Grant Rants

Archive for the ‘science’ Category

The stupid, it burns: Facebook vs. my sanity edition

- July 11th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

I’m convinced that Facebook is waging some kind of psychological warfare on me. It’s relentless. Merciless. It stops at nothing to inflict upon me the hottest, fiery burning stupid it can possibly create.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that  Facebook is an epic domain of the burning stupid in a way that can eclipse even Glee.  It’s staggering what you can find on there if you spend a few minutes looking. I mean it’s common place to see a couple having it out in series of posts and the whole time you are thinking “why aren’t you two having this conversation IN PERSON. We’re not cyborgs yet!” (Although the robot apocalypse is surely coming.)

Then there is the guy who took a woman hostage, had the police outside, and posted about the whole thing on Facebook until he finally was arrested. First off, everyone knows that Twitter is really the more effective forum for this sort of thing and two, just how far gone do you have to be? Bad enough you took someone hostage and shot at police, but you are going to document the entire thing in public? Criminals are stupid.thestupiditburns

But the serious assaults launched upon my brain by Facebook comes in a much more subtle fashion, mostly from the ads that frequently vie for your attention on the right hand side of the screen. Facebook must use some kind of algorithm to place “personalized” ads. Like if you were constantly posting stuff about, say, how much you love Glee, you would always see ads about the Heart of Darkness and brain damage. In my case, I get carpet bombed with ads about religion.

This is because, I suppose, I often post links to stuff by Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and the like. Atheist stuff. You know, cause I’m an atheist. In the warped mind of the Facebook adbots, this means I must want to buy religious stuff. It’s like if you posted a lot of stuff about the Beatles, and then got lots of ads about buying Glee CDs. You’d just want to pull your hair out.

I get ads for the oxymoronically named “Liberty University” – the outfit started by Jerry Falwell that regards evolution as affront to their religion – faith healers, psychic fairs, and Muslim dating websites. (I know, I was surprised those existed too.)

But this latest one takes the cake. I defy anyone to explain what in Odin’s empty eye socket this is supposed to be selling. Take a look:

CrazyasYup. They are selling a “blessed divine mercy quantum pendant” PLUS the science of wellness energy for life! Not to vent about this, but that is that even supposed to be? It’s totally meaningless. You just strung together a bunch of words, you jerks!

It’s like I could sell “Thor’s Mango Singularity Bracelet + Science of Quasar Cooking” I mean, what? How damaged would your brain have to be to think that meant anything?

Also curious is the price point. Apparently this blessed quantum pendant is normally worth $200. I can only surmise that it is initially constructed using the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva and then shipped to the Pope to be blessed. Hence the 200 clams they would usually ask. But NO! For a limited time you can buy this insane junk meant for suckers pendant for the low low price of $29! I guess quantum powered knick knacks just don’t sell like they used to.

I actually decided to check out the website in the ad, mostly because I must be into self abuse. In a completely bizarre video, they claim that these pendants were made using volcanic lava (as opposed to the other kinds of lava one can find on every street corner, I guess.) and will protect your family using something called “scalar energy.” (scalar fields are part of quantum theory in physics, although never observed in nature, contrary what the snake oil pendant sales folks will tell you.) If you Google it, you’ll all manner of loony references to scalar bracelets and pendants and whatever.

It’s really no different than those insipid Q-Ray Bracelets. Remember those? The hideous bracelets with teeny magnets in them that was supposed to cure all that ails you? You can still find infomericals about them from time to time, although they no longer contain specific claims about health and wellness because Health Canada told them stop. Turns out, you just cannot run about making health claims about something that does absolutely nothing. If only Health Canada would crack down on the homeopaths and Feng Shui peddlers too.

Anyway, the point being that if you are ever considering buying a super blessed, quantum scalar amazing health wellness Thor’s mango pendant…don’t. It’s just junk and has nothing to with science, or health, or wellness, or mangos.

Look there is a basic rule I have about people who start talking about quantum mechanics. It’s a very complex and confusing science. There aren’t many people who understand it and those that do tend to be highly educated brainiac types. Your average Joe Slob, like you and me, don’t understand it. We cannot even really come close to understanding it unless we decide to really invest time in serious physics education. So when you hear someone start talking about quantum physics in relations to jewelry, or spirits, or religion or whatever, just throw a pie in their face. It’s like the physicist Richard Feyman once said: “if you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.”

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Categories: atheism, fraud, General, Glee is evil, religion, science, the stupid it burns | 1 comment

I get feedback: End of the world edition

- May 11th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

So my last Grant Rant column has apparently upset a regular reader and commenter who goes by the handle “DayOh”. I don’t know who this person is, although his or her handle always puts a Harry Belafonte tune in my head.

Anyway, the Rant was about how the election of a majority Conservative government doesn’t mean the end of the Canada as we know it because, for simple, practical political reasons, Stephen Harper cannot dismantle Canada and turn it into some kind of fundamentalist loony land, even if that is something he wanted to do.

In the course of the piece, I threw at jab at the end-of-the-world crowd who believe a version of the Christian judgment day is coming on May 21. (I’ve blogged about this in greater detail here.)

Anywhoo, DayOh figures I am generally too hard on religion and specifically too hard on this end of the world stuff because, he says, science makes just as many ridiculous claims about the end of the world. In an exchange with another reader he claims that scientific observations of the asteroid Apophis is just as looney as the god is coming to destroy us crowd:

… NASA has predicted a NEO called Apophis of having a 1 in 250,000 chance of impact with the earth, thus eliminating life as we know it. This is well over 100x more likely to occur than you or I winning the lottery next week. Of course NASA and other scientists have updated this scale repeatedly as their prediction has changed based on new observations….

That doesn`t matter if it`s May 21, 2011 or 2036 (Apophis). In other words, the doomsday folks, whether in the name of God or not, are equally correct…

Grant has habitually picked on one people group (often the religious amongst us) and make no mistake, I’m no fan of the fanatics as outlined in his column. However, he routinely overlooks the equally contentious claims of science…

If we examine this sort of talk for even a moment, it falls like castles made of sand.

First, we can safely dismiss the idea that following NEOs (Near Earth Objects) is the same thing as some religious loon claiming the world is coming to an end.

The end is nigh crowd (which is not limited to Christian fanatics by the way. In Italy and Taiwan this week doomsayers predicting horrible earthquakes set off panics) use, well, nothing to claim we are all about to die. They use a bewilderingly ridiculous interpretations of holy books or other cockamamie “signs”. A lot of the time – as is the case of the May 21sters – they also ask for donations. Cause you know, if the world doesn’t end they need money to keep their scam church going. (In Taiwan, the doomsayer was getting people to buy shelters in a mountain top compound. Fraud charges are likely pending.)

Now is this the same as watching near earth objects, as DayOh suggests?

Not at all.

For those that don’t know, near earth objects are mostly asteroids, large chucks o’ rock  left over from the formation of our solar system. Mostly this space debris is found safely orbiting the Sun in the asteroid belt past Mars or the Kuiper belt out on the fringes of the solar system.

However, some of them wander around and drift near earth. Now, collisions in space are very common. It’s even common in our solar system. where we are lucky enough to have Jupiter acting like a blocker in football pushing away stuff that might otherwise come to close to Earth. Still,  Earth has been pounded by stuff in the past and odds are it will happen again.

I’m not kidding when I say “pounded” either. The reason NASA keeps an eye on near earth objects is because if one hits us…well, lets just say it would totally harsh your day. A large asteroid impact in the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago is the prime suspect in the global extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. In fact, there have been at least five global extinction events in our planet’s history, perhaps all of them caused by impacts from asteroids or comets. (I’d blame Glee for it too, but I don’t think dinosaurs watched TV.)

So keeping an eye on asteroids that float in near Earth is just prudent if you think our extinction is, you know, bad.  An asteroid impact would make the recent quake in Japan look like a charming day at the beach.

So what scientists do is track these asteroids to see if any have a chance at intersecting our orbit and if one does, determine the chances of it actually hitting the planet. Should we find one that has a very good chance of hitting us, the idea is we’ll have enough time to try to deflect it.

apophis_asteroid

Apophis, the killer potato from space

This is, you’ll note, pretty much the exact opposite of what a religious doomsayer does. You don’t see astronomers putting up billboards claiming the end is nigh (while asking for money) do you? They are observing actual real things, using real calculations. So the doomsayers and the astronomers are not “equally correct” as this DayOh fellow contends.  The doomsayers are always, 100 per cent wrong. The astronomers, using real evidence, are right. Funny how that works.

So why is this DayOh making bones about Apophis? It’s a pretty big rock that  has a chance of hitting the earth. But keep in mind that  a “good chance” is still less than 3%. Not great odds, but from an astronomical point of view, worth watching. It is scheduled to pass near Earth in 2036 and current calculations give it a one in 250,000 chance of hitting the planet, depending on if the rock passes through a “gravitational keyhole” when it passed by Earth in 2029. (See the video below.) Again, not exactly something to freak out over, just something to keep an eye on.  Certainly, while astronomers will tell us it is prudent to track Apophis, no one is having an irrational melt down over it.

In short the difference is this:

Doomsayer: “We are all going to die! The end is nigh! Repent! And give me money!”

Scientist: “We are watching a potential threat in the form of an asteroid and in the event it is likely to hit us, we are developing plans to prevent that from happening.”

Consider the following discussion of Apophis by the very awesome Neil Degrasse Tyson in comparison some doomsday lunatic:

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Categories: General, religion, science | No comments

Facts Matter: ET phone home edition

- March 7th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

So big news over at the fine people from Fox News over the weekend huh? They ran a story about a scientist claiming to have discovered alien bacteria on a meteorite. If true this would be huge, huge news because it would be definitive proof that we are not alone in the universe. If you could find fossilized life on a meteorite it would show that, among other things, evolution is a process not limited to earth. And really, finding life that can survive in space isn’t as weird as you might think, as I wrote about back in June in the St. Catharines Standard about some interesting evidence that there may be biological processes happening on the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn:

“Life is chemistry,” University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers recently told me.
Evolution is stubborn and if you can get the chemistry going, then life is possible even in hostile environments, he says. No heat? No light? No oxygen? No problem.
Myers points to extremeophiles — creatures on Earth found in just nasty conditions. Take tardigrades, for instance. These wee creatures, which look like chubby caterpillars, can live in temperatures near absolute zero. NASA once exposed some to the vacuum of space for 10 days, and they survived! And laid eggs! (You and I would be dead in less time than it took to read that sentence.)
“Also look to the vent communities in the ocean,” says Myers. “These are worms, they are related to us. But they have no mouths, no guts or anything like that. They just absorb sulphur from these (hydrothermal) vents.”
Yummy. I loves me some sulphur. Anyway, he says something that evolved on Titan living in methane would be completely bizarre. If there is something gobbling hydrogen it won’t look like the carbon-based critters we’re used to.

Urdnot_Wrex

no Krogans were found, or harmed, during the production of this blog.

Still, that operative phrase there is “IF confirmed.” The scientist in question, one Dr. Hoover, has made this sort of claim before and those claims remained unproven. Part of the problem is the extreme difficulty in finding artifacts of living things on the complicated structure of a meteor. The other problem is the conclusions are not peer reviewed and have not been duplicated. Other scientists are already chiming on Hoover’s paper – released on the web-based and scientifically sketchy Journal of Cosmology – saying basically, “WHOA NELLY!” Even NASA, who Hoover used to work for, is distancing itself from the paper. In essence, Hoover’s conclusions to be sustained by other scientists before it will be taken seriously, which is as it should be.

I understand how exciting it would be to find alien life. If I allow my heathen-self to wish-think, it would be the single most amazing thing we’ve ever discovered. But finding alien life isn’t easy, let alone intelligent life we could talk to. Scientists are uncovering bits and pieces of the universal puzzle that is starting to show that planets, even rocky planets like ours with liquid water, might not be as uncommon as we once thought. But even so, that is a long way from finding, identifying and confirming that life exists elsewhere. As cool as it would be to find something, the best policy is always to go where the evidence goes and remember that facts matter. Jumping to conclusions is not just poor science, but as Fox showed us this weekend, poor journalism as well.

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Categories: science, strangeness | No comments

Boxing vs. Trampoline: Round 2 – survival of the fittest.

- March 4th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

As you may recall a recent decision by the Canada Winter Games to give boxing the boot in favour of trampoline (withering sigh) ruffled my feathers somewhat.

My argument was basically this: boxing is a vastly superior sport – I actually have hard time considering trampoline a sport in any real sense anyway – is a truly global sport, unlikely trampoline, and is the biggest draw at the games. Moreover, Canada’s rather weak national boxing program, often its own worst enemy, needs the games as a way to help it improve.

And yes, I did mock trampoline as a sport. To wit:

I’ve never understood trampoline as a competitive event. It’s always struck me as gymnastics for gymnasts and divers that didn’t quite make it. To put it another way trampoline is to sport what air guitar is to chess. Sure it might be a bit of fun, but it’s not exactly one of the great endeavors of the species.

I might also have later called trampoline as a sport “dopey.”

This assessment has annoyed a few trampolining types. In particular Keiran Crouch, a competitive trampoliner from North Bay who responded to my rant about the winter games with a passionate defense of trampoline by saying, in part, that trampoline didn’t do anything to me, it’s fun, kids like it, it helps keep them active so they don’t morph into little Jabba’s and he has a six pack! Shazam!

He also suggests I watch Youtube videos of Canuck trampoline champ Jason Burnett, because if I did it would surely change my point of view.

Well in fairness to young Keiran, here is Burnett in action. Witness the drama!

Consider me officially….underwhelmed. Ok, yes, I can say with a high degree of certainty that if I tried even one of Mr. Burnett’s daredevil flips I would break my neck and spend my days drooling and eating pre-blended steaks.

That said, even recognizing the obvious talent of someone like Burnett, I still don’t think that trampoline is a sport that ought to have replaced boxing. Boxing should not have been given the boot in the first place, but if it had to go, trampoline simply isn’t a worthy successor.

As a spectator sport it lacks everything boxing has: compelling personal stories, high drama and the testing of the human body and spirit that is exactly what the games (based off of the Olympics after all) are supposed to be about. Legendary trainer Teddy Atlas (whose commentary can be heard on the recently released Fight Night Champion. Let me know when trampoline gets its own top selling video game) calls the boxing ring “the chamber of truth.” Once you are in the ring, under fire, there is nowhere to hide from yourself. Who and what you really are will emerge whether you want it to or not.

Compare the beyond (I will say interesting) performance of Burnett to the high drama of something like Gatti vs. Ward I:

But let us for a moment consider something that young Keiran said about fitness. Trampoline is fun (hard to argue against that) and it helps keep kids fit. Well, those are both great things. Certainly, in a time in which kids exercise less, fill their bodies with junk and spend more time playing something like Fight Night than they do working out in the gym. So Keiran has a point…only to a point.

Yes, any kind of exercise is better than no exercise. But as I have argued before, setting the bar low doesn’t get us very far. I mean, its like the new national fitness standards which appeared to designed to get people doing SOMETHING, but the bar is so low that something is pretty close to nothing.

Now to be fair to Keiran and the trampoline crowd, what they do has to be well above the national standards. But where does it rank among other activities, and boxing in particular?

Not very well.

I came across this study, thanks to my trainer Terry Fowler over at Fight Fit in St. Catharines, that ranked the physical demands of 60 sports against each other to find out which was the most difficult sport in the world.  ESPN got a gaggle of scientists together to measure demands on strength, agility, endurance, and to eye coordination and other indicators. Boxing won by a knockout.

High School Iron Cross

You don't see them doing this in trampoline!

Hockey, wrestling, football and basketball ranked near the top after boxing. Gymnastics, the vastly more difficult cousin of trampoline (which is not ranked at all) ranked a distant 8th. And given that gymnastics requires insane feats of strength like the iron cross on the still-rings, it’s not really fair to compare it trampoline. By my non-scientific eye, it would be closer to cheer-leading, which ranked 52 out of 60.

So it’s true, doing trampoline is better for you than say, eating a bag of cookies, but if the goal is get kids fit and healthy – and do it in venue that can inspire them onto to great things – then boxing is a measurably better fit that trampoline and yet another reason why it should not have been booted from the games. I am sure the committee could find it in its heart to include both, but if a choice has to be made, the chamber of truth should win out.

(By the way, there is a online petition going around to try and get the game’s committee to change it’s mind. Check out here.)

So, now that we have seen the admittedly amazing Mr. Burnett in action, I give you Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosely, who are titans by comparison:

Categories: boxing, General, science, sport | No comments

Evidence Matters. It really does.

- February 22nd, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

I am sometimes chided by those in political circles when, come election time, I am more than willing to ask a candidate what he or she thinks about evolution. Why, the say to me, when their jobs have nothing to do with it?

Well that is only partially true. First, like former federal science minister Gary Goodyear, a politicians views on science can matter a great deal. (Goodyear declined to answer the question when asked in 2009, saying it was a matter of religion and therefore off limits. In other words, he believes in creationism but didn’t want so say publicly.)

But in more concrete terms, it bespeaks how well a politician can handle evidence. The evidence for evolution isn’t even a question anymore, outside of fundamentalist religious circles. The evidence for evolution by natural selection is overwhelming. Questioning it at this point is like saying “meh, I don’t buy into this whole gravity thing.” As I have said before, there is a reason why Stockwell Day – who believes humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth together – wasn’t given the science portfolio. Whatever else he brings to the table as a politician, handling questions of scientific merit is not one of his skills.

To reject something not on the basis of evidence but on the basis of religious faith or personal feelings or whatever, does tell us a lot out a person, about the importance they place on evidence. And in politics, evidence is what we need to make sound decisions about, well, anything: science, the economy, education, the military. You don’t want people who will decide when and where our military will be deployed to base those decisions on personal revelation do you? You want it based on sound reasoning and evidence.

Which brings me to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. A recent report says that Toews is using old data about Canadian crime rates to justify federal policies. How old? According to a University of Toronto criminologist, he is using data from 1962 to claim the national murder rate is rising, when like most other crime stats, it’s been falling for decades. This is a bit like deciding our military’s equipment needs based on information from World War One.

This is not to say that strong policies on criminal justice are aren’t needed or that police forces don’t need new resources to combat the changing face of crime in the 21st century. But it is to say that those kinds of decisions need to be based on evidence, and if a government is using outdated statistics, then it calls into question the entire basis of policy decisions by his ministry.

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Categories: politics, religion, science, the stupid it burns | No comments

First a game show, then Skynet…

- February 16th, 2011

ibm-watsonhal9000GethTterminator_10rosieFullview_CylonPortrait

Oh this is just not good. No, not good at all! This is how it all starts people. Haven’t we learned anything from our science fiction? Making computers smarter than us is how the robopocalypse always begins.

It is not prefect and its limitations were exposed even as it beat down its meat bag competition.The final question’s answer was Chicago but Watson oddly choose Toronto as its answer.

I’m also not sure why they named it Watson. I guess it’s less scary than “Machine Mind Overlord that will soon rule the world, meat bags!”

Apparently, the computer system itself will eventually be used for medical purposes and other applications for tasks that involve large amounts of complex data. It’s actually pretty amazing stuff and while it’s not exactly a true AI, it shows we are inching closer to it. Yah for science!

Well, yah, but I was raised on science fiction and watching Watson in action reminded me way way too much of Hal 9000 from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A space Odyssey.  It’s a pattern repeated over and over. Hal, the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, the Geth from Mass Effect, Rosie that super creepy maid from the Jetsons.  It never ends well for the non digital fleshy human creatures. I mean, sure, IBM could be making a computer that will improve our lives in ways we have not figured out yet….or they are building the first step toward Skynet. First the machines best us at quiz shows and then, well, this:

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Categories: Geekosity, General, science, strangeness | No comments

The stupid, it burns: Dr. Sandman and Evil Germans edition

- January 24th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

So Monday is, for the most part, the most craptacular day of the week. If I ever find the guy who invented Monday, I am going to kick his butt so hard his breath will smell like shoe polish. Bad enough I woke up this morning to find a massive water main break on my street that cut me off from having any water all, but then I read this mind stunning piece about the Giffords shooting in the United States. Read it, but I warn you, it might make you dumber.

According to this, um, well lets call him a “therapist” to be charitable, the blame for the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others lays not with the fact that the shooter Jared Loughner is mentally ill. No, this guy “Kevin Root, licensed clinical social worker, a Cos Cob-based psychotherapist trained at the Carl Jung Institute with 25 years of experience helping people understand their dreams” places the blame at the feet of  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

He was nothing but disconnected to both personal and archetypal father. His hero was Nietzsche, the father of nihilism, who, we all know, is famous for announcing that “God is dead.” Nietzsche may also be viewed, as I do, as the father of terrorism, since he killed God (the father archetype par excellence) and everything that he represents.

So there you go. It’s that damn Nietzsche’s fault because he said god is dead. And, since he said that, he gave birth to terrorism. Well, kick me in the pants and call me Suzie, if only Kevin Root had been around to explain this to us after 9-11! Think of it! If we could only get copies of Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science out of the hands of the followers of Osama Bin Ladin, we could end terrorism! I mean, clearly, most terrorists have a firm grounding in Nietzsche’s work, right? I never did trust those philosophy majors in university. They all seemed a bit sketchy.

Well, forgive me for doubting a dream analyst here – because if you want find an expert on mental illness, crime and philosophy the first place to go is to a dream analyst – but I gotta call BS on this.

Root’s entire line of thinking here is simply a gussied up version of what Fredric Wertham was on about back in the 1950s when he said that reading comic books made young people violent. He would quote statistics (just like our friend Root does) without any particular context and then exclaim “ah ha!
Like Wertham would say that something like 60 per cent of teenaged boys in juvenile prison read comics, so therefore comics were the cause of the behavior that put them there. But, as Stan Lee often points out, those 60 per cent of teenaged boys also drank milk, but Wertham did not declare a causative effect there. Simply spouting off stats or ideas without evidence gets you nowhere.

Which brings us to Root. His idea is that because Nietzsche said “god is dead” and Loughner apparently read it, Loughner became disconnected with a sky daddy and shot Giffords and a bunch of other people. Also, Nietzsche created terrorism because not believing in god is bad mojo:

If there’s not an assumption that God is alive, there’s nothing to fear or to aspire to. If there’s no connection to a personal father or a spiritual father, then all hell breaks loose. Added to this is the violent imagery so prevalent today in video games, TV, movies, etc. that disaffected youth engage in.

This is burning stupid on two fronts. First, Root’s understand of Nietzsche is exceedingly poor. You often see this among religionists who want to paint atheists as evil. “If you are an atheist you have to believe in Nietzsche,” they’ll say. “And Nietzsche said god was dead and that morality is dead. So if you believe god is dead, then you don’t have morals and can justify anything.”

517px-Portrait_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche

Kevin Root couldn't carry Freddy's jock strap.

Of course, this is only sort of what Nietzsche was on about.  Nietzsche, being an atheist, didn’t think god had “died” in any real sense. Well he wouldn’t would he? Something that doesn’t exist cannot die. He was talking about god, particularly the Christian idea of it in Europe, as having died in a metaphorical sense. He saw in the Christian ethic something weak and corrupt that ultimately crushed the human spirit. The increasing secular ideas of Europe had, in effect, “killed” Christianity – that is to say, killed god.

But, and this is what Nietzsche saw as the essential problem, Christianity had defined morality and virtue for over a thousand years. So while it may have been the vehicle of a corrupt morality, at least it had a morality. The society that had killed god, Nietzsche thought, had not replaced it with anything else. In other words, getting rid of Christianity was all well and good, but you had to then build a new morality and a new virtue otherwise you fall into a chasm of nihilism.

This is the other side of Nietzsche’s ideas that people like Root simply cannot be bothered to read. My suspicion is that haven’t actually read Nietzsche at all. The old German created a metaphor for the creation of new morality. He called it the Ubermensch – the overman or the superman. (which has nothing to do with either the superhero or Nazi ideas of the ideal human.) The Ubermensch is to create  new, life affirming values, and break the chains of slavery that Christianity created.

Nietzsche didn’t say, as Root and others would suggest, that god is dead and life sucks so ransack and kill because really, who cares. Nietzsche’s work is complex and asks deep questions about what we believe and why we believe it. Loughner was probably incapable of digesting any of this and to say that these ideas are the source of an assassination attempt on a U.S. politician or terrorism itself is asinine.

The second place Root goes badly wrong is in this assumption that if you don’t believe in a god, if you don’t believe this is a father in the sky watching you (why, I wonder, does Root insist the 24/7 eye in the sky has to be male?) you don’t believe in anything and you cannot aspire to anything. Really? Really Dr. Sandman? I cannot aspire to anything because I don’t believe in a god?

The fact is that atheists, like everyone else, have hopes and dreams about their lives, their families, for their communities and country. Wanting to live in a eternal theme park after death, or believing in an eternal dictatorship just isn’t part of it. They are concerned with the here and now and those who come after us, never mind of hereafters.

Root, by making the staggeringly poor assumption that you need a god to be a good person, has failed to understand that Loughner is a mentally ill person and if there was any failure by anyone along the way, then it’s that the mental health system failed to recognize and help this guy before he did something drastic. It’s not about 19th century German philosophy or political rhetoric. It is about mental illness and crime.

Oh, and for those of you say  that Root is still right, that you need a god to see beauty and hope and aspire for a better tomorrow, I give you the late, great Carl Sagan – a dreamer, scientist and visionary who very clearly aspired to many great and noble things and didn’t believe for a moment that a god was part the picture. If this doesn’t give you chills or bring a tear to your eye, if you will forgive an atheist saying so, you have no soul:

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Categories: atheism, philosophy, politics, religion, science, the stupid it burns | No comments

So long and thanks for all the fish

- January 20th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

So this little bit of oddness caught my eye when scanning my Google news alerts for science. A bunch of egg heads are claiming that dolphins are people too.

Ok, so that sounds a tad strange to me to. Basically the idea here is that tests on dolphins show they are so wicked smart, they are the second smartest critters on Earth next to we human critters. (Although Douglas Adams might disagree.)

I don’t dispute that dolphins are smart. They are crazy smart for aquatic mammals.  Maybe smarter than chimps. But dolphins as “people”? Yah, well, until I see a dolphin do long division or write a sonnet or list the ways that Glee is an affront to all aquatic people…no. They are not people. Call me a rabid specisist if you like, but as smart as dolphins are, they are not human smart.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t recognize dolphins are, in this sense, like our ape cousins and probably should not be made to do tricks for our amusement. That we continue to do this while we know how smart these animals are is beyond me. We have Playstations now. We don’t need to make the dolphin jump through a hoop.

I understand and applaud the desire to protect dolphins. They should be protected. But to try and claim they are non-human people opens a very very weird can of worms. It’s not like when, say, African Americans were not considered persons under the law. If we want to protect our fishy friends, as we should, we can without trying to navigate some odd legalese.

Besides, “Soylent Green is Dolphins” doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

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Categories: science, strangeness | No comments

The stupid, it burns: Vaccine science edition

- January 6th, 2011

Huzzah! Science 1. Burning stupid 0!thestupiditburns

What’s got me all excited? This bit of awesome news that broke yesterday about the dishonest bozos trying to make a non-existent link between autism in children and vaccines. Biologist PZ Myers has a good break down of what went over at Pharyngula.

Basically, there is a anti-vaccine crowd that believes, on the basis of no hard evidence, that vaccinations cause autism in children. The claims have been debunked before, but that didn’t stop these folks from continuing to beat the drum.  They whipped up enough of a scare in places like the UK that parents stopped vaccinating their kids and preventable illness like the measles made a comeback. Nice going, dumb dumbs.

Yesterday we learned a study claiming to establish a link between vaccinations and autism was little more than utter fakery. The report had been widely discredited for sloppy methodology, but these new revelations show just how far the fanatics will go to make their case. They know they have no evidence but they cannot accept the facts for what they are, so they just make it up. I’m serious. Turns out they just made up stuff and put in their report.

It reminds me again of what Jawaharalal Nehru said: “Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.”

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The birds are falling, but the end is not nigh

- January 6th, 2011

Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

Here is a good little bit about the weird bird die offs we’ve seen lately. It is truly freaky, if not unheard of. I mean, you don’t expect hundreds of birds to just fall out of the sky. I’ve covered a couple of large die offs in Niagara. A few times a mess of fish washing up dead on the shore of Lake Ontario and a strange case of a lot of mud puppies dying in Lake Erie. When you walk down to the shore line and see it littered with dead critters….it’s  more than a little creepy.!

Still, it’s not the end of all things. Presently unexplained perhaps, but if you are one of those who is sees this as proof you might be raptured away sometime soon, you are going to be disappointed.

Best line from that story comes from a Swedish official, noting the difference in the reaction to the die offs in his country vs. the United States:

Boeckman said the response to the bird deaths also illustrated differences between more religious-minded Americans, versed in Biblical accounts of plagues of frogs or locusts, and secular Swedes who place their trust in human authority.

“In the United States the reaction is ‘oh no, Doomsday is coming’. In Sweden, they say ‘let’s call the veterinary authorities’,” he said.

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