Discovering Ardi

The Discovery Channel is having a documentary about Ardipithecus ramidus at 8pm Central time (in about half an hour). I’m planning to set my work aside for a while and fix a bowl of hot soup — it’s cold here, with a snow storm on the way — and see if they actually do it right.

First half hour wasn’t bad: nice overview of the practice of finding old bones, and a good illustration of the fragmentary nature of the fossil. At the same time, though, it’s also doing a good job of showing how they know the pieces of Ardi are from a single individual.

S l o w i n g   d o w n. So far this program is taking longer to watch than it took me to read the original papers. It’s got some nicely done bits, but it sure is taking it’s time, and it’s annoyingly repetitive. It’s also got commercials, and the frequency of commercial breaks is steadily increasing.

I thought we Americans were supposed to have short attention spans. How is this sort of drawn out programming supposed to appeal to the average person with a general interest in evolution?

Maher really is a moron on medicine

Bill Maher doesn’t believe in vaccines at all? Man, you’ve have got to be utterly nuts to make Bill Frist look good.

The first part is pretty good, where Frist gives Maher a lesson in vaccines; the last bit is rather annoying, as they find common cause in agreeing that we don’t need to make modern medicine available to more, because “we have the best health care system in the world” (baloney), and our bloated health care budget is simply a consequence of bad food and obesity.

Equality everywhere for everyone

Right now, people are marching on Washington with a reasonable demand: equality under the law for all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. It’s not much to ask for; it’s simply what every human being in this country ought to expect.

I’m not in Washington DC. I’m sitting in wintery Minnesota. You’re probably snug in your homes, too. So what can you do?

How about getting inspired?

Are you feeling it now? We all should hope for a world where all the differences between us are no obstacle to full participation in civic life by all people; whether you’re gay or godless, black or white, the law should treat us all the same.

Unfortunately, there are people who don’t share that dream and want to constrain minority positions, and make non-heterosexuals second class citizens. Equality is not what they want. We have to act to improve our country.

Contribute to the Support No on 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign. If you live in Maine, vote NO on 1 in the election booth.

On the other side of the country, contribute to the Approve Referendum 71 campaign, and if you live there, vote YES on Ref. 71. I have a lot of family in that state, so I’ll be contributing there, and will also be calling up family and reminding them that they ought to vote FOR this one.

Here in the middle of the country, you can donate to the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition. But you know this is an issue everywhere — look for local groups you can help. You’ve got google, even if you aren’t getting up off your butt today, use it! Contribute! Work with your GLBT friends and neighbors! Make a difference!

(Thanks to MAJeff for sending along the information, and for doing his part to enlighten North Dakota.)

My talk at AAI

Josh Timonen has put up a video of my talk at AAI. Tear into it!

One of the things I neglected to say more clearly, but should have, is that what I’m complaining about is the creationists’ blithe conflation of complexity with order. We can build up immense amounts of complexity from nothing but noise, so just babbling about how complicated something is says nothing about the impossibility of its origin from chance events. Order, functionality, and, as Joe Felsenstein defined it, adaptedness are more relevant properties, and we have a natural mechanism for generating those, too. It’s called selection.

Someone over at the RDF also mentioned that he thought the Q&A was really good, too. I agree — I need to learn to shut up more and just get the interactivity going. Maybe my ideal talk would be 5 minutes of raillery and inflammatory incitement, followed by 55 minutes of questions and comments.

O’Reilly. Dawkins. Or, what happens when a fathead meets a scholar

Richard Dawkins was ‘interviewed’ by that awful little peabrain, Bill O’Reilly. It was a horrible spectacle, but Dawkins kept his cool. Look at O’Reilly’s arguments:

Hmm, let’s see. O’Reilly claims we don’t know everything, which is entirely true, so somehow this justifies his belief in Jesus. Dawkins had a great answer to that: “It’s a most of extraordinary piece of warped logic to say because science can’t fill in a particular gap you’re going throw in your lot with Christianity.” Another point I like to toss in against that line of nonsense is that science at least has the integrity to say that we don’t know yet what happened in a particular gap (but we may be working on it, and have a more useful strategy than waiting for a holy man to have a vision), while the religious wackaloons will instead fill that gap with pious certainty…a kind of clot of myth that we’re eventually going to have to rip out in the face of great resistance.

Then we got the usual arguments: science provides no moral framework, but Jesus does. If that’s the case, why have Christians always been such a warring, nasty, oppressive lot? They’ve got this ideal of a self-sacrificing man of peace at their center, but Christianity itself seems to drive in the opposite direction. Please explain to me the opulence of the Vatican, the Thirty Years War, and the Prosperity Gospel, just as a preliminary exercise.

O’Reilly is committing a stupid logical fallacy when he trots out the old “there are more Christians than atheists” argument.

And finally, we get the usual O’Reilly tactic of shouting at his guest that he’s a fascist.

It wasn’t a very enlightening interview, except in that it confirms that O’Reilly is a blustering moron while Dawkins is an intelligent gentleman.

First snow!

This could be ominous — we’re getting our first snowfall right now. It’s coming down wet and heavy, too.

I knew this was going to happen. I’d made arrangements for a contractor to come by and do some fairly substantial improvements to the insulation of the house — we’re having a couple of doors and a big picture window completely replaced — and I told them it would be highly desirable to have this done before the snow arrived…and they told me yeah, yeah, they’d be out within a couple of weeks. They said that two weeks ago. So I knew they’d never get here in time and that we’d have an early snowfall.

Sorry, Minnesotans, you can blame me.