TAM London 2010. 16-17 October.

Like last time, I expect this news will set off another fusillade of dissenting opinions, but too bad. Extremists have vandalized Lars Vilks home, trying to set it on fire (original article in Swedish here).

In an undoubtably futile attempt to forestall what I expect will be common objections to this story here, I know that there are political ramifications to the cartoons of Mohammed. I know that many of them were motivated by racism and xenophobia. In this instance, though, I don’t care. Vilks drew a sketch. His enemies set his house on fire.

I would encourage Muslims to respond in kind, with their own cartoons lampooning Vilks (it shouldn’t be hard; the article about the arson has a picture of Vilks that looks rather deranged already). But when you respond to an insult to your beliefs with violence and destruction, you have moved beyond the boundaries of civilization, straight into barbarism, and you will get no sympathy from me.

Some of you know one of our regular commenters here…and she has some good news to share.

Hail the happy Happy Beltane season!

Naughty Marvin

&

Patricia, OM

Are pleased to announce

their engagement.

A Lughnasadh Wedding is planned

at Trout Lake Abbey, Trout Lake, Washington.

I even know where that is! Very pretty country thereabouts. Congratulations to all!

A colleague and fellow freethinker at Bemidji State University, Dann Siems, has been diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma. This is not good. This is damned scary stuff. He’s still blogging away occasionally, discussing the experimental treatments being tried on him, but this is all expensive, and he has a family as well. If you’d like to help, there is a benefit concert being held on 5 June with a raffle. Maybe you can’t attend because Turtle River, Minnesota isn’t exactly next door, but you could buy a raffle ticket. Or if you’d rather, you can just make a donation through Headwaters Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

I was given a proposal for a new word by a fellow named Francois Choquette. It’s a tough game trying to get a new coinage accepted, and I doubt that it’ll take off…but it’s actually a useful word to replace that abomination, “spirituality”. So I’ll toss Choquette’s description out there for the readership to judge.

Scientility

Describes the sensation that a scientist or amateur of science experiences when he/she observes an amazing phenomenon, for which his/her qualifications or knowledge makes them experience it a greater degree of appreciaton and joy than people without that knowledge.

Rationale:
We need a new word is that freethinkers can use instead of having to use the word “Spirituality” to describe this enhanced experience. Some of us cringe when having to use the word “spirituality”, when describing our feelings when describing our connection to nature.

Carl Sagan wrote, when speaking of the relationship between science and spirituality: “In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. They very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos….Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

Mr. Sagan may have prefered to use a different word, if it existed. The current use of the word Spirituality implies “Spirits”, a ghost, an unquantifiable being, supposedly present everywhere that affects human bodies yet, that has never been detected and is unfalsifable. It is an unscientific word and we need a new word to replace it.

Who would need this word:
Any person experiencing human emotion beyond that can be described by the data:
An astronomer will experience the night sky differently than an astrologer.
An automotive engineer will experience a car show more deeply than say, a car washer.
A biologist netting an new undiscovered fish will feel differently than say a fisherman, who may lack the proper interest in this rare find.

Richard Feynman said it best, but didn’t have the word scientility to describe it:
“I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty. […] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

Formal definition:

scien•ti•li•ty [scien-tee-lee-tee]
-noun, plural -ties.
1.the quality or fact of being sciential.
2.knowledge-based experience, improved by real, proven, scientific data. Can be euphoric in nature, like a eureka moment.

Use of Scientility in a sentence:
– Scientiliy can happen while appreciating the results of a scientific experiment.
– Observing a rocket launch can be a scientil experience or a patriotic experience.
– A farmer will have a scientual appreciation of a new genetically engineered seed.
– The class was scientilized by the new science teacher.
– Today I feel scientual.
– Have a scientil day!

–Related forms
non•scien•ti•li•ty, noun
su•per•scien•ti•li•ty, noun
un•scien•ti•li•ty, noun

George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay gay minister, has actually come out and admitted what he and his lovely rent-boy were doing on tour.

If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

Now I’m worried. I just know I’m going to go into class to “share scientific information”, and all the knowing gays will be giggling and laughing and saying, “oh, he went there,” and I’ll be baffled about what the joke is.

At least there’s no risk that I’ll “share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” I can only imagine how pornographic that is.

The poor man. With all that “luggage lifting” and “sharing scientific information” and “gospel swapping,” he must be totally “fagged out”.

George Alan Rekers is a fairly well-known anti-gay activist. He’s one of those scientific types who claims that being gay is curable, is best known for his claim that adopted children of gay couples are more prone to suicide, and is also one of the founders of the Patriarchy Research Council, with James Dobson. Oh, and of course he’s a Christian minister.

He just got back from a ten-day European tour — crusaders for heterosexuality deserve a break now and then, too — when it was discovered that he had hired a “rent boy” for the trip. He had picked the young fellow out from a web site that describes his sexual attributes and offered explicit services for pay, but Dr Rekers said he just hired him to…”lift his luggage”. I am unfamiliar with that euphemism, but I’m sure it was fun.

To even greater amusement, it is also revealed that Rekers, staunch opponent of adoption by gay couples, adopted a child — a 16 year old boy.

They hypocrisy is strong in this one.

Why are science and religion in conflict? Because changing ideas and new knowledge are sacrilegious.

[Read more…]

Any exobiologists out there might be interested to know that, according to certain wacky sources, the military has captured an alien. There are Septeloids:

“The male non-human originated from the star system Delta Pavonis, 20 light-years from Earth where it was the 4th planet from their sun. It is roughly the same size as our Earth.”

“We called the captured alien Septeloids. That was the identifying alien species name given to them by the astrobiologists on our team. I have no idea how they picked that name as well as some of the other odd-sounding alien species names ending with the suffix of ‘loid.'”

“The travel time to Earth was 18 Earth months using a very complex propulsion system and time-space displacement travel mode. Back then in 1980, we could not understand the alien propulsion system and we never saw his spacecraft.”

And there are Trantaloids:

The source also reportedly stated to Martinez that the home world of the alleged hostile alien species, the Trantaloids, “is the third planet out from the star Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus at 10.5 light-years away. Although somewhat cooler and fainter than our sun, it is very similar.”

Something about this story was nagging me, besides the fact that it was such weird conspiracy story/ufology mishmash — and then I remembered. “Time-space displacement travel mode”? Epsilon Eridani? Delta Pavonis? Me and some fellow geeks obsessed over that stuff in my college years: we were addicts of an old board game called StarForce, in which you used time-space displacement travel to bop about the local stellar neighborhood, fighting aliens who were based on a few stars nearby…guess which ones? It was a nice star map that we played on, too, that actually had the coordinates of the known stars within (I think) 20 light years of earth.

The crazy conspiracy theorists are still around, but you don’t find games like that any more — this was 30 years ago, before computers took over gaming. I think I still have it stuffed away in a box down in the basement, unless mice have gotten in and eaten all the cardboard.

This is an excellent review of a program that will be on tonight:

Tonight on Frontline, “The Vaccine War” presents both sides of the controversy over whether young children should be vaccinated for diseases such as measles and polio, and in a rare display of TV-news common sense and independence, one side is shown to be — sorry — wrong. Frontline’s documentary will, I hope, leave any sensible viewer feeling that you’d have be deluded or selfish not to have your kids vaccinated.

Now I’m going to have to tune in just for the unbelievable spectacle of a television show taking a skeptical, science-based view of the issue. It’s broadcast at 8pm Central time on PBS — apparently, it will also be available online as well.

---

It wasn’t bad — a little dry, not quite as blunt as I’d have liked it to be, but I think it made a good case. They’d show the anti-vaxers making some claim, then they’d show how they were simply wrong. Too much time was given to the doofuses, but I think that had to be done in order to shoot them down.

The most effective bit, though, was the showing of the effects of diseases like whooping cough, which can be easily immunized against. If I were a young parent trying to make a decision about whether to immunize (because I was an ignorant git unaware of the science behind vaccines), a bunch of statistics from an epidemiological study might not be that persuasive…but a video of a baby girl gasping for air and near death because of a disease that I could prevent her from getting, I’d give her the shot. No argument.