What is science?

Vox Day asks a question: what is my definition of science? It’s a bit weird coming from him — he is not usually that lucid or civil — but OK, I’ll take it seriously.

Unfortunately, “science” is one of those hugely polymorphic terms that carries a tremendous amount of baggage, and any one definition is going to be inadequate. This is one of those subjects where a smart philosopher (Janet? John?) could go on at amazing length, and even then, everyone will argue with their summaries. I’ll just charge in, though, and give a couple of shorter definitions off the top of my head.

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It’s like learning that the underpants gnomes are actually making money

There’s money to be made in crap. Who would have thought MySpace was so profitable?

Rupert Murdoch has told an industry conference that MySpace make $25 million per month on advertising.”It’s extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month — almost 30 per cent every quarter,” he told the Digital Hollywood conference, in New York.

There’s an evolutionary lesson in there, I think. The part of MySpace that represents what people want and value — the social networking, the easy customization — is a tiny fraction of what is displayed on a MySpace page. Most of what I see over there are ads being pushed at me aggressively; simply logging in presents me with half the screen filled with a scantily clad woman promising me a date. Just looking at the ugly, clumsy pages and the hideous, distracting clutter and noise, you’d think that no one in their right mind would want to use the thing—but obviously, it’s thriving.

Too bad it’s throwing more money into the pockets of the wretched Rupert Murdoch.

Of course this is the result I’d get

My score on The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test:

a Pirate
(You scored 3 Honor, 4 Justice, 4 Adventure, and 13 Individuality!)

i-1d56d62c1b18fa022abec60ba38d707b-pirate.jpg

Arr matey. You may believe in honor, and justice, and you certainly have a sense of adventure. But mostly, you play by your own rules. Your code is your own and you are flexible in most situations. Dress flamboyant and look into a parrot. I think you’ll do fine.

Link: The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test
(OkCupid Free Online Dating)

(via Cowboy Tikistitch)

The Geopolitical Strategist

I received a strange letter in the mail (the kind with paper and stamps, not the electronic kind) today. It was nicely and formally printed, and looked like something professional…but as soon as I read the first sentence I knew it was junk.

Evolution is defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica (CD Rom Version, 2002) as the process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state [this process is also called growth].

That’s a humdinger of an opening line; it’s completely wrong, of course. The silly book seems to have confused “evolution” with “progress”, since evolution makes no presupposition of a direction in the process. But wait! That’s only the beginning! As I read the rest of the first page, it was incredibly inane…but when I turned the page, it got even worse.

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Are you wiki’d out yet?

Here’s another special interest wiki: Athpedia, die säkulare Enzyklopädie. It’s a wikipedia for secularists, and as you might guess from the description, it’s so far all in German. There isn’t a lot there right now, so make it grow; a moment’s browse with my slow and clumsy recollections of German suggests that it isn’t a bad site—at least the articles don’t read like they were scribbled by third-graders and cribbed from some bottom-tier homeschool rag—but it clearly needs more contributors. More English would be helpful, too, but I mustn’t be a language imperialist, I know.

Shame on Oprah

“The Secret” is the latest New Agey scam; there’s an excellent article on this con on Salon:

Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.” And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that’s at the root of the other two. Here’s “The Secret” on reading and, um, electricity: “When I discovered ‘The Secret’ I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good,” and, “How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don’t, do you?” And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of “The Secret,” because it’s why the book exists: “[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, ‘I’d like to have this experience and I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.’ It is you placing your order with the Universe. It’s really that easy.” That’s from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to “The Secret,” on Oprah.com.

The main focus of the article, though is on how Oprah Winfrey is destroying her own credibility with the promotion of this nonsense; I never felt she had any credibility before (and heck, she had a negative account with me for advancing the career of that annoying fraud, Dr Phil), so that really doesn’t resonate with me…but the uncompromising dismissal of “The Secret” is worth reading.

Aww, it’s so sweet

A reader sent me a link to this myspace page (don’t quail in horror just yet!) called Bark, Hide and Horn—it’s by some folkies, and includes some songs. Love songs about mating molluscs and ants and various invertebrates! It’s very romantic. Listen if you’ve long had a lingering suspicion that you were born into the wrong phylum, or if just appreciate love no matter what the species involved are.

Consider it some theme music for the Circus of the Spineless, which will be appearing right here later today.

Lost Tomb of Jesus

Last week, I promised I’d watch this documentary about the “lost tomb of Jesus” because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I’ve put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I’m afraid there’s nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length.

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