B asked me the other day to mention his dad’s blog sometime, so of course I will do so. Observe the Banana. It’s part of the tapestry here in little ol’ Morris.
Aries: Look. The reason for your headaches is all the head-butting you do. Switch it up a little, and next time life throws one of those little annoyances your way, trying biting or kicking instead.
Monday, 12 May, 2:30pm. This is your chance.
The Residence Hall Association on my campus is having a fundraiser to send some members to a national conference, so they’ll be selling pies … to throw at faculty. I’ll be standing there for that half-hour, so students and anyone else who wants revenge can join in.
I expect a long, long line now. I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t have a horde prepared to be mean to me. And do note that this will be especially messy: the beard, you know. You won’t be getting your money’s worth with those clean-shaven professors.
Gemini: Avoid reading anything about Cyril Burt. There’s a strong possibility you might vanish.
No, don’t google that name.
I’m warning you.
Dang, too late, you’ve just become a statistical anomaly.
Mark Mathis does not come off as a nice man in interviews. You may have listened to the SciAm interview, a truly painful experience in which he made claims about evolution and then backtracked when confronted with his mistakes…and admitted that he knew nothing about the subject. He’s done it again in an interview with a Detroit weekly (scroll down to the “Unevolved” article on that page).
I confront Mathis with this point, and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue—to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.
When I point this out, he interrupts me immediately: “Whoa! Wait a minute! Please send me whatever material you have that demonstrates that we can observe speciation because I have not seen anything. I’ve never heard anyone even claim that!”
Is he serious? He’s just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail, and he later responds, “This isn’t an important argument for me.”
So I ask him about falsifiability. Clearly, evolution could potentially be disproved, but how could one ever disprove the existence of a deity? He laughs. “You can’t apply falsifiability to Darwinian evolution. How is it falsifiable?”
I respond by quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” One instance of fossils appearing in the wrong strata would disprove current evolutionary theory in an instant. Mathis pauses before saying, “If you want to get into the science…” He then trails off and mutters something irrelevant before finally confessing, “Look. You can get into the intricacies of the science on both sides. And I am not qualified.” On that point, we can both agree.
It’s really easy to find descriptions of speciation events on the web, there are thousands of papers on the subject, and there are even whole books discussing it (with difficult, hard-to-find titles like Speciation, which must be why Mathis couldn’t find them). It is cute how the poor man melts down when he meets anyone with even a hint of scientific knowledge. I don’t think “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian” counts as a scientific intricacy, at least not in the circles I hang out in, where it’s more of a glib quickie. But then, even that level of science probably leaves poor Mathis floundering and lost.
You’ll have to read the rest to find out what he says about me, personally. I guess calling him the ass-prod was an insult that really stung.
Sagittarius: Uh-oh. A Republican is going to notice that you are a man-animal hybrid today. Expect vicious denunciations on the steps of the Capitol; beware of federal agents in white lab coats.
Let’s catch up with the carnivals:
We’ve got a new Tangled Bank at Dammit Jim! next Wednesday — send those links in to me or [email protected].
Libra: There’s a choice to be made. You can live fast and hard in the hands of the coke dealer, or you can have the sedate life with regular maintenance, dealing with nothing harder than the occasional phosphate salt. The difference is as simple as a chain with a lock.
I mentioned this new religious license plate in Florida before, and now it looks like it’s closer to reality. I don’t object strongly to it — it’s optional, and people who want it have to pay an extra $25 — but some of the arguments against it are embarrassing, and the arguments for it are even worse. There are a lot of variations of the slippery slope being thrown around.
Rep. Kelly Skidmore said she is a Roman Catholic and goes to Mass on Sundays, but she believes the “I Believe” plate is inappropriate for the government to produce.
“It’s not a road I want to go down. I don’t want to see the Star of David next. I don’t want to see a Torah next. None of that stuff is appropriate to me,” said Skidmore, a Democrat who voted against the plate in committee. “I just believe that.”
What? So the objection to a blatantly Christian plate is that it might encourage those Jews in Florida to brag about their religion on their cars? Is Judaism that offensive?
There is a better example of what kinds of interest groups the state might have to accommodate: the ACLU suggests that this could open the doors to KKK plates. That’s definitely much more offensive than driving while Jewish, but still…on giving it a little thought, I don’t think I’d mind if the hateful idiots of the KKK all labeled themselves, and paid the state for the privilege.
Simon, of the ACLU, said approval of the plate could prompt many other groups to seek their own designs, and they could claim discrimination if their plans were rejected. That could even allow the Ku Klux Klan to get a plate, Simon said.
But then there is the usual Christian hypocrisy. These plates are going to be offered selectively, only to groups of which the Florida legislature approves. Guess who’s left out?
Bullard, the plate’s sponsor, isn’t sure all groups should be able to express their preference. If atheists came up with an “I Don’t Believe” plate, for example, he would probably oppose it.
That’s the way, Bullard old boy; stop the slide down a slippery slope and replace it with an official state sponsored religious preference.
Virgo: You may think you’re sitting pretty, but there’s a really ugly test cross with a triple mutant in your future.
…Republican Representative John Duncan of Tennessee. Confronted with a vast amount of evidence provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the US Institute of Medicine , the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Psychological Association that abstinence-only education does not work, does not reduce the incidence of either teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted disease, and that it is a waste of money, the honorable Mr Duncan declared his complete disinterest in data and expertise.
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.
Nobody is advocating an abandonment of the idea of encouraging abstinence; they’re saying that abstinence-only is a failure, and we should be encouraging dissemination of more information. I know, that’s terribly elitist — how dare we oppose some parents’ desire to keep their children ignorant and stupid.
I should also hand out an anti-Mummert to Henry Waxman, who deserves a lifetime award.
Panel chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said, “We are showering funds on abstinence-only programs that don’t appear to work, while ignoring proven comprehensive sex education programs that can delay sex, protect teens from disease, and result in fewer teen pregnancies.”
Scorpio: The black lights in your bedroom will pay off in a big way — expect a fluorescent romantic entanglement in your near future. Male Scorpios should definitely invest in life insurance.
Cancel your trip to Africa! There are sorcerors stealing…personal items.
Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Unfortunately, it’s not very funny since deluded people are blaming their tiny, impotent penises on random people and beating and lynching them.
Cancer: This is not a good day to molt—there’s a cephalopod with an eye on you. Hunker down beneath a rock with some ripe rotting fish and wait.
It’s 2008 — I think astrology has been dead for a few centuries. But OK, it’s been shown to be worthless again. A large study of thousands of “time twins” — people who were born at the same time — has concluded that there are no correspondence between them.
Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading – all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.
The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative.”
Big surprise.
Don’t look for astrology to vanish, though. Here’s the real surprise in the story.
Some of the most popular figures in the field, such as Russell Grant, Mystic Meg and Shelley von Strunckel, can earn £600,000 or more a year.
A single profitable astrology website can be worth as much as £50 million.
When the Daily Mail discovered that its expert on the zodiac, Jonathan Cainer, was about to leave the newspaper in 1999, it reportedly offered him a £1 million salary and a £1 million bonus to stay. He still preferred the offer at the Daily Express: no salary but all the money from his telephone lines.
Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I need to start inserting the occasional horoscope reading in my blog posts.
Pisces: You will be busy exchanging ions across your gill membranes today — watch out for predators, and trust your lateral line organs.
Well, at least you might think this was my mission statement if you were an incoherent, demented kook, anyway.
(Hat tip to Bay of Fundie)
The things you learn from crazy clerics…
A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.
Oh, well — if a prominent cleric said such a thing, who am I to argue? I’m sure there must be an utterly dazzling, deep theological argument to explain how one specific point on the surface of a spinning sphere, a point which doesn’t seem to have any special relationship to the pattern of rotation, can be defined as a “center”. I’m probably not smart enough to understand it, though.
