19 May 2009 (morning)

Workout notes yoga, then 8 miles of easy running on the East Peoria trail (41:11 out, 37:33 back, to the 4 mile mark on the pavement). Beautiful day, breezy, cool. I felt better after the first 2 miles.

Snark and other things

Paul Krugman
Dr. Krugman had a couple of interesting posts. One was on health care; it may be the case that we might end up with a health care plan that is more similar to the one that Hillary Clinton was pushing for rather than the one that President Obama campaigned on. Obama had thought that if we could get costs down, people would want to buy into the insurance program. Many, myself included, thought that this would be an easier sell politically, though at the time I said that I was ambivalent on this issue, though I thought that Obama’s plan was more viable on political grounds. But evidently a plan that is more similar to the one that Clinton campaigned on appears to be closer to what we will end up with.

Dr. Krugman backed the Clinton plan, but is being classy about it:

Actually, I don’t care who gets credit, as long as we actually get universal health care.

But Dr. Krugman’s bite is reserved for the Republicans!

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? [...]

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Now you know where I get my disdain and contempt for conservatism.

Scientists I hang around with mathematicians at work, but in my day to day life I encounter many non-technically inclined people. I don’t get along with them very well; it is almost as if I have to walk on egg shells around them.

Why? Well, this is the kind of discourse that I am comfortable with:

Yesterday, I tore into a reeking pile of creationist bogosity by Peter Heck. This morning, he sends me email.

Dr. Myers,

Someone sent me a nasty email that included a link to your blog. I found it a pretty thorough shallacking! Not that I’m opposed to that. If I put arguments out in front of people, [...]

This is a rather disingenuous reply; he wasn’t just shellacked, he was exposed as a dishonest fraud who knew nothing at all about the subject he was critiquing. I didn’t just criticize a few niggling errors in his article, I ripped it apart from stem to stern and pointed out that he was ignorant and unscholarly…and now he comes back and offers the feeble excuse that he had three biologists look it over? Who were these biologists, and why didn’t they point out that the article was nothing but a crudely hacked together raft of creationist fallacies?

[...]
When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they’ve got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

Heck was merely flaunting the tedious ignorance of creationists, which is no longer ever surprising. He was also making a dishonest pretense to knowledge, which is also not surprising, and is one reason to never, ever trust anyone who claims to be a creationist — it’s a synonym for lying, stupid fraud. I don’t even trust his letter. Does anyone really believe that he will regard the series of arguments he made in his article as “hacked up”? I would bet that he’ll be thumping the same old lies again next time he preaches in front of his fellow phonies.

I recommend reading the whole article; it describes how the swine flu is an example of evolution in action. But what I wanted to highlight was the clarity and the straight forwardness in the speech and writing of scientists. There is none of the phoniness and sugar coating that one often sees in non scientific circles.

Religion and Woos

Friendly Atheist found that this was amusing:

God did it. Gee, let me tell you when I’ll believe that “god did it”: if I were to go out and, say, win the New York Marathon, then I’ll believe that some deity did it.

But in all honesty, this doesn’t upset me. After all, I don’t give up an evening to watch Dwight Howard give a physics lecture. I enjoy watching him play basketball because he is very good at it. And yes, he has one of the most impressive physiques I’ve ever seen.

If you want to know what I find troubling, go here. I hold the Secretary of Defense of the United States to a much higher standard in this area.