YouTube commenters are the stupidest people in the world.
YouTube commenters are the stupidest people in the world.
Apparently this optical illusion was created by Phillippe Schyns and Aude Oliva of the University of Glasgow. The pictures reverse if you take a few steps back. (Fewer steps for me, now that I'm wearing these bastard old contacts again and everything's fuzzy.)
And remember to vote Liberal!
I've seen parts of this before, but not the whole thing, and at the time didn't recognise Morrow from Chaser's War on Everything.
a steep and rough trail. This is us.
- George W BushSo Bush’s inspiring, proselytizing Methodist is in fact a horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency. Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. In fact that man is a wily criminal one step out in front of justice. It perfectly reflects Bush the man... and Bush the president.
Scott Horton's articlette, "The Illustrated President", in Harper's, is an interesting read. For a start, it turns out that Bush mistakenly named his autobiography after a painting of a horse thief. Of course, it turns out that Salon.com spotted this first.
It's important to occasionally rail off some statistics to put things in perspective. For example, how many children would you say were killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict last year? If you guessed 60, you're hella right. 60 kids. That's pretty fucked.
Here are a few things to remember. When the news (and that includes mainstream New Zealand media) talks about Hamas "taking control of Gaza", they were actually democratically elected by the Palestinian people. They are the democratically elected government. That's important to remember. Also, "Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas" refers to "unelected Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas".
Here's another interesting point. What's going on in Gaza at the moment is FUCKED. For those who don't know, essential supplies have been blocked from getting into Gaza, including food and fuel. The fuel is used for generators. The generators are used for the hospitals. The hospitals are used for keeping people alive. This is collective punishment. Blatant collective punishment.
So, punishment implies a crime. What is the crime for which 1.5 million people are being punished? Rockets being fired at Sderot, an Israeli town. You can read the LA Times article here , about how hard life is in Sderot:They take quick showers, afraid to miss an alert, no longer sleep in upstairs bedrooms and avoid public places at what are considered peak Qassam times. And when the alert sounds, people drop everything, including their unpaid groceries in the aisles, costing Daniel Dahan more than $100 a day, he said. He owns Super Dahan, the grocery his father started. They run to one of the square concrete shelters, known as betonadas, after the word for cement, that increasingly dot the town. Then they pull out their phones, to check on their children.
And let's face it, that's pretty terrible. Living with that kind of fear must suck. Dropping your groceries, phoning your kids... Hell, it's going to cost US$25,000 per house to add safe rooms to protect people. Who can afford that?
Well, presumably the people of Sderot can afford that. And apparently they have groceries and phones. Yes, it's a tough life there. And their kids! I mean, as I said above, 60 children died in the conflict last year. Some of them must have come from Sderot, right?
No?
Well, some of them must have come from Israel, right?
Yes! Yes, one child out of 60 who died last year from violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict was Israeli. His name was Mahmoud Ibrahim Mahmoud al-Krenawi, 11, of Rahat, near Beersheba. He was a Bedouin with Israeli citizenship, and he was shot by the Israeli Defence Force, in his head and pelvis, while picking figs.
Oh, wait. Even the Israeli kid wasn't killed by Palestinians. He was killed by the Israeli Defence Force too. This is very disconcerting. So, basically, hospitals are being shut down, 1.5 million people have had their vital supplies cut off, who are living in shit anyway, because they democratically elected the wrong people and include some minority who fire unguided rockets into a town 1km away, disrupting grocery shopping and killing one Israeli child every two years, on average, since they began being fired in 2001.
There's another statistic for you. On average, since 2001, Qassam rockets fired into Sderot have killed 1 child every two years. Four children since 2001. THREE KIDS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN GAZA BY THE IDF IN THE LAST MONTH! NO CHILDREN HAVE BEEN KILLED IN SDEROT IN THE LAST YEAR! This is not a proportionate response.
It's just fucked. And the media's attempts to "show both sides" and "be objective" just results in a ridiculous presentation of the affair as being roughly equal, with equal accountability and equal power to resolve the situation.
Anyway, according to Tom Feeley, here is how to donate food directly to Palestinian kids. No political, religious or militant groups involved.
PS. Statistics from Remember These Children.
PPS. Yes, life in Sderot is fucked, and it shouldn't be. Missile attacks on civilians are by definition terrorism. It's just fucking paradise compared to what the IDF do to Gazans.
Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!
Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.
I am loving Portfolio's online mirror. I've recently read a whole series of quality articles there. Check out this one on online piracy and a neat meeting with a teenage hacker. Or maybe you'd be interested in an article about Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Funny or Die online comedy site. Or perhaps you'd just like to go to Funny or Die and check out Jerry O'Connell doing Tom Cruise.
Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.
Surprisingly -- stunningly, in fact -- research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?
Why people believe weird things about money.
I'm a massive geek. Here is one of the reasons. Television brought me the future today. A room-sized computer with a name and bespectacled owner... who did magic tricks?! His ballet-doing girlfriend and closet homosexual athlete friend and BMX-trick-doing black-guy friend?! AND THEY SOLVE CRIMES, HOLY SHIT. With a little help from their detective friend, and his detective mate "A Martinez" (not to be confused with "The Martinez").
So digital! So watch-out-for-static!
And can it be that there is an entire fucking episode of Whiz Kids on YouTube? Yes, it can be.
Here's a curious thing. Scylla, at the Straight Dope message board, decided to try waterboarding himself to see what the fuss is all about. For those who don't know, waterboarding is an interrogation technique used by American intelligence on detainees. It simulates the sensation of drowning without actually drowning you, triggering the Fuck I'm Gonna Die reflect.
Ian Wishart has kindly responded to my recent post on chapter four of his book The Divinity Code. Rather than create a bulky ongoing commentfest, I prefer to post further articles (mainly because Blogger's comment system combined with my layout equals shit).
One of my criticisms was that Ian's application of the anthropic principle assumed that earth life is the only kind of life. At least, that is the premise that would have to be added to make the reasoning sound. I made a separate criticism that his argument assumed that life is special enough to demand more explanation than any other kind of physical phenomena. While I made the points separately, they can be made together. Here is Ian's argument.
1. Life requires exactly earth-like conditions to arise.
2. The chances of earth-like conditions arising are impossibly small.
3. Therefore it is unreasonable to believe it happened by chance.
4. Therefore it was done on purpose.
5. Therefore God.
I suggested that there was an implicit assumption that earth life was the only kind of possible life - or else the first premise is false. If earth life is not the only kind of possible life, then the first premise becomes "earth life requires exactly earth-like conditions", which is tautologous and therefore true, but invalidates the argument. To illustrate this, I made an analogous argument:
1. Ryan requires exactly Ryan's Life conditions to arise.
2. The chances of Ryan's Life conditions arising are impossibly small.
3. Therefore it is unreasonable to believe it happened by chance.
4. Therefore it was done on purpose.
5. Therefore God.
The Ryan argument seems obviously silly, because the chances of anyone else's life being just right for them to arise is just as unlikely as Ryan's life. The earth-life argument seems less silly because while we're familiar with the idea of other potential people, we're less familiar with the idea of other potential forms of life.
We know from everyday experience that there are millions of people who could correctly think, "Fucking hell, if Mum and Dad hadn't had that last oyster 27 years ago, I wouldn't be here!" It requires more thought to imagine the possibility of other potential kinds of life which could reflect on their existence and say, "Fucking hell, if we didn't orbit a binary star system, we wouldn't be here!"
Ian has recently been given a similar response, where someone has replaced "earth life" with "Cambridge cosmologists". Ian quotes their counter-example:
1. If an all-powerful god made the world so that Cambridge Cosmologists would thrive, then Cambridge Cosmologists would thrive
2. Arguably Cambridge Cosmologists do thrive
3. Conclusion: An all-powerful god made the world so that Cambridge Cosmologists would thrive.
His respondent adds, "The problem with this argument is that Cambridge Cosmologists can be replaced with anything (including yours truly or tape-worms) and therefore is vacuous."
It's worth noting here that this is not really the argument that Ian was putting forth in chapter four. There is nothing like the first premise ("If God made the world so that Cambridge cosmologists would thrive, then they would") in his argument.
Ian's response is thus:Your context is set too vaguely. If Cambridge Cosmologists, and only Cambridge Cosmologists, appeared to exist, this would be a closer analogy to the situation we currently find ourselves in...
It's not an entirely adequate response to Mr Cambridge, but I'm not going to go into that, because Mr Cambridge's email was not an entirely adequate response to Mr Wishart.
What it shows, though, is that I need to be more clear in my Ryan's Life analogy. Presumably, what Ian is saying to me by quoting his response to Mr Cambridge is that my analogy would only be analogous if I was in fact the only person to exist. That's fair enough, given how difficult an analogy it was. I'll make it a bit clearer.
Ryan = earth-life.
Ryan's Life = the conditions on earth that give rise to earth-life.
Other people = other potential forms of life.
Other people's lives = other potential lives that give rise to non-Ryan people.
The surprise that I am Ryan and not someone else is analogous to the surprise that earth-life exists and is not some other kind of life. It is analogous not because Ryan is the only person who exists, but because Ryan is the only person who is Ryan, amongst others who are not. The difference is that we can see other people, other potential lives, but we cannot see other potential forms of life. That was, in fact, my whole point - that this is why it's intuitively compelling to believe that earth-life is unbelievably special, whereas it's not intuitively compelling to believe that Ryan is unbelievably special. Because we have examples of alternatives to Ryan, but no examples of alternatives to earth-life.
This isn't lost on Ian, and he's provided a few arguments that, in fact, earth-life is the only possible kind of life. Biochemists have suggested that only carbon or silicon has the versatility and stability to be a basis for life, and carbon moreso than silicon. That narrows "life" down to "carbon-based life". A fair enough argument. The problem is that carbon is fairly prevalent in the universe, and we don't really know what other potential self-replicating patterns of matter could arise involving it.
We can speak of the unlikelihood of an entire cell forming spontaneously. We can speak of the lower unlikelihood of RNA forming spontaneously. We can speak of self-catalysing molecules - some of which we have produced. But we don't have comprehensive knowledge of every possible self-replicating molecule and the chances of it forming spontaneously in conditions earth-like or not. We really don't know the odds, though we do know that there's an awful lot of time and an awful lot of space for them to play out. In other words, we have no reason to conclude that exactly earth's conditions are required for carbon-based life to arise - still only the tautology that exactly earth's conditions are required for exactly earth's carbon-based life to arise.
Those paying close attention will note another analogy here. There's no end to my statement, "We don't know all the possible arrangements of matter and their likelihood of spontaneously occurring." We can never know. Isn't that analogous to the God of the Gap of the Origin of Life? A "Get Out of Argument Free" card?
Well, perhaps, and I suspect that's the attitude of many scientists. "We don't have a definite naturalistic explanation for the origin of life on earth, therefore there is a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life on earth that we don't know." It's not even worth throwing "yet" on the end of the statement, because we can never know for sure, as I mentioned earlier.
Again, we're back to the odds. Scientists assume there is a naturalistic explanation for life on earth - either one they've imagined already or one that have not - because there always has been in the past. Schizophrenia is not caused by demons. Palsy is not caused by fairies. Lightning is not caused by gods. Rainbows are not placed there by God. Mental states are not souls, but directly alterable chemical processes. Almost everything in the past that was previously given a supernatural explanation now has a proven naturalistic one. What are the odds that this one is different?
Let's say you line up a thousand people, and you ask each one, "Have you ever lied?" Each one tells you they haven't. Then you come back with a lie detector and ask them all again, "Have you ever lied?" The first 999 were lying, but when you get to the last guy, it turns out he died earlier that day. You can't test him with the lie detector.
What do you believe about him? That he was the one guy in a thousand who actually had never lied? Do you believe neither that he had ever lied nor that he had? Or do you believe that he was the one guy in 1000 who had never lied, because some people are telling you so, and it's just dumb luck you can't prove for sure that he lied?
That's the reason for the "faith" in naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. It's a habit born from centuries of experience. It's just unrealistically unlikely that this is the time that supernatural explanations trump naturalistic ones, after the last thousand examples of naturalistic explanations trumping supernatural ones.
But I digress. Back to the matter at hand. I claim we can't know the odds of life spontaneously occurring somewhere in the universe, sometime from its beginning to its end, even if we limit ourselves to carbon-based life. To me, it's a safe assumption that life of some sort is inevitable in the universe - there's a lot of universe. If those incalcuable odds are different, I could be wrong, and life may well not be inevitable. It may be incredibly unlikely. Let's look at a different part of the argument, the most fundamental:
Even if life of any kind is incredibly unlikely, why does that demand special explanation? There are innumerable things in the universe that are incredibly unlikely. It's incredibly unlikely that the third neutron from the left of the exact centre of Alpha Centauri is moving in the direction it is. Why does this particular phenomenon - life - demand special explanation when nothing else does?
WE, THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF THIRTEEN INDIGENOUS GRANDMOTHERS, represent a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come. We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. We believe the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future. We look to further our vision through the realization of projects that protect our diverse cultures: lands, medicines, language and ceremonial ways of prayer and through projects that educate and nurture our children.
Season three, episode six of Veronica Mars is all about Veronica trying to clear her name from plagiarism allegations. Meanwhile, her awesome boyfriend Logan keeps writing a few seconds after an exam is finished. The lecturer doesn't accept his paper.
He asks, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
The lecturer says, "No, and I don't care."
And Logan puts his exam inside the pile and walks off.
Ahem.
Still, I like the Veronica Mars writers enough to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe this was a witty little joke about plagiarism. After all, they did the cool homage to Lebowski - "You're entering a world of pain, Larry" - and didn't make a big deal about it. I make a big deal for them. I'm like that.
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