Have you ever wondered how many five year olds you could beat up?  I had never thought about this before, but now I know. The answer is customized to your physical characteristics, your fighting etiquette and your sense of morality.

OK, now bring on those five-year olds!

This Saturday, I visited the Atheist Coming Out Party in Westerville, Ohio. The event had numerous hosts and sponsors- American Atheists, Students for Free Thought, Secular Student Alliance, and many, many regional skeptical and atheistic groups. As such, the event drew in atheists, secular humanists, skeptics, and other assorted heathens from all around Ohio, as well as neighboring states.

Where, do you ask, does a group of such cursed godless people go to gather? A lovely event barn in a gorgeous park:

And what do atheists do at such a party? Well, they begin with a little bit of potluck dinner and socializing:

I sat at a table with atheists from Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern Ohio. Visitors had traveled for hours and hours on end for this lovely event. Our region, after all, does not generate many skeptical and atheist get-togethers. New England has Boston Skeptics in the Pub, Las Vegas has The Amaz!ing Meeting, but the midwest usually has a dearth of heatheny gatherings.

After a filling lunch of the unwashed souls of the damned (and carrot cake), we moved upstairs for a series of talks. First up was Hemant Mehta, Chicago-area atheist who wrote I Sold My Soul on Ebay, and who writes at the Friendly Atheist blog.

Hemant had one very important take home point in his talk: atheists need to capture the positive aspects of church culture. We need to provide a sense of community for one another. We need to advertise our messages as effectively as Christians do. And, especially, we need to use our organizations to do a boatload of charity work, like the Christians do.

Following Hemant came Edwin Kagin of American Atheists. He delighted the audience with a very impromptu series of atheist jokes and assorted ramblings.  Edwin does most of the legal heavy lifting for American Atheists, and has done so for quite some time. His take-home point was…well, I’m not exactly sure, but he definitely stressed the idea that atheists must come out of the closet, lest they remain a forever marginalized group.

Speaking of atheist marginalization, the event even had protesters! Unfortunately, my photo did not come out very well:

The protesters’ signs said things like “God Loves You”. They behaved in a very respectful and kind manner. We certainly returned the favor: some atheists brought the small group food and water, and I made sure to ask permission before snapping a quick shot of the gang.

Hopefully the group learned that atheists look normal, behave decently, and even have families themselves. Look at this beautiful family that attended the event:

Wow! This presumably atheist family has already taught its young daughters to play chess.

I had to leave the event not long after Hemant and Edwin’s speeches. I missed the “de-baptism” held later; formerly baptized theists were passed over with a large hair dryer, then given a certificate of their newly de-baptized state. I missed out on the certificate, but I did get a free shirt from American Atheists. It espouses the general, non-confrontational message of the event:

Do any of you remember the Nick Smith of 30 months ago? Back then, Nick, based in Decatur, Illinois, designed a brand new site called Dangerous Intersection. At that time, DI was only the most recent of Nick’s accomplishments—he had already established himself as a graphic designer for music groups and entertainers, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mandy Moore, the Veronicas, Eric Clapton and Paris Hilton.

That was back then, of course, and some of you might be wondering, “Nick, what have you done lately?” The answer is not at all subtle. Today is the official launch date of Nick’s newest web project: PWN or DIE. What? Huh? PWN? Think of Funny or Die, and then change the content from comedy to video games.

PWN or Die is highly interactive forum where gamers gather to announce their accomplishments, to share strategy and to offer encouragement to other gamers. PWN or Die is a place where gamers may upload videos to illustrate their finest hours. According to today’s press release issued by the Or Die Network:

PwnorDie.com, a new website for gamers and enthusiasts of all levels and the latest venture from the Or Die Networks launched today, it was announced today by Dick Glover, CEO of the Or Die Networks.

“Given the tremendous impact of the video game industry on the web, the Or Die Networks would not be complete without a site dedicated to gaming,” said Glover. “Like Funny or Die, we have established a great destination for game enthusiasts of all levels and interests to be entertained and engaged on a daily basis. It is also a site where developers, manufacturers, bloggers and everyone else associated with gaming can find and break news, information, commentary and entertainment around and about their favorite gaming community,” he added.

Designed to pick up after users put the controller down, Pwn or Die is the ultimate “hub” of gaming videos for the casual user who enjoys the classics like Super Mario Bros., Tetris, or PacMan to the hardcore gamer entranced in World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Halo. From user generated videos to videos featuring the best gamers to methods and tips on how to excel in games to celebrities and their involvement and love of video games — Pwn or Die is designed to entertain and engage the game enthusiast in everyone.

The site also features content from the major game companies like Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts, THQ and Activision, as well as gaming sites like NextGenWalkthroughs.com. In addition, Roberty Bowling (aka FourZeroTwo of Infinity Ward, makers of Call of Duty 4), will have a personal video blog on Pwn or Die as well as pieces from Infinity Ward showcasing the COD4 game and their upcoming releases. Pwn or Die will have crews covering major gaming events, showcasing some of the best gamers and gaming companies in the world.

Pwn or Die is the brainchild of Nick Smith, an entertainment industry graphic designer who is most importantly an avid “gamer” and ultimate fan. In addition to the signature Or Die Network attributes such as a voting system and a rich embedded video player, Pwn or Die also features a point system which will reward users for interacting with the site and a state-of-the-art video player designed specifically for the ultimate gaming fan.

Truly, this is a site that is jammed full of valuable information for gamers, as well as those who like to see what the gamers are up to.

Congratulations, Nick!

Apparently the Pacific Justice Institute is suing a couple of Berkeley professors for putting up a website that explains evolution. The PJI apparently sues anyone who might constrain Christian evangelism in America, including in public schools. I read about this current suit here, on CitizenLink.org.

CitizenLink is a newsletter for Focus on the Family, a non-profit political action group for Pro-Life, evangelical Christian, and/or Young Earth education policies, but with redeeming social action programs. As long as they don’t mention candidates by name, they don’t have to pay taxes.

The legal claim is that evolution is a faith-based idea, and that the professors used Federal Grant money (National Science Foundation grant no. 0096613) as part of the funds needed to develop the site. Apparently the site disregards Creationist sources and ideology, and as such is religiously biased and violates the separation clause.

www.UnderstandingEvolution.com is full of references and citations, explanations, illustrations, and teaching guides to try to lead one to an understanding of many facets of what evolution is, and how it affects, well, everything. Topics include easy to follow answers for skeptics, like “How does evolution impact my life?”, “What is the evidence for evolution? ” and “What is the history of evolutionary theory?”. There are guides for teachers at all levels.

As such, this site has been a thorn in the side of Intelligent Design since 2004. Let’s see how much mainstream press this current nuisance suit attracts.

Summer of 2004. I have considered myself an atheist at least since the summer of 2004. For the sake of feeling smart and consistent, I believe I’ve considered myself an atheist for much longer. But I only have documented evidence of such a stance dating back to the summer of 2004.

Did I have some great logical awakening that roused me to critical thinking and clear-headedness? No. I know I did not. I know I didn’t become a perfect bastion of scientific thinking because, in the summer of 2004, I believed in handwriting analysis.

A knowledge-thirsty little 10th grader, I still believed then that if someone with a PhD wrote a book, that book had to contain gospel truth. I didn’t know the difference between bad science and good science. I didn’t even realize such a rift existed. So handwriting analysis, with all of its certain language and its sheer lack of cited empirical evidence, seemed as valid as medicine or geology.

Only half a year or so later, as I struggled to tell a friend that the dominating middle region in her script belied a permanently childish outlook, did I begin to realize exactly how idiotic this whole graphology thing sounded.

Ouch. It still stings to admit. Should I also admit that I used to take multivitamins? That I preferred bottled water over tap? Evidence supports none of these beliefs.

I hope I’ve made my point clearly: atheism did not protect me from having moronic faith in things not supported by evidence. The empiricism I had used to destroy God did not extend automatically to all other silly things settled in my head. I had to force out all of the cobwebs. (more…)

Here’s a simple commentary on claims by faith:

(Click to see the original in situ)

From the online comic series XKCD, a strip for those who know emacs from God, and also those who can’t tell them apart.

I was reading this ZDNet blog about the Browser becoming the new Desktop, and one question came to mind. What happened to the promise of inter-operable parts of your computer environment?

About 15 years back, when computers were going to create the paperless office, all of the operating system and desktop teams were promising this glowing future when you could mix and match components seamlessly. You can have one spell checker, one email program, one internet interface, one text editor, one math interface (as for spreadsheet formulas), and so on. But they didn’t have to be from the same source! WordPerfect would work with 1-2-3 would work with Usenet (email), and their respective parts could be called up by your schedule program. This didn’t come to be.

Now, for example, you have one spell checker for each brand of each component. Microsoft did follow the Lotus model, and integrated text, spreadsheets, and email so that they share a spell checker. But there is no way to use the Microsoft spell checker from (for example) your web design program (unless you do buy it from MS). Nor can you use it from your browser, even if you are still shackled to IE. Sure, FireFox comes with spell checking, but you have to train it for your special needs from scratch.

It would be nice if I only had to remember one set of special formula commands that do the same things in several different programs, too.

But sadly, this promise faded away, possibly buried under the tons of paper records that office computers now generate for (as near as I can tell) strictly CYA reasons.

At Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse puts Rand’s theory of objectivism under a bright analytical light and finds it wanting:

Since Objectivists reject all notions of a social safety net, it’s natural to ask what would happen to the poor and needy in an Objectivist society. This is Ayn Rand’s answer: “If you want to help them, you will not be stopped” (p.80).

This chilling response, which carries with it the unmistakable implication that she will not be participating in any such effort, illustrates Objectivist philosophy’s cruel, heartless ethic of social Darwinism. Its guiding principle is not “we’re all in this together”, but rather “every man for himself” - and whatever misery strikes the worthless and the inferior as a result ought not to trouble the brave, heroic, superior souls whom Rand imagines are mankind’s salvation. The parallels between this doctrine and the beliefs of tyrants throughout history should be too obvious to need pointing out.

Rand based many of her conclusions on her unwarranted belief in the allegedly perfect wisdom of the “free market,” an (unfortunately) common belief that I have repeatedly criticized at this site.  

As a teenager, I was briefly enchanted with Rand’s writings.  I pulled away, though, for many of the reasons Ebonmuse eloquently raises in his detailed post.

As usual my head is abuzz with the social media explosion and the impact technology has on my world. While communication has always been a part of the technology, folks that barely own computers are becoming familiar with Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, and twitter.  iPhones are being advertised so deliciously on television ads that my lust can barely be contained, not to mention the tiniest of notebook computers making an appearance with the cutest of jingles. Sometimes I am not sure If what I am doing makes sense for my business. Sometimes I worry that I waste my time with my focus on all this geeky technology and social media web 2.0 stuff.

I am no expert, but as usual I know enough to be dangerous, and to provide a lively conduit to my less technologically focused comrades. A less kind way of saying that is that I am obsessed with technology and communication but that I have people in my life who keep me from completely disappearing into the matrix. I love social connections technology provides, and I have for as long as I can remember. I went from devouring Asimov and Heinlein as a child and dreaming about connections within world to almost going broke networking coffeehouses with chat and email and online information in St. Louis prior to the web explosion.

One of the reasons I ventured out on my own in recruiting is that I could experiment with stuff like this and the stuff that is still being developed. I have had a lot of success with the social media in recruiting, and love the heck out of it. There is truly a dizzying amount of activity, and it promises to be a wild ride as we venture even more into interactivity and robust network applications. It can be a distraction, but I have found that as long as my online activities drive me back to the telephone (or my bottom line) I am okay. It is hard to focus and be that disciplined with all the fun, crazy stuff happening out there, but recruiting success (like most of life) really is about discipline and focus. I know I have to stay balanced, and a tool like twitter is very dangerous for us folks easily distracted by shiny bits, but it is also a way to find people, and that is what I do for a living. I guess it is always all about the results, and I should just let those decide if my geeky methods are helpful or harmful.

I believe that life is always enhanced by connection, which is partly why I love being a recruiter. And though I know that a lot of folks scoff at meaningful connections through a computer or a mobile device, for me it goes without saying that the lines between the virtual world and that of my own back yard are now so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable. I have had countless virtual world interactions that changed my life, made me money, or led me to find new friends or business contacts, so there is no debate on the value to me. The challenge for me lies in finding a balance. The dizzying real time feeds of email, tweets, chat and mobile blogging are as necessary to me as my morning cup of joe, but I have to work to find a way to stay grounded, centered and balanced in my approach, otherwise I might go crazy. So I am working on it. I think it is funny that I try to do 20 minutes of sitting meditation each morning, and then I go off to work, but it does seem to help me keep my balance.

Recruiting efficiently has a lot to do with doing effective research. That is why I think my methods might be interesting to people that are not just recruiters. Here is an example of how I use twitter. Think of it as a constant explosion of 140 character thoughts into space. Steams of consciousness from an unidentified number of consciousnesses. Random thoughts, pointers to pictures and articles and interviews and what someone had for dinner. Dizzying, right? You can follow people and see, in real-time, their streams on your screen. Entertaining, fun, pretty pointless though, right? Wrong.

Enter tweet scan, a real-time twitter search. For example, I will search for St. Louis tweets, and what do we find? An ever growing and surprisingly active list of folks using twitter here in my home town. Coolio! I am seeing denizens of the web that I never realized were there. But wait, what is that? Oh, a tweet from someone I might know, who knew that guy was on twitter. Man I need to get back in touch with that guy, uh, wait, holy cow. He is tweeting that he is hiring people, and is having problems. He needs me!

Uh, sorry guys, I gotta run. Right there is some potential business popping its head up and, as a rhino, I need to charge right after it. But isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly pointless tool can help you do what you need to do?  Or at least it can if you know how to use it.

As some of you may know, I am a dedicated reader of Language Log, the blog where a bunch of linguists hold forth on a variety of topics, sometimes only tangentially related to linguistics. Their posts ridiculing ignorant peeve-rants about the degeneration of English are hugely enjoyable; but another frequent theme is bad science writing and modern forms of innumeracy.

However, in this post Mark Liberman singles out an article in the New York Times Magazine for praise for finding a way to explain how “small but statistically reliable differences in group distributions” should not be seen as “essential properties of the groups themselves.”

The article profiles a school that is changing its educational policies based on hack theories about male and female brains:

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Are there differences between male and female brains? Research findings suggest there are some. Does any brain research yet suggest that differential single-sex education is superior to co-ed classrooms? Hardly.

Scans of boys’ and girls’ brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. “Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage,” the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.

One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place.

Of course, in elementary school the height/locker room assignment would be almost completely random, and in middle school, there might be more girls than boys in in boys locker room, and vice-versa. A better analogy would be an adult fitness club that made locker room assignments based on height. How many people reading this might find themselves in the “wrong” locker room on this basis? And remember that the correlation between gender and height is stronger than the correlation between gender and brain development rates, (and also remember that there’s no evidence that the differential development rate is related to learning in any way.)

While being assigned to the wrong locker room would no doubt be traumatic, think about the harm that is caused by teaching girls that it is unfeminine to to like reptiles, or depriving boys of opportunities to learn how to work together cooperatively.

It’s time to chuck the “evidence-free rubbish” out of our schools.

Bear with us as we improve this site. I realize that the comments function was not working this morning. That has now been fixed. Also, posting capacity was down for awhile. Those problems have been ironed out.

We’re making lots of changes here, most of them to the backside of the site. These changes (I am told by Nick Smith, our website designer) will make our site faster and easier to use. Last night, Nick upgraded this site to the newest version of WordPress, adding dozens of new plug-ins. We now have the capacity for podcasting and we will soon have the capacity to host our own videos.  We are considering numerous other changes that will improve navigation.

There are a few features that will appear (and, perhaps, disappear) on the home page in the next couple of days. We are trying out a few things and mulling them over.

If anyone has any comments on the usability or technical issues with this site, I would really appreciate your feedback, so we can address the situation.

I stumbled onto this excellent column by Damian Thompson about the modern proliferation of pseudo-information. That is, the way various formerly obscure conspiracy cults (UFO’s, moon landing hoaxers, second-shooters, 9/11 Truthers, Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Inflating Earthers, etc) manage to disseminate their beliefs convincingly to wide and gullible audiences.

Before Gutenberg, only reliable, church-approved texts could be widely read in western culture. Then a new technology came along, and suddenly heretics like Martin Luther or Galileo could publish widely before the church could disappear them and their ideas. It took a few generations to settle down to the publishing and  editorial ethic that made it clear which information was reliable and accepted, and which was fringe. It helped that there was still some economic hurdle to wide publication, and publishers needed to maintain their reputations. This lasted until almost the end of the 20^th century.

Now, we have the web. Any misinformed but layout-talented individual can produce publications (pages) that look as wise, vetted, and reliable as Britannica. But without the necessity of prissy little details like fact checking or actual expertise in the subjects being purveyed. Must it be another couple of generations before the average browser can tell fact from fancy?

(more…)

I’m a newcomer to an extremely popular website called Lifehack.  The site specializes in “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.” 

There is obviously a lot to consider at Lifehack.org.  One might wonder, though, how much time one should spend on productivity lest one’s productivity sags.  Despite this self-limiting concern, Lifehacks marches on relentlessly, reporting on hundreds of ideas, big and small, that claim to enhance productivity. 

I really enjoyed a post called:  “Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus.”  Mingus was a highly respected bass player, composer and band leader. 

I’ve played a fair share of jazz guitar over the years (I’ve long been inspired by the music of Wes Montgomery).  that experience often has me wondering how much of those jazz techniques transferred over to other activities.  In particular, is jazz playing merely good subliminal therapy, mental chiropractic, or do some of those jazz skills have clear relevance to other domains?

The author of this Mingus post, Dustin Wax, was inspired by Mingus’ autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, arguing that some jazz techniques do indeed transfer to other walks of life.  To me, Wax’s arguments make intuitive sense.  His article is succinct and well-crafted.  Here’s a sample:

You don’t play alone: Too many people think about the great Jazz geniuses as exemplars of individualism: free minds striving for greatness. Here’s what Mingus would do when a soloist thought too highly of his own genius — he’d direct the band to stop playing, leaving the soloist hanging without any backup, looking like a fool. Improvisation is as much about the relationships between people as it is about our own self-expression; work with the input of those around you instead of trying to stand out against it.

Here are some of Mingus’ jazz rules Dustin Wax found to be useful beyond jazz playing.  I found myself nodding agreement to each of these:

Go with the flow

Learn the rules so you can break them

Play by ear

Embrace limits (Infinite choice is paralyzing)

When you make a mistake, keep playing

Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old.  We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories.  These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments.  Many of these posts (I’m guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day, and will age quickly.  There are many other posts that may be of some value months or even years after they were written, however.  Our authors work hard to embed useful quality links in their posts in an effort to inject lasting value into their posts.

Quite often, I run into a topic that has been addressed in some detail by a previous post.  Tracking down those older posts can sometimes be a challenge. The Dangerous Intersection website, which is built upon WordPress, includes a search function that often works fairly well in digging up previous posts and comments.  On other occasions, however, the algorithm of that simple search function pulls up too few or too many search results to be useful.

On those occasions, I have turned to the exquisite “Advanced Search” function of Google.  Google’s Advanced Search allows you to focus on the content of a particular website.  You can do this by inserting the URL of that website into the “Domain” field. For instance, if you wanted to search only content found on Dangerous Intersection, merely insert http://dangerousintersection.org/ into the Domain box.

At that point, you can continue to fine-tune your search in many additional ways.  See, for example, the top four fields on the advanced search screen.  You can request Google to return only those results that contain each of the words you enter, or an exact phrase, or all those results containing at least one of a string of words.  You can also ask Google to exclude content containing a word or words that you designate.

You can fine-tune your search request in other ways too.  For instance, you can request content within certain date ranges or limit your search to content found in certain parts of a webpage (e.g., only in the title).  For more assistance in using Google’s advanced search, see the Google Help Screen for it’s Advanced Search.

I offer this information regarding Google advanced search for those of you who might want to search for information on this site (or on any website) where the simple search feature offered on the website itself doesn’t quite get the job done.

Psyblog presents a handy summary of ten of the most famous social psychology studies. The post is a succinct review of each of the following studies, along with thoughtful commentary.  The social psychological studies include the following:

 1. The Halo Effect - Nisbett
 2. Cognitive Dissonance - Festinger
 3. Robbers Cave - Sherif
 4. Stanford Prison Experiment - Zimbardo
 5. Obedience to Authority - Milgram
 6. False Consensus Bias - Ross
 7. Social Identity Theory - Tajfel
 8. Bargaining - Deutsch
 9. Bystander Apathy - Darley & Latane
 10. Conforming to the Norm - Asch

Who is Psyblog?  It’s Jeremy Dean, a lawyer/psychologist who has assembled an impressive collection of clearly written posts on various aspects of psychology.  It’s definitely worth a visit–though you might end up staying for quite awhile.  I certainly did. 

Other recent Psyblog posts include the following:  Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind? (it’s questionable) and Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted.   And why is career planning wasted?  Because we aren’t even capable of knowing what sandwich we’ll want each day for the upcoming week, much less our job preferences.  “Your future self is probably a stranger to you.”  In fact, “70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.”

One of my favorite current cartoonists is Brooke McEldowney. I discovered his work online a few years ago in the form of “A Fairy Merry Christmas”. In the interest of copyright non-violation, I’ll leave it to youse to Google up your own excerpts.

This cartoon series was an NEA sponsored 6 week series. Finally, a use of NEA funds that anyone can appreciate. Except that it only appeared online, and maybe in a few papers. Anyway, I was captivated by the sense of humor. It doesn’t hurt that McEldowney has a magnificent grasp of sensual line in his figure drawing.

After its conclusion, I found his two other strips, 9 Chickweed Lane, and Pibgorn. It took my local paper about another 2 years to discover either one of these, but I’ve been reading them online. (Pibgorn is temporarily without a home as of this writing).

Well, I’ve started reading the cartoonist’s blog, wherein he refers to his teenage daughters as Snark Major and Snark Minor. This led me to one of the Snarks own blog, currently written from her post as a freshman at Aarkvard University (arch rival of Dale, you know).

So, if you want to follow a mental roller coaster of exceptionally twisted and oblique prose, check these out. I had enough fun there to be willing to impose it on yall.

I have a friend who wrote a song to me. (Free mp3 download courtesy of Anderson Productions, Ltd.) “Dear Friend” appeared on Russ Anderson’s 2003 album, “Arsenal Street”. All his CD’s are Available here. I recommend listening to the song before proceeding.

This nice, eerie, and sometimes psychedelic song is a heartfelt plea for me to discard my narrow, science-informed view of the world and just try to accept the ultimate truth of his favorite, ancient, re-translated book.
When my very Christian 11 year old nephew heard the song, he worried that it would anger me. He is fond of both Russ and myself, and the song conveys a basic disconnect. Conversations I’ve had with other Absolute Biblically Literal Truth Christians indicate that these are common misperceptions of atheist ideology.

Let’s examine some of the contentions in the song:

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Here’s another fun site. 15 dots walking–a walking animation. It’s amazing how much emotion can be conveyed by 15 dots.

Freethinkers, in their attempts to cast light on culture’s many logical foibles, can lose focus. Like the more traditional naysayers, who bemoan our times while looking foggily to those good-old-days that never existed, liberal critical thinkers can come to a similarly deluded doom-and-gloom conclusion. Of course, the evidence used by both camps differ completely- people like us at DI don’t mourn the decay of some imaginary moral backbone, but instead the rotting of clear-thinking minds.

It can seem at times that only the present U.S. suffers from ignorance, sloppy logic and woeful gullibility. This probably comes from our own faulty thinking- the availability heuristic at work. We see neighbors and coworkers buying into bogus alternative medicines and celebrity gossip, and the U.S. seems doomed to crumble into total sensationalism or idiocy. As if silly, baseless thoughts flourish only in the cultural Petri dish we have created.

But humans think silly, baseless things everywhere. Take the South Korean fear of “fan death” for example. As recently reported on Public Radio International’s program The World, many South Koreans believe in a unique urban legend that claims if you sleep with a fan running in a room with closed windows and doors, you die. No explanation why, mind you- it just happens. This zany, senseless belief apparently has had a profound impact on South Korean culture- every fan in the country supposedly comes equipped with a timer to prevent a deadly fan death disaster. South Korean researchers have even devoted studies to debunking the pervasive myth. Yet despite the evidence, the fear carries on successfully, and the superstition just won’t shake free from the minds of the people. That sounds almost American, doesn’t it?

The South Korean “fan death” urban legend reminds me that we cannot place all the blame for stupid people and idiotic thoughts on the media, the education system, religion, or the American culture at large. Sloppy logic appears in any group of human animals, and our species will likely always struggle with this aspect of human nature.

This is the title of a newspaper commentary column that I stumbled onto recently. It was less annoying than I thought it would be. The “New Facts” turn out to be mainly the testimony of Ken Ham’s Creation Museum (Here’s my earlier post about that).

One gripe I have is the idea of testimony as evidence. This is a very human concept, the basis of legal evidence, and anathema to good science. In science, testimony is merely a claim of observation intended to lead others to be able to repeat the observation. Furthermore, in science an observation is meaningless unless it can be objectively measured with unimpeachable instruments.

Author Tom McVeety brings up a couple of measurable data tidbits free from their context, but responders to his column neatly provide the missing framework for some, and politely attack the innumeracy obvious in others.

It is worthwhile to read many of the comments to the column. Among other threads, they get into a clash between Christian denominations that accept scientific conclusions, and those that deny science when it disagrees with a particular narrow interpretation of the Bible.

Just for grins, here’s a rebuttal on BadAstronomy.com

Television is part of the American political problem, but not only for the obvious reasons.  See Ebonmuse’s review of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason.  Here’s an excerpt:

[T]elevision is a time- and space-limited medium with high barriers to entry, making it in its essence a medium of the rich and powerful. It is not a place where people can have a two-way conversation; rather, it turns people into passive receivers of information, unable to respond as they see fit. Worse, television is not a meritocracy. One’s ability to participate in the medium is not based on the merit of one’s ideas, but rather on how much money one can afford to spend to purchase airtime for them . . . Unlike print, television can present vivid, visceral images that bypass the faculties of reasoning and trigger emotional responses - especially fearful responses - far more directly, overwhelming the faculties of deliberation.

Oh hai:

1st lolcats in your browser, makin u lolz.

2nd - LOLcritters got a website.

3. lolbrarians in ur cattylog, makin up subj3kt hedinz.

4. LOLgays can has marrige?

5. LOLlinguist sez: pidgin or cweeole? Do want LOLchart:

6. LOLmedievalist:

And yet in this derke tyme of sorwe and tene, ich haue foond much deliit in the merveillous japeries of the internet. No thyng hath plesed me moore, or moore esed myn wery brayne than thes joili and gentil peyntures ycleped “Cat Macroes” or “LOL Cattes .” Thes wondirful peintures aren depicciouns of animals, many of them of gret weight and girth, the which proclayme humorous messages in sum queynte dialect of Englysshe (peraventure from the North?). Many of thes cattes (and squirreles) do desiren to haue a “cheezburger,” or sum tyme thei are in yower sum thinge doinge sum thinge to yt.

7. LOLtrekkies has tribbles and also troubles.

8. LOLgeeks loop until KTHXBYE

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
YARLY
BTW this is true
VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
NOWAI
BTW this is false
VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
KTHX
KTHXBYE

9. LOLphilosophers srs, K?
10. Shakespeare cat is shakespearean:

11. Pls is it can be LOLsingularity now?

Dive in at Enchgallery.  You could spend quite a while at this site taking in the fractal sites.   Those fractals are common in nature, there is something other-worldly about these works of art.

Just wanted to pass along this link to an article by one of favorite columnists.  He goes over the edge some days, but most of the time he is spot on in his rantings!

Enjoy -

Here’s a good question:  why can’t a woman go topless wherever a man can? 

Sorry . . . I’m not buying answers like “Because that is the way it has always been” or “Because they are women.” 

Talk about equal rights!  The prevalent dress code inequity is motivated by the same mindset that leads some people to kick breastfeeding women off of airplanes.  Or am I missing something?  Here’s a relevant article on cross-cultural attitudes toward nudity.

I didn’t realize that New York state is one of the very few places in the US where women can legally be top free anywhere that a man can be top free.  Photographer Jordan Matter used New York City as the backdrop to a collection of photos he has named “Uncovered.”  Here’s how he explains the collection on “The Thinking Blog.” 

Challenging this inequity between the sexes is the purpose of my work. There has been a recent shift in America towards a socially conservative philosophy, so right after Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed at the Super Bowl, I started asking women to appear topless in New York City. [Uncovered: Busting Out in the Big Apple] is a collection of photographs featuring bare-breasted women in public around NYC, often presented with interviews exploring the issues of body image and sexuality in America today. The informal and humorous nature of these images celebrates women without sexualizing or objectifying them, while creating the illusion of a tolerant world in which shirtless women go casually about their lives. Uncovered represents just one aspect of what America could look like if we were free of shame and liberated from moral judgment.

“The Thinking Blog” contains various links to “Uncovered.”  Here’s Matter’s official site. [Warning to those who are offended or mortified by images of human breasts, including all of you who pummeled the FCC with emails complaining about Janet Jackson: "Uncovered" contains non-sexualized images of human breasts. If you're looking for sexual images, you'll be disappointed and you'll have to surf on over to one of the tens of millions of Internet sites that offer those sorts of images].

I’m sharing this information because I found the Matter’s photos to be both humorous and intellectually challenging.