One of the common principles used to characterize the rules of growth in developing systems is the idea of allometry. Here, I’ll briefly summarize the concept with a few clear illustrations and a tiny amount of simple math.
Hey, I’ve got this wonderful forum that’s read around the world, so I’m going to use it to unload on one of our local idiots, Ted Storck. Storck is one of those insufferable self-important Christians who makes the whole religion look like a lobotomy ward. His wonderful contribution to the cultural life of Morris is that he donated a set of ghastly electronic chimes to the nearby cemetery. And he writes letters to the Morris Sun Tribune.
This Memorial Day weekend, the chimes will play more hymns and patriotic songs at the cemeteries here in Morris.
We hope the few who dislike chimes will tolerate them as we honor the brave men and women who gave their lives to protect this great country.
Ted Storck
U.S. Navy, retired
Morris
Let me count the ways in which Ted Storck is an obnoxious jerk.
Pushing a button to play amplified, sterile hymns over a cemetery honors our dead about as much as slapping a magnetic yellow “I support the troops” ribbon on a hearse.
He knows that there are residents here who find the chimes loud and annoying, yet he announces that he’s going to fire those suckers up anyway.
This cemetery is next door to the university, six blocks from the center of our town, and only a block away from my house. It’s well-positioned to annoy a large number of people.
Ted Storck lives nowhere near the chimes.
He didn’t just start ’em up for Memorial Day weekend. They’re playing this weekend, too. He’s probably hoping to drive us mad all summer long.
And the major reason Ted Storck is a contemptible hypocrite and curse on our community: they’re playing these damned hymns and patriotic songs EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES. ALL DAY LONG. LOUDLY.
I also live two blocks away from the Catholic church in town. They ring their bells — real bells — a couple of times a day on Sunday, I presume at the start of Mass or something. That’s no problem. It’s even a pleasant sound, and I rather like hearing it—it’s a classic reminder of small town America.
But I want you to imagine this. Even if you are a devoutly religious person who thinks Christianity is the essence of all that is good and true and loving about humanity, try to imagine spending a quiet weekend at home with your family, out on the deck with the barbecue or relaxing in the easy chair with a good book, and every 15 minutes a set of cheesy chimes blares out “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Now imagine being atheist or Jewish or anything other than a blithering Christian sheep and getting slammed with the same noise incessantly.
Ted Storck’s legacy to our community is that he is going to have conditioned lots of us to puke on your shoes if we hear you humming “Rock of Ages.” Thank you, Christianity, for training your members so well to be insensitive, inconsiderate, pushy, arrogant dimbulbs. And thank you, Ted Storck, for personifying one reason why I despise your religion. I still wish you’d shut those damned things off.
I’ll be at City Hall tomorrow to complain, not that I have much expectation that anyone there will do anything.
Oh, come on. This is no surprise. Public schools mostly take religion for granted—it’s rife in athletics, in particular, but many of the ceremonies have prayers and ministers involved—so when a valedictorian speech damns her godless classmates to hell, it’s just a reflection of the culture.
Hey, theistic evolutionists, you have a new pal and representative: Dinesh D’Souza. Doesn’t that just make you want to reevaluate your philosophical foundations?
Don’t worry too much about it. D’Souza is a spectacular twit of a theistic evolutionist. He reveals his endorsement of evolution because he likes Sam Brownback (Strike 1!). He’s not at all informed about the debate because he thinks there are only two possibilities — you either accept evolution, or you’re a Young Earth Creationist (Strike 2!). And he endorses a particularly shallow form of NOMA—”Evolution provides a convincing account for transitions from one life form to another, and God breathed souls into us humans, just like the Bible says,” in which he accepts biblical authority without much thought (Strike 3!).
Maybe it’s hasty to call him a theistic evolutionist—there’s no sign that he’s put a moment’s thought into either the “theistic” part or the “evolution” part. I hate to say it because it is extremely slanderous, but perhaps we just ought to label him a — don’t say these words aloud if there are children about — “conservative pundit.” Bleh, ick, ptui.
After a long hiatus, the Koufax Awards site is chugging back to work, and is accepting nominations. No voting yet; this is just the time to let them know who you think is most deserving in various categories.
Just in case you had any doubts about how the Intelligent Design creationists would react to the denial of Gonzalez’s tenure, here’s how Uncommon Descent illustrated it:
I like the little sign above his head: he’s being burned at the stake because he “believes in God”! I assure you that the fact that someone goes to church does not play any role in tenure decisions, nor does the penalty for failure to get tenure involve immolation, or even singeing. The reality is that Guillermo Gonzalez is being politely shown the door because he “believes in pernicious pseudoscience,” and more pragmatically, because he didn’t bring in enough grant money.
Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, and it was exactly as the Dead Alewives portray it, right down to the guy always cruising for munchies.
(via Dr Bushwell)
Sad news for us all: Steve Gilliard has died.
I can’t help it—everything I read only makes sense in the light of evolution. Here, for instance, is a story about the popularity of the AK-47 assault rifle:
The AK-47’s popularity is generally attributed to its functional characteristics; ease of operation, robustness to mistreatment and negligible failure rate. The weapon’s weaknesses — it is considerably less accurate, less safe for users, and has a smaller range than equivalently calibrated weapons — are usually overlooked, or considered to be less important than the benefits of its simplicity. But other assault rifles are approximately as simple to manage, yet they have not experienced the soaring popularity of the Kalashnikov.
The AK-47’s ubiquity could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly. In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied.
“Path dependency”…hey, that’s another phrase for something I hammer on all the time, that you can only understand the full extent of evolution if you understand the developmental processes underlying it. Many sub-optimal solutions persist because they are part of a developmental framework that isn’t easily changed.
And speaking of suboptimal…there’s Microsoft Word, an ungainly monstrosity if ever there was one. Both Science and Nature have rejected the use of the latest version of MS Word, because it is non-standard and effectively broken.
Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.
There’s a “path dependency” for you, the ubiquity of Word. Even highly evolved, complex and otherwise necessary pathways can be replaced, though, if more effective alternative pathways acquire greater importance. If the target of selection is the production of a functional end product (a standard readable file in this case) and there are multiple paths for delivering that end product (doc or pdf), the acquisition and spread of a deleterious mutation in the dominant pathway can lead to greater importance of the alternate.
Hmm, I have to go home and start a pot of minestrone soup for dinner…somebody explain that process in evolutionary terms for me.
The president of Iowa State University has rejected Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal for tenure, citing the fact that “he simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.” That, alas, is the result I expected, and that everyone involved should have expected.
Now, if we expected a rational, productive response from the DI (not that I do), we should see them put down the hammers and nails and peel the poor fellow off the cross they’ve put him on. It’s time for Gonzalez to focus on the future and try to recover from the PR debacle his “friends” at the DI have put him through.
