If you think the ads are bad now…

Watch out, because now your ISP will have the power to insert their own ads into the html streaming through their pipes.

Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD’s technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD’s platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.

Bleh. At least Nic has a possible solution — we should all go to encrypted web pages. I suppose another solution is to not give your business to an ISP that implements such an awful solution.

Mohler fears the cookie-eating mouse

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The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south.

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He’s afraid we’re going to put a human brain in a rodent’s head. No, really — it’s not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals “before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.” Now, seriously, his worry isn’t that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.

The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.

They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!

[Read more…]

Obviously, the earth must be 110 years old

This should win a prize for the dumbest excuse from a creationist that I’ve heard in, oh, about 24 hours.

…don’t you find it interesting that there is NO recorded history prior to less than 10,000 years ago? If man has been around millions of years why the heck did it take so long to learn to write? Most kids are doing it by 2nd grade! Man evolved enough to suddenly figure out how to record his thoughts just a few thousand years ago? Hmmm.

This same creationist also makes a “marketing” argument, that creationism is better because it is easier to understand than evolution. He claims to have read both Darwin’s Black Box by Behe and Finding Darwin’s God by Miller, and that Behe’s book was easier and used a mousetrap to “get his point across”, while Miller’s book was too complex. That’s an interesting example of selective memory: both books deal with similar subjects on a roughly similar level. Behe’s book has details (some of which are wrong) of cilia and blood-clotting cascades and such, all of which seemed to have slipped out of this creationist’s memory. Miller’s book deals with similar subjects, but doesn’t make the stupid errors Behe’s does.

Yet all Mr Marketer remembers is that mousetraps don’t evolve.

I’m more concerned that if man has been around for 6000 years, why the heck didn’t anyone patent the snap-trap until 1897? Hmmm.

Brains are plastic, not hardwired

Cosma Shalizi has written a two part dialog that is amazingly well in line with my own thoughts on the subject of the heritability of intelligence: g is a statistical artifact, we have brains that evolved for plasticity, not specificity, and that while many behavioral traits have a heritable component, it’s not anything like what the naive extremists among the cognitive science crowd think. There are no genes that specify what you will name your dog — in fact, most of the genes associated with the brain have very wide patterns of expression and functions that are not neatly tied to behaviors: how does an allele of an adhesion factor map to your performance on a math test? It doesn’t, not directly.

Cosma has a wonderful example of the heritability of accents to illustrate the complications of trying to assign a genetic cause to properties associated with race and class and ethnicity. They may look like they’re genetically determined, but they aren’t. In my own family, I noticed a weird phenomenon: my grandparents came from Minnesota, and my mother was born there but moved to Washington state as a child. My grandparents had that Scandinavian-influenced upper midwest accent (if you’ve seen the movie Fargo, you’ve heard an amplified version of the same—most Minnesotans have only hints of that degree of an accent). My mother doesn’t have it. Oddly, though, I’ve heard bits of it in my sisters’ accents, an attenuated version of the already mild Minnesota sing-song, while my brothers and I don’t have a trace of it. I was tempted to speculate that there was a dominant Scandihoovian allele located on the X chromosome, but I suspect the more likely culprit would be sex differences in the influence of maternal and paternal families on boys and girls. That’s harder to tease apart than something as discrete as a gene, though, and it’s also a fuzzy effect that can be affected by scientific scrutiny.

Unfortunately, Three-Toed Sloth doesn’t have a comments section, so if you want to argue about it all, here’s a convenient battle ground in a Pharyngula thread.

And there shall be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth

The UK government does not mince words.

The government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.

It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.

Cue another DI media blitz, they’ve been dissed. It’s too bad for them that this is a government decree that actually aligns well with the position of scientists.

There once was a man from Downe…

This is a dangerous link: the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form. A number of obsessed lunatics have been submitting limericks on each word in the dictionary — they’ve got over forty one thousand entries so far — so it can just suck you in.

Here, try looking up limericks on evolution. The really hazardous part is when you start thinking you could do a much better job than that…

Your weekly Fish

I’m sorry to say that Stanley Fish is treading the same futile path that every defender of religion follows: there’s the knee-jerk detestation of atheism, then there’s the argument that atheism is nothing but faith itself, and now he’s reduced to impotent handwaving about a sublime but unknowable god, and therefore religion is … what? He’s not clear. He seems to be saying we can’t criticize religion because we have imperfect knowledge of a perfect being.

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Those wacky, happy-go-lucky Christians and their amusing ways

A “visionary” is recommending a new way of seeing “visions” of the Virgin Mary: stare directly into the sun. It works! Sort of.

Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.

Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.

“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.

I have a “vision,” too — if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer really, really hard, you’ll see Jesus! That makes about as much sense as Zackey’s. Who, by the way, is reported as being “happy”, and is “inundated with people seeking prayer and healing.”

Sunday afternoon exercises

Here’s your course of action. First, tune up your brain with Encephalon #25. Feeling smart now?

Next, browse The Carnival of the Godless #69. Now you’re smart and aggressively, skeptically godless. Sharp as a knife.

Now you’re ready to read Revere’s Sunday Sermonette. You will be entertained. It’s an account of a Georgia pastor wrestling with theodicy, and he refreshingly concludes that a) yes, god is screwing with you and making you suffer, and b) his explanation is that god is making sure you don’t forget him. God is a petty tyrant who torments you to remind you that he exists.

You should be feeling pretty cocky at this point. These theological arguments are so silly and shallow and superficial, and you can just slice right through them.

Unfortunately, Greg Laden is going to slime you with a loogey gun next. Watching Michele Bachmann talk about god is agonizing—god was apparently “focused like a laser beam” on her congressional race; the omnipotent omniscient ruler of the entire universe thought a political contest in a small Minneapolis suburb was the most important event in the whole cosmos, and was personally wielding his vast power to get a babbling boob into office.

Hah. What good does all your brain power and reason and logic do against that, I ask you? If there were a god, Michele Bachmann would be evidence that he is evil and he is screwing with us.