Oklahoma!

We are in Pryor for the night and hope to take advantage of some of Oklahoma’s lakes tomorrow.

Friends I have a friend from graduate school who got his master’s degree (commutative ring theory) and went on to learn computer security. He is back in Austin now and has sent me a photo of his little daughter Alexandria.

The caption he supplied me: I should have never told her that George Bush was president!

Mind you, he is a social conservative.

Some cool comments from elsewhere:

KnightinDragonland: has unwelcome attention from local Nazis on his blog. For those not from Central Illinois: “Knight” refers to a Peoria High graduate (Peoria Richwoods), and “Dragonland” refers to Pekin, as Pekin High calls themselves the Dragons. Believe it or not, they were once “The Chinks”.

Knight has always taken strong stands against racism.

Sandwalk: Professor Moran has a series on creationist debating tatics. Part I, Part II, Part III.

Friendly Atheist: responds to Freakonomist wondering why there is such an interest in atheist books.

Steven Levitt, the co-author of the (wonderfully entertaining and informative) book Freakonomics, writes on the Freakonomics Blog:

I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God. I’m definitely not interested enough to go out and buy books explaining to me why I shouldn’t believe in God, even when they are written by people like Dennett and Dawkins, whom I greatly admire. If I were religious, I think it would be even more likely that I would go out of my way to avoid books telling me that my faith was misplaced.

So who is making these anti-God books best-sellers? Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?

Let me put the argument another way: I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend $20 in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird watcher books would be.

[...]

My response: if people didn’t try to get their religion taught in public schools, if they didn’t try to ruin science education by fighting for “equal time” for their idiotic creation myths and if they didn’t try to cut funding for stem cell research, then I wouldn’t care what they did.

I’d even be willing to put up with tax exemption for their churches!

On Evolution: has a post in a similar topic.

Anthropology.net: notes that human brains are less symmetrical than the brains of other primates, and notes that a candidate for the gene responsible for handiness (e. g., left handed, right handed) has been found.