Yeah, sure, I wouldn’t mind visiting heaven. Round trip ticket, though, please.
Actually, it’s a real genre of books: all these crappy stories about people dying and recounting their visit with Grandpa and Jesus before getting revivified by doctors. It’s been a huge windfall for Christian publishing houses.
The FreethoughtBlogs online conference starts up tomorrow at 5pm CST with an introduction by the fabulous Debbie Goddard, followed by a fabulous line-up of fabulous speakers that doesn’t stop until 8pm Sunday. I’m going to be a desk-chair-potato most of the weekend, writing up stuff, preparing for a talk, composing an exam, that sort of thing, so this is going to be perfect — I’m going to clear a spot off on my desk, prop up the iPad there, and stream all the talks to entertain and educate me through my drudgery.
That’s one of the nice things about this online con. I can stay comfortably at home, get work done at the same time, and also, if I miss anything good, it will be preserved forever on youtube, so I can watch it on my time. You should flick on through. Check out the schedule, there’s guaranteed to be something you’ll find interesting.
By 98 to 1, the senate voted in favor of an amendment to a bill that declares that climate change is real (the one exception was Roger Wicker of Mississippi). Finally, you say, we can get something done. Wrong, I say. You should know better. The Republicans found a way to twist out of the implications.
We all had doubts about that economic impact report commissioned by Answers in Genesis for their Ark Park: it was clearly biased towards inflating revenues. Ken Ham goes around claiming that it will draw two million visitors/year, when the Creation “Museum” itself draws an eighth of that, and its attendance is declining. No one should be surprised that an independent assessment predicts much, much lower numbers.
I was a graduate student in Eugene, Oregon, and I liked it. It’s a very liberal town, as is Portland, and we were only vaguely aware that the surrounding areas were extremely conservative. We also knew that there were areas to the south in particular that were flamingly racist and homophobic, and reading David Brin’s novel, The Postman
You may recall that sad comment by Scott Aaronson on his blog, Shtetl-Optimized, in which he deplored the way no respect is given to men’s biological imperative to have sex with all the women. Or more recently, Paul Elam’s bizarre appeal to badly interpreted biology and duck rape to justify MRA entitlement. It’s all of a piece, and it’s annoying: it’s reductive nonsense, in which people see a well-established set of scientific principles, and see their own complex situation, and imagine out of whole cloth a clear, simple path from one to the other. And suddenly, they’ve portrayed their messy life as the outcome of a purely determined, clockwork series of inevitable interactions, and they find refuge in the lowest common denominator of possible explanations. “It’s not my fault,” they can say, because of the way electrons interact, because biochemistry and thermodynamics, because genes, because everything follows from astronomical impacts and geology and Chicxlub at the end of the Cretaceous.
As it turns out, that’s what Scott Aaronson (with seemingly little comprehension on his part) was discussing in that notoroious comment section, in part, with someone named Amy. What started as a discussion about a grab-ass professor losing his job evolved into a lot of denial and defensiveness, and of course whenever a lot of nerds try to defend the status quo, they ultimately try to bring up Human Nature and Behavioral Science and This Is How We Evolved. I struggle myself to avoid falling into that trap, and sometimes I do anyway, but a whole gang of male nerds tends to inevitably drift into gross reductionism. Because of thermodynamics, I think, or maybe van der Waals forces.
Anyway, the provocateur behind all that argument, Amy, has now beautiful essay on all the phenomena in the middle that get ignored.
In case you missed last night’s state of the union address, here it is (and here are a few departures from the script). It was…OK. It was largely focused on the economy (which is slowly getting better) and increasing opportunity for those who aren’t doing as well — so that was good. I’m not entirely convinced that Obama isn’t still in the pocket of Wall Street, but he talks a good game.
