Wait—I’m supposed to be on which side in this video?

Bigtime cognitive dissonance here. This is a promotional video for an organization opposing the current predatory banking system, and what do they use to represent the evil banks? “A great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnell into anything that smells like money.”

I admire vampire squid, you know. Lovely creatures.

Also, vampire squid live in practically anoxic deep water environments, where metabolic activity is limited. They’re also very soft and fragile. They really get a bad rep, and are much, much nicer than bankers.

By the way, this is a British group, and if you’re of that persuasion, you should look into their proposals for banking reform.

It’s a strange phobia

The latest xkcd is an odd one. I know some people freak out a teeny tiny bit at the thought, but it never bothers me.

i-265ff94d9b1c3a33150c08dc475b011f-xkcd_parentsex.jpeg

I’m a first child, and I calculated back when I was conceived, and estimate that it was almost exactly the day of my parents’ wedding — which was an elopement. The two of them ran off at a young age to Idaho where they didn’t need to get parental permission to marry, and right away they had me. I find that wonderfully romantic and have always had the knowledge that my parents loved each other very much (and were also a bit crazy and impetuous and careless…well, and also loved kids a lot). The squeamishness about parental sex has always seemed a bit weird to me — don’t people want their parents to be happy?

Of course, I don’t want to know the details, OK? That’s personal and private and should remain between the participants, no voyeurs allowed.

And I definitely don’t want to know about my kids’ sex life. I just want them to have a happy one, and that’s enough knowledge for me.

Hmmm…maybe that’s the root of the fastidiousness—a concern for the privacy of the individuals involved?

Meltdown imminent

This will be an anxious week. It’s the last week of classes, I have piles of stuff to finish grading and get back to the students, and the students themselves are looking more than a little stressed. The last labs in my development course are falling apart thanks to animal intransigence and the incompetence of shippers. We have two job candidates visiting this week, and I’m on the search committee. And the end of my book writing project is in sight, with just the last little bits of polish and duct tape needed to make it all hang together. As usual, the universe has converged on this one little moment of time to maximize my personal tension.

So expect long periods of silence here, punctuated by brief eruptions of tooth-grindiness and fury. Trolls, lie low if persistence is a goal. Outbreaks of drama in the threads will be met with a combination of neglect and exasperation (oh, so nothing will change there, at least). Goats may spontaneously combust.

I am seriously looking forward to finals week when my tasks will be reduced to administering the last few bits of classes that got off to a bad start, and nothing else. But first I have to make it through this one.

Such blithe liars

I’m not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They’ve got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He’s commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it’s a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis’s trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science.

Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this arrogant in writing; usually they reserve this kind of total pseudoscientific BS for when they’ve got you one-on-one.

“Did people really live for hundreds of years?” Yes. Pre-Flood, carbon-14 was not present in the vast quantities that pervade our atmosphere today, and cosmogenic C-14 was very rare. During the Flood, the earth’s crust, wracked with magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes and rich in quartz (which generates electricity when deformed), acted as a gigantic fast-breeding nuclear reactor and produced all of the radionuclides (up to uranium and arguably plutonium) known to man today. That included C-14, produced in tremendous quantities through cluster decay. And when C-14 gets into your system, and then decays, it can wreck whatever molecule (including DNA) of which it became a part. So the reason we *don’t* live hundreds of years today is that we are all suffering from radiation poisoning (or isotopic substitutional poisoning) and have forgotten what it was like not to be subject to such poisoning.

Wow. Breathtaking. So breaking quartz generates electricity (true so far), which with a little prestidigitation is equivalent to turning into a nuclear reactor, which produced all the radioactive elements present on earth in less than a year, and also distributed and mixed them throughout the earth’s crust and mantle. And somehow eight people in a wooden boat survived this remarkable upheaval. (I know, that part was a miracle. The rest was science. Right.)

And the reason we get old is that C-14 decomposes and breaks our DNA. This is a contributing factor, I’m sure, but this fantasy world where all carbon is C-12 never existed: most of the C-14 we’re breathing in is produced in the atmosphere, not some magical giant nuclear reactor beneath our feet, and the only way it wouldn’t happen is if the sun didn’t exist.

Then someone points out that tree ring data contradicts his claims, and Hurlbut ups the ante.

Tree rings are not necessarily annual. And the point is that the Flood, and the associated nuclear reactions in the earth’s crust, released virtually all of the C-14 present in the atmosphere today. Do you know of any experiment in an atmosphere totally free of C-14? I thought not. Isn’t it amazing, how we get used to something as “the new normal” and never consider that it’s the result of a serious health hazard introduced 4400 years ago?

See? His story must be true, because look — the atmosphere contains C14 today! Let’s all ignore the fact that we know how C14 is produced, and that it’s being constantly replenished.

And then he rants some more about the ferocity of his god’s wrath.

And hel-lo-ooooo! The Flood knocked down all the trees that were growing at the time! All the trees that grow today, sprouted after the Flood, not before. You have no concept of how violent an event the Flood was. Magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes; a water jet powerful enough to throw 1 percent of the earth’s mass, as water, mud, and rock, into outer space; killer hailstorms that froze the mammoths (many of them standing up); and the formation of a protuberance (the Himalaya Range and the Tibetan Plateau) heavy enough to pull the earth off-balance and move the poles. (Which is what the mammoths were doing in the Arctic region in the first place; that used to be a lush tropical jungle.) Not to mention the big rocks that slammed into the Moon, mostly on one side of it, forming the “seas” and causing the Moon to turn one face toward earth and lock in place.

And all that is right there, in the Bible! I repeat: Eight people. Wooden boat. There’s kind of a low limit on how catastrophic the flood event could have been.

I do rather like the argument about the heavy Himalayas making the earth topple over and shift the poles. So why aren’t the Himalayas at the South Pole then, smart guy? Huh? (I know, that argument makes no sense, either.) I’m also struggling to imagine what his pre-flood geography was like…so where was Palestine before this big shift? And what was the orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation prior to the big wobble?

I’m not seriously asking those questions, because I know how Hurlbut would respond: with more pseudoscience shouted very loudly and with complete and absolutely incompetent confidence. That’s the knack these creationists have; they don’t know anything, but they’re really, really good at making nonsense up, and expressing it with sublime certainty. That must be the training the Bible gives them.

The violence isn’t at all surprising…it’s from offended religious folk, after all

This is genuinely screwed up. Supporting separation of church and state can get you beat up in Hawaii.

When Senate President Colleen Hanabusa introduced a reverend to say the invocation, Mitch Kahle stood from his seat in the gallery of the Senate chambers and said, “I object. My name is Mitch Kahle and I object to this prayer on the grounds that it’s a violation of the first amendment of the constitution of the United States. I object.”

Kahle’s protest lasted about seven seconds. Then he stopped talking and sat down. The Senate’s Sergeant at Arms was determined to remove Kahle. When Kahle resisted he was forcefully removed and roughed up. The incident was caught by several video cameras including a camera belonging to Hawaii News Now.

Watch the video. You can hear Kahle make his brief statement, which does not disrupt the proceedings — the prayer goes on without interruption. It’s the aftermath that gets ugly when security guards and various people in suits drag him out of the room, rough him up on the ground, and strike out at the cameraman, who also ends up thrown on the ground.

It’s a distressingly violent response to a moderate and civil protest.

But there’s good news! It went to trial, and look how it ended:

District Court judge Leslie Hayashi needed less than an hour to find Kahle not guilty.

“Number one, there was no disorderly conduct. Number two, he has a first amendment right to speak in a public forum such as he did. And number three, the legislature was violating our U.S. Constitution as well as the Hawaii constitution by having these invocations,” Harrison [Kahle’s lawyer, not the judge] said.

American government should be secular. Let’s stop this game of opening government meetings with pleas to an invisible magic man in the sky.

Standards of proof are pretty low at Fox News

Gah, this is an awful and credulously reported story: Child’s Nightmares and Memories Prove Reincarnation. There is no proof there. The story is simple: ordinary child plays video games, draws lots of pictures of airplanes in dogfights and dropping bombs, and has a few night terrors, so the parents leap to the conclusion that he’s a reincarnated WWII pilot. When they contact a carrier crewman from the era, he conveniently provides more details to fill in the story, and soon enough, they’ve got a full blown delusion.

My favorite part? The kid is always signing his drawings as “James”, and they identify a pilot who died in a crash over Japan…whose name was James! Astonishing confirmation! He was signing his crude cartoons of airplanes with the name of a long-dead pilot!

By the way, the name the kid was born with is “James”.

The battle over NCSE

It’s still going on. Jerry Coyne repeated our common criticism that the NCSE spends too much effort promoting Christianity; then Richard Hoppe fires back, complaining that his comment was held in moderation (Coyne has been sick for a while, you know…I wish people would have more patience), and then repeating the common and misguided defense that NCSE is not an atheist organization. We know. We’ve both agreed on multiple occasions that the NCSE should not be an atheist organization. But still we get this same tiresome objection.

NCSE’s main remit is defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools. That defense is both legal (think Kitzmiller) and political (think the Dover PA school board election after that trial but before the verdict was in). One cannot win political battles without accepting alliances with groups with whom one does not agree on all aspects of all issues. To imagine otherwise is to live in dreamland.

Yes? Please look in a mirror, Richard!

As I’ve said before, said just above, am saying again, and will no doubt have to say a hundred times more, no one is asking the NCSE to become an atheist organization, and no one is saying that the NCSE shouldn’t make strategic alliances with religious organizations. I’d put it in 72 point type if I thought it would help, but I doubt that anything will.

The problem is that the NCSE is not neutral on atheism vs. religion, but has clearly taken a side in preferring one particularly fuzzy, liberal, soft version of Christianity as its ‘acceptable’ religious belief. I have a preference for it myself — it’s what I was brought up in, and I think the country would be in far better shape if there was more widespread support for a faith that quietly defers to science on material matters and supported progressive ethical values — but that does not justify exclusively endorsing it, especially since I think promoting atheism would have even better consequences for the nation. If the NCSE is to be respected as an honest broker, supporting only better science education, it can’t do so by this weird sectarian favoritism.

What raises hackles is that once again NCSE is caught promoting a cult event, a group of theologians and preachers gathering to babble incompetently about evolution. As usual, they’re being selective: Spong and Giberson and their ilk will always get a thumbs-up from the NCSE, but they don’t seem to appreciate that they are almost as great a minority as atheists, and that supporting this one slippery version of Christianity is not going to suddenly win over the majority to their side. The fact that most of the participants at this conference are generally nice people is not a reason to argue that they’re right.

Here’s what would make me content, and satisfy me that the NCSE was not turning into a religious organization. It’s only two things, and it does not involve sticking a knife in the back of any Christian groups, and none of it involves adding an atheist bias to the center.

  1. Demonstrate some rigor in who they’re going to promote. Right now, it looks like any religious group that announces that they’re OK with evolution, for any reason, gets the happy-clappy treatment from the NCSE. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing is pushing teleology and a history of godly intervention — if they say their faith is compatible with evolution, no matter how much they distort the science, they get the thumbs-up. Have some standards; don’t allow your logo to be slapped on a gathering of theologians of the acceptable faith, unless there is going to be some critical thinking encouraged, and honest evaluation of the evidence.

  2. Be more equitable in distributing information. The most glaring discrepancy in NCSE’s current policy of so-called alliance-building is that atheists are left out; I presume their support is taken for granted. But I will note that some ditzy conference by Biologos-types gets front page attention from the NCSE, while Richard Dawkins can tour the country giving talks on evolution (if anyone had been paying attention, they’d know that most of his talks are about science, not atheism) and be completely ignored. It’s as if the biggest, most popular promoters of science in the world do not exist, simply because they aren’t liberal Christians.

    Why? Apparently because the alliances they are trying to build are with delicate bigots who will balk if the NCSE even occasionally acknowledges that atheists are sharing goals with them. It doesn’t help to pander to such fragile souls, especially if you’re going to turn around and use their sensitivity to accuse atheists of refusing to work alongside Christians on the issues of science education. We aren’t the ones threatening to abandon science education because Christians are involved in it, please notice; we aren’t the ones refusing to cooperate with religious people who want to better teaching in this country. Instead, we’re the boogey men the NCSE would like to hide in the closet.

Note that I agree that the principle in point #1 should also apply to #2. There are plenty of atheist conferences that address evolution, and many of them are using it to lead the cheer for atheism in the same way that Biologos uses it to promote Christianity. The NCSE is under no obligation to promote every atheist meeting. But I think if they’re going to push anything as aiding the cause of science education, it ought to be events that feature science and education. Right now, it’s science and education and friendly theology. That latter addition represents mission creep, and a growing bias towards promoting a version of religion.

Jerry is precisely right. NCSE is becoming Biologos, and Biologos is an openly and honestly sectarian organization that evangelizes for a specific version of Christianity. That makes NCSE the secretive and dishonest version of the same, and as a long-term supporter of the NCSE (and someone who never will support Biologos), I object. Get back on track with an honest neutrality on the conflict between science and religion, please.

And do I need to say it again? That doesn’t mean promoting atheism. I know what that looks like, and I do it myself all the time, and it’s not what anyone is asking the NCSE to do.

Watch out for Zombie Newton and Zombie Leibnitz!

They might be stirring in their graves and preparing to rise to do battle. A medical researcher named Tai has published a method that he has called “Tai’s Model”, which is “a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies“.

I think — now I am a mere biologist, so this might be beyond my feeble gooey brain — that I vaguely recall doing something sort of similar to this many, many years ago, as a way to approximate an integral, and it might be something like 350 years old. I guess we’ve forgotten.

By the way, I’ve discovered a marvelous and efficient way to multiply numbers together by adding logarithms; I’m thinking I should publish it as Myers’ Method. I wonder if it’s patentable?