14 June Midday Quickies

Atheism: read this post at Daily Kos; it discusses some common misconceptions concerning atheists and atheism. The comments are entertaining as well.

I think that the argument boils down to this: many people don’t understand that not believing in a deity is NOT symmetrical with believing in it. As Richard Dawkins loves to point out: most “believers” reject the thousands and thousands of gods that are believed in (or were believed in) by literally billions of people. The difference is that we (atheists) take it one god further.

NBA

I liked this Kiszla column. If a player is ready for the NBA right out of high school, why shouldn’t they go and play? Sure, not everybody who has NBA potential is ready but there is no reason to straight jacket those who are.

This Kiszla column made me yawn; it purports to argue that basketball fans are either anti-Kobe Bryant or pro-Kobe Bryant. I am neither; I think that he is a good player and I actually admire his competitive fire. But as to this:

Down on the court, Bryant was fixing to stare an angry hole through the heart of helpless Magic sub J.J. Redick after burying a jump shot that put the Lakers two points closer to raising the 15th championship banner for the storied franchise.

And I sat slack-jawed, wondering: Does Bryant really have to be that way? His brilliance is unsurpassed anywhere in sports. So why spoil the moment by acting like a bully?

Huh? This is the NBA finals, not some pick-up game. Many of the great ones used to do similar things; for example google “Larry Bird” or even just read his book.

As to Mr. Bryant’s personal life: I don’t watch basketball to see role models in action. They guy had a trial.
What happened? I don’t know; I find it hard to believe that women who hook up with him aren’t in it for something for themselves anyway.

Sure I could “tisk tisk” this but let’s face it: it isn’t as if pretty females throw themselves at me 24-7. Celebrity males (athletes, politicians, or even just really rich guys) have situations that I just don’t have; that is why I really don’t care about the personal lives of a Kobe Bryant, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, etc.

I have no idea of how I would act if I were that popular.

Oh the game . The Magic win tonight and send it back to Los Angeles where the Lakers wrap it up in 6 games.

Toxic Atmosphere…

Frank Rich in today’s New York Times:

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

So, what is the difference between the rhetoric we are hearing now and what went on when President Bush was in office?

1. Liberals weren’t taking guns and shooting people.
2. The (absurd) “Bush is Hitler” rhetoric came from liberals on blogs and websites and not from the established political leadership.

In fact, those of us on Daily Kos remember being dressed down by then Senator Obama:

From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

It’s this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts’ confirmation hearings. A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don’t think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While they hope Roberts doesn’t swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

Thoughts while running around Town Lake (Austin, TX)

Back in 1980-1983, I’d come home on leave from the Navy. The “short loop” (about 4.1 miles) took just about 30 minutes to run; hardly anyone passed me.

In 1998-1999, the same loop took 33-34 minutes. A few people passed me.

Today: it takes about 37-38 minutes; EVERYONE passes me.

Ok, I wasn’t used to the heat (it is suffocating) and I did walk a mile to cool down (and did an easy set of 5 pull ups).

14 June 09 (am)

Posts: Paul Krugman points out that, in the past, Republicans were very willing to say “hey, let’s show some patience as it takes time for changes in economic policies to take effect. Now, they are yapping about President Obama’s policies not reversing the course of the country right away.

Iran

Of course Iran just had an election and the result is hotly disputed. Also, the leadership structure did come up during the 2008 general election in the U. S.:

Here is a handy guide from 3-quarks daily that shows how the Iranian political leadership is structured (the role between the President (who is elected), the Supreme Leader (who isn’t) and the council of mullahs, etc.

Science: We know about absolute zero (roughly speaking: the temperature at which molecular motion stops). Is there an upper bound? Maybe. (hat tip: 3-quarks daily)

Size of objects in the universe: are you ready to feel insignificant?

Does Language Affect the Way that We Think? Probably. This is a snippet from an article that 3-quarks daily pointed us toward:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.[...]

13 June 2009 Climate Change Crock