Oh god, Skepticon

Jebus, it’s only the first night. Rebecca Watson, Bailey’s, Amanda Marcotte, Red Stag, Vic Stenger, some random ale. I seem to have outlasted everyone else tonight, but I can’t keep this up the next couple of nights.

This. Is. SKEPTICON.

I confess. It was pretty funny watching Vic Stenger trying to stagger out of the party room. And it was a wild conversation about the role of chance in physics and biology. You ought to be here.

I think I better curl up and get some sleep now. Let’s see when I regain consciousness tomorrow. I might have to stand toe-to-toe with Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson tomorrow night, and that will be rough.

You’ve got to be kidding me

Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study?

A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice.

What’s “ground-breaking” about that? She’s simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical incantations have a medical benefit. What’s the point? We know how people will respond, and it’s completely meaningless, except as a confirmation that religious people think religion matters.

And the rationale sucks.

Findings from an extensive scientific literature review showed a need for data from a United States survey to determine whether further progress towards standardization of a holistic approach in medical clinical practice is indicated through the incorporation of spirituality by introducing spiritual assessment tools and resources for patients that include use of prayer and its associated benefits.

That’s impressively vacuous.

Go ahead. Take the survey. I think they need input from a few people who are not credulous, gullible loons. It’s only a few pages long, and the questions are easy — they ask how likely you are to ask your doctor for spiritual aid, for instance. Let’s make sure they’ve got a whole bunch of people responding who reject all that nonsense.

Confessions of a professional cheat

You can’t get much more cynical than this article by a fellow who churns out term papers for incompetent students. He gives some examples of how awful their writing is, and talks about the formulaic approach he takes to writing everything from term papers to Ph.D. theses…and it’s more than a little depressing.

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America’s moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

With respect to America’s nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands­–just hands that can’t write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company’s biggest customer bases. I’ve written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I’ve even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

At least I can say that this doesn’t happen much in my classes — when you’ve got small classes and can follow their progress draft by draft, there is pretty much no way to smuggle in a ringer without getting caught.

Episode CXXXII: The Hate Mail thread

I’m already getting grumbling about the commenting changes, so maybe the rhubarb thread would like to chime in with more. Do it with the panache of a Dawkins, please!

Hmmm. Some atheist meeting sometime ought to do this: have a session where the speakers just read aloud from their hate mail for an hour. It could be entertaining.

(Current totals: 11,369 entries with 1,187,728 comments.)

The janitor is annoyed

I’ve had to make some changes to how comments are filtered here. Here is the only allowed html that you can use in any of your comments:

<a href=””></a>
<b></b>
<i></i>
<u></u>
<s></s>
<em></em>
<strong></strong>
<sub></sub>
<sup></sup>
<p></p>
<br />
<blockquote></blockquote>

This is rather minimal text formatting: you can do a little bold, italics, or underscore, with blockquotes and links. That’s it. This is all retroactive, unfortunately, so if you had old comments with fonts in color, or imbedded images or videos, those are all gone.

All it took was a little abuse of the flexibility we used to have. Right now, I am really overloaded with work, so coming in this morning and finding that a few people had played games with text positioning via style commands, splatting garbage all over the page outside the bounds of the comment box, was not a happy moment. I had concerns that the site had been hacked, notified the administrators, and then it took some effort to track down the offending comments that had the bad code imbedded in them. This is more than just annoying. It’s causing me extra work, costing me time, and breaking the trust I have in commenters here.

One thing you have to understand is that I have very little tech help here in comment management — it’s all me, monitoring the comments for spam, cleaning out old crap when it comes to my attention, trying to tweak the filters to block problems. Don’t even bother suggesting technical solutions — I don’t get to add or modify the blog code, and there is virtually no tech help to speak of, beyond the basic business of keeping the server running. I’m the janitor around here. Taking advantage of the liberties I provide to puke up nuisances on the page causes me extra work, and I’m not going to put up with it at all.

So I’m adding a new criterion for banning. Trying to abuse the system in any way, no matter how helpful your intent may be or who you are, will be grounds for insta-dungeoning. Try to put all of your comments in bold? The <b> tag will be removed, and so will you. Try to create a wall of white space with <br /> tags? Gone. Try to take advantage of the absence of length limits on comments by dumping pages of screed? I’ll fix that for everyone. (Actually, that last problem is common—I’ve got spammers who every day dump 10K+ piles of text on the site; they’re automatically caught only because they always manage to include one of the filtered words somewhere in the clutter).

Jeez, people. You should know the universal rule: don’t piss off the janitor. It’ll help you in real life as well as on the blogs.

What is it with kinesiologists?

I know it’s a respectable field; kinesiology is the study of human movement, and I’ve known some who are sensible and well-trained (applied kinesiology, on the other hand, is total bunk). But it’s becoming a bit like engineers and the Salem hypothesis — I also run into creationists who proclaim their kinesiology degrees, like the frothing mad Joseph Mastropaolo. I’m beginning to think there must be some deep conceptual hole in the formal educational background of kinesiologists.

Anyway, here’s another example: a professor of kinesiology, Phil Bishop has written the most wonderfully condescending and wrong letter to the Crimson White at the University of Alabama. I have to marvel at the ignorance of an individual so handicapped by stupidity and religion (whoops, pardon my redundancy), yet who still managed to flop his crippled way upwards to achieve a position with some intellectual authority.

Show compassion for atheist friends

Evolution has been a hot topic in the CW as of late. I understand the emotion that evolutionary theory carries for my atheist friends, but I can’t figure why my theist, deist and agnostic friends feel so much passion against Darwinism.

For Muslims, Jews and Christians, whether or not evolution happened is irrelevant. For these people, God created, but how He did so is not specified in detail.

However, for my atheist friends, Darwinism is essential. A Christian can believe in evolution or not, but an atheist must contrive some natural means for life and speciation that must, for philosophical consistency, exclude any Divine intervention.

An attack on evolution threatens the very foundations of atheism, so it is a “life and death” issue, and consequently an emotional one. Darwinism may have some serious problems, but hey, it’s the best they can do for now. So, Christians, show a little compassion for our atheist friends.

Ah, such a lovely illustration of the backwardness of religious thinking. Evolution is not a philosophical rationalization; it is not a desperate exercise in weird, wild apologetics that exists solely to justify an ideology. It’s the hard rock of reality in the path of your philosophical peregrinations. You can look like an idiot and try to butt heads against reality, or you incorporate it into your understanding. Creationists do the former. Rational people do the latter.

Get it? For atheists, evolution and other aspects of reality and the natural world come first, and the atheism comes second as a consequence, not a cause, of our understanding of the universe. For the fanatical Christian, apparently, their delusions come first, and any natural, real phenomena must be warped in their imaginations to fit their weird and unsupportable interpretation of how the universe ought to be. And they seem to think other people’s minds are distorted in the same way.

It’s like looking at a dancer and arguing that she must have invented the concept of a floor in order to carry out her heathenish gyrations, and oh, fortunate Christian that he is, Phil Bishop gets to pretend that his dance is free of the constraints of gravity and frames of reference and the stage and the music. Which is probably why he looks like a spastic klutz with no rhythm when he trips onto the dance floor.