How many football games do you have to win to make up for one broken child?

Joe Paterno is dead. He won a bunch of games, and that’s the best thing he’ll be remembered for, which is awfully trivial, if you think about it. The worst thing he’ll be known for? He closed his eyes and kept silent when children were raped.

I’m imagining a scale. In the right pan are heaped all the great accomplishments of Joe Paterno — and it’s all inconsequential fluff, balls thrown across lines on the ground, numbers on scoreboards long since forgotten. In the left pan…well, we start by throwing on one child’s tears, and the balance tips with a leaden thud, the beam crashes to the ground, the whole assembly splinters and falls apart.

We’re done. The man’s life has been weighed and found wanting.

Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

Mondays are my long, long days — this is the day I get to spend 3 hours talking to students in small groups about cancer (they’re young and invincible, so so far it hasn’t been as depressing as I feared.) And they teach me stuff! Among the things I learned today is that there was a Peanuts special from the 1990s about cancer, titled “Why, Charlie Brown, Why“. I was incredulous — it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d expect on Peanuts — but I looked it up, and there it was on YouTube. So I’ll share. It’s not bad.



The class is operating on a much higher level than this special — it doesn’t mention oncogenes even once! — but the session today was a conversation about everyone’s personal experiences with cancer, and yes, we did talk about television and movies and how they deal with the disease.

(Also on Sb)

THEY IZ NIBBLIN ON MY BRAIN!

This has to stop. Other people have named cats after me: here’s PZ Meowers from Norway.

That is a fairly typical pose for me at home, but otherwise…I think the grammar centers of my brain are eroding.

P.S. These cat pictures better be worth it. I want to see a huge surge in traffic right away, or I’m going right back to spurious spontaneous controversy generation.

Incremental progress

Minnesota has a “defense of marriage” act on the books, which prohibits gay marriage. Several gay families have challenged the law; their case was dismissed last year. However, it went before the Minnesota Court of Appeals today, and they have ruled favorably: the case was unfairly dismissed, and has now been tossed back to the lower courts.

Minnesota has not overturned the ban on gay marriage yet, but has won the right to challenge the law in court. It’s a step forward, at least. If you want to help out, Marry Me Minnesota is looking for donations.

Quantum is just a metaphor

Could Chopra be any more muddled? First he claims that “quantum” is just a metaphor, and then he accuses all those fundamentalist physicists of hijacking his word and using it wrongly.

Quantum physics is a very specific discipline that currently has no direct applicability to medicine — every time Chopra opens his mouth and uses the word inappropriately, he’s committing quackery.

I get email

Every time I mention the fact of global climate change, the denialists start sending me furious emails. (By the way, I know that AGW is “anthropogenic global warming”; what is CAGW?)

I think we can safely say that AGW believers are clinically psychotic

The psychosis of the CAGW cult is total. Rational thought is not possible. It’s like watching a freak show from the asylum.

Not ONLY must you never be near the reins of government, you should never come out of your padded room.

Right. So all the scientists who are citing the evidence and presenting the logic of greenhouse gases are the crazy ones, while the tiny fringe minority of TV weather presenters, angry Republicans who don’t want their industries regulated, and demented conspiracy theorists are the sane ones. It’s a topsy-turvy world for the denialists, isn’t it?

(Also on Sb)

Man, what did I do lately to piss people off? I’m getting a huge amount of hate mail today, much more than usual.

Hey Puss Zit
You disgusting jerk off, quit living off other peoples money and try to find a useful purpose on this planet.
How could you be such a fool?

I would like to ask all the hate-mailers to please be specific and tell me precisely what horrible thing I’ve done. Vague accusations of generic parasitism are neither informative nor entertaining.

Answer revealed: I made Marc Morano’s hit list for this post, and he has a Legion of Idiots wailing at me.

Why I am an atheist – BCskeptic

I am an engineer and I work in a science field, in particular that of astronomy instrumentation development. I became atheist some years ago when an atheist colleague and I started talking about religion. I argued the points that “you can’t get something from nothing”, and “what’s the point of it all then”, quite for vociferously for ~3 hrs and then went home.

I thought a lot about what I was arguing, and also the contradiction I was living. In my career, I lived everything “evidence-based”, but in my personal religious life it was faith-based. Although, even though I prayed and all that, I was never, I don’t think, a 100% hard-core believer.

I realized that I was living a life of intellectual hypocrisy, that it lacked integrity, and that I couldn’t live like that anymore. Truth mattered to me more than comfort, and the science I had learned since working in the astronomy field made the notion of the existence of an elusive supernatural deity quite frankly ridiculous.

I went to work the next day, and declared to my colleague, “that’s it, I’m atheist”. And I’ve never looked back. There is simply no evidence to support the existence of a god or gods, and in fact all of the evidence is contrary to that existence. I feel free to think and question what I like, and no longer have a ‘target’ on my back. I find that socializing with religious people is like socializing with people who really believe Santa Claus exists. Much (although not all) of my family, including my daughters and my wife’s family are highly religious. I find there is a barrier there to true communication; really getting to know people and what they are like and think at a deep level is off the discussion list, because of religion. With my family who is not religious (and they are quite well educated as well), some deep and interesting discussions occur, as happens as well with my atheist colleagues.

It came with a price, though. I believe turning atheist was the major contributing factor to my divorce, which happened a few years later. A very painful and expensive process! But now I’m with someone who is atheist as well, and life couldn’t be better. I have read many books in the meantime, starting with ‘On the Origin of Species’, many of Dawkins’ books (reading ‘God Delusion’ was like savouring a delicious meal), Harris, Hitchens, books on psychology, books on morality, and now blogs. I also believe I have a much deeper appreciation of our/my existence, the Universe, and all of the complexity and wonder involved. Life is good. Life as I know it is exceedingly rare and precious. And life is finite and must be enjoyed to its fullest. That’s what I try to think of and do every day.

BCskeptic
Canada