Take one terrible NY Times pundit who lives on an alien planet of her own, and toss her into the esoteric hothouse world of Silicon Valley, and all you’re going to get is a hot mess, a weird dive into the delusions of very rich smart people with no reality brakes to check out the truth. Maureen Dowd talks to Elon Musk and other pretentious luminaries. It’s painful if you prioritize critical thinking.

They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don’t live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization.

Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.

In a world overpopulated with billions of people, where climate change is a looming threat, where all those people are a petri dish for cultivating new diseases, where the majority live in poverty, where in many places clean water is a struggle to find, where the most militarily powerful nation has just elected an incompetent, narcissistic clown to be in charge, two men sit down to talk. One says the most important project in the world is to put a tiny number of people on a barren rock. The other says the most important project is to create more powerful computers that can think on their own.

And then the two of them start arguing over the threat of artificial intelligences enslaving, or liberating, humanity. These intelligences don’t exist, and may not exist, and will definitely not exist in the form these smart guys are imagining. It is the grown-up, over-paid version of two children arguing over who would win in a fight, Darth Vader or Magneto? The Millenium Falcon or the Starship Enterprise? Jesus or Buddha?

And then Ray Kurzweil shows up.

Fuck me.

Dowd just parrots these absurd conversations and doesn’t offer any critical perspectives, and lord help us, the participants certainly don’t. Can we just lock them all in a well-padded room with an assortment of action figures and tell them to get to work to resolve the most important dispute in the universe, which toy is powerfulest?

Or could we at least have one skeptic in this mess to try and focus the discussions on something real?

YouTube loon David Seaman apparently organized a rally in Washington DC to mobilize people to fight against a nonexistent pedophilia ring run out of a nonexistent basement at a pizza parlor. A “couple dozen” people showed up, but about the only coverage it’s getting is a few comments on Twitter.

This is a nonsensical story that has only gained a relatively small number of advocates, but the few are fanatical.

I’m so sorry for those poor kids. Not the imaginary ones kidnapped by a pizza parlor, but those three kids stuck with parents with a bizarre obsession.

The Most Hated Woman in America is on Netflix today.

It’ll be interesting to see how her story is handled: she was rude, assertive, cranky, and opinionated, and she met a horrible, violent end…but she was principled and right, too. I wonder which side of the story will be emphasized?

Yeah, sure, accuse atheists of eating babies. Do you know who actually consumes fetal tissue, though? Suburban new agers with a weird fetish for “natural” and “organic” BS.

I just learned about Minnesota Placenta, a place that does placenta encapsulation (pdf). It’s easy! After your baby is born, it comes with this hideous lump of fetal support tissue, the placenta, that looks like a lump of hamburger and a piece of raw liver got into a serious barroom brawl, and neither won. Scoop up that bloody sac slathered with slime and mail it off with about $250 and it will be steamed, chopped, ground, powdered, and packed into tidy pill capsules for you to consume at your leisure.

There are photographs of the process. The only thing that would make this more unappetizing would be if Guy Fieri were involved.^*

Bonus! The company that charges $250 will also shape the umbilical cord into a short script message (“love”), and dry it down into a hard, leathery, mummified sign the color of old dried blood that you can hang on the wall and terrify your offspring with for years to come. I really missed out on this opportunity.

By the way, these outfits have lots of anecdotes about feeling more “energized” and “peppy” after consuming these discarded scraps of their baby (for a more entertaining version of this myth, see the movie Ravenous), but there is actually no evidence that it provides any benefit. No benefit. None at all. Lots of ick, though. Probably no worse than chowing down on calf’s liver, though.

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^*Would it perverse of me to say I really want to see what Fieri would do with placenta as an ingredient?

Doesn’t matter, you’re not the boss of me. Ian McShane makes for a good Wednesday, I’ll say that.

I am so sad that Ken Ham blocked me on Twitter — I miss out on the most hilarious crapola from one of the more cracked brains on the internet, and must rely on the kindness of strangers to relay his tirades to me. The latest thing to pop his wig: The Pope. How dare the Catholic church dismiss his literalist interpretation of the Bible? NOT TRUE CHRISTIANS. SAD.

Of course, this is not news. Historically, American protestants have been hatefully anti-Catholic, in part prodded by the nativist bigotry that was stirred up by immigration from Ireland and those Mediterranean countries. It’s not surprising that an Australian protestant shares the same views.

However, I do appreciate that Ken Ham admits this:

Remember that next time you get in an argument with a literalist. I don’t care much for either popery or the lutherite heresy, but at least one side isn’t demanding that we ignore physics and astronomy.

(h/t Caine)

I just had to mention to someone who is trying to arrange a Darwin Day debate for 2019 (I am favorably impressed that they’re planning way ahead), that I actually have specific requirements for creationist debates nowadays. Usually that scares them away, but we’ll see this time.

Much of that is negotiable, depending on who’s doing the asking. I was just getting a little tired of being the talking monkey dragged into church to face a hostile audience of bussed-in parishioners who were always unsatisfied when my opponent failed to draw blood.

I joined the Great Debate Community last night to talk about this chromosome 2 fusion thing again. One of the topics was about why we have to keep hammering away at the obvious beyond the point where any rational human being would have to accept the facts. Another question was why Jeffrey Tomkins is so committed to promoting a counterfactual that is neither supported by the evidence nor is required by the doctrines of his religion.

If you have an explanation, tell me. Or just watch the video.

Basic stuff: Brian Cox explains that there’s no physics to support the existence of ghosts, but I’ve also heard Sean Carroll explain the same idea.

Recent polls have found that 42 percent of Americans and 52 percent of people in the UK believe in ghosts – a huge percentage when you consider that no one has ever come up with irrefutable proof that they even exist.

But we might have had proof that they don’t exist all along, because as British theoretical physicist Brian Cox recently pointed out, there’s no room in the Standard Model of Physics for a substance or medium that can carry on our information after death, and yet go undetected in the Large Hadron Collider.

“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist, then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made,” Cox, from the University of Manchester, explained in a recent episode of BBC’s The Infinite Monkey Cage.

“We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”

I can almost hear the protests already: But that’s mere physics, the afterlife is metaphysical and supernatural and whatever other meaningless cliches they want to sputter. Read carefully. We, our bodies, are physical and bound by the laws of physics. If you want to claim there is a floofy physics-free metauniverse where your consciousness dwells, you still have to deal with the fact that there must be some kind of bridge or interface between our material forms and that etheric plane you believe must exist. There has to be an interaction, or there is no connection between my worldly identity and self and consciousness and the ghost/soul you claim is the actual me.

To put it in words the New Agers might understand, the vibrations have to resonate with my brain — and we’ve mapped all the frequencies that could do that, and we’re done, there are none left over to accommodate magic. Sorry.

There is also lots of other evidence against an afterlife, like the lack of empirical evidence, the inconsistencies of ghost stories, the necessity of mundane biology to maintain a mind, etc. The evidence for an afterlife consists entirely of wishful thinking.