A logic puzzle for Martians

Don’t worry about what it means. It just came to me in a dream last night, so I wrote it down. I often have very odd dreams.

Al, Bill, Chuck, and Dave have a weekly Gourmand’s Club, and this week Al has baked a perfect and delicious cherry pie. However, Bill has invited a friend, Ed, to join them, creating a group of five and creating some difficulty in dividing the pie fairly. As their guest, they’ve given Ed the knife and asked him to do the honors. How should Ed handle the situation? Assume everyone is equally hungry and that the pie is perfectly circular with a uniform distribution of mass.

A.   As it turns out, Ed is a Libertarian. He uses the knife to hold the other four at bay, while he uses his left hand to stuff great gooey fistfuls of pie into his face until it is all gone.

B.   Ed is a Libertarian who eats the whole pie. Al, Bill, Chuck, and Dave let him finish, then smile wolfishly and pull out an array of handguns and knives and axes. “What Bill didn’t tell you, Ed,” says Chuck, “was that the club had a hankering for barbecue this week, and your sweet marbled flesh is on the menu.” Ed is quickly cleaned and jointed, and the meat is distributed fairly using a butcher’s scale, and a rack of ribs is soon sizzling on the grill for the afternoon’s repast.

C.   Ed eats the pie, and the remaining four cut Ed into equal parts for distribution and consumption. Sirens wail; there is a pounding on the door; a megaphone blares. “THIS IS THE POLICE. IT IS IN THE INTERESTS OF A SECURE AND STABLE STATE THAT CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE AND LIBERTY. GIVE YOURSELVES UP, CANNIBALS!” There is a brief flurry of violence, followed by trial, incarceration, and eventually, death. The right of 300 million Americans to bake and consume pie without fear of death and dismemberment by roving bands of cannibals is preserved.

D.   A concentrated mass of complex sugars and fats is rendered temporarily inhospitable by high temperatures. As it cools, new bacteria settle on it and begin to colonize it. They are interrupted briefly by the intrusion of a few metazoans who, in a brief flurry of activity the details of which are insignificant and inconsequential, assist in the breakdown of the nutrients by first distributing them to massive internal colonies residing in their guts, secondly sharing the remaining nutrients in the form of a fecal slurry to bacteria outside the organisms, and eventually by dying to deposit great rich lumps of protein for consumption. The bacteria win. The bacteria always win.

E.   The planet is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with respect to carbon, with complex cycles of release and sequestration.

Blogging isn’t the path to riches, I guess

I’m getting a lot of sad stories about bloggers struggling financially, and I just thought I’d mention a few of them.

There’s the perennially struggling Gary Farber, of course. He’s a blogger emeritus, having been around for several years longer than I have. Check out his left sidebar for options to help him out.

Gary has mentioned that the fierce and acerbic Roy Edroso of Alicublog is having a rough go of it, too.

Now I learn that Lance Mannion is deep in a hole and scrabbling to escape. He’s writing a book on raising a child with Asperger’s — somebody ought to snap it up, he’s a wonderful writer.

The annoying thing about these writers is that they’re all good, thoughtful, interesting people…and they ought to be writing for the big magazines or newspapers. But, unfortunately, when the NY Times goes looking for columnists, writing skills and cogent commentary aren’t among the qualifications, or plodders and hacks like Ross Douthat or Jonah Goldberg would be unemployed, rather than living well on wingnut welfare.

I’ll also mention a fourth example of low-budget blogging: me. Seed hasn’t managed to send me a paycheck for the last several months. I, at least, have a solid stable day job and a family that has grown up and moved out on me, so I’m not panicking. I’m definitely not asking for money for me…if you’re feeling like dropping a few dollars on someone for online content, look to Gary or Roy or Lance. Or if you can’t afford anything right now (I’m definitely sympathetic about that), at least go start reading their stuff regularly.

That answers nothing

Here’s an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.

The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it’s fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:

A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.

That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and simply sits there looking absurd. I don’t understand how anyone can commit themselves to a life spent promoting that kind of nonsense; these people really should try taking their summaries and looking at them carefully to try and see the peculiarity of their claims.

I’m not cherry-picking, either. Here are a couple more examples just so you can see the general thrust of the arguments.

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

The good news is that they all mostly agree with one another. The Bible is about a god who is trying to get people into his heaven by asking them to believe a story about his son being killed and rising from the dead.

The bad news is that the story makes no sense. I’ll give them the existence of their god as a premise, just as I’d grant Herman Melville the existence of Ahab as the start of his story. But what follows doesn’t work. This god has a son — there’s a whole story there that is glossed over. It rather anchors the deity into the prosaic, doesn’t it? He’s a discrete being with an anthropomorphic capacity for procreation. OK, let’s just give them that as a premise, too, although my experience with theologians is that they’ll sit there endlessly arguing with you over that detail.

But then it gets sillier. He sends this son to us to die. He dies? So he’s not an immortal god? Oh, wait, he doesn’t really die, he bounces back a day and a half later, and again, Christian theologians will weeble at you incessantly about how Jesus really is their god, their one true god, who is part of a trinity.

And then that bit about his death “redeeming” us? No way. That makes no sense. If I commit a crime, having someone else suffer 2000 years ago for some other crime that is completely unrelated to what I did does not have any logical connection at all to absolving me of guilt. It’s simply crazy talk, theological noise.

I have my own one-sentence summary of the Christian bible. It actually fits well with human behavior, unlike the prattling nonsense of theologians.

Here is a long tome containing fractured history and arbitrary and patently ridiculous rules that, if you say you believe them, will represent a costly signal to indicate that you are a committed member of our tribe.

Or if that’s too long for you, “Be stupid and belong.” Theology then fills the same role as frat-house hazing or blood-brother rituals, and all the contributors to that list of summaries can be proud brothers together in blissful inanity. It’s clubhouse psychology.

I can even sympathize a bit with that purpose. Lots of organizations have similar trials to secure their membership. Even science does this: we’ve all been through that long gauntlet of calculus and chemistry and basic physics. The difference is that scientists are expected to master something difficult and useful, not bullshit.

Why we need separation of church and state: an example

Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by “Reverend” John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.

What do you think her crime was?

According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.

“The matter of disposing of the Eucharist in an inappropriate way is a serious matter to us,” Peggy Dekeyser, the communications officer for the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee said in confirming Trebesh’s theory.

Trebesh said the only thing she could think of that Kelly or anyone else might have seen her daughter do was “spit out a piece of gum in the parking lot.”

It’s fine that crazy Catholics want to enforce their crazy doctrines within the scope of the church; if crazy John Kelly wants to refuse to do his crazy mumbo-jumbo for anyone, that should be his right. But what’s really disturbing here is the county deputy using his official status to administer punishment outside the church.

I don’t care what the priest believes or does, but that deputy needs to be fired.

PRUUUUUUDES!

Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.

“She stood in front of the students,” district spokesman Jeff Puma said. “If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it’s a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students’ heads. I’ll be teaching human physiology this term, and I’ll just project photos and diagrams of the various ladybits and manbits on a giant screen in front of the auditorium — I don’t know if a public school could handle the level of detail I’ll be going into. Levin’s approach sounds like a good compromise.

But wouldn’t you know it…some parents in the school district freaked out.

King said his son objected to participating, and both he and his son objected to him being “forced” to participate.

“I’m all for scholastically based sex education,” King said. “But this dance is meant to take away modesty and is disrespectful to women.”

Oh, the poor widdle boy! Forced to pretend his manly muscled arms are womanly fallopian tubes! And oh, those poor little girls! Immodestly made aware of the existence of ovaries, ovaries that their mommies have told them to keep covered and hidden away!

This has become a cause for the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, who have taken a brief moment from their usually obsession with homosexuality to decry elementary sex education.

A couple of months ago Crystal Lake’s Prairie Ridge High School Health teacher Jacqulyn Levin decided that the best way to teach her co-ed class of sophomore students the parts of the female reproductive anatomy was to use something she called the “Vagina Dance.” To the tune of the Hokey Pokey, Levin led her class in a puerile dance that involved pointing to and singing about reproductive body parts while prancing about the classroom.

Her selection of this inappropriate instructional activity demonstrated a lack of empathy for those who may have a degree of modesty and self-respect that Levin does not possess. Did she consider that some students might feel uncomfortable participating in or even watching this dance and that they might fear being ridiculed if they chose to opt-out?

Her decision to use this dance as a teaching tool also reveals that she has no commitment to fostering modesty (please don’t be deceived by the attempt of “progressives” to conflate essential modesty with some kind of priggish, neurotic prudery). The very fact that a teacher would consider such an activity reflects how debased and immodest a culture we have. And it reveals that she has no regard for the values of all the families who have entrusted their children to her tutelage.

“Priggish, neurotic prudery”…why, they snatched the words right out of my mouth.

There is nothing immodest about the demonstration (which, by the way, the IFI portrays dishonestly and inaccurately). There is nothing titillating or arousing about fallopian tubes, any more than there is about the common bile duct or the duct of Wirsung or the epididymus, and if you’re getting aroused by hearing about any of those, or blushing in embarrassment at a generic discussion of guts, there’s something deeply wrong with you. I’d suspect the lunatic who wrote the above words of having some morbid paraphilia, actually.

Wanting to pretend that your insides have all the uniformity of a potato is not self-respect, it’s ignorance and denial. Those are things a school is supposed to correct, and I don’t think a school or the teacher should feel any remorse about politely instructing kids in the nature of reality.