exclusively focused on you, and am addressing issues you don’t seem to care about, because other people did raise them.
I’m responding to several people who are disagreeing with different things I’m saying, often unclearly but quite negatively, and that’s difficult.
I’m happy to address some of the other issues you’ve raised, as I get the time, but I’m way less motivated if you chalk up all the difficulties in discussing the subject to my sheer incompetence and assholery.
Louis @ 184:
No schism here. Reaper Man is still my favourite, then Hogfather, then Nightwatch, then Witches Abroad, then Feet of Clay. And on it goes. :D
Nightwatch is a great piece of work though, I’ve read it more than once.
Precisely.
Looking at the picture in #155 I can tell that boat is sponsored by a magazine because of the boat’s name. Sailors like to name their boats. Sometimes the names are really clever like “DILLIGAFF” (Do I Look Like I Give a Flying Fuck) and “Runs With Scissors”. But more often the names are really stupid: “Breaking Wind”, “Bow Movement”, “Dixie Normous” (they wish), “Ahoy Vey” or “Aquaholic”. I used to race against an E-Scow with “HELP!” painted upside down on the transom.
The boats I’ve owned have had names like “Vintage” (this was a 60 year old wooden boat), “Xenophon” (my E-Scow back in the 1960s) and “Moondance”. Sorry, I have no imagination.
I was following #qanda as a twitter trending topic (it got to third IIRC, which is impressive for a little-known show on Australian tv) and, while most of the tweets were in support of Dawkins (or bemoaning Fielding’s idiocy or Julie Bishop’s nasty death stare), there were a few where people wrote about how ‘rude’ and ‘disrespectful’ he was.
That’s one of the things that makes Daniel Dennett a great speaker against woo – he’s so pleasantly avuncular and gentle that it’s almost impossible to play the disrespect card against him.
Not that I’m suggestion Dawkins should change his style, mind you – he certainly gets the job done, at least in the mind of any intelligent audience.
And what was really good was when Dawkins – the ‘miserable atheist with nothing to live for’ as the woo-soaked like to paint us as – pointed out that our world is a great place; why do we need a heaven as the carrot on a stick? Why not enjoy life now?
That’s something we need to change – and I’d like to think the GAC is a place where the seeds of such change can be planted. Australian atheists need to be shown exactly how much Jesus-freaks are determining public policy; if they become aware of it maybe they’ll do more about it.
I think you hit it spot on there.
and, as a head’s up, Brian Tamaki and half the Destiny Church appear to be headed your way:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/religion-and-beliefs/news/article.cfm?c_id=301&objectid=10629377
stomp them out before they get too much of a foothold!
Pygmy Loris @672@XXXVI:
What definition are you using? Lewontin’s essay on SSRC disagrees with you, btw, and claims that race has been abandoned* as a biological category.
(*I don’t think this is quite true, but it’s usually not used without a qualifier such as ‘geographic’ or ‘host’)
How many human populations are there?
Same was true of Kropotkin in his later years. Someone should graph “looking like Santa” with “how radical you can be and not be hated/killed” (I’m sure there’s an equivalent for women – maybe substitute Sastra for Santa :)).
Wowbagger, is it OK if I ask you a question about an earlier comment you made? I’ve been curious about it, but if you’re not in the mood I can leave it alone.
How many human populations are there?
Somewhere between one and seven billion. As ever, definition is all.
Of course, Dawkins was perfectly respectful – but his incredulity regarding the particulars of religious belief is something he simply cannot hide, and those others on the stage just don’t like it. No one likes to be told, even politely, that they believe impossible (or even horrible) things; but Dawkins (and others) need to keep it up.
Exactly. Don’t we get tired of people thinking that atheism destroys appreciation of beauty, or wonder of the universe? And I have pointed out to people, on the contrary, the universe is all the more wondrous to me for having not been created by a supposedly all-powerful entity. Believing in supernatural explanations removes all mystery, because you stop asking why and how. Reality is so much more fascinating.
Ichthyic @ 195:
Yes we shouldn’t be too smug about rationality here in NZ. Pharyngulites will enjoy this webpage though:
http://www.bishoptamaki.org.nz/
And today we’ve got the comfortites on campus handing out the origin of species by Ray Comfort & Charles Darwin. I took one and nearly scored another. The woman handing it to me said it has an introduction by a Christian.
It is with trepidation that I return to the Thread here…I did a stupid burnout troll-thing, like an idiot, in a shit mood, and now it’s been a long time and it’s clear just from peeking that of course there is shit to be read. And I can’t commit to a lot of time, and I am completely uninterested in arguing and so of course that means I should have just shut up in the first place, I know that. So but here and now, even though I acknowledge writing the check, I am afraid that I may not cash it.
OK so looking only now at SC’s Ep36#628, which was in response to my dumbshit #583.
sez you. The truth is that the term has been used with many different meanings in different contexts by different people talking about different concepts altogether. One example: the title page of Darwin’s Origin. Another: those guys over at Gene Expression; they are not using the word to mean what you insist it must mean. OK? They’re really not. (I am not certain, actually, exactly how they are using it, but that’s tangential. Because I’m trying not to use it.) A third: Pygmy Loris (PL, ‘race’ and ‘subspecies’ have not always been synonymous in various subfields of zoology). This is precisely why I have already said explicitly that I am not defending a typological ‘race’ concept, and in fact I don’t even have to use the term ‘race’ in any sense to talk about what I am, or was, trying to talk about–which is in fact genetic variation (which term also has several slightly different possible technical meanings).
Not only did I already say explicitly that I was “not defending” a concept, but the specific type of concept that I explicitly said I was “not defending” was “typological”.
You know. Easily visible traits. Why? Because they are easily visible. Seriously. And also geographically clustered. I was not attempting to categorize people with any formal and, y’know, typological lists of features. I was talking about my brain’s face-recognition center’s ability to recognize similarities and differences that correlate with geographic ancestry—you’re not arguing with that, right? I mean, you’re kidding about the PBS ‘quiz’, right?—and then I was speculating about the genetic patterns that must-must-underlie those easily visible and apparently geographically clustered phenotypic patterns, and then I was sort of wondering aloud—because I honestly don’t know much about it—how much geographic structure there really is to human genetic variability. And I kind of looked into a little bit and found some information.
And I was kind of a dick about it, and snarked an extra snark or two that I didn’t have to, as for example at the SSRC and so I apologize for that.
tl;dr
no, just kidding. I just gave my response. All that is irrelevant to what I was talking about.
That said, I did read it and I thought it was very well written and made a lot of sense.
I didn’t say I engaged with those articles meaningfully. I think I said I read some of them. I gave my reaction. I was looking for information on a specific topic (not social-construction theory) and found some (Graves) and also some contradictory assertion-fests (Leroi, Lewontin, Marks) and then some rhetoric and some of that north-campus discourse of the kind that’s just not my cup o meat.
No, no, those weren’t arguments, therefore not
ad-homs, and they weren’t intended to make a case—I just thought they were funny. But yeah, again, I’m sorry about the attitude.
So I can see that there’s a lot more to go and a lot of it looks like more talking-past so I’m going to stop responding and just read the rest of the Thread…
OK, acknowledging stuff from windy and PL and AE, thanks…AE is grokking me @#676; no halibut-beating necessary. PL nobody is arguing with the concept of socially constructed ‘races’.
gah but it’s hard not to start responding here. SC, I find you most frustrating at times.
*subThread turnover*
[much skipped, some dramatic]
I swear my eyeballs are aching from rolling so hard. It’s freaking 1972 over here.
OK, caught up. Caught up and walking away, from this discussion and from the topic in general from here on out. It’s some kind of CP Snow and/or bizarro Baby-Bear-level failure-to-communicate zone and I’m not playing any more. I’m going to edit this, post and be done, and happy last words to all.
Yes! I am flouncing! From teh fucking Thread! Watch me flounce!
Pygmy Loris and SC: Thanks for the clarification. I think I understand the confusion.
1. Perhaps the botanical and zoological tradition of “race” differs…in botany (less now than in the past) the idea of a geographical race did not require strong demarcation, but could consist of populations separated by a cline. Nonetheless, I don’t think its an appropriate descriptor of human variation (regardless of genetic facts) simply because it is charged in such a way that prevents interesting discussion of science to be misinterpreted as a justification for discrimination.
2. The use of the word “race” here may be biologically inappropriate but clearly doesn’t refer to any social construct. My interpretation of the biological use of the word “race” was as just mentioned. Note that I have tried to be careful in identifying “race” as a social construct where I meant it.
Regarding the test: It’s not really a test…its a demonstration that racial preconceptions are often wrong.
Exam proctoring over. Going home.
Ol’ Greg:
Yeah, I believe I did that, and I apologize for that escalation.
All I meant by “ask nicely” is that you apply the “principle of charity”—if there are multiple ways of interpreting something, don’t guess that the stupidest and morally worst one is the one that’s meant.
But if you’re going to dismiss what I write as not just long-winded—which I’ll cop to—but crap laden, without asking for clarifications to see if it really is that crappy, well, there’s not much I can do about that.
I think it’s a complicated subject, with several novel distinctions worth making, and I don’t know how to do that briefly and punchily, without greatly increasing the chance of being misunderstood. (And vilified.)
If you think my writing is long-winded and crap-laden, suitable for quick and easy dismissal as sexist bullshit, I can only say that I’m trying to do what I just got a Molly for, which some people think is a bit better than that.
I may be failing, this time, but I’m honestly trying. And I may in fact be a sexist asshole in the final analysis, but I try not to be, and I honestly don’t see how yet. You’re not going to be able to raise my consciousness by jumping on me the way you have.
SC wrote:
Go for it – I’m both intrigued and a little nervous. But hey, I’ve got nothing to hide; heck, in a few days people will be able to say they know what I look like…
Carlie:
Oh, I’ve tried. The events I described happened in four different areas of three different cities.
I’m starting to get hinky.
Indeed, Nightwatch is his finest. And Guards, Guards. Terry’s two finest are Nightwatch and Guards, Guards. Nightwatch, Guards, Guards and Pyramids (The scene where all the Gods become real and start fighting over who pushes the sun across the sky is hilarious, as is the High Priests reaction when his religion becomes reality). Nightwatch, Guards, Guards, Pyramids and Witches Abroad … Oh, all right, all of them. They are all his finest. And Science of the Discworld too.
pfft, Victoria has enough religious crazies already.
Xenithrys @ 200:
Wow. So he’s the new god, eh? Yep, very Jim Jones like.
Hmmm. Pretty much rules out that free will business and gives him an excuse for controlling his followers to the nth degree.
On a plane for 19 hours? What the hell am I going to do without new content on Pharyngula for a whole 19 hours?
Windy,
How does that contradict anything I said? Biology may have abandoned the use of the term (and category of) race, but that doesn’t mean it’s any more useful to use the term for human variation. In fact, it supports the idea that race is a poor tool for examining biological populations. OTOH, race and subspecies were essentially synonymous. It is clear (or at least should be) that Homo sapiens has only one extant subspecies.
That depends on what you’re talking about. There are too many human populations to list effectively. Any such list would not have clear, genetic demarcations between populations, especially when you take different levels of analysis into account, for example, local vs. regional vs. global.
Here’s how one might talk about a little bit of genetic variation: Most Native American populations lack the A and B allele groups due to founder effects.
or
Distribution of ABO blood groups in Na Dene and Eskimo/Aleut populations provides evidence that at least two distinct migration events are responsible for the origins of modern Native Americans.
In both of these examples I identified one or more subsets of human beings based on geography in the first example and linguistics in the latter. Then I said something about the specific genetic variation in those groups. In a different context, the distinctions I relied on may be irrelevant and I would need to use different criteria to define my populations. The point is that there are no criteria to reliably identify immutable human groups. Thus, race is a useless concept to explain human variation.
And more New Zealand surprises here:
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdetail1.asp?storyID=172122
For background, see e.g., http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10616394&pnum=2
I think PZ will set up his automated post-disseminator device to cover the time he’s in transit. You don’t think he’s really awake and posting new topics at the times they appear at, do you?
I have no interest in labeling you as a sexist asshole as the whole of your identity.
Originally I only had a problem with the logic and content of the things you said which I quoted
When I said I think both of these statements are sexist I meant I agree with you that both statements are sexist by the way. However I had problems with other things you said. For instance your dismissal of women entirely as if males are the standard sexuality and women can be better understood if they are removed from the equation entirely.
Try to distinguish between “I believe that argument to be sexist” and “you are a worthless sexist pig” because they are light years apart.
Lastly, when you quote some one and then place a long block of text which goes off into a territory that person never said it.
Lets go over some things. Back to one of the quotes I harped on originally.
What are these hang ups anyway?
See, no one is saying this. When you quote some one and then put something like this beneath it it is a bit shady to back up and say… well *some* people do.
It would be as if I quoted Sven from above and then went on a rampage about eugenics. It’s not what he said, but *some people* have said it. All right, so why bring it up beneath some ones quote with nothing else that addresses that quote in that space unless you are implying that person *is* saying that. Shady shady shady, molly or no.
I’m particularly disturbed by this “be more like women” statement.
Tell me sir, what are women like?
GAAAAAH!
Then you shouldn’t be defending or linking to Leroi or Razib, who are very plainly talking about race in traditional terms and trying to use contemporary science to prop it up.
Why are you attached to typologies and classifications?
Are you defending or suggesting any concept of race, or an equivalent (same thing, different word) at all? If so, what is it? If not, then we’re not arguing, but you should make this clear.
How, specifically?
No.
Which?
What?
OK.
What sense? If that’s irrelevant to what you’re talking about (and bullshit), then what are you talking about? Are you acknowledging that race (or race by another name) is not a valid or useful concept for discussing human genetic variation, or not?
Oh, hell. Say something of substance, please.
Mutual. *ponders*
Point?
Picturing a dancing bear in a tutu. Bleh. :)
You said that there’s a scientific definition of race and humans don’t conform to that definition. This contradicts the statement that there is no accepted scientific definition of race and that’s why it’s useless for humans as well. Both arguments are OK but they can’t both be true at the same time.
I had meant to delete that fragment. Apologies.
SC,
You’re obviously in the middle of discussing something else but I did respond (at #204) – with a ‘yes, feel free’.
windy,
Sorry, let me rephrase myself. Race, as a taxonomic grouping, has been synonymous with subspecies in the discipline of biology at different times. This taxonomic grouping became so problematic to define that biologists abandoned it. The abandonment of the race grouping in biology should indicate that it is, at the very least, problematic wrt human genetic variation and should also be abandoned in this context.
Just because the use of race has been abandoned by biologists doesn’t mean the term doesn’t still have a meaning in the discipline. Most biological anthropologists don’t talk about typological races anymore, but the concept still exists.
I thought Nightwatch was his finest until Thud. Thud made me cry. Literally. More than once.
It also made me laugh my ass off. Not an easy task, given the size of my ass.
Oh, and for those who wonder: The reason Ronnie Soak has so much cold to deal with can be better understood if you consider that he was once one of the five horsemen of the apocalypse (yeah, there used to be five, but there were creative differences…). That’s right. Death, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Soak (which is his real name backwards).
For those who think they have no time to read these books, consider that there are excellent audio books which can be listened to while stuck in traffic.
[First, the irony: Sven and I in recent emails both expressed our determination to take a break from arguments here. Now we’re in one with each other. We’re pathetic.]
:). OK. It was a comment about having exchanged emails with a woman. I guess it didn’t work out, and you reported that when she was asked if she missed you, her response was something like “I miss his emails.” You were disappointed by this, I think. And I was wondering if you missed her emails. I’ve seen you here enough to be absolutely sure you don’t just use writing to advance other aims, and that you enjoy written conversations. But I was wondering to what extent in that context you were looking upon writing, and conversation through writing, as a means to some other end, and whether you enjoyed or were interested in her words or more read them for signs of romantic/sexual interest. I may be reading more into this than exists for various reasons, and this may be impossible to pull apart, but I was curious.
David Marjanović:
Well, then, it looks like you’re going to just have to get your priorities in order, aren’t you! ;D
—
Paul W., don’t take this the wrong way, but…please don’t move into my neighborhood. You seem to attract scarey acquaintances, and the local nut-jobs are quite enough for me, thanks!
—
I’d be hard put to it to pick a favorite Discworld book, but my favorite character is Lord Vetinari. He is definitely The Man*. Tassssty brainssss….
*And he has The Vote.
Sigh… Barney Zwartz at The Age (the Melbourne broadsheet) is having yet another go at the Atheist conference. Atheists are just another sort of religious fundamentalist, Richard Dawkins = Pat Robertson, etc…
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/the-religious-write/by-their-fruit-shall-ye-know-them/20100309-pt02.html
To answer a question from the last threadination: The slides the Lord of the Pies showed me were, IIRC, mostly of wild places in California. I hadn’t seen any yet, really, not even what you can see from I-80, because I came in at night.
What really turned me on, though, was the way he handled his cat. She was a sarcastic bitch, too; we had a lot in common. Long gone, of course, and I still miss her. She was a tuxedo-tortie named Bernadette Devlin.
OK, I’ll give some auntie-ish advice to the guys here who are talking about Not Getting Any.
First, seriously, stop talking about fucking as something you “get,” and lose the economic model. See if you can’t quit thinking that way. It’s an interesting exercise and you’ll avoid stepping on some corns.
Second: Get good at it. You don’t start with practice practice practice unless you know someone else who wants to do the same and you’re both (all) outspoken enough to say what’s working and what isn’t even before you figure out why. I’m trying to think about whom to suggest and coming up empty, but I bet others could suggest some writers, books, video producers. Come on, we’re all geeks here; we all know to read up on a subject.
There is such a thing as a good reputation, and it has nothing to do with keeping purity on your balls. Or whatever that was about.
Ya know, I really don’t know whether it’s harder to get laid now that it was in the early ’70s. Sex has been getting more pornified, I think, and that edges it toward performance. Speaking of words that don’t help matters. Skill is not the same as stage- acting.
SC #220
Ooh, heavy. But valid. Will put some thought to it and get back to you.
And today we’ve got the comfortites on campus handing out the origin of species by Ray Comfort & Charles Darwin.
was that at Vic?
I had no idea those guys actually made it down here!
Otrame @ 219:
Speaking of his most recent books, Going Postal was brilliant.
#223, I respectfully submit that learning to be a good lover is a little like engineering, or the study of music composition. You combine one part imagination, one part trying and failing, one part building on the knowledge of others who are successful and who do things you like, and one part building on things you find out by yourself.
was that at Vic?
Yep. But they’re all over apparently.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/3421162/Creationist-takes-on-Dawkins
Since David has been neglecting his duty of linking to teeth-related articles, I’ll have to do it myself: pig lobotomizes self with tooth
congrats at very nearly surviving another orbit of the sun!
Safe travels, and have a good trip.
As for the other… as the Death Knights say: “Suffer Well”
AE, I appreciate that you acknowledge and appreciate the clarification.
Yes.
That’s what they’re trying to refer to. Quite explicitly.
Showing that the idea that “races” are easily visually identifiable is silly and wrong. Sven’s claim told you what about race, exactly?
SC,
Yes and no. I knew she didn’t miss me (the person) because all she needed to do to spend time with me is reach out and make contact; I’d made that clear after our falling out. But that was at least something – or, in fact, two things: a) that I was an writer of emails interesting enough to be worth missing and b) that by denying her this I was gaining some small (and very petty; I don’t deny it) revenge.
Not really. She wasn’t much of a writer. The ratio of my words to hers was probably 10:1 – but I love writing while she doesn’t so the comparison shouldn’t be that shocking. I just missed her, because we used to do stuff together before it became almost entirely limited to writing.
Hmm, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. If you mean ‘was I using my writing to woo her’ then yes, that would be true – does that count as ‘using writing to advance other aims’? But I can say straight out that the content certainly wasn’t of the wooing kind – I don’t go in for rapturous flattery – but was much along the lines of what I write here, i.e. snarky social commentary. Oh, and a lot about films and music, since that was something we had in common.
So, a very oblique kind of wooing. But yes, wooing nonetheless.
Well, I don’t know if I’ve come up with very good answers; maybe I’ll just explain it from my perspective.
I like writing, and from all accounts I’m quite good at it. I used to think that it might be a way to help me in forming a relationship with women I’m attracted to, but the episode we’re discussing – plus several others – made me realise that it didn’t work and I was left with women I really liked who’d be reluctant to be anywhere near me in person but who eagerly awaited my emails.
Which would’ve been fine if the effort was being matched, but it wasn’t. I’d get a few lines in response to my thousands of words – literally; for a while a standard email from me was 1,000 words; I’d get to 2,000 fairly often and 3,000+ wasn’t that unusual.
Now, when (or, more accurately, if) I meet someone I’m attracted to, I won’t be doing any cyber-wooing. Apparently, there’s just too much of a fundamental disconnect between Wowbagger’s words and Wowbagger – which, other than the minor satisfaction it gives me as a writer, it’s very depressing and one of the reasons I’m beginning to eschew any meatspace interaction beyond the absolutely necessary – not to mention that it’s making me more than a little nervous about the GAC this coming weekend.
Does that answer your question?
Showing that the idea that “races” are easily visually identifiable is silly and wrong.
To be clear: not that visible traits, even if they were identifiable, would provide the basis for biological “races.”
Err…I’m giving way here a little. I don’t know if it is explicit, but a fourth and fifth reading (especially of the awfully written endnote) leaves me in doubt.
Also, I saw the last 15 minutes of the video you posted (spent 3 hours lecturing today and another three reading papers while pretending to proctor an exam), and read the Bolnick chapter Individual ancestry inference and the reification of race as a biological phenomenon (available on Google Books) that criticizes Rosenberg et al. (2002). I haven’t used STRUCTURE in the past, but this weird prior choice regarding the number of populations in which to bin individuals (K) seems suspect to me. I had always assumed that this was parameterized like any other distribution to be estimated in a Bayesian analysis. Will read more about this.
But don’t you think that phenotypic traits can improve the probability of guessing right…not race (social construct) but geographical origin (biological concept related to clines, etc.?)
Thoughts on this:
a) A few weeks ago, I picked up a visiting scholar from the airport. I know that he is from New Delhi, but I hadn’t seen a picture of him. I got stuck in traffic, ran late, and arranged by phone to meet him in an airport Starbucks. There were seven-ten people there when I arrived, and only one looked like an Indian man. I walked up and introduced myself…right guy.
b) People complain constantly about depictions of Jesus as a blond-haired blue-eyed man. Its not impossible that a man living in Galilee at the time would have had these traits. It is just unlikely.
c) I work with one undergraduate researcher who self-identifies as African American. I have another who self identifies as Philippino. Neither fact would come as a surprise to anyone.
d) My wife is Sicilian, with very dark eyes and hair, and olive skin. Everyone gets her wrong, but not randomly. Mexicans identify her as Mexican (and will speak to her in Spanish, ignoring my blue-eyed pale ass entirely). Indian students think she’s Indian. Middle-Eastern students think that she’s Middle Eastern. No one has ever presumed that she was from Northern Europe.
For the PBS test to be a fair test of geographical recognition, 1) the pictures would have to be larger, 2) the categories would have to be geographical (Latino/Hispanic? Jesus…the US Census doesn’t even recognize that as a racial category), 3) the photos should be chosen randomly from a large diverse pool, and 4) one wouldn’t have to do well…just significantly better than random.
Hm.
Ah. OK.
Oh, I hadn’t realized that this was the sequence of events.
I think I may be trying to draw boundaries where there aren’t any. I mean, how do you distinguish between “hee,” “check this out,” “here’s this amusing story,” “look at this turn of phrase” as wooing, showing off, sheer pleasure, sharing knowledge, play,…?
I think those women were just not the right ones for you.
Oh, no! Your writing is wonderful. You just need to find the right person! The woman for you will love your words, and your joy in words. (And will probably write, though maybe not.)
This has nothing to do with anything (and I’m a hypocrite because I’m a terrible correspondent even with those I love), but I await emails anxiously. Opening them is a little thrill. If someone’s a writer,…well… I don’t speak for womankind, but I highly recommend cyber-wooing.
And I’m sorry your relationship didn’t work out.
:(
Hijacking the thread a little
Has anyone read the new Dean Koontz novel “Breathless”?
My fiance just finished it and as a postdoc in genetics she was infuriated by the end of it. Dean trots out the old “mathematics disproves Darwinian evolution” canard. “The universe just isn’t old enough for all those mutations to have happened.”
Man, he gets worse with every book.
badgersdaughter: #223, I respectfully submit that learning to be a good lover is a little like engineering, or the study of music composition. You combine one part imagination, one part trying and failing, one part building on the knowledge of others who are successful and who do things you like, and one part building on things you find out by yourself.
Absolutely. What I’m saying it that it’s good—considerate!—to start with the most of all those as you can, and if that’s to be had from print or pixels, that’s where to start.
And for the Meeting Her part, well, guys, how do you meet friends in general? Aren’t any of them female?
That said, Wowbagger, I feel for you. I myself, happily shacked up for over 36 years now etc. etc., have long periods when I really really don’t want to interact with people other than LotP. It gets in the way of work because we do phone and face-to-face interviews and pretty much have to show up at certain public events. It extends even to email. I know there are people who feel I’m shunning them, and I don’t want that; they don’t deserve it and I know getting that from friends is painful.
FWIW, the couple times I’ve met anyone via Pharyngula have been pretty damned relaxing.
Even though last time PZ was in town I didn’t manage to shove through the admiring crowd to say Hi. I was kinda worn out physically at that point, which has a strong and nasty effect on my social muscles.
I did get to eat pizza with the young ‘uns and act the Elder and kwok on about having gone to highschool with Behe and having his photo in one of my yearbooks.
Picked out in cuneiform, of course.
Never forget the words of Homer Simpson: “To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
SC, I appreciate that you are spending a good deal of time writing serious, thoughtful, and lucid comments, and I am learning a great deal from reading those conversations. However, I wanted to point out that cicely @18 left you some low-hanging fruit:
You may possess sufficient self-respect to refrain from beating that dead horse, but I do not.
Words are cheap, but also priceless. A man can get my attention, and hold it, by what he writes, but he has to know that I’m waiting for it to be ratified by his actions. That said, I think there’s a little of the Roxane in most women, responsive to being swept off their feet by someone who, by demonstrating brilliance in thought and pen, hints at brilliance in other… aspects of the relationship.
w00t!
Do you think Razib and friends are promoting a “classical,” “traditional” concept of race, or not? If not, what is the concept of race they’re talking about, how is it defined, and how is it scientifically valid and useful?
Blah blah blah. No one has argued that biological differences don’t exist. This is a ridiculous strawman. Ask them to define race and defend their concept’s scientific validity and usefulness.
OK.
What concept?
?
Which would be evidence of what, exactly?
This would demonstrate what? Someone’s personal “observations” about distinctions are worth what, exactly?
Antiochus Epiphanes,
The post from Gene Expression that you linked to explicitly advocates a racial interpretation of human biological variation.
They really mean it. I’ve read Gene Expression off and on and the guys over there have an explicitly racial conception of genetic variation. Papers that they reference sample a tiny portion of humanity from a tiny portion of geographically disparate populations and then say that race is a good construction to explain human genetic variation. This is false. I linked to an article by John Relethford explaining that genetic distance increases as geographic distance increases. This means that if you’re sampling 52 populations from around the world, chances are they’ll be geographically distant enough that the genetic distance appears to be relatively large and the gulf between distinct. Cavalli-Sforza et al. giant monograph The History and Geography of Human Genes produces clinal map after clinal map of genetic variation. And still these fuckers say that genetic variation analysis produces distinct clusters. It doesn’t when you’re sampling enough populations that conver the geographic distance between extremes.
You give a great example of how the race concept doesn’t fucking work:
You just need to realize that the people who fall in between racial groups are too common for race to be a valid way of looking at human genetic or phenotypic variation. Just because no one ever mistook your wife for Northern European doesn’t override the fact that people took her for a member of numerous geographically distant groups. Remember, phenotypically, Northern Europeans are a rather extreme phenotype and one of the more variable for eye and hair pigmentations. There are very few human populations that have hair colors other than brown to dark brown, Europeans, Tazmanians, Australian Aborigines, and a handful of others. So, two traits (pasty pale skin and naturally blond hair) could tell you someone is Northern European. This isn’t even a suite of traits, but two freaking traits covered by a bare handful of loci. It’s just not that big of a difference even though the phenotype is very distinctive.
Evolution in action!
GOATS ON FIRE
|
|
CARS ON FIRE
|
|
EXPLODING SHEEP
! Like being rickrolled, but in a good way :D!
SC,
If it were just the one time then I’d chalk it up to ‘statistically insignificant aberration’, but – as noted – it’s not the only time it’s happened. For whatever reason I, in person, don’t seem to be able to live up to my words on paper (or a screen); I suspect it’s because people value boldness and I’m a lot bolder with my words than I am with my actions – depending on how I’m feeling at the GAC I could be an enthusiastic babbler – or I could be sheltering amongst the wallflowers and saying very little at all.
But my antisocial tendencies stem mostly from the belief that, most of the time, I’m not facing an audience likely to be appreciative of me. It’s certainly not from shyness; after all, I’m a stage actor who over the last 7 years has performed in front of hundreds at a time on numerous occasions.
So, the way I’m looking at it at the moment is an opportunity to go amongst a bunch of people who don’t know ‘meatspace me’ – and who, by virtue of the fact they’re at the GAC, aren’t going to be put-off by outspokenness or snarkiness – hopefully, quite the opposite.
My kind of people, I guess. I can actually be like I am here, which is closer to the ‘real’ me than most people I interact with in person.
SC wrote:
Thanks. It’s nice to hear that :)
Kel wrote:
Oh, that’s an integral part of my plan. I don’t drink very often so my tolerance is low; it’ll happen quickly enough…
What prior choice? You don’t have to predetermine K to use that program, it gives you the best fit. (But sometimes different numbers of K fit the data about equally well.)
Yes, this needs to be a verb. I support the initiative.
*chuckle*
Perhaps I should figure out a way to post a recording of my lab’s purification machine in startup mode. It sounds just like the guy…octave-mangling and all.
badgersdaughter wrote:
Therein lies the problem. I know how to write – other aspects, not so much. Which is fine if you’re nineteen; not so great if you’re…older than that.
But you are your words. Really. It may not be immediate, but…
OK. Kel, BoS, Rorschach – you had damned well better not let Wowbagger feel like a wallflower. I mean that. Be alert. If he reports that he’s feeling left out for any significant period of time, I will be very angry with you lot.
*glare*
Theater isn’t life, though. :|
True, and you’ll all have a friggin’ ball.
Yep. But they’re all over apparently.
hmm, I wish I had caught that earlier. been looking to grab a copy of that.
probably could contact the “ministry” directly; they might still have copies.
Are you going to see Dawkins speak in CC or Welly this month?
Wasn’t planning to, but he was so on fire on the Q&A programme that I might have to see if there are still tickets for Welly, if I’m in town that day.
here is Ray’s “Ministry” in NZ:
http://www.livingwatersnz.co.nz/
I wrote them and asked for copies of Ray’s “special” version of Origin.
since they supposedly have 10K copies, anyone in OZ or NZ who wanted one might try contacting them directly.
oh, and do check out the site…
it’s rather obvious that Ray’s “ministry” is more like a store for junk good sales
:P
but then, that’s always been rather obvious about Ray; he’s clearly been in it for the cash from the very start.
I’m not sure that only one or the other, clines vs clusters, is right. You could use the same data to do the kind of PCA based analysis C-S did, or you could look for distinct clusters. For example, C-S et al also did genetic distance trees which do depend on “clustering” populations by similarity! And on the maps C-S et al used smoothing to fit their surfaces so that may affect the impression one gets of the genetic variation (they argue that smoothing is justified because of large sampling error of allele frequencies).
And while the C-S et al sampling density was impressive (was it 491 populations?) I wouldn’t take it as the final word on human genetic variation, since the genotyping methods available then were very limited.
btw, not for nothing, this discussion of the definitions and usages of race, sociology vs biology, has been the best one I have seen here… ever.
Wasn’t planning to, but he was so on fire on the Q&A programme that I might have to see if there are still tickets for Welly, if I’m in town that day.
sorry to say, that one’s been sold out for months.
but, next time you’re in welly, there are a group of us pharyngulites that hang out at Kitty’s from time to time, give me a head’s up and we’ll buy you a round.
@Ichthyic:
Ah:) You have no idea how oddly comforting it is to see that phrase! It reminds me of the places I grew up (upstate New York, and the suburbs of New York City). Sounds like home to me. Where are you from, Ich?
Just like Bishop Brian. I love the pastors’ employment contract prohibition on opening a church within 50 km of any Destiny church; obviously more interested in preserving market share than saving souls for Jesus.
What was that biblical definition of a sodomite again? Proud, eats better than others, and doesn’t help the poor?
Oh, and RD tomorrow night is sold out it seems.
… well, next month, anyway. I’m currently still fighting some bizarre liver ailment that’s laid me away for almost 2 months now.
:P
Excellent, thanks; I’d like that. Actually I live here, but need to be away on field work a bit this month, hence my comment.
Where are you from, Ich?
CA, but NY phraseology made its way westward as I was growing up :)
Well, um not fer nuthin’ but [chonks gum], at least you’re not all like, dooood. Teee-hee.
Actually I live here, but need to be away on field work a bit this month, hence my comment.
ah!
just shoot me an email so we can keep in touch then:
fisheyephotosAThotmailDOTcom
I’ll try my best, but until I’ve got a few pints in me I’m like a shy three year old – but without any of the cute (or a parent to bury my face in). Then after that I turn all pseudo-philosophical as the volume level becomes inversely proportional to the sense I make.
But like I said, I’ll do my best.
SC “Larsen B” OM @ 250,
I think if he can manage to get you to be jovial, he will do just fine at the GAC…:-)
I’ve left a couple comments at the Age’s comment section where Barney Zwartz has been spouting his usual prejudices once more, comparing the GAC with the PWR(parliament of world religions that was on here in December).
I wonder how many discussion panels at the PWR had the topic “Islam, Christianity, or Leprechaunism, which one is right?”
windy,
There are obvious limitations to the analysis by C-S et al, but no other genetic study I’m aware of has the number of populations covered by them.
Genetic distance trees do cluster populations. That’s specifically what the technique is supposed to do. I can produce cluster analysis for any set of data. That doesn’t mean that cluster analysis is the best way to analyze the data. Genetic distance trees aren’t really that great for supporting the idea that human variation produces clusters because they depend on the assumption that the variation is best described by such a tree.
I know we’re talking about genetics here, but the quest for clusters of genetically similar individuals reflects early 20th century craniometry. There’s a PCA graph in the White et al. publication* on the Herto cranium that shows the gigantic cluster of human cranial variation. I remember the graph because it was too small and had too many points on it to be useful, but it did show that humans cluster together, but, with a large enough sample, you’re not going to get very distinct clusters for specific human populations with the possible exception of Australian Aborigines who have the most distinctive crania of any human population.
Anyway, the whole point is that some genetic variation produces clusters, some produces clines, but none of it supports the idea that race is a productive framework for explaining human variation. This should be enough to dismiss those who think we should talk about biological races in Homo sapiens without even discussing the social implications of racial classification.
*White TD, Asfaw B, DeGusta D, Gilbert H, Richards GD, Suwa G, Howell FC. 2003. Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423:742-7.
To add to my post at #266, I don’t agree with the entirety of Cavalli-Sforza et al, particularly their interpretations of the genetic maps in the monograph, but it is a very large global study, so it’s easy to reference.
Have no fear, Wowbagger is all set to get at least one message from a slut.
So, I have seen several burning cars, but never actually been there when the fire started. Traffic does tend to back up for miles when a car catches on fire. Hell, I’ve seen traffic back up for miles because people are gazing at the remains of a burned up vehicle!
Oh! It’s after midnight CST, so Happy Birthday, PZ!
Well, um not fer nuthin’ but [chonks gum], at least you’re not all like, dooood.
like, gnarly!
Happy Spawnularity!
Patricia, Most Awesome Slut Queen @ #268
..and I’ve been growing my fingernails, extra special long, just for that extra “oomph” factor.I was never one of those kids in the playground who teased other kids so in one mighty swoop I’m going to let loose 40 years of repressed bully factor on the poor Wowbagger.
Anyway, the whole point is that some genetic variation produces clusters, some produces clines, but none of it supports the idea that race is a productive framework for explaining human variation.
so, when addressing applicable areas of distinct variability, the idea would be to address individual genealogy instead?
I’m thinking along the lines of specific heritable diseases, that selection has shaped in various populations in various regions.
what is the best way to *ahem* “frame” that?
..and I’ve been growing my fingernails, extra special long, just for that extra “oomph” factor
This is YOU?
grrrrowwwlll.
:)
And since the 9th of March is almost over in Australia, Happy Birthday PZed.
Josh, Official SpokesGay | March 9, 2010 12:50 AM:
Careful, Josh. I heard it used a fair amount during the second half of my childhood … spent in Worst Jordan, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. (Although I doubt Ichthyic is from there.)
so, when addressing applicable areas of distinct variability, the idea would be to address individual genealogy instead?
or regional descriptives instead?
like:
sub-saharan african
nordic
arctic
etc?
How did you know???
I especially dream about the dangly bit, then the claws…:-)
Oh what a great “convention” we will have !!
Ichthyic,
emphasis mine
You mean something like Tay-Sachs disease that is most common among Ashkenazi Jews? You’re talking about a population, not a race since Jews are Caucasians. Or perhaps sickle-cell anemia, which is more common among some populations of Africa, but certainly not all? Or thalassemia, which is common among people of Mediterranean ancestry, who are, like Ashkenazi Jews, Caucasians? I could go on, but I think that’s enough. You did, after all, answer your own question. We talk about populations and the selective factors acting on those populations. Those selection factors have not been enough to produce racial variation in humans.
Native Americans are very similar to Asians (relatively speaking of course), but the current distribution of genotypes among the former is defined by both founder effects from the migrations to the Americas and the rather dramatic selection event that took place after the introduction of Old World diseases in 1492. We can talk about these things by discussing populations and natural selection without ever talking about race.
In a clinical setting where a person might be getting genetic counseling wrt a potential or existing pregnancy, yes individual genealogy is the most important factor. One great-grand parent who was Ashkenazi could have passed on the allele for Tay-Sachs to you.
One great-grand parent who was Ashkenazi could have passed on the allele for Tay-Sachs to you.
right.
so what would you classify the term “ashkenazi” as?
Whatever do you mean, Ichthyic? Are you referring to phenomenons like sickle-cell anemia amongst Sub-Saharan African and lactose intolerance amongst Asians? Because, it would be hard to frame such things, because those genetic traits are variable, not exclusive. So one can say that most East Asians are susceptible to lactose intolerance more so than Scandinavians, but you must anticipate exceptions to those generalization.
The system that I’ve used for categorizing people is through ethno-lingual families. Of course, it’s still politically charge and has its controversy, but for the absent of a better system I think it’ll have to due.
Ichthy
..apart from the weird codpiece thingy and talons it kind of has a passing resemblance. My eyebrows aren’t quite that spock-like though.
The system that I’ve used for categorizing people is through ethno-lingual families.
YES!
that’s what I was looking for, I don’t think I was clear enough that it was the descriptive terminology I was after, not arguing whether race as a technical term is applicable to human populations.
I am grateful that I am not the only one who thought she was wearing a codpiece.
…I wonder if it would be worth discussing applying finer descriptive terminologies to animal populations as well?
I’m not actually a taxonomist, but being involved in researching the evolution of fish behavior from time to time, classifications are always an issue.
How many times do I have to repeat it, population! This is actually exactly how the Ashkenazi are discussed in papers about their genetic origins. Race is entirely inappropriate.
Seriously, what’s the obsession with “If we can’t use the term race, how do we discuss genetic differences in humans?” Race is no longer used in biology, but they talk about populations all the time. There’s a whole field called population biology that covers this stuff.
Race is entirely inappropriate.
read 284.
I think i wasn’t being clear enough that I was after specific descriptive terminology, the case against using the term “race” had won me over years ago.
There’s a whole field called population biology that covers this stuff.
uh, back off. you don’t need to be condescending. You don’t think someone with a grad degree in zoology from Berkeley has studied population biology?
maybe it’s just the age difference. When I first studied population biology as an undergrad, it would have been around 1983.
What? Where? I don’t see it? *squint eyes*
I think it’s pretty clear that “race”, as identifiable by physical characteristics, isn’t tied to any other genetic traits. The only thing it tells you is what cultural group a person is more likely to self-identify with. For that specific purpose I would argue you can usually tell with greater than random accuracy what group a person belongs to. Again, this tells you nothing about a person’s genes other than those for appearance. It does hold the possiblity of conveying social/cultural information.
I find myself curious whether people self-identify based on what groups they feel they fit in with, or how other people have classified/discriminated against them. Even if you self-identified as caucasian, if your appearance led people to discriminate against you for appearing hispanic/black/etc., it could possibly alter your view.
That large dangling thing!
That large dangling thing!
yeah, can’t figure out why the artist put that there.
very stylish armor addon?
GHP,
You should talk about the distribution of lactast retention (lactose tolerance). Approximately 75% of living humans are lactose intolerant. Lactose intolerance is the ancestral condition, but lactase retention is the derived (and interesting) condition. It’s also only present in populations that both had access to dairy products and reasons to consume them. Interestingly, lactase retention exhibits a clinal distribution in Europe.
A quick primer on lactose intolerance.
Yep. Linguistic patterns often (but not always!) reflect the distribution of interbreeding human populations. It’s easier to marry someone who speaks your language :)
Ichthyic,
I’m sorry for being condescending, but you’re hardly the first person on this thread to raise that specific question and #284 wasn’t posted while I was composing my reply.
Yes, I understand that you would be aware of population biology, that’s specifically why I was so exasperated with the question. If race isn’t necessary to describe variation in other areas of biology, why do we need it for humans?
I can see why you might want something a little more specific than population, but I don’t feel that way. Populations can be defined at many different levels (I’ve said this before) like local, regional and global. It’s a useful idea and is how we discuss this stuff in biological anthropology. That hasn’t created any problems in getting ideas across that I can see, so I get annoyed when people keep saying “then how do we talk about this.”
And you’ve hit the spot. Very descriptive terminologies of human populations, through such means as ethno-lingual groups, is valuable in identifying different cultural patterns amongst people of the a large group. However, it’s a charged issue with many anthropologist supporting it and opposing it. Some feels that it’s dangerous in that mirrors some of the classification processes of scientific racism and colonialism, others fell such classification are appropriate to distinguish groups especially if one group does not agree with a seemingly related group. Not to mention the great deal of politics involved. Example: the classification of Khmer Surin, a distinct cultural group speaking a distinct dialect of Khmer, would be problematic because many Khmer living in Cambodia believes that they are cultural similar to Khmer in Cambodia wish to absorb them into mainstream Khmer culture. OTOH, some Thais believe that the fine and detail classification is appropriate because it would add to the uniqueness of the Khmer Surin. Under both argument lies a great deal of nationalism and racism. Sorry, for the anthropological rant, I’m just throwing things out there because I’m brainstorming for a paper. I’m not targeting you for anything here, Ichthyic.
See the above rant.
If race isn’t necessary to describe variation in other areas of biology, why do we need it for humans?
that’s a good question actually.
I bet in my case it’s simply repeated exposure to using various descriptive terms to begin with.
cognitive dissonance between how I look at animals vs humans.
sometimes it DOES take multiple re-thinks to decide which descriptive terminology seems a best-fit.
I’m also working on coming up 2 months with no more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep on any given day.
my mind is working… slowly…
if you’ve ever been jaundiced for any reason, you well know the horrors of the infernal, endless, unceasing itching.
*scratch scratch scratch*
I’m going to take a break until tomorrow morning…
unless I can’t sleep again, in which case I’ll probably gibber something even less useful in a few hours.
*cries for lack of sleep*
You’ve got to jam for you birthday morlam style Go, PZ!!! Oh la noi ouy!!!!!!! grooo!!!!!!
Phallic
Ichty,
why are you still itchy if plumbing has been fixed?? That shouldnt be the case…..
Janine, Mistress Of Foul Mouth Abuse, OM | March 9, 2010 2:53 AM:
It is intended to be a sort of two piece skirt, which has one piece of cloth in front, and one in back, and shows off the legs and hips.(0) (Akin to certain styles of loincloth.) However, the artist went and put curved metallic scales on the front piece, which make it look cylindrical rather than flat, and stiff rather than flexible. Combine this with the taper and you have an unintended codpiece like look – a problem which occurs from time to time in art depicting this outfit.
(0) This is a ridiculously common outfit for women in RPG-related art. It is a challenge to find a d20 book that does not depict a few women in this outfit. I originally saw it in Snarfquest, where it was used in part to showcase Telerie Windyarm’s relative lack of any sense of modesty.
why are you still itchy if plumbing has been fixed?? That shouldnt be the case…..
indeed.
*sigh*
the plumbing has been “fixed” not once, but twice, btw, and still….
next step: liver biopsy.
fun times.
Ichthyic,
So, if you were studying a non-human mammal species with similar levels and patterns of genetic diversity to humans, what terminology would you use to discuss that variation? Would you use different terminology if you were only studying a small part of that species?
WRT behavior, the Gombe chimps (the ones studied by Jane Goodall) exhibit different behaviors from other chimp groups. I’ve read articles that call the various breeding populations, populations, groups, and tribes. Most of the chimp groups that have been studied have distinctive behavioral repertoires that include, but are not limited to, different patterns and types of tool use. No one calls them “races.” It’s simply not terminology I ever run into in the literature on other primates, which is the biological literature I’m most familiar with.
Just popping my head in to blow up a rabbit, pull a ballon out of my hat and say “Happy birthday PZ”
Ichthyic,
I do hope you can find out what’s going on with your own biology. The no sleep thing sucks. Good luck with the liver biopsy.
it is now 2:36am CST.
Happy Birthday, PZ.
Pygmy Loris, lactast retention is due in part by a mixture of natural and artificial selection. Intolerance would be the default because it would be advantageous for a mother to divert her resources from one child to the next. Retention OTOH is advantageous to those group who rely heavily on dairy products for nutrients. However, reliance on dairy is a cultural practice as much as it is an issue of available resource. So, in that way it’s both a cultural and biological adaptation. As we come closer to the present, it becomes apparent that dairy products are no longer as essential to human survival but retention is still selected for due to cultural adaptation to dairy. Consider the dairy campaign in the US. With economics aside, the support of dairy is a cultural thing. So here, intolerance is an abnormality, where in reality most people in the world are intolerant.
I dont like the sound of that.Had a CT yet ? It’s not hard to tell intra- from extrahepatic cholestasis based on blood tests, and unless you have hepatitis or something awful, this should have cleared by now.
Well, good luck man….
GHP,
Yes. I’m fully aware of that. Reliance on dairy is entirely a product of culture because the domestication of dairy sources is a cultural phenomenon. Horses, for example, weren’t domesticated for their milk, but once that milk was available, it became advantageous to be able to use it. Lactase retention is a biological adaptation to a cultural environment. It is a wonderful example of the utility of the biocultural approach to human biological variation.
Of course there are purely cultural methods of utilizing dairy resources like fermentation. Yogurt is a common product in the Mediterranean and Middle East where lactase retention is not as common as Northern Europe, but dairy sources are abundant.
I’m eating a cheeseburger. Just sayin’.
Josh! You’re a dirty sinner. Cheeseburgers are not kosher :)
Why, yes, I am. And, no, they’re not! But they, and I, are delicious. I have serious doubts concerning whether you’re ready for this jelly. And with that, it’s time for SpokesGay to go “poof” into his crisp, luscious cotton sheets. Night-night!
Night! I think I’m going to try to sleep now too.
Which reminds me Pygmy Loris; never ever work on abdominal after drinking a glass of milk. Especially if you’re intolerant to it. (Even slightly, as I am)
What’s even more culturally adaptive is schizophrenia. We joke about schizo nowadays but there are still some cultures that regard people with it as being close to divine. Hell, I’m willing to bet that many saints and prophets had schizo. (Or were high as was with the case of pre-Incan societies.)
(sigh. I want to work on my essay, but I’m toggling between Pharyngula and. . . uh. . .never mind.)
Well, it’s 12:45AM PST on March 9th, 2010.
Professor Myers, as of now you are nearly an hour into your 53-year-old dotage.
My condolences.
(Should I? Nah… well… okay, I should):
HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!!
Ichthyic, how awful. Cholestasis is horrible; I had it when I was pregnant with the twins. Had my gallbladder out three months after they were born, too. I had never been that miserable (and exhausted from sleeplessness) before. I do hope you can find out what’s going on very soon.
I’ve scanned the thread so quickly I didn’t notice if anyone answered this question, but that sorry sumbitch terrorist Joseph Stack burned down his house before he murdered Vernon Hunter by crashing his plane into the IRS building in Austin. Sheryl Stack, his wife, spoke at a benefit concert given for her on Sunday. She and her daughter (Stack’s stepdaughter) lost everything in the fire.
I have to get some sleep; I’m driving to East Texas tomorrow in a car with a tire problem. I’ve SO enjoyed all the car fire stories tonight, especially the ones dealing with blowouts. ;(
Reminds me of my car in college, a Volkswagen with fuel injection that tended to blow sparkplugs out of its aluminum head, so that I went down the road trailing fire. Or at least I thought that would happen; it was so long ago I don’t remember if it really did. It’s a wonder I didn’t crash into something since I always drove looking in the rearview mirrors. Good times.
Happy birthday, Tentacled Overlord. I hope you’re walking around on the plane at least once an hour; at our advanced age, deep vein thrombosis is a real possibility. On that cheerful note, I bid you Many Happy Returns!
Happy birthday PZ. All the best…
btw, does anybody know what is the official birthday of Pharyngula ?
Aspirine, and walking round the plane and doing calf muscle exercises, is your friend.
Jadehawk, this quote reminded me of the last subthread:
I guess sex in the big cities IS different! ;)
Re Discworld books, my favourites are probably Men-at-Arms, Feet of Clay, Going Postal and Making Money. Thud! was also very good, though a little bit darker and more complex.
Discworld has definitely got much, much better as time has gone on. The early ones (Colour of Magic, Equal Rites and so on) were much less sophisticated, and more focused on parodying fantasy genre tropes.
I feel sorry for our itchy Ichty.
Hope you can find out what’s going on and get better soon.
hebear | March 9, 2010 3:32 AM:
Whyever did you massacre an innocent rabbit? And if it had to be killed, couldn’t you have kept it in one piece, so as to make the tasty meat easier to harvest?
PZ and Wikipedia?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY PZ!
I hope those Australians get you some good gifts. However, I don’t think anyone could top this present.
llewelly: When you’re going for the wacko-clown-style celebrations, chunky is the only way to go.
#327
Aren’t we supposed to start crucifying rabbits pretty soon ?
I refuse to crucify any but pre-Cambrian rabbits!
Happy Birthday PZ (fewer than 110 minutes left of it here).
Tee hee… you are now a year older than me (for a few months, anyway).
Why is it when I get home from seeing a show (or shows in this case) and decide to check in rather than go straight to bed I always end up reading about one of the women doing awful things to me?
Gah. No wonder I’m single!
scooterKPFT | March 9, 2010 5:37 AM:
No no no. You’re supposed leave out a basket full of grass. Then a bunny will hop by and lay a few chocolate eggs in your basket.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if it’s oval, brown, and came out of a bunny’s butt, it probably isn’t a chocolate egg.
For the record, I totally meant this:
And that is why I will not be responding to the continuing discussion, rife though it is (IMO) with misrepresentation, misleading rhetoric, dogmatic assertion, party-line toeing, framing, simplistic gloss, condescension, seemingly willful ignorance, straw-figures, academic-disciplinary heel-digging, emotional reaction, and a notable lack of grounding in evidence.
It is my choice to let it all stand rather than waste time arguing.
Fuck me…human population genetics is fraught with peril–who would have guessed for such a lame species. Nonetheless, muchas gracias SC, Sven, Pygmy Loris and others for the enlightening* discussion.
*For me, anyway.
Now she tells me.
Oh…and happy birthmas, PZ.
:). Just want to clarify, because I think too often this is presented as a question on which there a disciplinary division. The first piece I linked to on this thread was by Graves:
Again, just a clarification – I don’t think you meant “vs” in that sense (more “in sociology or anthropology and in biology”), but it’s a common, and problematic, presentation.
I enjoy your posts about plants, by the way.
Thanks to you, too.
Anybody else watch the Daily Show last night. Jason Jones interviewed Dan Barker. I didn’t see the whole thing, but it’s hard watching them make fun of somebody you like.
Can we archive this entire thread for the next time somebody pulls the “Pharyngula commentators just agree with each other in lockstep” card?
and my resolve to stfu is sorely tested already
Just a quick public service announcement to remind those of you who have not already visited this month’s molly award thread to go on over and put in your two cents for February…
The clearest sign that a commenter only reads the most obviously anti-religious / anti-woo threads and doesn’t even bother with any others is when they make the “echo-chamber” claim. You will find hearty debate and disagreement between the regulars here in a thread at least weekly…
…or whenever Walton shows up.
*ducks*
Happy Birthday, PZ! (Should be your 5th (mod 8), right?) Enjoy your trip once you’ve unfolded out of the airline seat.
The fact that the bunnies themselves sometimes eat them does lead to confusion.
Since there isn’t enough bacon here (really, is there ever enough bacon?)
World’s largest BLT
Yeah I watched it. It was ok. They were totally making fun of him for going after a Mother Teressa stamp.
Never could really make a good case against her because of the taunting.
And this is the daily show.
Mildly funny.
Hearing the audience giggle anytime he suggested she was less than perfect got a bit grating, too.
Yes. Yes, it did. I wish someone had referred to Hitchens’ work on her.
Totally.
This news is from a Catholic news outlet, so I guess not all Catholics are onboard when it comes to the new rapprochement with the LDS Church.
The article is titled Glen Beck to Jesus: Drop Dead. There’s a short video showing Beck holding up a Nazi symbol and the communist hammer and sickle.
Sven,
perhaps an alternative outlet would be to add some widgets to your Threadtracker2000 graphing project to track episodes of confrontational dialogue on teh Thread…you know, like how they wire up the Right and Left wing listeners during political debates and record their level of agreement, etc?
Did you get my email?
Ichthyic:
Sorry to hear about your liver, man! I had cholestasis when I was pregnant with Kid B, and it sucked–very uncomfortable and scary as hell because of the risk of fetal death if the amniotic fluid accumulates too many bile salts. Lucky for me (and for Kid B) the cure was as simple as not being pregnant any more, so we just had to pace the floor for a few weeks until she was baked enough to be induced. I hope your condition will improve soon, friend.
PZ Myers:
Happy Birthday!!!!
strange gods before me ?:
About the Pandagon article…
(for reference here’s the link:
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/well_then_maybe_it_isnt_so_cute/)
I haven’t read the original Levitt and Dubner article, and I’m not defending that—it may be as bad as Amanda says.
There are some things Amanda says that I disagree with.
One is that she’s apparently arguing—badly IMHO—that men’s positive motivations in going to prostitutes is not just to alleviate a shortage of sex, from their point of view, but to get a woman to submit. She’s arguing that it’s about female submission.
I do think that’s important for some men, who are straightforwardly misogynistic; they enjoy making a woman do something sexual that she doesn’t want to do precisely she doesn’t want to do it, rather than in spite of her not wanting to do it.
I suspect that most customers are not in fact motivated by that, and I’m pretty sure most are not least not mainly motivated by that. (I could be wrong.)
Amanda’s arguments about men’s motivations are, IMHO, invalid, and come to (AFAICT) false conclusions.
I’m not saying that actual prostitution isn’t exploitative, or even that the customers are not mostly somewhat misogynistic in a weaker sense.
Some men know but don’t care that they’re exploiting women sexually. That is a kind of misogyny, but not the blatant kind that Amanda seems to want to attribute things to. They’re not actively out to hurt women, but they’re willing to exploit women selfishly.
That’s very bad, but it’s not all I took Amanda to be saying.
There are other men who pay for sex who do not realize how much the woman doesn’t want to do it, and how desperate she likely must be to do it anyway.
That too, is bad, but not as personally, morally bad as knowingly exploiting a woman to the extent some men are willing to do, much less the blatant misogynists who do it because they enjoy that kind of misogynistic power/submission/degradation thing for its own sake.
I’m not saying those guys aren’t all morally in the wrong. If they’re ignorant of the realities, that may well be largely their own fault. They should be aware of patriarchy and misogyny, and not assume (like some simplistic libertarians) that anybody who voluntarily engages in a financial transaction is by definition not being exploited, given the way the world actually works.
—
Imagine somebody whose political/economic views are roughly similar to Walton’s a year or two ago, but whose sexual views are more like mine, such that he’d consider going to a prostitute for sex, in principle.
That kind of person might think for ideological reasons that he’s not hurting anybody by actually patronizing a prostitute—he’s paying her, and it must be worth it to her, and he can’t be in the wrong. That may in fact be reprehensible and sexist in a certain sense—it’s morally negligent to be so oblivious to the realities, and use goofy ideology to justify behavior with bad consequences for others, even if you’re entirely sincere.
That may have similar practical consequences to being an outright woman-hating john who enjoys demeaning women mostly for the sheer joy of it. It keeps the fucked-up system going, unchanged, and that’s A Bad Thing.
I do know that, and it seems to me I have to spell that out, because some people don’t seem to acknowledge the distinctions I’m making, and maybe assume that if I say johns are not mostly outright woman-haters, I’m justifying the whole system, as is, and letting johns off the hook for any moral culpability. I am not.
—
One thing I disagree with Amanda about is the significance of the anecdote about a woman who got more responses on to a personal ad when she said she was an “escort.” That does not necessarily imply that men would prefer paid for sex to free sex, or any of the further conclusions she derives from that. It may only mean—and I suspect that it mostly does—that they figure that their chances of success are higher with a woman if it’s a simple financial transaction than if it’s a normal dating situation. That may be ultimately a bad thing in some sense, too, but not the simplistic sense of outright misogyny that Amanda seems to cast it as.
She casts it as wanting to pay for a “subservient sexbot,” which in some sense maybe it is, but I don’t think it’s a fair way of putting it.
That’s one reason I came up with the hairdresser analogy. Are hairdressers’ clients just looking for “subservient hairdresserbots”? In some weak sense, I guess they are, but it’s just not clear to me that’s necessarily a bad thing, up to a point.
(Consider women who like to be pampered at spas, getting their hair done, getting a massage, etc., rather than developing friendships in which friends do that sort of thing for each other. Are they just looking to pay people to be their slaves? In a very weak sense, I might say yes. In a very bad sense? No, not usually—not unless they’re real assholes to underpaid help who put up with being treated badly because they’re economically desperate. I do think there is typically a degree of exploitation involved, because too much money is concentrated in the hands of too few people, who get to treat others like slaves to some extent. But in most cases, that’s not the kind of thing you should simplistically describe in loaded terms about dominating hairdressers and masseurs and using them as subservient X-bots because you feel entitled to slaves who you’re out to degrade for the sheer malicious joy of it. Maybe you just like the way a massage feels, and think it’s reasonable to pay somebody to do it.)
My wife could have a friend do her hair, if she made it worthwhile for that friend to do it, and mabye picked her friends on that basis. And she would likely enjoy it, if the friend did. She likes being pampered. Her hair is easy to do, given the kind of hair she has and the way she does it, and she doesn’t need a pro to do it. (It mostly consists of separating little bunches of hair into locks, then twisting pairs of locks together into braid-like things. No problem. Anybody could do it. Easy as pie, but tedious.)
But she is not willing to do what it takes for a friend in order to get a friend to do it. She’s not going to take on the more difficult task of doing some other women’s hair, or put a lot of effort into finding the right “compatible person” to have a mutually satisfactory relationship that involves doing each other’s hair.
It’s not worth the trouble to her, or arranging her life around to that extent. So she’ll either hair-wank (do her own hair) or hire a hair whore (hairdresser) to do it for her for money.
And I think that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you should scorn her for being selfish and unwilling to treat other people as human in order to get them to want to cooperate with her and give her what she wants. That would be ridiculous.
That’s the kind of thing some people have been saying about men who want more sex, but don’t want it to be a great big deal, and especially men who would be willing to pay for it.
Maybe hairdressing is a bad analogy for prostitution, and I’m sure it is for many people. Many people have attitudes about sex—or hairdressing, in Ol’ Greg’s case!—that make it a qualitatively different kind of thing, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t. (Although I would like them to think about it, and especially avoid projecting that qualitative distinction onto others who do not feel the same way about sex, or sometimes don’t.)
If it’s a bad analogy in a strong sense, so that nobody should see it as a reasonable transaction for some people to engage in, or even many people to engage in under some circumstances, it’d be good to make clear exactly why.
(I don’t know if that’s anybody here; most people speaking up do seem to acknowledge that prostitution is not intrinsically an evil thing, in principle, if the people engaged in it can see it as similar to the hairdressing thing, and are treated and paid appropriately. I did get that kind of message from Amanda’s posting—she was directly attacking typical johns’ motivations for paying for sex in way I thought was simplistic, invalid, and fairly condemnatory.)
I think that’s worth making explicit, even if nobody here’s disagreeing, for a couple of reasons. One is that many people in the larger world do see prostitution as a Bad Thing even under those circumstances, and that’s one thing that’s wrong with public discourse about it—the problems are often misdiagnosed. The other is that even for people who agree on that special case, it serves as a useful reference point for discussing what really is and isn’t wrong with how prostitution actually works, and what should or shouldn’t be done about it.
For example, if Amanda’s right about men’s horrible motivations for paying for sex, then making it legal (and safer, much less abusive, better paid, and less stigmatized) wouldn’t make as much difference as I think it would, because that would take the fun out of it for typical johns.
They’d avoid legal prostitution, because they not only want dirt-cheap sex, they want to degrade and abuse women, and that wouldn’t be allowed in legal brothels. There’d be a small market for legal prostitution, and still a big one for the fucked-up illegal kind we have now.
If she’s right, that’s very interesting and very important. I don’t think she is right, at present; I’d need a much better argument to be convinced.
It’d be interesting to see some good statistics about the effects of legal prostitution on illegal prostitution. (Ideally statistics that could discriminate between illegal prostitution because it’s cheap black-market sex vs. because it’s degrading to women, and the johns want that.)
As the lockdown on web surfing here at company X continues I notice that as of today this is about the only site I can access.
Even Yahoo and CNN are blocked. But Pharyngula is gold.
Maybe some one in core services is a fan…
Gay folks sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This story comes to us from a former security guard who worked in Temple Square.
Source: http://www.salamandersociety.com/foyer/security/ Scroll down to “Sitcoms from Ex-Temple Square Gumshoe”. The Ex-Gumshoe tells several tales, and the story about the gays is #2.
The mormon tabernacle choir continues to be associated with the gay community. Though the LDS Church manages to hide the connection, gay mormons themselves take a more appreciative and ironic approach.
I did, and am appreciative.
Oh hey again. You see this is I think part of why we seem to have an impasse. I really don’t subscribe so much to Kantian intent. The end means more to me than the means. Whether you intentionally participate or not it is still a contribution to the problem.
It really only matters a small bit to me that it was out of privileged ignorance than intent.
So yes, perhaps neglectful homicide is less bad than intentional murder, but in terms of affect on society I don’t really think it is.
A habitual suspended-license-defying drunk driver that hits a pedestrian on accident is really no less a social danger to me than a person who willingly walks out looking for a victim to kill. Provided that they each only have one death attributed to them, but each have a high probability of repeating the behavior that cost a life… I don’t see that much difference between them in terms of what threat they pose.
Lots of people are nice people but do terrible things.
Ichthyic, I was very sorry to hear about the cholestasis. I don’t really know what to say, except that I hope you have the best medical care. Keep us deformed.
whoever that is @ 223:
Am I among the people that’s directed at? I’ve gotten several comments that seem to indicate that some people think I’m soliciting dating advice, can’t get a date, can’t get laid, don’t know how to talk to women, don’t know how to treat a woman as human, etc., and maybe even that I’m fishing for a sympathy fuck.
For the record, none of that is true. I do okay, and I think I understand a lot of things people assume I don’t. I clean up pretty good, and can be a charming and nice guy and considerate guy in meatspace, and (I think) in bed.
(In case anybody was wondering don’t pay for sex, either, BTW, for a number of reasons, not least among them being in a committed, monogamous relationship with a woman I love, who wouldn’t like that, and serious moral concerns about whether it would be wrong, given the way prostitution actually works in the U.S., even if I was single. And of course the health risks, etc. are important, but those issues don’t come up for me personally because of the prior reasons. I’m not just ignoring those things when I make different points.)
Sorry, no can do. It’s just a fact that many people, both women and men, do wish they got more sex. Many also do wish they got more other relationship goodies, and I think it’s good to be clear on when and why those things do go together, and why maybe they sometimes don’t have to.
And there are economics-like issues that are important with regard to sex. (And many other aspects of relationships.)
There are supply/demand problems about what people want, and what they have to offer, and they’re very important.
I think almost everybody realizes that in some respects—e.g., that there’s a problem with so many preferring people who are “good looking,” nice, interesting, charming, not fat, etc. than the available supply can satisfy. Not everybody is going to get what they want, and some people aren’t going to come close.
I also think it’s important to spell out the market-like issues, because they’re real and important in understanding how problems actually arise. In particular, relatively small differences in supply and demand can have big effects.
Realizing that makes it easier to avoid simplistic, greedily reductionistic blaming, because you can see that fairly big problems can be due to comparatively small differences—e.g., in statistical distributions of attitudes among men and women. People can be mostly similar human-type people, and still the differences can have major effects. Market-like supply/demand situations often “blow things out of proportion,” and it’s important to know that even if the effects are real and problematic, it’s not because the other people are so hugely different.
It’s a real problem, and it’s worth talking about here—but certainly, it’s often the wrong thing to talk about on a date, or when fishing for a date. It’s way too fraught.
One reason this is a good place to talk about such things, for many of us, is that we don’t live anywhere near most of the people we’re talking to, so we can talk about stuff we auntie might advise us not to if we were looking for dating advice.
Wow, look at the date*…
Happy Birthday, PZ.
(*/Yeah… Umm… Time to sleep, looks like…)
BYU Management Society to award NOM [National Organization for Marriage] director Orson Scott Card
In addition to directing the homophobic National Organization for Marriage, Orson Scott Card is known for his personal animus toward gay marriage:
The NOM members are trading on O.S.C.’s past literary successes:
Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
WE’RE
ALL
GONNA
DIE!!!!!!
Ol’ Greg:
I suspect we disagree less than you think we do.
I’m not very Kantian. I’m a pretty Utilitarian kind of guy, who worries about social justice and outcomes.
The main reason I care about motivations is instrumental—I don’t think we can solve problems, and get better outcomes, if we’re mistaken about what the problems actually are that lead to those outcomes.
So I care about people’s motivations because I do think the outcomes are most important, not because I don’t.
At the bottom line, in terms of how bad I think any particular situation is, I agree emphatically.
In terms of how to change things, so that you get a better bottom line—e.g., less exploitation—I think it’s critical to know what changes will have what effects.
That’s why my disagreement with Amanda at Pandagon is relevant. I think her diagnosis of the etiology of injustice is wrong, and I think she dismisses a “cure” (or more accurately, a very worthwhile partial remedy) as hopeless, when it’s not.
If people agree with her on how the injustice comes about, they likely won’t do what I—and you—think would likely make things better, i.e., legalizing prostitution, and working at doing it right. (In the ways you emphasized, which I agree with—e.g., making sure working conditions are acceptable, with health insurance, etc., and destigmatization.)
If we just vilify johns as if they were the worst sort of despicable woman-haters, I don’t think that’s going to help much. The despicable woman-haters aren’t going to care much what a bunch of liberal feminists think about them, and the ignorant privileged schmucks will correctly think we have no clue about why they do what they do, and not listen to us.
If we do understand the real etiology of the problem (and it’s what I think it is), we can do things that are much more constructive. We can raise the consciousness of some people who aren’t really woman-haters, and get them to realize that what they’re doing is wrong, some won’t do that. More importantly, if we can spread an accurate understanding of the problem, we can get laws changed and make a big difference.
I agree in the sense that outcomes are what’s most important—people dying unnecessarily is very bad, whether it was murder or just an irresponsibly ignorant neglectful accident.
But if you characterize the problem as being one of having a lot of cold-blooded murderers around, you’re not going to be able to fix the problem. You’ll go looking for murderers who don’t exist, and fail to make sensible laws about what risks you can take with other people’s lives.
When what you need is something like OSHA, you shouldn’t be talking simplistically about rampant cold-blooded murder. (Even if, in some cases, corporate behavior is exactly that cold-blooded, just as some men really are flaming misogynistic assholes.) It obscures the main problems and their realistic solutions.
Question for clarification:
When Pygmy Loris (@#23) writes this:
…is (s)he using typological categories of ‘race’ (under cover of ‘ancestry’ and one of two different usages of ‘population’), or not; and if not, why not?
Assuming the answer is ‘not’, then why am I, in asking about exactly this kind of geographic-ancestry-informative genetic variation, repeatedly accused of defending typological ‘race’ concepts even while explicitly denying that I am doing so?
I would really like to know the answers to these questions even though I do not intend to participate further in discussion of the general topic.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Tentacles!
—
Yep. Sooner or later. When we get around to it.
I give up.
I’ve come up with two replies to two threads in five minutes. And both had already been posted!
I’d pay money to see that.
Is that one so old that Death still talked in quotation marks back then? In most books he doesn’t.
Deep Rifts.
:-D
Four thousand throats can be cut in one night by a running man.
– Klingon proverb
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Can’t be said often enough.
No new content? And what is this thread? :-)
Perhaps you’d like to join the Mutual Intellect Appreciation Society. :-)
:-) :-) :-)
I love SIWOTI syndrome :-)
X-D
My lungs briefly collapsed from silent laughing, as if 100 m below the sea surface.
That was deliberate. It was meticulously planned. See? This way I get to find out that you’re reading Tet Zoo all on your own now ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
:-)
That is, the English word black has been imported into (young, hip) French for precisely that purpose.
Which others?
(And, er, how well are the native Tasmanians documented? <shudder>)
Mini-Me ;-)
Seconded.
But… the best representation of the results of a phenetic* analysis isn’t a tree. It’s the distance matrix that was used to calculate the tree.
* As in “phenotype” and “phenomenon”.
:-D
:-)
That only works some of the time, because languages aren’t inherited the same way as genes.
“Innocent”? Probably it was the Killer Rabbit. That must also have an impact on the taste of its flesh.
ROTFL!
What an appalling waste of bacon. Lettuce? Tomato? American “bread“? Urgh.
“Sometimes”? They eat everything twice. That’s simply how their digestive system works, hindgut bacteria and all.
(Not 3 times, mind you. Twice.)
Hmmm… thinking about what I wrote:
I gotta confess that overstates my motivation for social justice somewhat, and understates my evident motivation to geek out trying to Figure Things Out and express them.
I don’t want to make myself sound like Mr. Righteous, as though all I care about it the social justice bottom line. Obviously, I’m also an intellectual wanker, though I don’t think it’s mostly an either/or thing.
Nanoparticles and gold rule … again:
I’m not sure where that blockquote went wrong.
Test:
Don’t do yourself down Paul.
You are just like the most people here. Decent people, trying to work out what is right, and what is the best thing to do, acting on imperfect information and quite often cocking things up on the way. Or to put it more concisely , you are human.
But
but
look how big it is
They cheat. It’s a long row of sandwiches next to each other. And some of the bread is burnt in some places.
Yeah I know. I don’t have the energy to continue my faux amazement.
Warning to SC: you might be smothered in adorableness if you click on the links below, unless perhaps if you already know what’s said there.
Best joke of the week :-}
The same thread links to this.
I didn’t say it was perfect David, only that it’s the best one I can think of (since people tend to marry within the same language).
And in some cases it may help to understand population drift, such as distinguishing Ryukyuan from Japanese.
Sven,
There’s a significant portion of biological anthropologists who think that ancestry determination is the same thing as typological race. It’s not. When a forensic anthropologist is determining the ancestry of a particular set of remains, they are using various markers on the skeleton, including measurements, to decide which socially determined group people would have assigned the person to in life. The reason forensic anthropologists do this is because our society does it, not because it helps to explain variation. There are forensic anthropologists who think that race is a good tool to explain human variation. They’re wrong and they’re in the minority.
PZ, Many Happy ones. Born in the year of Sputnik! Back when Americans actually thought science mattered and called on Nazi scientists to reach the moon. Now that’s good ol’ Murkin ingenuity.
Gao. Saw the Daily Show last night. I don’t mind the little shots the infotainment (Dont’ get me wrong, it’s still some of the best News Media in MErika, I just recognize that there should be no way in hell I can say that) get at Atheists, but I do mind greatly when they take much longer shots like the one over the Freedom from Religion foundation opposing a Mother Theresa Stamp.
I mean, Colbert even had a guest who had a book documenting why Mother Theresa was a horrid bitch! Why does she have to be treated as a humanitarian?
You know, the talk of race got me thinking. Back when I was in the Peace Corps in Africa, I can remember being shocked by the varied physical appearances of the Africans. My experience with African Americans (who mostly came from around the Bight of Benin) and National Geographic had simply not prepared me for how different one tribe looked from another.
If you discount skin color, two people living in villages 50 km apart could look as different from each other as they looked from people of other races. There were some villages where I could go on Market Day and just sit and watch a veritable United Nations of Africa in front of me.
That was when I started to question whether race was a distinction without a difference–not because there aren’t different races, but rather because there is so much diversity, a simple categorization cannot accommodate it.
Walton said
Quite true. Although the earlier books are fun, they are less… well, “significant” is the only word I can come up with. I feel like he really found his “voice” with Men at Arms. He is our century’s Mark Twain.
One that hasn’t been mentioned that is one of my 2 or 3 favorites is Jingo. That is a work of sheer brilliance from beginning to end, and has a much better set of fulfilled prophecies than the bible.
They’ve stole my idea!!!
Paul W. @ 355: whoever that is @ 223:
“I’ll give some auntie-ish advice to the guys here who are talking about Not Getting Any.”
Am I among the people that’s directed at?
That’s me, Ron Sullivan, Queen of Forgetting I have to Sign These Damned Things Separately No Matter How Often I Go Tweak GooHoo.
Answer: No. In fact, to some extent I was trying to make an end-run around what you’re talking about to talk to Those Other Guys (for a waiterly def. of “guys”).
There are supply/demand problems about what people want, and what they have to offer, and they’re very important.
One thing the supply/demand model makes easy is marketing. Marketing in the Mad. Ave. sense of telling people what they want and making it the norm. Also pumps up perceived scarcity. Not so good to carry around in one’s head when looking to meet mates or dates.
I think almost everybody realizes that in some respects—e.g., that there’s a problem with so many preferring people who are “good looking,” nice, interesting, charming, not fat, etc. than the available supply can satisfy. Not everybody is going to get what they want, and some people aren’t going to come close.
The sticky word there is “what.” Really. The “good looking” and “not fat” bits are of course strongly subject to fashion, which would be a clue that there’s marketing involved.
I have a standing joke that it’s all pheromones. It’s a joke, not even an hypothesis, but I’ll bet it’s not orthogonal to how things work when we let them, and not just for me.
I thought I liked tall green- or blue-eyed black-haired thin men and women until I met LotP, who’s barely taller than I am, hazel/brown eyed, off-blond rather the way I am, and red-bearded. (It was only a mustache then. He was kinda skinny but we’ve grown old and well-fed together.)
At the time I was in the middle of my catting-around phase, if you will. I say “middle” because the only change I made was in focus. I wasn’t looking for anything OR anybody; in fact, Berkeley was only supposed to be a stop on the way Elsewhere.
The thing is, he didn’t fit any of my criteria, insofar as I had them. (That was mostly from noticing whom I’d fallen for in the past.) He just was Right.
I’d bet he’d frame it (sorry) a bit differently, but there it is. He {something} right, and smelled is as close as I can get but not quite on target. Of course I didn’t know until we were together. He’s my intellectual match and a thoroughly kind and decent person with talents galore and a wicked wit, but I didn’t know that when we jumped into bed.
Market ideas would not have worked for either of us, and I’m betting on Ugol’s Law that we’re not outliers, much.
I’d legalize prostitution just for harm reduction, by the way. And not as the end of a solution, just as Step One. Wanna help, folks in general? Vote, donate, and stop using “whore” as an insult.
David Marjanović @ 364:
Death talks in capital letters. Yep, that’s still going on.
Do you guys mind if I rant about cancer here?
‘I have a standing joke that it’s all pheromones.’
and I couldn’t resist – god, devil, OT, food etc.
More threats to a Danish Newspaper, as Christopher Hitchens notes in Slate:
Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2247256/
No. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Gyeong Hwa Pak @ 382:
Rant away.
two birds with one stone.
And I’m greatly amused that he picked Costa Rica, which hasuniversal, nationalized healthcare :-p
As an engineer (and a Bristolian) I am rather prone to ask questions that include ‘yeahbut what’s it for?’ And I know that the proper answer in science and art often boils down to ‘it’s not for anything, it’s just beautiful’
Yeahbut, this discussion about the definition of race, what’s it for?
Surely everyone here can agree that we are all human, that we all share a very recent common ancestor but that there are wide variations between populations.
However, my limited understanding of statistics leads me to believe that knowledge of a person’s (opposed perhaps to a population’s?) genetic inheritance is largely useless as a predictor of anything really useful about that person.
*plaintively* what’s it for?
Rev BDC @ 342: Your tongue must be getting in the way of your typing again as your link to the world’s largest BLT actually linked to the world’s longest BLT.
And did you have to mop up your keyboard after salivating on it while reading said article?
Unfortunately, my older Discworld books are not at hand so I cannot check, but my recollection is Death never talked in quotemarks. Assuming he did in some books, I wonder if that’s a difference between the N.Manic and proper (Britoons) editions?
Jadehawk @ 387:
Ha! Truly, you can’t make this shit up. The Lulz at Limbaugh’s expense are somewhat tempered by the presence of the rampant wackaloonery at HuffPo, however. Just today there’s another antivax rant by Jenny McCarthy and a 9/11 Truther spew by Jesse Ventura. *sigh*.
blf, in the U.S. editions, Death always speaks in capital letters.
Okay here it goes,
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE IS NOT BETTER THAN CONVENTIONAL.
The people in my cultural perspective of cancer class seem to think that altmed is okay just because it makes people happier, it avoids “death”, and it’s cheaper (which it ain’t). They think it’s more affective because of that. NO IT’S NOT. Whether or not it makes makes one happy is completely irrelevant to whether it’s affective. It doesn’t fit internationally accepted scientific standards, it’s not affective. I understand that hope can be good for the individual as a promoter and enabler. But god damn it, I dare anyone to show me proof that hope kill cancer cells. There are much better ways of having hope without deluding oneself and wasting one’s money on altmed. Furthermore, it’s not the point of the class to say altmed is better; the point of the class is to understand the narratives, the cultural implications, the economic factors of cancer and its various treatments. But just because people turn to altmed due being economically disadvantaged, doesn’t make it affective.
I can’t accept the “hairdresser” analogy. – Badgersdaughter
Oh, I have no problem with that analogy – my wife cuts what little remains of my hair :-p
I have been grading all fucking day and I am going to have to keep going all fucking night. – Sven DiMilo
I suggest that to even things out, you make sure you fuck all grading day, and keep going all grading night :-p
Knockgoats, you might be vaguely interested in one of my replies to strange gods, above at #175.
Longest / largest. WHATEVER
DID YOU SEE HOW FREAKIN’ BIG IT WAS
Happy birthday, PZ!
#390 blf / #392 Caine
My wife has collected all the Terry Pratchett books as they have come out in the UK which makes them all (worthless?) first editions.
As far as I can make out, Death always speaks in small capitals and without quotation marks. Other characters use single quote marks.
I can’t speak for any other countries.
Caine@392 ends with
GHP@393 immediately responds:
Is GHP Locutus of Death?
Considering how many preventable deaths are caused by adherence to ‘alternative medicine’, that’s probably not too far off, Paul W.
A counter to my own advice, tho’.
Auntie Ron Sullivan
Excuse me, where did I say or imply he didn’t? I was speculating only on whether or not what he said was ever quoted, and if it ever was, whether or not that was one of the edits for the N.Manic editions (like the reversal of the single and double quotes; in the Britoon editions, Britoon quotemarking convention is used; in the N.Manic editions I’ve seen/have, N.Manic quotemarking convention is used).
I always picture Death silently pointing his bony finger at Ebenezer Scrooge’s headstone in A Christmas Carol. He actually speaks? In CAPS?
Rev BDC – Do you think the “longest or largest or whatever” BLT was a BYOM* event?
*bring your own mayonnaise
That’s why I like the site whatstheharm.net . It’s a collection of stories of people injuried, disfigured, sued, or killed by everything from feng shui to cults to ear candling.
HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT I’M NOT DEATH. BWAHAHAHA!!!9!
If Josh, OSP gets to be he Locutus of Gays, then I get to bet a Locutus of something right?
Which brings me to another point, one of the girls in our class noted how a child was taken away from his parents because they refused chemo in favor of altmed. She noted how sad it was to adhere to conventional medicine. But the child lived, and that’s the fucking point. I can point a number of incidences where faith healing, an altmed, lead to dead kids which defeats the purpose of medicine.
Not exactly, and not exactly. It’s made clear in several of the books Death’s words just seem to show up as-if they were spoken, but without all that messy business of being vocalised and vibrating air and so on. Besides, how would Death speak? What does he have to make the air vibrate et al.? Hence the surprise that, maybe in some versions (presumably only in the older books), what he communicates is in quotemarks.
And it’s (always?) typeset as small caps, not full-sized caps.
OK, so, so while everyone else is talking about s-e-x, I will post something about d-e-a-t-h. No, not “Talks Like This”, but rather, world-spanning annihilation of life. Complete and massive extinction. Death on a level beyond imagining. DEATH! 1
That’s right, this is about Chicxulub.
Boom.
I first read about Gerta Keller’s competing hypothesis (that the Chicxulub impact was not responsible for the K-Pg mass extinction, but rather, that the iridium spike and subsequent extinction event correlated with some other event (impact/vulcanism) that took place some hundreds of thousands of years after the Chicxulub impact) some years ago, and was reminded of it, and of her belief that she has more evidence in support of this competing hypothesis, while recently reading Don Prothero’s 2004 book about the radiation of mammals in the Paleogene and Neogene periods. I asked about the topic here on the Thread, and David Marjanović noted that :
However, Keller also seemed to be claiming that she had found tsunami deposits from Chicxulub in Texas and Mexico which included stuff like burrows and such, and on top of that, the iridium layer. Well. If she were interpreting that correctly, then there was indeed a distinct time period between the impact and the K-Pg event — whatever that actually was.
Alas, no-one had a response to that at the time. Alan B provided some information about the K-Pg boundary, and David Marjanović added some additional information, but didn’t analyze Keller’s claims. Josh the geologist was also too busy to address it, when I asked again.
Fortunately, the March 2010 paper in Science noted earlier in the Thread (The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary, reference 0 below) addresses Keller’s claims while providing all of the evidence in favor of the Chicxulub impact being the direct cause of the K-Pg boundary layer and extinction event.
I do not normally have access to Science, but I now have a PDF copy of the document, by various means. 2 I am glad to see that they address Keller’s claims, and the paragraphs that do so I shall copy here.
So, as I understand them, the first paragraph quoted summarizes Keller in general, the second and fourth go into more detail of what David M. wrote about infilled material in the crater and so on, the third explains Keller’s additional claims based on her finds in Texas, but argues that the alleged tsunami deposits are from earlier in the Cretaceous and long pre-date the Chicxulub impact in the first place.
References:
===========
0: Schulte, P. et al. 4 2010. The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. Science 327, 1214. DOI: 10.1126/science.1177265
Reference numbers used in quoted paragraphs from reference 0:
=============================================================
14. G. Keller, W. Stinnesbeck, T. Adatte, D. Stüben, Earth Sci. Rev. 62, 327 (2003).
20. I. Arenillas et al., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 249, 241 (2006).
22. J. Smit, W. Alvarez, A. Montanari, P. Claeys, J. M. Grajales-Nishimura, Spec. Pap. Geol. Soc. Am. 307, 151 (1996).
23. P. Schulte, A. Kontny, Spec. Pap. Geol. Soc. Am. 384, 191 (2005).
31. G. Keller et al., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 255, 339 (2007).
32. G. Keller et al., Meteorit. Planet. Sci. 39, 1127 (2004).
33. L. Alegret, E. Molina, E. Thomas, Geology 29, 891 (2001).
34. J. A. Arz, L. Alegret, I. Arenillas, Meteorit. Planet. Sci. 39, 1099 (2004).
35. J. Smit, S. V. D. Gaast, W. Lustenhouwer, Meteorit. Planet. Sci. 39, 1113 (2004).
36. T. J. Bralower et al., Geology, in press.
Note that the supplementary figures and tables referenced are in the supplementary material, which is a PDF that can be freely downloaded by all.
________________________________________
1: Cake is not an option.
2: After a long and arduous hike through wastelands, forests, hills, and tunnels, and a mysterious coach-ride, I arrived at an institution of higher learning, where I proceed to use my secret ninja skills, as well as a grappling gun, rappelling harness, lockpicks, alarm disabler, fake fingerprints and retinas, USB computer system cracker (with large onscreen display as it cracks each character of a password), and many other devices and techniques that I just now threw in to add verisimilitude, excitement, and local color to an otherwise bald and insipid narrative. Fortunately, no-one was killed or even maimed in my adventure, although some security guards might be a bit sore from slipping on the ball bearings I tossed to distract them while they chased after me. 3
3: Or maybe the PDF fell off the back of a truck. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
4: There are 41 authors listed on this paper (one of whom died during the final revision), which is only 5 pages long (not counting the supplementary material). I nearly think that might very well be called a cross-disciplinary consensus. 5
5: Or, in the atrocious slang of modern youth, a lot of scientists are saying to Keller et. al.: “Geology: You’re doing it wrong.”
Ouch. Half of Europe says “whore!” when they have a hammer-thumb encounter. :o)
Though the same languages have a tendency to use it as an expression of surprise… so maybe it has already started shifting. It definitely has in French.
Death talks in capital letters without quotation marks around them, except in the oldest few books.
Or were the quotation marks stupidly added in the German translation? Of the few Discworld books I’ve read, at least half weren’t in the original… :-(
<high-five> :-D
He’ll have to go to China to find the current American system (only a bit worse… yes, worse).
This past weekend yet again had me grateful for modern medicine. My eight year old niece got pneumonia. I was so serious, she was on oxygen for two days. But that is the point, it was serious but not life threatening. A few decades past, a child like that might have drowned.
Thankfully, her parents are so brainwashed, they did not even consider alternative methods of treating her.
Some early editions of some books do have full caps. They are wrong.
PaulW… I’m not sure which or who you’re talking to, but I’ve never considered your personal life actually. Up until you mentioned it, that is.
As for Walton, anything that I say to him on that subject is said as a peer and not as some kind of expert or aunty. I forget exactly how old he is but I think he’s only five or so years younger than me.
And I say it only because I think the kind of negative anticipation he sets up for himself probably hurts his chances as much or more than the actual constraints themselves.
That and I just generally like his online persona.
I get pretty down on myself but it’s not about relationships but rather professional options and the ever-nagging worry that I’ve not done anything important enough, met my own potential, or developed enough talent, picked the right jobs, been good enough at x, y, z… made enough money, won enough awards, worked enough towards social improvement, helped people enough… blah blah blah.
Now as for “fat” or “good looking” as an either/or in the dating pool. I don’t know that it’s so simple. I had a terrible crush on a hugely tall fat bald guy who made a decent wage probably but nothing too overwhelming. Why? I dunno, I liked him. There’s more to attraction than fitting some specific ideal. Then again I guess it’s established I’m weird girl anyway.
Eh… but I was in a relationship and in general I’m not that sort of person to go damaging one relationship for another.
Maybe in some ways I’m just a much bigger optimist when it comes to meeting people though.
@ Owlmirror:
Yes, I saw the Science paper this week–seems pretty settled to me.
As a related aside, my family and I recently watched a BBC program(me) entitled “What really killed the Dinosaurs?” which presented Keller’s alternative hypothesis, among others. My husband was quite enthralled with the presentation of Geology/Paleontology in this piece, and at one point turned to the rest of us and gushed “Wow, wouldn’t it be fun to be a scientist?!!”
(For those of you who don’t know, I am, in fact a full time, PhD-havin’ scientist–in molecular genetics)
I cocked my eyebrow at him and he qualified, slightly less gushily:
“Um, I mean, that kind of scientist”
Yeah, right, sweetheart. The “fun” kind. Jackass.
Thanks a lot for that presentation, Owlmirror! Could you send the pdf my way?
Janine, I’m glad your niece is okay. That had to be frightening.
Tell me about it! I’m glad to hear she is ok. That can be so dangerous.
I have pneumonia currently and even as a healthy adult I have been toggling between extremely sick/barely breathing and somewhat weak for the past two months. Currently awaiting another chest xray and a decision on what to do next or what antibiotics to try. Luckily no one is suggesting Reiki or removing toxins from my feet as a treatment. The upside is I’ve lost 7 lbs already … at this rate I’ll be able to fit into my clothes from highschool by next month!
But seriously I’m really glad to hear that she’s recovered.
:-D
KOPD wrote:
Ooh, I like that. I’m going to use it as my url everywhere I post from now on.
Thank you. Cannot say she is completely recovered but she is off the oxygen and allowed to go home.
Ol’Greg, two months? Good luck with that. I hope it has not been too bad of a financial drag.
I saw that Walton@396, fine as far as it goes, but there’s really no need to wait! None of their pledges to respect civil liberties will turn out to mean what they seem to mean, should they get a majority. Much the best guarantee against further authoritarian measures is a hung Parliament, which looks to be a real possiblity, though I think the odds are still on a Tory majority. The constituency where I vote is currently Labour, with LibDems and SNP almost tied for second place. I’ll probably vote SNP because of their opposition to Trident replacement.
I’m having trouble even keeping up with the Endless Thread alone, let alone the rest of Pharyngula!
Oh, and a very happy birthday, PZ! As it happens (or, if the universe is deterministic, was bound to be the case at the moment of the Big Bang), you’re just one day older than my younger brother.
My mysterious psychic ninja powers tell me that [first].[last] AT gmx.at will soon be present at a PDF-falling-from-back-of-truck incident.
Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with my mysterious psychic ninja self. What can you do? These things happen.
Oh, again – very best wishes, Ichthyic.
That site is great!
When I was young I worked for a while selling vitamins in one of those sports nutrition type stores that shall remain unamed. There is some shady stuff in there, but after a while I found myself more often than not talking people out of doing really really really stupid things like drinking creatine to “boost” their kidneys, or drinking weird concoctions because they need gall bladder surgery and don’t want to get it, or ear candles. I remember one woman just arguing with me forever about ear candles. We didn’t carry them.
But the saddest were the travelers and the truly disadvantaged. We were by an airport in a ghetto part of town. People would stop by as they flew back to visit relatives in far flung places, some times trying to bring something back to help them.
We would get people coming in who had family in very poor places wanting vitamins to cure things like typhoid.
We would also get very sick locals who couldn’t afford a doctor all the time. It was really sad to tell some one that they really probably need like flagil or something and should really see a doctor even if they have to pawn their tv or something to do it.
Re: “what’s the harm” specifically with regard to cancer, this account is one of the most horrifically compelling that I have ever read. In general, the SBM blog has a ton of great stuff about Cancer Quackery if anyone is interested.
I know. It’s crazy. Yeah it sucks as far as money goes but the bills haven’t hit yet, just the copays and scripts so we’ll see how I fare later.
Eek! And all the best to Janine MOFMA,OM’s niece and Ol’Greg, too. The worst I can offer is that a chunk of amalgam filling fell off upper right 5 while I was flossing on Sunday, food keeps getting stuck in the resulting cavity, and I’ve had to fix a dental appointment! (I can feel the waves of Pharyngulist sympathy washing over me already…)
I admit that, until just now when I looked it up with Generalissimo Google and on Wikipedia, I always thought ear candles and ear candling was satire.
Paul Simon and Willie Nelson singing “Graceland”:
Lynna @ 384,
thanks for that link, great article by Hitchens, if only politicians would listen.Maybe this is something that can and should be brought up at the GAC this weekend.
I’m off to claim ownership to my new rental place, notably by train, because my car is going to be in service for 2 weeks after the rear-ending the other day, great fun !
I might not mention the fact that I have an empty beachside house during the GAC to too many people haha…It’s in the burbs tho.
Ear-candling?
WTF!
I learn about new crazy stuff every day thanks to Pharyngula.
I don’t think you have to worry too much; there’s no time to do much else other than go to the convention – unless you’re talking about Sunday afternoon/evening after RD finishes up. Then we might be inquiring…
Uh-oh!
I think Pharyngula has been smited!
I have an 8am start Monday, and given lack of car that means getting up at 6 and taking the train to work…:-(
But that’s not saying that one can not have a few Absacker on Sunday evening…:-)
Ear-candling, huh? Whatever happened to hydrogen peroxide and a cotton ball? As a child, I loved to listen to the muddy fizz and feel the now hot liquid pouring from my earhole at session’s end.
TMI?
I had soem earwax problems, OK?
Antiochus – did you have to use castor oil in your ear first to help soften it all? That’s the really gross-feeling part.
Cecil Adams has an article on ear candling.
I always used just a hollow tube. One end in the ear, one in my mouth, and a really good blow. The wax, dead mice, live bats, and occasional hedgehog would, with enough huffing and puffing, be dislodged and blown into the internal hollowness. They rarely come out the other side, however, as they were captured by the really dense bit at the centre, spiralled inwards, and eventually vanished beyond the event horizon.
Disposing of the used tube was really easy. Just shove it further into the ear. It sides nicely down the now-cleaned channel until one end is attracted to the dense bit in the centre. Then it starts getting pulled in, deeper and deeper, and disappears inside with a WHOOSH!
Ol’Greg, I’m sorry to hear about your illness. Get well soon.
Regarding @#423, I’m increasingly inclined to the view that (despite the serious systemic faults of the NHS over here) there are substantial advantages to universal public funding of healthcare. Certainly, at a minimum, government should fund the provision of healthcare for those on particularly low incomes. No one should have to rely on quack remedies, or leave untreated conditions to worsen, because of being unable to afford basic primary care.
I would add that I don’t support the NHS model of healthcare provision, whereby government actually administers hospitals directly and employs physicians and health workers. A major practical failing of the NHS model is that the public expect and demand to be provided with every cutting-edge treatment (look up the Herceptin controversy, for an example), but are simultaneously unwilling to pay the substantially higher taxes that would be necessary to fund the best care for everyone. Not to mention the dangers of political interference in the provision of medical care, and the fact that the NHS does many flagrantly stupid things (like funding homeopathy with taxpayers’ money), because it is the politicians and bureaucrats, not doctors or healthcare professionals, who call the shots.
But some variant of the Canadian or Australian “universal insurance” model has much to commend it, IMO. Government shouldn’t be running hospitals or telling healthcare professionals how to do their jobs, but it should provide funding so that everyone, regardless of wealth, has access to a basic level of medical care. By analogy, it’s like the difference between government running farms and producing food (which would be a bad idea), and government providing welfare payments so that those with no income can afford food (which is a good idea, and is done in all civilised societies).
*cough* *cough*
The pdf hurled itself successfully in my general direction. :-)
…???
But anyway. I knew about ear candles (saw an ad maybe 10 years ago), and I raise you young French royalists. I found out about them when I saw a sticker in the métro a few days ago (100% jeunes – 100% royalistes, no, duh!) and wanted to post the link right away, but it’s just so surreal that I kept forgetting!
This just in :
Faith Falls Down Under
Owlmirror, thank you for that marvelous post. Can you send the PDF to me as well? If so, send to lynna[at]artmeetsadventure[dot]com.
Rorschach, glad you enjoyed the justified rant from Hitchens. I didn’t include in my post the excerpts from the offensive letter. I was, however, glad to see that Hitchens gave us a good sampling of the outrageous, lawyerly idiocy of the threatened “litigation”.
Carlie–No castor oil. I bet that feels gross. I have never actually even seen castor oil as it turns out.
Does it help?
My dad’s an ENT and he reckons that between cleaning up the messy outcomes of earcandling and doing myringoplasties to patch eardrums that some idiot’s pushed a hole through by using cotton buds, he’s paid for weddings for 3 daughters.
ol’ Greg, hon, a few years ago I had pneumonia for more than a month. It took everything I had to get to the bathroom when I needed to and then I would lie in my recliner and sweat for an hour. ugh.
It was a viral pneumonia, so antibiotics didn’t help. When it dragged into it’s second month I was moaning to my doc about feeling better but not better enough and she said, “Hmm. Let’s try this.” She treated me for mild asthma. Three days later I was back at work. I then realized that some things that had happened in the past had been mild asthma attacks. Apparently the pneumonia had triggered a worsening of the asthma. These days if I get a cold I always end up back on asthma meds. It only occasionally (less than once a week) bothers me otherwise.
Anyway, I can sympathize and I hope you get better soon. It is a miserable feeling.
Am I going to be getting in your way?
Crossing the international date line to skip your birthday PZ?
Also: Ear Candles=freakin weird. I just don’t get it.
Also the second: An article in the WSJ about Mosab Hassan Yousef. It was from March 5th, it’s called ‘They Need to Be Liberated From Their God’
The thing that’s weird about it, is that he insinuates that they need to be liberated from the Islamic and Jewish gods to become Christians.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103481069258868.html
Freakin’ weird.
I cannot confirm or deny any PDFs being put onto trucks in precarious positions.
However, my mysterious psychic ninja powers tell me that by a remarkable coïncidence, a carrier pigeon winging its way from a secret military base to Area 51 will accidentally drop a PDF right over your e-mail inbox.
Fancy that.
I’ve now read some of the manifest of the Young Royalists. Tedious! “We are that youth who, proud of their History [yes, capital H], loving their country”…
At least the Serbian royalists my dad once found on the Internet had the decency to make a rhyming one-liner: bez kralja ne valja – “without a king it doesn’t work”.
Area 51 is one of my favorite places. There’s so much desert, so many long vistas … and a surprising number of unexplained PDFs arriving from who knows where — PDFs that contain sexy stuff like “bedding planes” and “impact-ejecta-rich red clay layers” and “ballistically ejected shocked quartz grains”. Bliss.
Psst! Don’t let Walton see this.
apparently it’s now illegal to have a miscarriage in Utah – or so the law could be interpreted to read.
http://current.com/12udc4c
The worst I can offer is that a chunk of amalgam filling fell off upper right 5 while I was flossing on Sunday, food keeps getting stuck in the resulting cavity
ha! add that exact same issue to my list of woes.
lost 75% of a filling in that exact spot 2 weeks ago.
most irritating thing? toungie loves to probe the empty spot over and over again.
:P
I have pneumonia currently and even as a healthy adult I have been toggling between extremely sick/barely breathing and somewhat weak for the past two months.
yeeouch. I think you and I are competing for most debilitating illness of the month. Like you, at least I’ve lost weight. I’m under 100kg for the first time in 10 years (lost 8kg so far).
Isn’t it fun to feel like a walk to the corner store is a 5 mile hike up a mountain?
Yeah it sucks as far as money goes but the bills haven’t hit yet, just the copays and scripts so we’ll see how I fare later.
*sigh* Mine hit me at the worse time possible, right while they were processing my medical exam for my 2 year work permit. If it had hit 2 weeks later, I would have been fully covered by NZ health.
as it is… I’m currently looking at out of pocket for 100% of 4 hospital stays and 2 surgeries.
Hey, at least it’s a far cry cheaper than in the states. everything here is 1/3 to 1/10 as much as it is in the states, from the surgeries to the hospital stays to the scrips. seriously, the scrips here are almost all subsidized, even for non-citizens, and average about 3.00 NZD. Things i used to pay 80.00 for in the states are literally less than 10% of that here.
Still, buffybot and I here have reached the proverbial bottom of the barrel this month. My family is non-existent at this point, so hopefully the “inlaws” will be able to come to the rescue.
On the bright side, at least I managed to finegle a temporary work permit out of immigration here, and while it won’t cover any medical, it did at least let me apply for a sweet job here.
now if i can just get healthy enough for the interview…
anywho, I’m pullin’ for ya. pneumonia sucks, but if you’re getting good homecare and good drugs, you should be able to kick it pretty soon, yeah?
David Marjanović #448
I’ve just read La réforme des institutions politiques (reformation of political institutions) of Les Jeunes Royalistes. They’re apparently Orleanists supporting le Comte de Paris.
KOPD | March 9, 2010 9:06 AM:
I don’t own a tv, but after reading your comment, I went and saw it on atheist media blog, where I posted this:
Oliver Stone’s JFK, Loose Change, Zeitgeist, and other garbage have convinced many people that every mention of the word “conspiracy” indicates a lunatic.
But a few years ago, Bin Laden, a number of Saudia Arabians, and a few other muslims conspired to attack the WTC and Pentagon. No, there’s no evidence Bush was connected to it, and Al Qadea never had much power, but it was nonetheless a conspiracy. Nixon’s CRP is another example of a real conspiracy, and they did enable Nixon to win the 1972 election by an enormous margin – see All The President’s Men. But they didn’t manage to keep the secret long enough for Nixon to finish his 2nd term in office. They had enough power to prevent significant punishment of nearly all of the people involved, but many lost most of their political power and had their reputations damaged. Conspiracies do happen in real life, but they’re almost always far simpler than anything depicted in most novels, they seldom stay secret as long as the conspirators intend, and they often break up due to differing aims of the conspirators. And although some have had widespread (but not necessarily strong) influence, there’s no evidence of one that has had influence everywhere.
The RCC does have a lot of power – but most of that power is out in the open. And it does have a lot of influence on the US government, but most of it is indirect and imprecise; they don’t call shots directly, but they do play a big role in keeping gay marriage illegal, and restricting abortion. I doubt any RCC official made a direct suggestion to the USPS. Rather, it’s more likely that the RCC’s aggressive, long-running PR campaign for Mother Teresa led ordinary US citizens to independently suggest the stamp to the USPS, or to USPS people making the decision. That’s actually how the vast majority of influence works – not through secret channels, but through the opposite – through messages we are all so heavily bombarded with that we can’t possibly ignore the message.
I doubt Dan Barker is the conspiracy theorist this funny, but obviously cherry-picked joke depicts him as. More likely, he was trying to explain that the RCC’s influence on the US government exceeds most people’s estimation, and he was quoted out of context. I’d like to see the full interview.
@lynna 354:
Keep us deformed.
grossly.
;)
That is so disrespectful to the deformed. You might as well just start openly supporting eugenics, you godless monsters!
godless monster
and proud of it!
;)
as an addendum to the discussion of race/genealogy/populations/phenotypes and genotypes, did anyone catch this article:
http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2010/03/genetic_ancestry_testing_peopl.php
Dearest Nerd O’Deadhead,
It’s nicest when you see red.
Logic you lack, try to stay on track
Or at least remember what was said.
You say I’m a quack and a fool,
But I’m using a much better tool,
They’re studies, my friend, and so I will send,
You to medline, or maybe to school.
The rest of you lot, have you even got,
A single reputable statistician?
Or do you rely, like that O’Deadwood guy,
On a psychiatrist and a magician?
Quackfraud, you aren’t talented, witty or interesting. Just a con-man who has zero evidence for all your huckstery claims.
man, the fact that you spend so much time HERE on a fucking BLOG, desperate to somehow convince us that you really are doing an honest living, when it’s so obvious you ARE NOT, tells me volumes about your self-esteem.
what a loser you are, quacky.
…and what’s more, you evidently know it.
I think Dr. Quack doesn’t want to engage in conversation, but just likes being the subject of our discussion. He never seems to add anything to the discussion except to try to stir things up. Best ignore him, I suspect.
Why is the woomeister spending so much time and effort to convert the rational to irrationality?
Quack,
After reading that poem I was going to write ‘don’t quit your day job’, but it probably do a lot of good if you did.
Wow, would-be doggerel by Quackalicious.
Nah, he’s deriding you, not being apoplectic.
He was always ahead of you.
:)
Which would that be?
You forgot the citations.
Bring on the statistics.
We rely on ourselves.
Feynmaniac, it would be good if Quackster got an actual job.
The Quackster still has the same problem as when he started. We aren’t falling for his woo. His woo is dangerous to his
patientsvictims, maybe even hastening their death due to non-treatment. And he wonders why nobody is listening to his garbage. Good, reproducible data that impresses the good MD’s who post here, and the medical consultants for magazines like Skeptical Inquirer is absolutely required. So he has nothing but woo filled hot air. An explosive combination with a bad case of the stoopid.By the way Q, we scientists look at all data, including the data showing your ideas to be woo filled verbal salads without any congency. Find another job for the safety of your victims. Telephone solicitor or used car salesman, or even just a pick-pocket, are far, far more honest jobs.
Quackalicious @ 458:
My mother trusted altie med
To take care of her ills
Because her friends messed with her head
And sold her lots of pills.
My mother trusted in the Lord
And also quacks like you
And spent more than she could afford
To make her dreams come true.
The cancer got her in the end
But not without a fight.
That’s how I lost my dearest friend.
I miss my mom tonight.
I’m writing this, sad, and perplexed
why you are such a quack.
I live in fear I might be next,
and like Mommy, won’t come back.
Fuck you, you bastard. How many mothers did you kill this year?
And that pathetic, substandard bit of doggerel is all the breath I’m wasting on that goddamned walking case of negligent homicide.
Hey, if he has the evidence then let him present it. After all, that’s all people are asking for here. What evidence is there that his work is a) efficacious, and b) that what we call medicine is not. If he can do that by not cherry-picking papers (three positive and fifty negative / neutral papers – if you cite the three and not the other 50 you are cherry picking) and that the studies have a large sample size, double blinded and quality controlled, well then I’m all for him presenting his case.
If he can demonstrate scientifically that his techniques work, then I’ll stop calling him a quack and change my mind on those therapies. He says he has the capacity to do this, so unless he’s just talking out of his arse let him give the chance to present his case. Though I’m betting its just rhetoric – it always is with quacks.
badgersdaughter:
Quackster would never answer this, at least never answer it honestly. That two-bit fraud won’t even admit that he does harm. For all the people who die as a consequence of altmed woo and those who peddle it, the harm ripples out, leaving anger and grief in its wake. One more reason to constantly call these thieving liars out at every opportunity.
The Quackster, pile of steaming shit he is, wouldn’t even address a question posed to him about Andreas Moritz, the cancer quack. Instead of doing a bit of reading and answering (as to whether Moritz is a quack and harmful), he pled ignorance. Big surprise. He doesn’t dare diss another quack, because if he did, he’d have to be honest about what a criminal he is himself.
Kel, OM @ 469:
He already has. His idea of evidence is articles from the journal of alternative medicine. Nothing there.
I know I’ve linked to this before, but it’s very relevant
pfffft….
how can they tell if something was already eaten twice?
nerd-love is awesomely adorable
yeah, I know. if I had the time, I’d have looked for a less stupid source for that. but i didn’t.
that was my first thought, too. the irony of that struck me as interesting, to say the least.
surreal indeed. too bad I can’t read any of that for even the most basic level of comprehension. at least past the “youth is the fire of the world” (?!) part; and something about teeth.
——
I’ve quick-red the thread and my eyeballs hurt, so I seem to have missed the particular posts in which people are describing their ill states of health; so I’ll just send a generic “get better, y’all” out to every pharyngulite who’s ill right now. because I’m not rereading this thread.
Case in point,
http://www.truthout.org/fiction-marja-city-was-us-information-war57470
Jon Stewart is tearing some jackass journalist apart on The Daily Show tonight. Woohoo!
Jon Stewart fucking rocks! Why are the some of the best interviews on the freaking comedy channel? What the fuck is wrong with our real news organizations?
So true. Whenever I think about it I am reminded of this painting.
Good night, all! Happy birthday, PZ!
Feynmaniac,
I love that painting! It’s strangely reminiscent of Jon Stewart’s apparent mood as of late.
Badgersdaughter, my hat is off and my heart goes out to you. That’s all I can say.
Re: less-toxic woo, I live in Berkeley. Yeah I’ve seen ear candles. Scared me half to death; all I could see was my hair catching fire. I’m waiting for toenail candles to appear as a treatment for that damned toenail fungus that seems to be everywhere* in the last decade. I walk downtown and, two blocks from my house, I pass a block that’s mostly taken up by North Atlantic Books (publisher of the toroidal-tiger guy) and some crystalaurahealing store that advertises ~healinnnnng~ ~readinnnnnngs~ by phone, and a chiropractor.
*OK, mostly on toenails. I’d like to see the epidemiology of that, though.
Other than The Luggage, Death is my favorite Pratchett character, Foul Old Ron notwithstanding. I covet The Luggage. You can keep your minions, your henchpersons, your butlers, even your goons; I want The Luggage.
Anyone here read Terry Bisson?
how can they tell if something was already eaten twice?
I’d imagine it tastes different.
I’ve seen two cars on fire that I can recall offhand. One was a few blocks from me and I never did see a driver. The other showed up when we were doing a Christmas Bird Count up in Yolo County, not too far from Davis but pretty much middle of nowhere. It was rainy; we were coming down the canyon road, and we heard this odd {whoomp} and came round the bend to see a brand-new sporty-muscle kinda car that we’d noticed on the way up, only this time it was in flames. Just off someone’s long dirt driveway on a patch of newly-green grass, a safe distance from the house and any trees.
I’m reaching for the phone but there’s a young guy on a cellphone walking down the driveway. We stop; he sputters something about the car just bursting into flame, he dunno, visiting friends, just noticed… He seemed oddly calm though. The four of us muttered, “Insurance fire,” more or less in unison.
Pulled off to do more counting around the next bend and kept hearing more {whoomp}s, which I took to be the tires and something volatile, by turns. Took a good ten minutes for the county firetruck to come past us.
I must say it was picturesque, all that mossy damp winter green and deep brown and this thing in flames in the middle of it.
Fr gawdsake, Icthyic, Ol’ Greg, everyone, get better! Y’all are scaring me half to death. Virtual hot toddies to all; Icthyic, you can collect yours when you’re up to it. Cripes, can you even take sedatives when your liver’s acting up? Should I row over there and hit you with a brick?
Ron, a login with your name, yay!
Who wouldn’t covet The Luggage? Wouldn’t find me turning away a nifty Sapient Pearwood trunk.
As a result of the Daily Show, I now perceive BBC news journalism as satire. In the USA only Stewart will sit politicians down and say “You screwed up completely, how come?”, whereas the Today programme does that every morning, to everybody. I once heard them flat-out tell a Lib Dem spokesman that their policies were largely irrelevant as they were never going to form a government. It was true, but it seemed a little harsh.
I’m reaching for the phone but there’s a young guy on a cellphone walking down the driveway. We stop; he sputters something about the car just bursting into flame, he dunno, visiting friends, just noticed… He seemed oddly calm though. The four of us muttered, “Insurance fire,” more or less in unison.
ahh, don’t be so sure.
decades ago my cousin used to be a cattle rancher, and had to drive thousands of miles each week to price feed and figure out which markets to best sell his products in (both just beef, and prime studs).
well, he drove a VW rabbit, and he put so many miles on that thing so fast, I think it must have melted the injectors or something, because I was visiting one day about a year after he bought the car, and I SAW it just… catch fire right in his driveway. He was around back (it was a big place, so “round back” meant at least 10 mins away), and I didn’t know where the water hoses or anything like that was (hell, I was only about 13 anyway; probably thought it was pretty “gnarly” to watch it burn anyway).
thing just burned up, right there on the spot.
He was pretty calm about it too, surprised, but calm.
Should I row over there and hit you with a brick?
I would seriously consider that offer, if it wouldn’t take you so damn long to get here by rowing.
got myself a scrip for some sleeping pills, and hope that will work to put me out at least every other night (doc says definitely DO NOT use every night, or you will get dependent on them :P )
If you make it over here within the next week, you can slam my head with a brick every other night, maybe?
cheers
Oh, hi,
I can has facepalm for bad science “noooz”?
I happened to find the sciencedaily news release about the Chicxulub paper, and noted that it was annoyingly vague on the whole Keller hypothesis:
Not helpful for those of us who want details, so I’m even more glad I got the PDF. But that’s not the bad science in and of itself.
One of the related stories linked to was about a paper that the K-Pg extinction was not responsible for the diversification of mammals. The actual paper is whatever it is, but there’s a line in the news release that is one of the most mind-bogglingly wrong sentences that I’ve ever read in a science news release, and I only have a layperson’s knowledge of the palaeontology of mammals.
These are the clauses of the sentence that fill me with frustrated SIWOTI syndrome:
However, most of these groups have since either died out completely, such as Andrewsarchus (an aggressive wolf-like cow)
Wait… what?
1) Andrewsarchus is not a “group” (or if it is, it’s not a particularly large one). I suspect that someone originally said/wrote mesonychids, and offered Andrewsarchus as an example of a mesonychid, and the reporter bollixed up that reference and explanation very badly. Note that the identification of Andrewsarchus as being a mesonychid is now in doubt, and it is tentatively considered to be more likely an artiodactyl.
2) No-one knows if Andrewsarchus was actually “aggressive” or not. This is a minor quibble, I suppose, but the real fuckup is next.
3) Mesonychids were related to artiodactyls, and Andrewsarchus may have been an artiodactyl, and artiodactyla does include cows … but saying that Andrewsarchus was a cow is as stupid and confused as calling Darwinius 1 a human. It’s just mind-bogglingly dumb.
Did some malevolent creationist edit down a paragraph that actually explained what mesonychids were into that horrible result?
___________________________________________
1: Yes, I’ve seen the work that emphasizes that Darwinius was almost certainly not even ancestral to humans, which is kinda my point. Andrewsarchus was not even ancestral to cows.
——
+1
Kel @ 445,
Uhm, to be honest I hadn’t thought of Monday morning lol, you mighn’t want to be kicked out at 6am haha…
Travelodge or Victoria Hotel should have rooms though if it’s too inconvenient.
PZ is in the air already, and only 2 days to go, yay !!!
Ichthyic:
I hope that doesn’t make the liver situation worse. You’ve been ongoing with that for way too long already. Sleep is good though. We could always contract the hitting you with a brick out, I’m sure Bride of Shrek wouldn’t mind…
I hope everyone who is ill gets better.
Apologies to anyone who thought they deserved a specific well wishing.
We could always contract the hitting you with a brick out
meh, I’m living with another (rare posting) pharyngulite (buffybot), who just saw that post and has now eagerly volunteered herself for the job, since I’ve been keeping her awake many nights too.
:)
Nah, that’s fine. Leaving Melbourne by 8 anyway to get back to Canberra. I’m sure there’s some place I can grab a coffee and a danish while I wait for my mates to get ready.
Talking about PZ, something for you evo-devo folks out there to chew over :
Sonic Hedgehog found in mice ectoderm
And more GAC in the news :
HeraldSun opinion piece regarding the GAC
I’ll just nip out and get a brick.
Oh dear, now I am slipping back to Python again.
“Nurse! Apply the anesthetic!”
Python ! What coincidence, somehow I was thinking of John Cleese earlier !
Cleese Interview 2009
And a longtime question FINALLY gets answered! (I kept hearing of Ichthyic’s having found love amidst the postings, but somehow missed it when it happened and didn’t want to ask who it was.) I hope the pills (or brick) brought sleep.
Owlmirror, ScienceDaily continues to be a source of disappointment for me. I was so excited for the site when I found it, until I realized that although it’s all science news, it’s science news as reported by the person who usually does the Out on the Town segment and is substituting in the science section for the day or something.
Antiochus (from upthread): no idea if oil really helps. It seems like it would, but I never experimented with it. I was quite young and those were the doctor’s orders.
In case anyone wonders what the CEO is up to, I suspect it’s this :
QF94 LAX to MEL
I knew it!
All that semifascistoid pestering to get us to floss is reallu just a plot be dentists to drum up more business.
/tinfoil
Poor bastard. I’m not a good flyer; I’m not that enthusiastic about the hour or so I’ve got to spend in the air to get there. It doesn’t help that on two occasions while landing I’ve had inappropriate songs on either the internal music player or my own: Crash Into Me by Dave Matthews (that’s obvious) and Lucky by Radiohead – less obvious, but it features the chorus ‘pull me out, of the aircrash; pull me out, of the lake’ – not exactly reassuring…
You people have all been a terrible influence on me. I seem to be rapidly turning into a hippie leftie commie unsound liberal; I even found myself listening to and enjoying this anti-war song last night. :-)
Right, I’m off to bed. After tonight only one more sleep to go ’til the GAC starts. Sweet!
:-D
Second comment from there:
“Clearly the Tories want power – they always have. The difference this time is that they cannot articulate why! The country is fed up with Brown but his calls on the current economic situation have been largely correct, whereas Cameron is clueless. Even though Brown got us into this mess the electorate is perhaps coming to the uncomfortable conclusions that he may have the best route for getting us out of it.”
Didn’t find that while skimming. Which page is it on?
(What I did find is that they believe a king as supreme judge would guarantee the independence of the judiciary. TSIB.)
…and I should have clicked on it the first time, but didn’t!!! A bit of redundancy is a good thing.
Sorry. Here, have some awesomely toothed almost-marsupials.
Looks and smells different, or so I’ve read.
Can’t be said often enough.
I’ll translate the juiciest parts later today and/or tomorrow and/or on the weekend. Some are funny. Perhaps all. :-)
The “fire” part is the one word I saw I didn’t know. Dictionary sez… yes, fire, but more poetic: 1. (Kohlen-)Glut; Feuersbrunst; 2. fig. (Liebes-)Glut. Embers; blaze/conflagration; figuratively embers, embers of love. :-} So… it’s not only way over-the-top poetic imagery (“when it cools off, the whole world’s teeth chatter”), it’s also revolutionary imagery. The Revolution sits so deep in the French consciousness that even the royalists are revolutionaries :-Þ :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Teeth? I need to check.
And gave the spokesman a welcome opportunity to rant about defeatist attitudes, rally the voters to dare the unimaginable, say “Yes, we can!!!”…
Did he make use of it? I bet he did.
Any day of the week, and twice on Sundays! :-)
This is such a classic case of Hanlon’s Razor that even the truth machine wouldn’t argue with me over that.
:-)
I didn’t even know it’s expressed in the mesoderm. <shrink> However… quote from there…
Now it gets interesting. Now it gets seriously interesting. The ways digits are patterned and formed is a hot, hot field these days. Major controversies rage over birds, salamanders, Tulerpeton, Ichthyostega, Acanthostega… lungfish even…
Oops. I need to run. Read you all later, best wishes to the way too many ill threadizens.
And for post 500
Pure awesomeness