I was a Lutheran before I grew up and got wise, so it is particularly piquant to be insulted by Martin Luther. He wasn’t bad at it.
You pant after the garlic and melons of Egypt and have already long suffered from perverted tastes.
What you say is a blasphemy that has made you worthy of a thousand deaths.
Your astute minds have been completely turned into stinking mushrooms.
You are the devil’s most dangerous tool!
He speaks to me!
(via Making Light)
I regret to say that I introduced some of you to Eugene Delgaudio, an extraordinarily annoying spammer whose gimmick is calling himself the “Public Advocate of the United States”, writing these histrionic emails to people declaring the imminent take-over of the country by the radical homosexual lobby. All he does is scream about fear and weakness and homosexuals coming to get you, and how he needs your money to protect us all…but of course, he does nothing with your money except use it to beg for more money on the internet.
And pay himself a nice salary. He has submitted an IRS 990 form, so his budget and expenditures can actually be examined, and yeah, he’s a fraud. He pays himself about $170,000 a year, and the bulk of the rest of it goes to postage and printing for mailing out his pleas for cash.
Somebody ought to investigate him. It’s pure fear-mongering and scammery.
The guy keeps yammering on twitter that he’s catching up to me in this online poll. I’ve got 62% of the vote, he’s got 12%, and he isn’t even in second place. I’ve been idling along, not worrying about it, but apparently I need to now langorously stretch out my tentacles, enfold his paltry percentage in their toothy embrace, and crush and rend.
I urge you all to go vote and teach Martin S Pribble a lesson.
He’s Australian, so you know he deserves it. I’ve already warned him that there will be a hug-off at the GAC, in which he shall be totally crushed even further.
I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and I am horribly biased — it’s the most beautiful place on the planet. So I quite like Dana Hunter’s tour of the geology of a subduction zone. It’s a perspective with which I’m unfamiliar, focused as I usually am on complex shorelines and soothing rain showers and slugs and salmon.
And then I learn that the recently crowned Miss Seattle, a carpetbagger from Arizona, hates the place.
Ew, I’m seriously hating seattle right now Take me back to az! Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.
I say run her out of town on a rail and hand the tiara over to Dana.
Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette, I have learned that MIT offers a certificate in Pirate. I could have gone to MIT. Now, suddenly, in the midst of my remorseless, perfect life, I learn what regret is. Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks heaps.
Jen mocked this argument that Dave Futrelle highlighted on his blog. Some wacko MRAs have been diagnosing Sandra Fluke as being a lesbian with higher than normal levels of testosterone because, they say, she has “man hands”: they’ve looked at some photos of her hands and have subjectively determined that her ring finger is too long.
her ring finger is quite a bit longer than her index. It’s almost as long as her middle finger. In general, a low 2d:4d ratio in women indicates a greater proclivity towards homosexuality or bisexuality and greater tendency towards aggressiveness and assertiveness. So, yeah, pirate fits.
I hate this shit.
It’s really bad science — it’s not even science — and reflects a very poor understanding of the evidence. Yes, it is true that there has been an observation that men have relatively longer 4th digits (ring finger) compared to 2nd digit (index finger) than women. But let me show you the actual, real, quantitative raw data on this metric.
There is a statistically significant difference between those two distributions. You’ve gotta trust the math: P=0.0002. The male average ratio is 0.98, or that the index finger is 2% shorter than the ring finger, and the female average ratio is 1.0, or the two fingers are essentially identical in length.
But look at the variation! If you were given a blind assortment of ratios, you would not be able to reliably estimate the sex of the individuals. Yeah, sure, if it were a game in a casino, over many trials you might be able to make money at it, but as a guide for one on one sex determination, it sucks.
But, you say, isn’t there a reported correlation between digit length ratios and testosterone? Yes indeed there is, in men. Not in women, obviously. And here’s the raw data on that:
There is a statistical bias in the distribution, but really, if I told you the lengths of my fingers, you would not be able to use that to make significant estimates of my testosterone levels…and these differences are tiny relative to age-related changes anyway. We do not turn into women in our old age, though.
It’s a peeve of mine, though, that too often it’s considered sciencey to ignore the variation, when that’s the most interesting and important part, and reduce everything to a mean or a trend. There are morphological differences between men and women — you may have noticed — and since they’re driven to a large extent by systemic differences in hormones that regulate growth and metabolism, it’s not surprising at all that there are subtle variations in details. The question is whether they are at all significant functionally or selectively, and there’s no evidence for that at all in these ridiculous digit length studies.
Manning T, Scutt D, Wilson J, Lewis-Jones DI (1998) The ratio of 2nd to 4th digit length: a predictor of sperm numbers and concentrations of testosterone, luteinizing hormone and oestrogen. Human Reproduction 13(11):3000-3004.
American Atheists has sponsored another billboard, and this one is both ugly and controversial (Surprise!). Kylie doesn’t get it at all.
And with all that (because of that?), perhaps there’s something I’m missing. Because I honestly don’t freaking get this:
I don’t get how the hell this was every approved as a billboard by an atheist group. I just don’t. I personally find it rather shockingly confronting, distracting me from seeing it as being about atheism (was that its intent? This lesson?) and… maybe it’s meant to compliment (somehow?) the recent African Americans for Humanism campaign?
I get it. I even approve of the sentiment, but not the implementation.
The Pennsylvania legislature recently passed a meaningless declaration that this was the year of the bible. This is a confrontational, provocative billboard aimed in opposition to the bible: I consider it reasonable and appropriate for an atheist group to mock such a stupid law, and to point out that the bible is not a consistent or useful source of morality. I am all for confrontation.
However, there is good, informative confrontation and there is pointless lashing out. This billboard doesn’t do the job.
Once again, the lack of serious, qualified design experts really hurts. Graphic design is a discipline with skills and conventions and widely accepted principles: it actually takes a lot of training and talent to do it well. This ad…doesn’t. Not only is it ugly, but sarcasm is really, really hard to communicate well on a billboard. You’re best off avoiding it. Especially when it’s on a sign that is as esthetically unprofessional as that — that’s in Pennsylvania, a place rich in racism. There are rural farmers who’d post that sign approvingly.
And it’s not just Pennsylvania, this is America, where racism is endemic. If you’re going to put up something that addresses the racism of the bible and Christianity, especially when many of the targets of our institutional racism approve of the church, you’d damn well better tread carefully, and demand some taste and clarity. That sign has neither. I also have to wonder how many black American atheists were consulted in its design.
I’m going to disagree in part with Kylie: I think shockingly confrontational is a good thing, and I want more of it, and that’s the wrong thing to be upset over. But jeez, it has to be done well, and I don’t understand why American Atheists continues to use cheap-ass design work in what is clearly a major promotional effort for them.
My story is fairly simple. C.S. Lewis did it.
As a kid I had an extremely active imagination, I loved to believe all of the stories my Mum told me about fairies and magic woods etc. I had a voracious appetite for books, and the one that seemed the most real, the most plausible was the story of Aslan, singing the world or Narnia and surrounding country into existence. A giant, mysterious and wise talking lion, now there was a God you could believe in! Of course, my mother, being the brilliant woman she is took the time to explain that you cannot believe everything you read, and that you must think carefully about whether something is true or not. She is and never has been religious, but my father is (in that weird creepy way of mumbling and muttering at odd times around the house), so my mother was careful to leave it up to us kids to decide for ourselves. Trouble began when during Sunday School and storytime at the front of the congregation with the Minister, I began comparing Jesus and Aslan, as their similarities seemed obvious to me (I’ve only just learned recently that this was by design!). Of course it was then carefully explained to me by the adult believers around me, that the story of Aslan was just make-believe, but the story of Jesus was very very true. I immediately recognized this as ridiculous. I understood that I had no idea whether a giant talking lion had the ability to come back from the dead, or sing a world into existence, but I had plenty of evidence that human beings certainly couldn’t do any of the things they were claiming Jesus did. The combined stories of the Narnia Chronicles made for a far more convincing gospel, and C.S. Lewis seemed a much more reliable source, his writing was simpler and far more direct, not cloaked in metaphor that constantly needed to be explained, and everyone knew he had really existed as he had been alive far more recently than the Bible’s authors, and it seemed strange to me that someone would not have confronted him about lying if it was all just made up (I didn’t quite have a grasp on the whole ‘fiction/non-fiction thing’ yet). But the adults around me insisted that the more plausible story was false, and that their story was the truth. In my little brain it seemed obvious that they were mistaken, and if they were wrong about that, I reasoned, they could be wrong about everything.
We all continued to go to church, even long after my Dad left, as my siblings, my Mum and I enjoyed the sense of community, and the damn good burgers they made for the lunch afterwards. My Mum was even the church secretary for many years, making the bulletins every week, and I was the janitor during my teen years after my brother quit. But passed the age of five I knew that there was a very big dividing line between the way my thinking worked and the way the rest of congregations did, and I often found myself feeling sorry for them. As a kid it was weird knowing that in this regard you are probably smarter than many of the adults around you, but I think it was a big confidence booster, and has kept me questioning authority figures all my life, which has been invaluable in terms of my life as a “science enthusiast” and a sensible human being in general.
I will admit though, there is still a little part of my heart that insists that Aslan is real, and I just haven’t found the right wardrobe or picture frame yet. And if it is ever revealed to me that there is a God, I have every confidence he will have a lovely big mane for me to cuddle in.
Kate
Canada
I am abrupt in my dismissal: I see no evidence nor plausible mechanism for group selection, and I don’t even understand why some scientists continue to insist it had to have happened, other than a fondness for some kind of vague deus ex machina to reach down and smooth over the indirect and inefficient mechanisms that can produce altruism and properties of populations. And discomfort with the fact that evolution is weirder and less straightforward than our brains can imagine is not an argument for endorsing wishful thinking.
Jerry Coyne rips into the latest eruption of group selectionism. Go there for the details.
(Also on Sb)
That’s the title of an academic science book. It sure sounds sciencey, doesn’t it? It got accepted by Springer-Verlag for publication. And then inside it claims that one of their conclusions is that “conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life”. Oooh, more of that fancy science talk. It must be taken seriously!
Only, it turns out that this book was being peddled as a contribution to the category of “Engineering and Applied Science” rather than biology, because if it were proposed to Springer-Verlag as a biology text, it would have gotten reviewers who knew something about biology. And it was the product of a creationist conference held in a School of Hotel Administration at Cornell. And the editors are Marks, Behe, Dembski, Gordon, and Sanford, names well known for their affiliation with the Discovery Institute.
Once again, the ID crowd engages in some stealth creationism in order to get a line on their CV. Only this time, Springer-Verlag noticed, and the book has been quietly removed from their listings, pending further review.
Man, those guys at the DI are pathetic.
(Also on Sb)
