Extropians, Kurzweil, Libertarians, and the deluded immortality scam

The story should begin with the victim. This is Kim Suozzi, 23 years old, and diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer that was going to kill her within a few months. She’s doomed and she knows it, so she has gone to Alcor, signed over her life insurance money, and asked to have her head frozen after death in the unlikely hope that someday, someone will be able to revive her. I feel a deep sadness for her; for someone so young, for anyone, to be confronted with an awful mortality is tragic.

She did die too soon after this video was made. And now we learn about the bumbling corpse mutilation that occurred afterwards.

You might want to stop reading right here. It’s a hard story, especially after seeing the young woman alive.

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Brains are so confusing

Do you need a good, basic introduction to Neurodiversity 101? Here you go.

Neurodiversity is, according to activist Nick Walker, “the diversity of human brains and minds – the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.”

Basically, it’s a fancy name for the fact that all our brains and minds are unique and individual. Like snowflakes, no two brains and no two minds are exactly alike.

But that’s not enough! The article also points out that within that range of variation there are some brains that work in a way that society finds acceptable — the neurotypicals. I think it’s safe to say I’m a standard neurotypical, which is not to say that some of the workings of my mind are out of sync with the larger culture, but that I can fit in reasonably well in most circumstances. While someone who is neurodivergent in some way might have extreme difficulty with situations that I find not at all stressful, but that does not mean they are somehow inferior.

Shouldn’t all of this be elementary and taken for granted by teachers, and maybe made part of standard training? I ask because I never did, and it’s taken years of gradual awakening to see what’s going on. It’s also because I’m looking over the midterm status of my students and wondering what I can do to reach some of them who are struggling. I know it’s not because they can’t, but because something I’m doing is failing to communicate.

What about the biology of space battles?

reavers

An interesting discussion of the physics of space battles brings up a lot of good points — those science-fantasy movies with spaceships flitting about ignore a lot of basic physics. Star Wars was basically WWI biplanes whirling around at speeds under 60kph, which is kind of ridiculous. But fun.

This article points out that that’s not how things would play out if ever there were a real space battle. The ships would have to obey physics and orbital mechanics, and there would be a priority on speed and acceleration and rapid maneuvers; also, explosions are kind of useless in a vacuum. So he talks about using big gyroscopes to whip mostly spherical ships around, and they’d be zooming about in complex spirals to take advantage of gravity wells.

But then he talks about crews.

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Correcting errors is now anti-religious bigotry?

That paper that cited the Creator for designing the hand has been retracted. The authors say it was a translation error — that they assumed that “Creator” was synonymous with “nature” in English, and apparently, they weren’t aware of the potential for willful misinterpretation of the word “design” in the creationist community. I can sort of accept that, except, of course, that they managed to write an entire complex technical paper on the physiology and anatomy of the hand in fluent English. I wouldn’t have expected a retraction, though, but only a revision of an unfortunate mistake.

Except now it has become a different story: Science Journal Publishes Creationist Paper, Science Community Flips Out. Wait, who’s flipping out? It wasn’t a creationist paper, but an ordinary technical paper that leapt to an inappropriate conclusion. I think it was entirely reasonable for scientists to be irritated by some sloppy editing that would be abused by creationist propagandists. But no — this is now the tale of deranged atheist scientists getting unwarrantedly upset about a casual mention of a god in a science paper.

Even more amusingly, I am now the villain.

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The human hand is good at grasping. Therefore, God.

PlosOne has published an article on the Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living. There’s nothing wrong with the data that I can see, but the authors do make a surprising leap in the abstract and conclusion.

In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years. Moreover, functional explanations for the mechanical architecture of the muscular-articular connection of the human hand can also aid in developing multifunctional robotic hands by designing them with similar basic architecture.

The paper is a technical structure and function analysis of the bones and muscles of the human hand. There’s nothing in the paper that probes the creator for their intent and goals of proper design, or that assesses the the hypothesis of design vs. evolution — in fact, they seem to want to have it both ways, ascribing its functional adaptedness to both.

The authors are from the Institute of Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics, State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Engineers. Somehow, I am not surprised.

But be prepared: this is the kind of thing creationists love to cite, and I expect it will make it to the Discovery Institute’s list of ID-friendly scientific publications. Just note that it says nothing to support the god hypothesis at all.

I did like one of the comments there.

Humans occasionally use their hand as a tool of masturbation, one of “a multitude of daily tasks” performed “in a comfortable way”.

Clearly, the divine purpose of the human hand is masturbation. I look forward to their analysis of the proper design by the Creator of the human tongue. Unfortunately, all the evidence says the human penis was a botched design, as the development of multifunctional robotic penises has completely abandoned the original inspiration and seems to be pursuing an evolutionary path rooted in the Hitachi Magic Wand.