Last July 2007 Thursday

Workout notes 1500 swim (fun, but slow), 5 x (100 swim, 100 pull), 5 x (25 fly, 25 free, 25 back, 25 free)

Yoga, then 4 mile treadmill run (knee ok); 2 mile warm up, then elevation to 2, 3, 4, 5, down to 1, up to 2), 3+ mile walk home. I felt it a bit in my right knee (front); not much in the back.

Speaking of running, Julie Berg has some nice Vermont 100 photos on her blog.

There is just a ton of stuff today:

Shalini: irritated by a fundie. I noticed this:

Basically, the point of the post is that we are in a war between people who believe in rationality and people who believe in superstition. Frankly, if that’s the choice we got, I’ll choose superstition.

My rational, logical thought processes don’t make me happy, don’t lead me to a more fulfilled life, don’t give meaning to the world

,…ad nauseam

Here, we are well aware of where this whole argument is going. His mind has already been made up. Far from being a totally ignorant fool, he is aware that there is an irreconcilable clash between rationalism and superstition. He knows that he has a choice of leaving superstition in favor of rationalism, and he has made up his mind to continue living in superstition. Sometimes, I feel pity for theists who are too ignorant and deluded to know that they have fallen for the lie that is religion, but I only feel contempt for theistards like Jared who refuse to grow up and live in reality. People like that make a conscious choice to believe in fairy tales and a sky daddy because they are whimpering cowards who refuse to shed their infantile beliefs. Rick Warren and his sickly, oh-sky-daddy-sappy-sweet-Jesus doctrine is a classic example of this theistard refusal to grow up.

I have said this previously but I think it has to be said again and again: Only when such infantile, mythical beliefs are shed can a person truly appreciate what the natural world has to offer.

and they most certainly don’t make me a better human being.

I’ve refuted this dimwitted fundie bullshit here. It looks like Jared is following the theistard laughter-inducing formula right down to the pure, unrivalled idiocy.

I’ll take a non-existent God who loves me and takes care of me and directs my steps every day of my life than an angry, self-righteous, bigoted, fundamentalist atheist hands down.

Merely wishing something doesn’t make it so.

Here is my take on this: this fundie sounds like someone in a 12-step program (say, Alcoholics Anonymous). The idea behind such programs is that people have made a mess of their lives by trying to live by self-will. By “turning thier lives over to a Higher Power”, they make better life choices, thereby increasing their serenity thereby reducing their craving for their substance.

Now, I HAVE found it useful to pretend that there is such a deity that has my best long term interests in mind, and meditate on what a deity would want me to do today.

Why? Often, I get very, very stubborn and just “want” to do something that I shouldn’t be doing, just because I want to, and this deity can lead me to a more mature, less selfish attitude, thereby making me happier and more useful to others.

But I still reject anything supernatural but rather chalk this up to a “emotional centering” technique.

On Evolution: a very funny “god’s inbox” graphic. Check it out!

Friendly Atheist: good cartoons here.

Prairie State Blue: Durbin takes on BP to protect Lake Michigan. Hat tip to Wegerje.

In the war for hearts and minds, the battles over pollution and the environment, have been among our most successful. When we have as allies both the Chicago Tribune and Republican Mark Kirk, you know we have penetrated pretty deeply into conventional wisdom. So deeply in fact that corporations spend millions if not billions of dollars in greenwash. So deeply that even Bush and Cheney have to give us lip service: “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” anyone?

So when we are handed a chance to further our brand identity of environmentalism, we should make the most of it. The Chicago Tribune fired the opening salvo against multi-national polluter BP on Sunday July 15th with an article on BP’s plan to increase the amount of pollution, including heavy metals, into our treasured fresh water icon, Lake Michigan. Since then, following their lead, have been such disparate business interests as Mark Kirk and the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce.

Illinois Senator and majority whip Dick Durbin is upping the ante.

Mathematics
Good Math, Bad Math has a nice article on space filling curves, and the comments on this article are pretty good as well.

For those of you who have had some mathematics: do you remember those limit theorems which said something to the effect: if each fn has property X, and fn coverges to f (in some limit) then f has that property as well? Did you ever wonder why you had to prove such things?

Well, this blog post gives an excellent example of what can go wrong. A space filling curve can me thought of as a “limit” of functions, each of which maps an arc in a one to one, smooth (or piecewise linear) fashion into the unit square. But the “limit” gives a map from the unit interval (an arc) ONTO the square (obviously not in a one to one fashion).

This is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak; if one reads Morgan’s elementary geometic measure theory book, one is confronted with an example of a unit disk in 3 space; one then constructs a countable family of unit disks with the same boundary, but each new unit disk in the family contains a thin “feeler” which reaches out to a specific rational coordinate in 3 space, and each “feeler” only adds, say, (1/2)^k in area.

Hence, at each stage, the disk has a finite area, any member of family of disks has area less than pi+ 1, and yet, “in the limit”, the thing that is constructed reaches EVERY SINGLE rational point in three space, and the closure of the limit is ALL of three space!