5 February

Athletic notes Yesterday, I didn’t feel quite right; then later in the morning I took a 32 ounce bottle of Poweraid Zero and finished all of it rather quickly (without intending to). Then I felt better; I knew that a 3 pound weight loss over a 3 day period probably spelled trouble.

Today: perhaps 8 miles of “run six, walk two” after my yoga class.
Barbara is sick today and I hope I don’t catch what she has, though I probably will. There is something going around campus that leads to diarrhea.

Update yoga, 6 mile treadmill run (55:20; did 3 1 mile hill intervals at 6.5 mph), 1 mile track walk, 2.2 outdoor walk. It was a balmy 19 F but there was a strong wind blowing off of the river which made things a bit frosty.

Other things

Academia These days, many students claim “learning disabilities”. They want extra time for exams as well as other accommodations. I wonder what will happen when these students get to the work force?

Part of my frustration comes from the fact that Larry and Lucy are B-School students. How are we preparing these biz kids for the “real world” post graduation?

Boss: “Lucy, here is a project, I need it done in 3 days.”
Lucy: “But boss, I need double the time to complete it and breaks as needed. By the way, I can’t work in this cubicle farm; I require a totally separate room.”
Boss: “I’ll give the project to Larry.”
Larry: “I’ll have it done in 4 days and it will be all typed up nicely”
Boss: “I’ve seen your typing. I’ll do the project myself”

Or: “ok, doctor, you need to get this operation done in 1 hour or the patient will die.”
“That’s not fair; I get extra time!”

I suppose that there is a fine line between being reasonably accommodating (e. g., I’d willingly give a student with a broken hand some alternatives) and crossing the line (e. g., waving some of the relevant course requirements).

Elementary arithmetic fail:

Sometimes it just isn’t much fun to deal with the general public.

Science and Religion

I loved this book review Jerry Coyne in The New Republic magazine. It is a long article but well worth reading. It makes some interesting points and speaks to why I’ve abandoned liberal religion.

1. Those who try to harmonize science and religion end up either:
a. reducing religion to a type of mushy deism or pantheism or

b. allowing for divine intervention in science; even if one eschews “God in the gaps” that ID provides, one merely makes the gaps tinier.

The easiest way to harmonize science and religion is simply to re-define one so that it includes the other. We may claim, for example, that “God” is simply the name we give to the order and harmony of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry, the beauty of nature, and so on. This is the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza. Its most famous advocate was Einstein, often (and wrongly) described as believing in a personal God:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

But the big problem with this “reconciliation,” in which science does not marry religion so much as digest it, is that it leaves out God completely–or at least the God of the monotheistic faiths, who has an interest in the universe. And this is unacceptable to most religious people. Look at the numbers: 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, 79 percent believe in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, and 72 percent in the divinity of Jesus. In his first popular book, Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller attacked pantheism because it “dilutes religion to the point of meaninglessness.” He was right.

A meaningful effort to reconcile science and faith must start by recognizing them as they are actually understood and practiced by human beings. You cannot re-define science so that it includes the supernatural, as Kansas’s board of education did in 2005. Nor can you take “religion” to be the philosophy of liberal theologians, which, frowning on a personal God, is often just a hairsbreadth away from pantheism. After all, the goal is not to turn the faithful into liberal theologians, but to show them a way to align their actual beliefs with scientific truths. Theologians sometimes suggest a reconciliation by means of naturalistic deism, the idea that the creation of the universe–and perhaps the laws of physics–was the direct handiwork of a deity who then left things alone as they unfolded, never interfering in nature or history again. For the faithful, this has been even more problematic than pantheism: it not only denies miracles, virgin births, answered prayers, and the entire cosmological apparatus of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and much of Buddhism, but also raises the question of where God came from in the first place.

2. Coyne also points out that scientists don’t have some sort of religious attachment to materialism; we think that way at the moment because such an approach has lead to real, tangible results. There is simply no credible evidence to believe otherwise.

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God’s celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea “God did it” has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, “Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la,” “I have had no need of that hypothesis.” And scientists have not needed it since.

In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism. He claims that “if the face of Jesus appeared on Mount Rushmore with God’s name signed underneath, geologists would still have to explain this curious phenomenon as an improbable byproduct of erosion and tectonics.” Nonsense. There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.

Another major point is that Coyne gives an excellent defense of Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a “middlebrow” book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

The majority of the faithful simply couldn’t swallow the version of religion that many of the theistic scientists actually follow.

Oh, which books are being reviewed:

Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
By Karl W. Giberson
(HarperOne, 248 pp., $24.95)

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul
By Kenneth R. Miller
(Viking, 244 pp., $25.95)

Politics

Some time ago, I took myself off of the DSCC and the DCCC list (groups organized to elect Democrats to the Senate and to the House). This is the major reason:

Centrist senators, including Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, are seeking to cut tens of billions of dollars from the legislation. They’re operating with the blessing of Democratic leaders, who hope a successful effort could attract some GOP votes for Obama’s plan.

Democratic leaders conceded they may soon be obliged to cut billions of dollars from the measure. “It goes without saying if it’s going to pass in the Senate, it has to be bipartisan,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democratic leader, adding that rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties want to reduce the cost of the bill.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Democrats don’t yet have the votes to pass the plan.

Senate Democratic leaders conceded yesterday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written and said that to gain bipartisan support, they will seek to cut provisions that would not provide an immediate boost to the economy.

“We’re trying to find a way to reach 60″ votes, Durbin told reporters.

In a series of skirmishes Tuesday, the Senate turned back a proposal to add $25 billion for public works projects and voted to remove a $246 million tax break for movie producers. Both moves were engineered by Republicans who are critical of the bill’s size and voice skepticism of its ability to create jobs.

In other words, we control both houses and the executive branch and still can’t get it done. I know; many of the so-called Democrats from the red states have just about zero in common with me; that it why I have no interest in helping them get elected.

In short, we (as a party) are failing already. Yes, some liberals share in the blame:

Instead, we got a spending bill. I’ve actually read the Senate version version of the bill. I agree with much of what’s in it as a spending bill. By all means, grow the government. It’s a big country and we need a big government. Sorry Bill. And Ronnie. And yes, growing the government will create some jobs.

But as a stimulus bill, it is a joke. Both economically, and politically. Let’s talk about the politics for a second. Obama and the Democratic leadership should have known that they would have to have the support of the public to pass an 800 billion dollar plan. Surely they didn’t think that they could pull another stunt like the TARP, slipping it through before the public even had a chance to figure out what had happened.

This stimulus package was always going to be different. It’s one thing to bail out powerful bankers. Quite another to bail out the people. Surely we’ve learned that by now. Opposition to any big spending bill that goes to voters was always guaranteed. An idiot could have told you that.

A massive spending bill like this could create generations of dedicated Democrats. Mudcat Saunders likes to talk about how in the old days, people had two pictures on their wall, Jesus, and FDR. My grandparents on had one picture on their wall. It wasn’t Jesus.

This is why it was imperative for the Democrats to have a powerful, uniting vision. Something that would give the American people a beacon of light in this dark era. A big bold rebuild America plan.

Instead, Nancy Pelosi and liberals in the House decided to make this a catchall for pet Democratic programs they’ve been wanting for years. I know, I know. It’s “less than 1%”, as Obama said today.

But this completely fails understand the political calculation here. One minute Obama’s hopping TV interviews expressing the urgency of this bill. And the next, Republicans are talking about a provision for condoms.

But there are some who get it; I sure wish that they would be part of the Obama team.

I don’t have any formal training in economics; hence I have to rely on expert opinion for analysis.

One of my favorite resources is Robert Reich’s blog:

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

There was a time when he used to allow comments; however the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (et. al.) passed around the lie that Reich was somehow “racist”; therefore his blog was overwhelmed with wingnut visitors.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/…

More below the fold
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I don’t have any formal training in economics; hence I have to rely on expert opinion for analysis. One of my favorite resources is Robert Reich’s blog: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/ There was a time when he used to allow comments; however the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (et. al.) passed around the lie that Reich was somehow “racist”; therefore his blog was overwhelmed with wingnut visitors. http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-to-rush-limbaugh-sean.html More below the fold

I’ll share some of the stuff that I found there:

1. Lemon Socialism: here Reich explains that the government backs enterprises that are likely to fail; those likely to be profitable stay in the private sector.

In other words, taxpayers get stuck; the rich reap the profits.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/…

2. President Obama’s style: he thinks in the long term. Yes, he might be able to “ram through” a stimulus bill with only Democratic support, but he’d rather get a more modest (and less effective) bill in exchange for more people taking ownership in it:

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/…

3. After the stimulus: then what? Reich argues that the next battle will be between those who think that we are merely in an extreme “down cycle” and those who think that our economic system needs to be restructured.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/…

4. Finally, today’s post. Reich discusses why Daschle went down to defeat; Reich gets it.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/…

Tom Daschle’s surprise withdrawal today shocked most Washington insiders — after all, Daschle had been a key figure in the Senate, was Obama’s pick for a major role in the new administration, would very likely have done a superb job getting a new health-insurance system enacted, and, probably could have mustered enough votes to be confirmed. So what happened? My guess is that official Washington underestimated the public’s pique at what appeared to be the old ways of Washington. Hill staffers tell me that many offices have been inundated with telephone calls, emails, letters and faxes expressing concern (to put it mildly) about Daschle — not only his failure to pay back taxes but his relationships with major players in the health care industry and rich consulting contracts with the private sector since leaving the Senate, and even the fact that he was given a car and driver by one of them.

What’s going on here? Maybe official Washington, much like most of Wall Street, is still not quite getting it.
[...]

In short, many Americans who have worked hard, saved as much as they can, bought a home, obeyed the law, and paid every cent of taxes that were due are beginning to feel like chumps. Their jobs are disappearing, their savings are disappearing, their homes are worth far less than they thought they were, their tax bills are as high as ever if not higher — but people at the top seem to be living far different lives in a different universe. [...]

Robert Reich “gets it”.