In Washington state, politicians can apparently freely decide what label they want to use for their party affiliation on ballots — you know, like “Democrat” or “Republican”. Only the Republicans are all running away from the label “Republican”. I wonder why?
You have got to love cephalopod researchers. A rotting carcass, possibly of Architeuthis, is found in California — shredded by sharks, missing its eyes and most of its arms, torn by shrieking seagulls, described as bruised, battered, and chewed up — and the scientists are all “Helloooo, Nurse!”, and you can just imagine one of their hind legs doing a spastic tarantella and their eyes zooming out big as saucers. Heaven for a squid-fan has to be slimy, ripe, and wrapped in long, ropy tentacles, I think.
Mark Isaak has put together a list of Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature — all those strange names people have given to species and molecules.
Around 5 on 3 July, we’re meeting up in Denver … but we’ve changed the location! We will be meeting at the Wynkoop Brewing Company, where we have a room of our own reserved for 50 people. That should be enough, right?
Wacky Michael Egnor is complaining that the data showing progress in treatment of some cancers should be credited to the culture of Christianity instead of science, and further claims that “The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and prayer.”
Hmmm. Given that the data shows a change, a rise in cancer survival within the past few decades, was there some breakthrough in prayer efficacy 20 years ago? Thumbs in vs. thumbs out in the folded hands thing? Accent on the “A-” or on the “men!”? Sudden change from the old useless lazy god to a new and improved go-getter god? I suspect the correlations all show the effectiveness of entirely secular improvements in treatment, since the god-stuff hasn’t changed from it’s usual ineffectiveness at all.
Egnor makes much of the fact that churches built hospitals, and that the data came from a religiously funded organization. Christians aren’t that stupid; they can recognize a successful paradigm when they see it, and can jump on the bandwagon quite well. These hospitals founded by churches are using medicine, not faith, to do their healing. We’re sloshing about in the mud of religion, so you can’t credit the muck when something rises above the superstition to shine simply because everyone’s hands are filthy with dirt.
And this is just disgusting.
Science grew in a culture made fertile by Christian (and Jewish) faith and prayer. When science is explanted from Christian culture and is idolized — consider evolutionary psychology and eugenics — it becomes banal and even evil.
Faith and prayer do nothing. They do not make a culture fertile, as we can see by many examples all around the world of quite religious countries that are marked as much by failure as success. His two examples are insane. I disagree with much of evolutionary psychology, but can you think of any evil done by that academic exercise, in particular, anything comparable to the Albigensian Crusade, to name just one example? As for eugenics, that wasn’t good science to begin with, and it was endorsed by evangelical Christians. Their god seems to be no better at leading people into right action than no god at all.
All science is explanted from sectarian superstition, and large numbers of scientists are godless — yet rather than banality and evil, they seem to be very successful at discovering wonder and beauty. Egnor’s comments are but one step away from the same nonsense Ben Stein was peddling, that “science kills people”, and just as ill-founded and ridiculous.
Uh-oh. The president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, is descending into the den of idiocy that is our local evangelical radio station, KKMS. Listen if you can bear it. Personally, I don’t know that I can — it’s too repellent to listen to people who stress the importance of mindless faith, yet have only bad faith to offer.
If you missed it, here’s an MP3 of August’s segment.
But you should still watch this retelling of the ID saga, as it would be written by Dr Seuss.
Let’s play the most boring card game in the universe!
Here are the rules. We start with a fully sorted deck of 52 cards, and we deal out four hands. We don’t deal in the ordinary way, either: we give the top 13 cards to the first player, then the next 13 to the second, and so forth. (We could also do the usual deal, but it makes the illustration and logic a little more difficult to see. We’ll keep it simple for now.)
This is what the table will look like.
| Hand 1 | A |
K |
Q |
J |
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
| Hand 2 | A |
K |
Q |
J |
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
| Hand 3 | A |
K |
Q |
J |
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
| Hand 4 | A |
K |
Q |
J |
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
Next, we play the game, whatever it is. It really doesn’t matter, since we know exactly what hand everyone has, right? So don’t worry about the rules for that. What’s important is that next the dealer carefully picks up each hand in reverse order and stacks them, restoring the original arrangement of the deck.
I had no idea Ray Comfort was running an Agony Aunt column, but here you go. He got a rather snarky question:
There’ve been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven’t checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they’re fighting floods, while in California it’s fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?
Weemaryanne
And then he answered it. Seriously. Isn’t it nice how God has arranged that there is pain and suffering in every part of the world, just so His preachers have something to point to and say “Sinners!”?
Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said “while in California it’s fair and dry.” We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed.
It’s always nice to see these kooks get explicit and credit rain to the actions of a god rather than natural meteorological processes. It’s so primitive.
Ah, if only we had stoned those gay people, fire insurance rates in California would be so much lower.
But wait! There’s more! Quick, remove those irony meters from the circuit, because Comfort’s closing will definitely cause them to blow!
You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.
Right now, my yard is littered with a couple of tons of twisted, smoking scrap irony.
