Die, Caps Lock, Die

One of my peeves against propagated obsolete legacy is the caps lock key for computers. I hate it. In the 32 years that I've been using computers, I don't think that I've ever hit it intentionally. It is where it is because typewriters used it to mechanically lock down the shift key. But I have yet to meet anyone who types in all caps, except to indicate online screaming. Even then, it isn't hard to hold a shift key with a pinky while typing with the other 9 fingers. But now there is a fix! In every version of Windows since W2K, there is a secret patch that lets you convert any key to another. I've chosen to make CAPSLOCK into a simple shift. If I really need to lock caps, I can do it through software, or convert another useless key (e.g. scroll lock) into caps lock. I found the magical tool in JohnHaller.com's Useful Stuff essays: Disable Caps Lock. It's a simple registry tweak that he found at annoyances.org (where they have full technical details). Just download and launch the tweak. You get warnings, But it works! Just follow the directions and you'll never be bothered by caps lock again.

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Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing "Daughter". Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons. Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men. Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women's rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

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The Hierarchy of Disagreement

I found this illustration of how to order your arguments at the Starts With A Bang blog. This blog usually leads one to a first source. However, I had to do some digging to find the original creator of this image. This image is all over the web, but I think the first source is here, from the Create Debate blog in April 2008. This image (click on it to enlarge) was created to illustrate an earlier point by Paul Graham, whose text-only posts I've been (occasionally) reading for years. The premise is to always lead with your top level reasonable arguments, and never resort to the bottom layers. As Ethan Siegel (SWAB) put it,

It's sometimes tough to decipher what the central point of someone else's argument is, because most people don't argue clearly and logically. But if you can identify it, that's when you win. When someone else mucks around at the bottom of the pyramid, don't sink to their level; stay up high. Those top two levels are really the only way to ever change someone's mind, or to sway other intelligent, thinking people to your side.

This is an attitude that would serve us well on this site.

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Yes, Dangerous Intersection is under contruction . . .

Dangerous Intersection is undergoing yet another face lift. I think I'll have most of the bugs worked out within a few days, but the site is mostly functional already. I really liked the ability to feature some of our articles (at the top section), but I didn't like the sliding display. This new design by the same company (Solostream) uses a crossfade, which is much easier on the eyes. There are lots of other features as well, most of which will be invisible to readers but will make my life easier. Anyway, thank you for your patience while we finish up implementing this new design, which is called "Prolific."

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What’s in a Type?

One of my peeves against anti-evolutionists is those moderates who fully accept gene drift and mutations for short term changes (breeds, "micro-evolution") but not longer term changes (species, types, "macro-evolution"). Try to pin one of those people down on a definition of species and type, and one can always show them an observed example of something that crossed the line, or else multiple species that are obviously different but on the same side of their line. But this post is broader than that. For example, Pluto was a planet. Everyone knew that. Recently it was demoted to dwarf-planet. There are groups still dedicated to its reinstatement as a planet, like the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. My presumption is, because that's what they were taught in their youth, therefore it's "As God Intended". Nothing changed in the sky, nor in our understanding of how things work. But a category changed and our world shook. Well, at least the world of those of us who noticed. What of moons? An excellent article is here: Meet our Second Moon! We now have two moons? And in my lifetime, the origin of our main moon changed from an unlikely captured or even less likely co-congealed object to a reasonable and most probably ejected one. I remember being disturbed when the moon count around Jupiter went from 12 (the 19th century standard) to 63 (care of Voyager etc). The count varies depending on how you define "moon". One has to be broadly accepting of both size and ballistic classification to accept 3753 Cruithne as a moon of the Earth, but it is there. Speaking of the moon, here is an incredible new way to see our moon up close (with pan and zoom) taken from ground based cameras. Things change. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, most people are hung up on the misconception that words accurately define things. The thinking that, if you have a name for it, then you understand the thing. You get the collector's fallacy: The confusion of the joy of matching names to things with the understanding of the things themselves. Knowing the names of thousands of birds (or bugs or species or stamps or diseases) and accurately matching them to the subjects is useful. But it is not complete in terms of understanding the similarities and differences. That is what is meant by the quote "Biology without evolution is but stamp collecting". One cannot understand things without also understanding the relationship between things (species, astronomical objects, populations, etc) and knowing the latest (most complete, so far) underlying set of theories (scientific definition, not vernacular). Humans are better than most other creatures at recognizing patterns. We regularly see patterns in random observations: Pareidolia. Any set of words will be an incomplete definition of any object. Defining a class of things is even more nebulous. Do species change over time? Certainly, given either enough time or a precise enough definition. How many moons are in the solar system? Good question. Define "moon", and show me the latest ballistic data on the 100,000 largest object so far discovered inside of the Oort Cloud. By the time I have an answer, something will have changed.

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