Assorted Topics: 31 May 2010

Books: while in Chicago I made the mistake of stopping at Borders. I finished reading the book Idiot America by Charles Pierce ; his premise is that America has gone from being a “crank friendly” country to elevating cranks into the mainstream. He has three premises of Idiot America:
1. Someone’s expertise is determined by how popular they are (e. g., Michael Behe (and Intelligent Design crank) is considered on a par with the top biologists because his books have sold relatively well)
2. Anything is true if said loudly or passionately enough and
3. Something is considered true (or at least a valid alternative to be seriously considered) if enough people believe it.

Note: though many of my friends (and ok, me too) think of the right wing, this sometimes holds true among those considered left-wing (think of the bogus claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism). One might think of some of the absurd left wing academic claim (e. g., Newton’s calculus book may well be called “Newton’s Rape Manual“) but given the lack of popular support, this is basic crack-pot stuff; the stuff of cranks.

I am also half way though Mano Singham’s book God Vs. Darwin; Singham is a physics professor who has had experience in science education. He outlines the many cases in which religious groups have sought to retard the teaching of evolution in public schools or at least water it down. He proceeds with the assumption that evolution is an established fact (my favorite books on this are Jerry Coyne’s, Richard Dawkins’ and Doug Futuyma’s). I’ll report more when I am finished; this is a small book broken into easy to digest chapters (perfect bedtime reading) and is really focused on the battle to keep evolution out of the classroom.

For a pre-ID history of creationism, I recommend the book by Ronald Numbers. .

For a blow-by-blow refutation of creationism nonsense, I recommend this older book (1983) which was complied by Lauri Godfrey.

For an interesting history on evolution (e. g., how evolutionary theory evolved from Darwin’s day), I recommend this Barns and Noble Portable Professor Series CD set by Chandak Sengoopta.

For an enjoyable, easy to read but not insulting book on evolution which focuses on the connection between fish and humans, read Neil Shubin’s book. Note: it contains a section on a transitional form called the tiktaalik: it was a form between fish and tetrapods (e. g., it had a neck).

Speaking of evolution: Jerry Coyne discusses human cognition (e. g., the ability to think abstractly) here; the questions are along the lines of “is this trait the consequence of some natural selection” when, in fact, they would have produced little reproductive advantage, say, 50,000 years ago?

But Wallace’s question remains a good one, and is posed anew by Steven Pinker in a nice paper in a recent online issue of PNAS:

. . . why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?

Pinker proposes an answer—that these feats are byproducts of selection for early humans to inhabit a “cognitive niche.” This answer may well be right, but at the very least will make you think. (You can find more discussion of the cognitive niche idea in chapter 3 of Pinker’s How the Mind Works and chapters 5 and 9 of The Stuff of Thought.)

What Pinker sees as the “cognitive niche” (a term invented by John Tooby and Irv DeVore) is a lifestyle of using both thought and social cooperation to manipulate the environment. [...]

I think Pinker’s theory is right—at least, it makes a lot more sense than other theories of human evolution. But, as always, there’s a big difference between thinking a theory is right and showing it’s right. Ironically, in the case of human evolution, we are prevented by our evolved morality from using our evolved skills to test theories about our evolved cognition.

He goes on to discuss the ethics of trying to test out this conjecture.

Social Criticism Miranda Celeste Hale isn’t impressed with trying to make the mundane profound:

I don’t throw the word “loathe” around lightly. But I loathe all things Sex and the City. Perhaps that’s because there are few things I find more boring or unpleasant than shopping, an activity that the show’s characters seem to find endlessly thrilling and fulfilling. Or perhaps it’s because, as exemplified by Carrie’s columns and silly voice-overs, the show attempts to turn banal, shallow, and utterly conventional activities into deep and profound “lessons” about the true meaning of being a woman in today’s society, implying that the characters are somehow defying the expectations of what a woman “should” be and are thus helping to make the world a more progressive and female-friendly place.

That is part of modern society, isn’t it?

SLAPP Lawsuits This sometimes happens: a company (or some powerful entity) screws someone over. The person complains via the internet (don’t use company X: they screwed me). The company files a lawsuit against this person, attempting to get them to take down their page, tweet or whatever. One of my favorite bloggers is an attorney who sides with the “little guy” in these cases; he is quoted in this New York Times article:

They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.

The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when confronted with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.
[...]
Many states have anti-Slapp laws, and Congress is considering legislation to make it harder to file a Slapp. The bill, sponsored by Representatives Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, and Charles Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, would create a federal anti-Slapp law, modeled largely on California’s statute.

Because state laws vary in scope, many suits are still filed every year, according to legal experts. Now, with people musing publicly online and businesses feeling defenseless against these critics, the debate over Slapps is shifting to the Web.

“We are beyond the low-tech era of people getting Slapped because of letters they wrote to politicians or testimony they gave at a city council meeting,” said George W. Pring, a University of Denver law professor who co-wrote the 1996 book, “Slapps: Getting Sued For Speaking Out.”

Marc Randazza, a first amendment lawyer who has defended clients against Slapps stemming from online comments, said he helped one client avoid a lawsuit last year after the client, Thomas Alascio, posted negative remarks about a Florida car dealership on his Twitter account.

“There is not a worse dealership on the planet,” read one tweet, which also named the dealership.

The dealership threatened to sue Mr. Alascio if he did not remove the tweets. Mr. Randazza responded in a letter that while Mr. Alascio admitted the dealership might not be the worst in the world, his comments constituted protected speech because they were his opinion.

Note that Mr. Randazza is passionate enough about this area to actually oppose a politician (Rep. Grayson, D-FL) whose views he agrees with because Rep. Grayson went after a political critic who wasn’t following established campaign finance rules. I see this as purity trolling (it isn’t a fair political fight if only Democrats have to follow the rules) but what the heck.

The Silly
I love the quote between 1:15-1:20, that says that religious fanatics hate other religions more than they hate anything else.

Note to Mormons: this is “poe”; of course some of the criticism leveled at you in this video is supposed to be patently absurd. If you want real criticism here it is:

(serious point: if you think that you have the right to go around and attempt to proselytize, then others do too)

The funny This is just a short blub about what your e-mail address says about you. Note: I once had my own domain, but it kept getting stuck in other people’s “spam” folders so I abandoned it.

The bizarre:
This sounds like an “Onion” parody, but evidently isn’t:

Justin Davis noticed his friend Jarrod Wyatt acting strangely earlier in the day after drinking some wild mushroom tea. Davis left the Requa, California home, then returned early in the morning to pick up his dog. He instead found a grisly sight…

Wyatt, described as a 26-year-old cage fighter, was standing in the living room naked and bloodied with the brutalized body of his friend, Taylor Powell. Wyatt told Davis he was going to cut out Powell’s heart.

Davis left to find a pay phone and call police. When deputies arrived, they found Wyatt on the couch with Powell’s body. Most of his face had been removed. An eyeball was laying in the middle of the living room. There was a large cut in his chest, which Wyatt used to remove some of Powell’s organs, including his heart. He told deputies that he had thrown the heart into a fire.

31 May 2010 (noon)

Religion

No, this guy is NOT isolated. No, I don’t welcome people like this; he is ignorant and morally repulsive.

What is more puzzling is why people are so reluctant to denounce bigotry that stems from religion, especially if it comes from a religion that they feel is being picked on:

Nicholas Kristof seems like a decent enough fellow, with a concern for humanitarian causes. He’s also something of a simpering apologist for religion — anything with a whiff of godlessness seems to put him on edge and start him whining about intolerant, obnoxious atheists.

He is definitely not the right person to have review Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book. He might be able to sympathize with the human rights issues she confronts, but at the same time he’s got a kind of willful blindness to the contributions religion makes to human misery, and is guaranteed to belittle the problem of Islam.

If you haven’t read Ali’s previous book, Infidel(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), get cracking; you’ve got to catch up. It was a harrowing description of the life of a Muslim girl in a poor country who managed to escape both poverty and her misogynistic faith. Her new book is Nomad(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), about her move to America. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list.

Kristof’s review is aggravating, though, because it is so thick with — and here I’ll use a word often applied to atheists — condescension. He is a privileged white American male criticizing a black African woman…and he is completely incapable of appreciating her opposition to Islam.

Even now, she needs bodyguards.

That’s partly because she is by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex

In all honesty, I think that Kristof is trying to point out that the sort of Islam that Ms. Ali experiences isn’t the type that most experience:

She is at her best when she is telling her powerful story. And she is at her worst when she is using her experience to excoriate a variegated faith that has more than one billion adherents. Her analysis seems accurate in its descriptions of Somalis, Saudis, Yemenis and Afghans, but not in her discussion, say, of Indonesian Muslims — who are more numerous than those other four nationalities put together.

To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or ­Judaism.

Of course, I find it nauseating that Mr. Kristof seems more concerned about her being strident in her denunciations than in the horrors that she is denouncing.

I think that this applies:

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof is one of many commentators to find the tone of the newly resurgent atheism “obnoxious” or “mean.”

Ubiquitous as they are, such epithets are not borne out by an objective reading of the works he cites: Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation,” my own “God Delusion” and www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com (I had not been aware of this splendid Web site; thank you, Mr. Kristof).

I have scanned all three atheist sources carefully for polemic, and my honest judgment is that they are gentle by the standards of normal political commentary, say, or the standards of theater and arts critics.

Mr. Kristof has simply become acclimatized to the convention that you can criticize anything else but you mustn’t criticize religion. Ears calibrated to this norm will hear gentle criticism of religion as intemperate, and robust criticism as obnoxious. Without wishing to offend, I want “The God Delusion” to raise our consciousness of this weird double standard.

How did religion acquire its extraordinary immunity against normal levels of criticism?

Richard Dawkins
Oxford, England, Dec. 4, 2006

Islam, as practiced by many who still follow the faith as written, IS an intolerant, morally repulsive religion. Of course, moderate Muslims who abide by the laws in a free, secular society are welcome. Those who issue death threats (and attempts) for religious “crimes” are not.

Yes, there are Christians who act this way as well, but they tend to be moderated by the societies in which they live, and I know of no state sanctioned/endorsed Christian group that enforces the death penalty for religious crimes. Yes, there are the domestic terrorists that bomb abortion clinics, but mainstream Christians denounce them and they are brought to justice by the government.

I see it more or less this way:

The educated Christian moderates keep the pin in the grenade and won’t let the rabid fundies pull it.
Atheists in the larger society are harmless; where atheism becomes harmful is when it is enforced by a state that requires unquestioned obedience and loyalty (e. g., Pol Pot’s regime); that to me is “statism”.

Rejection of the supernatural does not inoculate one against being evil and unreasonable.

Social/Political/Economic Robert Reich: explains why the President should BP under a temporary receivership. In a nutshell: the President doesn’t have the legal authority, at this time, to tell BP what to do or to keep the public fully informed.

31 May 2010: Memorial Day Race

Workout notes Yesterday: Wildlife Prairie Park Floodplain Trail; untimed. I head a large bullfrog. It got hot toward the end. (so: 4 miles of easy walking). Here is the course; it was much greener yesterday.

Today: 4 mile Peoria Chief’s walk in 43:06; it was hot and sticky though we missed the thunderstorm. 10:35; then my shins just killed me (not enough warm up nor speed work). 12:03; then 10:55 and then 9:30. That last mile, though accurately measured, was a bit of a sham. It was a shuffle/ugly power walk; Barbara said that I looked like I was running. But it was painless; right now it is about conditioning and not causing pain.

After the operation I’ll have a ton of technique work to do. In the mean time I can do leg weights and toe raises by the hundreds.

Barbara did the one mile walk and Tracy did the 4 mile run and won an age group award.

31 May 2010 (am)

Not much going on right now; if the thunderstorms hold off we’ll do a local race (Barbara: 1 mile, Tracy and me: 4 miles). I’ll walk; we’ll see how fast. I’d like to walk in the 41 minute range but it is warm outside.

Injury: shoulder not 100 percent; this week I’ll return to oh-so-slight swimming and rotator cuff exercises; maybe more.

Basketball: the President is not right about everything.

Now Obama expects the Lakers to beat the Boston Celtics, assuming they meet in the upcoming NBA Finals.

“Boston surprised me,” Obama said in a TNT interview with Marv Albert. “They gelled in the playoffs in a way that they hadn’t all through the season. (Rajon) Rondo’s become one of the best point guards in the league in no time. I mean, when he gets a real jump shot, he’s going to be unstoppable.

“But I’ve got to go with the Lakers again. I think (Pau) Gasol may be the best big man in the league right now. He’s different from Dwight Howard, but he’s (got) unbelievable footwork, speed, savvy. He’s playing magnificently. Kobe (Bryant) is the fiercest competitor in the league, and they’ve got what I continue to believe is the best coach in the NBA right now in Phil Jackson, so they’re going to be formidable, and I think it’ll be a tough series.

“Boston’s a veteran club, but the Lakers are looking pretty good.”

World events: not pleasant photos, but they show some of the environmental damage from the BP oil spill. Here are two; surf there to see the whole set (upper one is from the Coast Guard):