Crap.

Sad news: Iain Banks has died.

People who knew him personally have written some marvelous remembrances.

Charlie Stross:

I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. And in his science fiction he achieved something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do: he was intensely political, and infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

Neil Gaiman:

He wrote really good books: The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass and The Bridge all existed on the uneasy intersection of SF, Fantasy and mainstream literature (after those three he started drawing clearer distinctions between his SF and his mainstream work, not least by becoming Iain M. Banks in his SF). His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent. In person, he was funny and cheerful and always easy to talk to.

I only knew him distantly, as words on paper — but it was his hard-edged cynical idealism that I loved very much.

Say hello to Nirmukta on FtB

We’ve got a new addition here, Nirmukta, and here’s what they do.

A quick introduction to Nirmukta: Nirmukta is an organization which promotes science, freethought and secular humanism in India. It was founded as a website by Ajita Kamal in 2008, and since then its online presence has grown into three websites: the main parent site at nirmukta.com, the community forum at nirmukta.net and Nirmukta’s atheist activism arm, indianatheists.org. We have formed regional groups in several Indian cities as well; the objective of these groups is to mobilise local on-ground activism (like Hug an Atheist Day just the other day). Nirmukta also operates numerous social media groups on Facebook. This includes the popular Indian Atheists page, one of the largest gatherings of atheists in India. For more about our goals and values, please see What is Nirmukta and What Do We Plan to Do? or watch this short Introduction to Nirmukta on Youtube.

Their FtB branch is clearly just one tentacle on the mighty cephalopod that is Indian science and atheism.

It’s “crawdads”!

This language stuff is messy and complex. I was looking at this series of maps illustrating American pronunciation differences, and was starting to see a pattern in my own language — basically, if you look at the general rule for Washington state and Minnesota (which are often the same), that’s how I talk. With one exception:

I grew up spending many summers wading in the Green River collecting those crustaceans (and eating them), and we always called them crawdads, without question. “Crayfish” was a formal name, “crawfish” was unheard of. It’s green on this map.

tiny-lobsters-are-tearing-this-country-apart

Then I realized…it was my father the fisherman who taught us about crawdads, and his family was apparently Appalachian Scots-Irish way, way back, who ended up in Iowa during the Civil War era, and eventually wandered into lives picking fruit and vegetables in the Spokane-Yakima axis…and those areas are all greenish on the map. Cool. There are these vestiges of my family history lurking right there on my tongue.

One weird thing about the article on this, though. It says,

Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect.

American English doesn’t vary all that much — I can easily understand everyone all across the country. English in the United Kingdom, though — that’s where you get the strong regional accents.

(via Skepchick.)

Dealing with the ten percent

NK Jemisin is an American writer who was in Australia to give a speech. The context: she’s a black American woman in Australia with some trepidation — Australia has a bit of a reputation for racism, I’m sorry to say. Even when I visited the place, there were a couple of instances of casual racism as we were touring the cities (not within the atheist convention I was attending, I am quick to add) that left me a bit gobsmacked, and I’m your standard oblivious white man. But before you think this is an Australia-bashing occasion, read the speech.

Now. Before you tar and feather me, let me tell you something else I’ve come to understand in the past three days. Australia may not be the safest place for someone who looks like me… but it’s trying to become safer. And Australia may have classified the peoples of the Koorie and other nations as “fauna” until very recently, but Australia has also made tremendous strides lately in rectifying this error. I’ve listened in fascination to the Acknowledgements of Country made at nearly every public event I’ve attended since I’ve been here. I’ve marveled that indigenous languages are offered as courses for study at some local universities. I am awed that you don’t shove all of your indigenous history into a single museum, where it’s easy for people not of that culture to avoid or ignore, because that’s what happens in the US. So as horrified as I am by the nastier details of Australian history… I am also heartened, astonished, inspired, by the Australian present. You’ve still got a long way to go before Reconciliation is complete, but then again, you’ve started down that path. You’re trying.

I want you to understand: what you’ve done? It will never happen in my country. Not in my lifetime, at least. Right now American politicians are doing their best to roll back voting rights won during our own Civil Rights movement. They are putting in place educational “reforms” which disproportionately have a negative impact on black and brown and poor white kids, and will essentially help to solidify a permanent underclass. Right now there are laws in places like Florida and Texas which are intended to make it essentially legal for white people to just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence. So: admitting that the land we live on was stolen from hundreds of other nations and peoples? Acknowledging that the prosperity the United States enjoys was bought with blood? That’s a pipe dream.

Ouch. It’s true: Americans can be masters of denial. Didn’t we fix all the racism with the Civil War? Or was it the Reconstruction? Or maybe the Civil Rights Movement. Anyway, it’s not a problem anymore. The Republican Party isn’t profoundly racist at all, nor is the rest of the country. I can’t see any problems with my eyes closed, anyway.

She’s not done. She then proceeds to chastise science fiction fans.

For the past few days I’ve also been observing a “kerfuffle”, as some call it, in reaction to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America’s latest professional journal, the Bulletin. Some of you may also have been following the discussion; hopefully not all of you. To summarize: two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as sexist and racist by most of the organization’s membership. Now, to put this in context: the membership of SFWA also recently voted in a new president. There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole. In this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent of the vote. SFWA is small; only about 500 people voted in total, so we’re talking less than 50 people. But scale up again. Imagine if ten percent of this country’s population was busy making active efforts to take away not mere privileges, not even dignity, but your most basic rights. Imagine if ten percent of the people you interacted with, on a daily basis, did not regard you as human.

Just ten percent. But such a ten percent.

And beyond that ten percent are the silent majority — the great unmeasured mass of enablers. These are the folks who don’t object to the treatment of women as human beings, and who may even have the odd black or gay friend that they genuinely like. However, when the ten percent starts up in their frothing rage, these are the people who say nothing in response. When women and other marginalized groups respond with anger to the hatred of the ten percent, these are the people who do not support them, and in fact suggest that maybe they’re overreacting. When they read a novel set in a human society which contains only one or two female characters, these are the people who don’t decry this as implausible. Or worse, they simply don’t notice. These are the people who successfully campaigned for Star Trek to return to television after 25 years, but have no intention of campaigning for Roddenberry’s vision to be complete, with gay characters joining the rainbow brigade on the bridge. These are the people who gleefully nitpick the scientific plausibility of stopping a volcano with “cold fusion”, yet who fail to notice that an author has written a future earth in which somehow seventeen percent of the human race dominates ninety percent of the characterization.

That ten percent seems to be a problem everywhere: politics, religion, science fiction, atheism.

Perhaps we should all move to Sweden

It’s always the lies. With the revelation that the US is collaborating with various big name internet companies like Google and Apple to spy on everyone comes round after round of denial, and I don’t know which bugs me more. The latest is the claim that we’re only snooping on foreigners, not US citizens (as if that makes it OK, anyway).

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Oh, yeah? Here’s a screenshot from the NSA datamining tool, called BoundlessInformant (just the name is revealing, isn’t it?). Color is a measure of the degree of surveillance, with red the most and blue the least. What’s that country in the lovely goldenrod somewhere in the middle of the western hemisphere? Oh, that’s us.

boundless heatmap large

Relax, though. All those companies collaborating with the NSA are swearing on a stack of Bibles that they have nothing to do with it.

On the heels of media reports that the NSA has gained access to the servers of nine leading tech companies — enabling the spy agency to examine emails, video, photographs, and other digital communications — Google has issued a strongly worded statement denying that the company granted the government "direct access" to its servers. That statement goes so far as to say that the company hasn’t even heard of "a program called PRISM until yesterday." 

It’s Google. It’s their company policy to not be evil. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase "direct access" connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided "direct access" does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program. Typically, the only people having "direct access" to the servers of a company like Google would be its engineers. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has issued a similarly worded denial in which he says his company has not granted the government "direct access" to its servers," but his language mirrors Google’s denial about direct access.)

No, not Facebook, too!

I like the point made by Cenk Uygur in this video: it’s a clear violation of the fourth amendment to the US constitution. Isn’t it cute how people are absolutists about the right to bear arms, but prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures? That we can wobble on.

The freeze-peach brigade gets taught a lesson

Amanda Marcotte explains the obvious.

Free speech entitles you to:

  1. Say what you want to without fear of government censorship or retribution.

Free speech does not entitle you to:

  1. An audience. You can say what you want, but people are not actually required to listen to you spew. So, contrary to many, many claims otherwise, your free speech rights are not trampled if someone ignores you, blocks you on Twitter, or refuses to give you a job as a writer or communicator for their organization. National Review isn’t stepping on my free speech rights because they don’t hire me. If your sexism stops you from getting a prominent job in media, that is also not a violation of your rights.
  2. To have others host your speech. This is a corollary to the first one. Facebook, blog comment sections, online forums, etc. are just like TV shows, radio shows, and magazines: Their house, their rules. They have built up an audience and they are not obligated to turn around and give you that audience to spew your garbage. Start your own damn website/magazine/forum.
  3. To be protected from criticism. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but free speech protects your right to celebrate rape with your “jokes”, and it also protects my right to call you an asshole for it. Daniel Tosh can think it would be hilarious to watch someone get raped and say so, and I say that makes him a moral monster and a piece of shit. It is not censorship to hurt the tender feelings of people who think rape is hilarious.

Occassionally, you’ll see some people try to sidestep the obvious idiocy of yelling “free speech” to defend someone from, you know, free speech, by instead lodging accusations that feminists are “oversensitive” or some other garbage. But the only people I see being oversensitive in these debates are the sexists who are so torn up over criticism that they melt down, start yelling incoherent and easily disproved claims of censorship, and start issuing rape threats in order to stop the painful, painful criticism. If oversensitivity bothers you so much, physician, heal thyself.

I blame the internet for their ignorance. It’s been infected with this ridiculous libertarian bullshit for so long…

I have much to learn in the ways of heresy

I am a mere novice. So I threw a cracker in the trash — big deal. Valerie Dodds found a way to really annoy the church.

A Catholic school in Nebraska says it is praying for a former student who returned to campus to take nude photos and masturbate with a crucifix.

Valerie Dodds, 19, told KETV that she started a nude photography business after graduating from Lincoln East High School. But she said some her classmates from her former school, St. Pius X High School, started “saying mean things and that’s when I decided to go there and show them that I’m here to stay.”

She has since been arrested for public nudity and trespassing. I’d like to offer my sympathy and stand in solidarity with her on this one, but I don’t think I’ll go quite so far as to emulate her. I know you’re all relieved.

Gun control now

How many more stupid tragedies will it take?

Authorities in northern Arizona say a 4-year-old boy has accidentally shot and killed his father at a Prescott Valley home.

Prescott Valley police say the shooting occurred just after noon Friday.

The 35-year-old man and his young son were visiting from Phoenix and were at a friend’s house.

Police say the boy somehow found a gun in the home’s living room and accidentally fired it and a bullet hit his father, who was rushed to a hospital where he died.

“Somehow” found a loaded gun lying about in the living room, in a place where a child can find it. “Somehow”. Maybe the gun fairy dropped it there, or perhaps Jesus miraculously poofed it into place.

Is the “friend” facing criminal negligence charges? Or is this just part of the freedom of owning guns?

The argument from antifreeze

Another day, another stupid creationist argument. This time, it’s some pastor whining that biologists don’t understand how animals survive the winter. We don’t?

These insects are not the only ones that hibernate – there are several others butterflies, insects, and even frog that make antifreeze in the fall and hibernate through the winter.  Insects in all stages of life – eggs, pupa, and adult (CHECK THIS) – have been programmed to make various versions of antifreeze chemicals in order to survive freezing weather.  How did the first Mourning Cloak butterfly learn to make anti-freeze?  If it failed even once, the result was death – an evolutionary dead-end.  God designed this butterfly to survive the brutal winter as an adult butterfly.  The next time you see a butterfly very early in the spring – chances are it is a butterfly that knows how to make antifreeze!

How many attempts to survive the winter did the woolly bear caterpillar try?  When did a certain caterpillar “get it right” and survive?  Remember there had to be both male and female surviving to produce eggs and continue the species.  The original Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar had to make this antifreeze so that its cells would freeze without rupturing for not just one winter…but 13 times for 13 winter freezes…always remembering to produce the antifreeze only just before winter arrived.  Then it had to learn to completely rearrange its body structure to turn into a moth on the 14th spring.

How do evolutionists explain this?  They don’t!  The Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar, the Mourning Cloak butterfly, and a myriad of other creatures were designed to survive through the freezing winter.  When you see design, there must be a Designer and that Designer is God.  Those who wish to deny God’s existence see this marvelous design and say evolution did it – random mutational changes filtered by natural selection caused all this marvelous design to happen…but this is just storytelling and hand waving – it explains nothing.

Gosh, what a surprise — an ignorant creationist. Actually, we do. Winters aren’t all-or-nothing — look at a globe, and we have these things called latitudes, where we can see variation in the intensity of winters. Minnesota gets rather cold in January, while Nebraska is milder, and Texas is milder still. That means it’s trivial to find animals with a range that spreads from mild to cold environments, and that natural selection can have both variation and different selection regimes to operate. This isn’t difficult at all.

Furthermore, anti-freezes aren’t hard to generate: these are just small molecules that lower the freezing point or bind nascent ice crystals to suppress ice formation. These things evolve all the time by chance! Ask Sean Carroll.

Insects have evolved a variety of cryoprotective substances. As winter approaches, many freeze-tolerant insects produce high concentrations of glycerol and other kinds of alcohol molecules. These substances don’t prevent freezing, but they slow ice formation and allow the fluids surrounding cells to freeze in a more controlled manner while the contents of the cells remain unfrozen.

For maximum protection, some Arctic insects use a combination of such cryoprotectants and antifreezes to control ice formation, to protect cells and to prevent refreezing as they thaw. Indeed, a new kind of antifreeze was recently discovered in the Upis beetle by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Unlike the protein antifreezes of other beetles, snow fleas and moths, the Upis antifreeze is a complex sugar called xylomannan that is as effective at suppressing ice growth as the most active insect protein antifreezes.

The necessity of avoiding freezing has truly been the mother of a great number of evolutionary inventions. This new finding raises the likelihood that there are more chemical tricks to discover about how insects cope with extreme cold.

Carroll has written a book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, that explains in detail how the antarctic icefish antifreeze evolved. It’s a truncated pancreatic enzyme; a copy of the enzyme gene acquired a mutation that reduced it to a short 3-amino-acid long fragment (and which was subsequently expanded by duplication to multiple repeated copies) that has chemical properties that suppress ice formation. The blood of the icefish is saturated with this peptide, and it’s produced by the pancreas, just like the original enzyme, secreted into the intestine, just like the original enzyme, and then transported into the circulatory system. The genome of the icefish also contains pseudogenes, copies of original natural ‘experiments’ in the expansion of the antifreeze gene, that provide a record of its molecular history.

Meanwhile, arctic cod also carry an antifreeze protein…but it’s different and of independent origin from the one found in antarctic notothenioid fish.

So, actually, this creationist is completely wrong. Not only can we explain the evolution of antifreezes in animals, we do so in explicit detail, with step-by-step analyses of the molecular events behind them. If you want to see “storytelling and handwaving” that “explains nothing”, you’ll have to go to the loons who say “God did it.”

The Creation “Museum” is not a museum

Kurt Percy, the assistant manager of the Cincinnati Museum Center, has crossed Ken Ham. Percy dared to speak the truth about the Creation “Museum”. I agree whole-heartedly with this comment:

This is not a museum, and this is further proof of that. Please stop referring to it as such. They are not an accredited museum by any association of museums. It is a theme park that misleads the public and it is a pockmark on our region. The fact that someone profits by misrepresenting their faith as science to children and families is shameful. When we wonder why America is falling behind in science education, it is because places like this are allowed to exist. I’m glad to see that their attendance is declining despite generous handouts from the state of Kentucky at the expense of their university funding.

Ken Ham’s “rebuttal” is pathetic. He cites a dictionary definition of “museum” at a manager of an accredited museum.

…an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also: a place where objects are exhibited.

So, is Disneyland a museum? A jewelry store? A church? Because you could claim that all of those fit his dictionary definition. A dictionary is a rough guide to common usage, not a definitive explanation of meaning.

Then Ham obliviously makes it worse. He cites other summaries of what constitutes a museum, in particular the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation, and notes that the Cincinnati Museum Center is accredited.

The Creation “Museum” is not. It’s not ever going to be accredited by any legitimate agency. Percy was exactly right: it’s a theme park, equivalent to a Halloween haunted house on a bloated budget, and it is little more than a colossal joke. There is nothing of lasting value there — animatronic Jews and dinosaurs and replica skeletons don’t measure up. There is definitely nothing worth studying; it has no archives, no scientific collection, no employees doing research. It could be blotted out by a meteor falling from the sky, and it would no loss at all to science, only a small loss to Kentucky tourism.

Then Ham closes by bragging about his new zip line ride at the “museum”. Without apparent irony.

I’m just glad someone in Cincinnati is speaking bluntly and honestly about the carnie act playing in nearby Kentucky. Someone give Kurt Percy a promotion.