Within limits, that is. The Freethoughtblogs crew is talking about atheism shortly, and invites you all to hector us with questions.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Within limits, that is. The Freethoughtblogs crew is talking about atheism shortly, and invites you all to hector us with questions.
It was a plain white insulated box, tightly sealed, no hint of its contents. We drove north a hundred miles to our clandestine destination, there to make the exchange.
We met the North Dakotan operatives at a nondescript Dairy Queen in downtown Crookston. I quietly slid the box across the table. I accepted a bowl of ice cream. Mission accomplished.
We told no one the contents of the box. It was whisked away to undergo detailed analysis by scientists at the University of North Dakota. I won’t reveal what it is, even under torture. There’s no way you can make me tell. Try your worst!
I’m sorry, the last day to register for the International Conference on Creationism was 3 July, so it’s too late for you. It will be held at Cedarville University, a glorified Bible college in Ohio.
It’s sponsored by a fine assortment of organizations dedicated to promoting ignorance:
I don’t think you’ll miss much. One of the things that struck me about the list of speakers at this meeting is just how familiar they all are. These are mostly the same old frauds who’ve been parroting nonsensical lies for years, in some cases, for decades.
I have to compare it to real conferences. There, you also find the old establishment giving review talks in plenary sessions, but the real meeting, the interesting and exciting new stuff, is given by hordes of grad students and post-docs presenting their current research. It’s a rich and complicated event with lots of people at all stages of their career talking things they’ve done that, mostly, no one else has done before.
Creationist conferences, not so much. It’s mostly old fuddy-duddies rehashing tired old arguments that have been repeatedly debunked and dismissed, and you have to pity any younger people who have been deluded and dragged into this mess. It’s just sad.
Also, is including representation from a few fringe ‘researchers’ at a Canadian university sufficient to call it an “international” conference? At the international meetings in the US that I’ve attended, I’m used to seeing a majority of the sessions led by European and Austrialian and Asian scientists.
They also tend not to be sponsored by religious institutions.
I’m stealing a fascinating thread on Twitter from Kathleen DePlume. In some ways, it’s unsurprising: if you compound the natural variation in enough parameters, you’ll discover that everyone is unique. It’s a question of including broad tolerances, and the real question is…how broad do they have to be to accommodate 99% of humanity? And another question would be…don’t the remaining 1% deserve a place as well? The math is nifty but it isn’t the whole of human reality.
So, did you ever wonder why car seats and seatbelts are so wonderfully adjustable? It all goes back to cockpit manufacture.
The USAF wanted to make aircraft with seats and belts fitted to the “normal” airman; the tolerances weren’t too wide, but lots of fellas are normal, right?
Wrong.
As it turned out, hilariously wrong.
You see, they measured several thousand enlisted men (just men – these were the dark times before women were people) on just a few things.
Leg length, knee to ankle, hip to knee, various seat measurements. Seating height to shoulder.
Shoulder width. Arm length. Shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist.
You get the point.
Measurements that would allow the cockpit and belts to be correct and safe, as long as they were “close enough” to the normal specifications.
So, after taking these measurements – a great undertaking, the measures got so good at it that they could do all 38* measurements in under 2 minutes – they analysed the data.
*I might be misremembering the exact number
They figured if every measurement had tolerances that fit 30% or so “normal” men, then they’d lose a few percent to the abnormally shaped weirdos (you know the ones – people whose arms are way longer than their height, or who have tiny hands compared to their feet?) they’d still fit at least 20% of their potential pilots into the custom measured Everyman cockpits, right?
Wrong.
So, so very wrong.
How many pilots do you think fit in the normal measurements on all 38 metrics?
Go on, take a guess. I’ll wait.
Actually, no I won’t, because I’m writing this as a thread.
Zero. The answer is zero.
Not a single soldier was within tolerances on all measurements.
Out of thousands and thousands of airmen measured, every last man was abnormal on at least one.
It turns out that while yes, arm length and leg length aren’t exactly independent (if you’re tall you probably have long arms AND long legs), their r-value isn’t anything like high enough for the purposes the Air Force had in mind. They’re probably long by different amounts.
So it isn’t as simple as going 0.3^38 (a number so small it should be obvious it’ll round to 0), it also wasn’t what they assumed (0.3x [almost 1]^37).
It was somewhere in between.
Okay, so where did that leave them?
It left them knowing with utter certainty that they could not design a static cockpit and recruit airmen to fit it.
They had to go the other way. Broaden the tolerances – make it so they could account for broad differences in measurements.
They had to invent adjustable seats. Adjustable straps for the safety harnesses, seats that could travel back and forth a little bit, that sort of thing.
Okay, but how does this relate to cars?
Well, there’s the obvious: once it’s been invented, why not use it in cars? But the older folk among us probably remember bench seats, and maybe even a time when you didn’t put your seatbelt on because you were insulting the driver if you did.
What changed?
Funnily enough, another clever statistician.
This one was tasked with keeping very expensive pilots alive after the Air Force had spent so much money training them up. He was supposed to be looking at the safety equipment within planes, but this was after the war, so…
…pilots weren’t actually dying in the air that much.
Mostly what killed dashing young men back in those days was car crashes.
So the statistician came back with the findings that pilots would live longer if they were forced to wear their damned seatbelts when driving.
Funnily enough, this was a huge part of the impetus to make it law that all passengers have to wear belts in cars.
It’s only sensible – but humans seldom do sensible things unless forced. And pilots are very much human.
So we all wear seatbelts now because pilots are expensive.
The moral of all this?
Mostly that maths is interesting; but also that if someone is jumping up and down demanding their right to call themself “normal”, they are full of sh*t and don’t know what they’re talking about.
Mathematically speaking.
Unfortunately, the thread lacks any mention of sources. I’d want to know a lot more about it before I could cite it as interesting history without any caveats.
No thank you. No meaty beer for me.
Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business host and former Trump economic advisor, raged against the idea of “plant-based beer” on his Friday-night show and falsely claimed that President Joe Biden’s climate plan would require Americans to give up meat.
“Get this: America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats,” Kudlow said. “OK, you got that? No burgers on July 4. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?
“So get ready: You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4 green,” Kudlow said.
“Now, I’m making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thinking is stupid,” he added. “It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don’t care one whit about America’s well-being. Not one whit.”
None of his claims are true.
Yes, you can grill Brussels sprouts. They’re quite good.
The big news for him is that all beer is plant- (and fungi-) based. A meat-based beer sounds remarkably unpleasant. If Larry and Kid Rock want to try it, though, I wouldn’t stop them.
Larry Kudlow is a lying moron…a typical Republican, I guess. He said this two years ago — has anyone seen any hint of a steak ban?
We’re having this conversation tomorrow.
One thing the other participants are welcoming is opening the comments to critics and serious questioners — if you want to disagree (politely!) with a gang of atheists, or dissent vigorously, or promote your goofy beliefs, go ahead. Bring it up in the YouTube chat. We’ll make some time to address those kinds of comments and questions.
Don’t be chicken. You can bravely march into the snake pit of atheists/evolutionists and get bragging rights by surviving.
Since FDotM mentioned how social media can cut into your book-reading time, I thought I’d say that for me, it isn’t true. I can read a book any time I want, and I do. It is my custom to read for an hour before bed, or sometimes over lunch, and I chew through books pretty fast.
Sometimes I pick up trash reads. The latest was one called Pistols: A Deep Sea Thriller (hint: you know it’s going to be a throw-away when they need to include the genre in the title; sometimes you can just look at the cover). It’s totally ridiculous. It’s about stomatopods that are exposed to toxic waste and swim around, snipping people in half and cooking them with high intensity sonic bursts. My favorite part was when the scientist character has to explain why they also have toxic slime, and starts babbling about ubiquitination, before he has done any kind of analysis of tissue, or even seen one of the monsters. Cheesy, but sometimes you need something silly.
I’ve also been on a Madeline Miller kick lately, and that’s definitely not cheesy trash. I recently re-read The Song of Achilles, which was magnificent and nearly made me cry. Circe is also really, really good and well worth your while. I’m going on a collecting trip in the old Lake Agassiz lands up north this weekend, and picked up her short story, Galatea for those moments when I’m not chasing spiders.
See? Being an internet nerd is not incompatible with actively reading for entertainment.
Go ahead. Prove your bookworm cred by telling me all the stuff you read for fun. Don’t be shy, and admit to your popcorn reading as well as your high-brow stuff.
I wish we could vaccinate some people with a heavy dose of reality.
The state next to mine, Wisconsin, has gone insane. The raging anti-vax hysteria
The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature on Wednesday voted to stop Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration from requiring seventh graders to be vaccinated against meningitis.
The state Senate and Assembly, with all Republicans in support and Democrats against, voted to block the proposal. There is no current meningitis vaccination requirement for Wisconsin students.
The Legislature’s vote also makes it easier for parents to get an exemption from a chicken pox vaccine requirement that is in place for all K-6 students. Evers’ administration wanted to require parents seeking a chicken pox vaccination exemption to provide proof that their child has previously been infected.
WHY? These are well-established, safe vaccines against terrible diseases. They work. But somehow, Republicans have got it in their heads that reasonable evidence-based medicine is bad.
This is getting personal, too. My daughter and son-in-law and my little 4 year old granddaughter all live in Wisconsin, and she’ll be attending Wisconsin public schools in a year. I don’t want her to get chicken pox or meningitis. Of course, I trust her parents to get her vaccinated even in the absence of a public health requirement — it’s all the other kids we have to worry about.
There are too many options for social media so far. Twitter is dying of a surfeit of Nazis and an incompetent overlord; Bluesky I haven’t tried, but I don’t trust it, since it’s run by the old overlord, and will probably follow the same trajectory; I’ve been on Mastodon for a while, and am comfortable with it; the new kid on the block is Threads, which is owned by the repulsive Zuckerberg. Let’s see what the First Dog on the Moon has to say about it!
I think the final category, “Owner seeks dominion over the Earth,” is definitive, which means I’ll stick with the distributed community of federated websites that lacks an owner.
Putin is, apparently, a student of history who has learned one lesson: “Russia will be saved not by pity but by cruelty.” I wouldn’t want to be in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s shoes right now, because Putin is probably planning to go all Peter the Great on him.
Russian leaders have always fashioned themselves as hideously cruel demi-gods, none more so than Putin’s hero Tsar Peter the Great, who went mano-a-mano with his own Prigozhin and an ersatz 17th century Wagner Group known as the Streltsy, a cadre of some 50,000 powerful soldier-tradesmen skilled in murder, embezzlement, and racketeering.
Although the Streltsy were sworn to protect the government, all the legitimized raping and pillaging made it difficult for them to decide who was in charge. Historian Robert Massie described them as “a kind of collective dumb animal, never quite sure who was its proper master, but ready to rush and bite anyone who challenged its own privileged position.”
And like Wagner Group’s 25,000-50,000 Kremlin-sponsored mercenary soldiers, the Streltsy, whose chief concern was also making money, made the doomed move to knock off their boss. Peter tortured thousands of them and their wives and children to death, with the Streltsy’s Prigozhin, Major Karpakov, strapped to a spit and twirled over a fire.
Peter sent his personal physician Dr. Carbonari to ensure Karpakov was slow-roasted. Let my notes from the historians in Russia’s state archive describe what happened next: “Karpakov was removed from the spit to rest before going back on the fire…Carbonari accidentally left his knife in the cell…Karparkov could no longer take the torture…Used the knife to slit his throat…But he was too weak and failed…Carbonari discovered him and he was returned to torture.”
But Putin allowed Prigozhin and the Wagner Group to peacefully retire to Belarus, you might say. I suspect that one reason for that is that it will give Putin an excuse to annex Belarus next. If his army can survive Ukraine, that is.
