Back from the Grand Canyon

I spent most of the last nine days in the Grand Canyon, rafting down the Colorado River on the National Center for Science Education's 2007 trip. I met interesting people and made new friends, ate great food, and saw amazing sights. This was my third trip down the Canyon, but my first in the last two decades (my previous two were in August 1976 and June 1985).


This trip included the presentation of both creationist flood geology and real geology, but there was no contest--when you have hundreds of feet of successive ocean floor beds full of fossils of marine life that has lived and died, and a large variety of completely different kinds of formations that have clearly been deposited in different kinds of events, it's transparently nonsense to claim that it was all laid down in a single year-long flood.

Top photo: Grand Canyon about 25 miles downstream from Lee's Ferry (mile 0); bottom photo: downstream view of river from Nankoweap Canyon (mile 53).

UPDATE (August 7, 2007): Here's a blog post about our trip by a member of the crew.

Ron Paul, Religious Kook

One of the serious problems I have with our democracy is that politicians are a package deal. When one gets elected we celebrate their good ideas, but we have to endure their idiotic ones. I think this could explain the popularity of the "lesser-of-evils" argument people often use to persuade others to vote for their pet candidate of the moment. Arguably, all politicians are idiots - to a greater or lesser degree.

Case in point: Ron Paul. You can love him for his stance on the war in Iraq, but this sort of stuff really makes me wonder about the guy:

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.

WTF??? Isn't Ron Paul supposedly a constitutionalist?

It's not a big surprise to me to find that the source of the above patent absurdity is an article posted at lewrockwell.com - home of the kookiest of the kooks in the "libertarian" world.

Thanks to the no god zone, which has more to say on this topic.

UPDATE by Jim (October 18, 2007): Dispatches from the Culture Wars has more on Ron Paul's views on religion and government, with lots of data in the comments.

UPDATE by Jim (December 25, 2007): Ron Paul rejects evolution.

Adopt Bully!

Bully is about 4 years old, approximately 40-45 pounds. For most of his life, Bully and his caretaker have been homeless. Bully currently is kept outside, behind the store where his caretaker works. He has little shade or other comforts, and does not get the love and attention he deserves. I keep tabs on him and his ‘owner,’ but I’d like to find Bully a better home if possible.

We tried to adopt him about 1 ½ years ago, but after two perfect months in our house, he began to attack one of our dogs. Neither dog was ever injured, but we could not trust Bully around our dogs. Other than that, he is a great dog. He loves attention and belly rubs, will come when called, won’t chew inappropriately, and never had an accident in the house. Despite his rather tough life, Bully always has a smile on his face and is happy to see you.

Bully is: affectionate, lap dog, house broken, neutered, eager to please, unknown behavior with children, extremely intelligent, unpredictable aggression towards other dogs.

In his ideal home he would be the only pet. As I have never seen him around children, I’d only want him to go to a home where any children are 16 or older. A prospective adopter home inspection is required. No adopters farther than 300-400 miles outside of Phoenix will be considered, as I will be unable to travel to inspect your home on Bully's behalf.

Asking printer manufacturers to stop spying results in Secret Service visit?

The fact that color printers print a pattern of yellow dots on all pages that indicate which printer was used, for the purposes of being able to track the identity of who has printed any page, has been known since the EFF decrypted the codes and publicized the information in 2005.

Now, however, the MIT Media Lab has started a project called "Seeing Yellow" to encourage printer owners to contact the manufacturers and complain, after it has been found that those who do so get reported to the U.S. Secret Service as subversives. (There is one known case, in which someone called to ask a printer manufacturer if there was a way to turn off the "feature.")

(Via Don Lloyd at Distributed Republic.)

DI promotes round 4 for creationism in public schools

They plan to get Paul Nelson's Explore Evolution book used in a Tacoma, Washington public high school biology classroom.

Round 4's strategy is to avoid mentioning creationism or intelligent design, but just present evolution badly, and let the students infer creationism or intelligent design on their own or with the help of materials supplied outside of the classroom.

The successful defense this time may not be through the courts, but by refuting the material and getting schools to abandon it (or better, refuse to adopt it) because it contains errors and doesn't meet minimal standards of accuracy or value for the science curriculum.

Google thinks I'm malware

While looking through multiple pages of results from a Google query that contained some operators like negations and "site:" specifications, Google was periodically failing to give results or displaying raw HTML in my browser, then ultimately came back with:

Google

Error

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

But no, there's no malware doing these queries, it's just me.

French market for driver's license points

In France, the penalties for speeding are now so widely seen as unfair that there is now a market for selling and purchasing the deduction of points from your license for traffic offenses.

Each driver starts with 12 points on their license, and loses points for violations. Exceeding the speed limit by 20 kph or less has a two-point penalty, for example. Once you get to zero, your license is automatically suspended for six months.

But if you get a traffic citation, you can pay 300-1500 euros per point to someone who is willing to take the rap for you (either because they don't drive or are sufficiently far from zero that the penalty won't bother them), and they'll incur the points by sending in their information on your ticket. The French Interior Ministry is attempting to investigate means to crack down on this, but the volume of tickets is apparently making it difficult.

More at the Reason blog. I think this mechanism could work well for photo radar speeding tickets in the U.S.

Arizona bans anti-Bush t-shirts

The Arizona legislature and the governor have passed legislation banning the sale of t-shirts that say "Bush Lied/They Died." The Arizona legislature voted unanimously in favor of the ban, which allows for the punishment of a year in jail for using the names of deceased soldiers to sell goods, and gives the families of such soldiers the right to collect civil damages.

This is an outrageous violation of the First Amendment to prohibit perfectly legitimate political speech using factual information in the public domain. Similar bans have also been passed in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, and are in the works in Florida.

In Arizona, this law also violates the state constitution (Article 2, Sections 1, 2, and 6, in my non-lawyerly opinion).

Several Democrats who voted for the bill have now agreed that they should not have, and made excuses for why they did:

"I shouldn't have voted the way I did," House Minority Leader Phil Lopes said. The Tucson Democrat blamed his vote in favor of Senate Bill 1014 on a "senior moment."

Rep. Tom Prezelski, D-Tucson, said he thought problems he originally had with the measure had been fixed. He acknowledged not reading the final version.

And Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix, conceded that she wasn't paying attention and was totally unaware of the contents of the bill on which she voted at least twice—once after a proponent of the measure gave a short floor speech explaining the essence of the bill and why he believed it was necessary.

Our governor, also a Democrat, has given an equally lame response when asked why she signed such a clearly unconstitutional bill:

...gubernatorial press aide Jeanine L'Ecuyer said a divided vote would not have resulted in a veto.

"Her concern is for the families who lost someone," L'Ecuyer said.

Asked if Napolitano, a lawyer, believes the measure is unconstitutional, L'Ecuyer's only response was, "The governor signed the bill."

Napolitano cannot be re-elected, and after this, she clearly should not be. Any legislator who voted for this bill should be given the boot, which means cleaning out the entire Arizona legislature. Toss the bums out!

The shirts are being sold by Dan Frazier of Flagstaff, who also offers some different messages on top of the list of names of the fallen soldiers.

The Arizona Civil Liberties Union has already filed a lawsuit to overturn the law (PDF).

If anyone in Phoenix is interested in purchasing some of these shirts as part of a group purchase (or as my resale at cost to you, so I can work some civil disobedience of an unconstitutional law into it), please let me know.

UPDATE (August 24, 2007): Dan Frazier has gone to court to get an injunction against the law, but it looks like the legislators wrote the law not only in ignorance of the Constitution, but in ignorance of what Frazier is doing--the law doesn't ban the sale of items using the names of fallen soldiers, it bans advertising using the names of fallen soldiers. The names are not legible on Frazier's website, so he may not fall afoul of the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad, unconstitutional law, however.

A difference between Christians and atheists

Atheists, who see prayers in Congress as unconstitutional superstitious appeals to a fictional deity, have fought against them with arguments and lawsuits, observing that the First Amendment prohibits government establishment of religion.

Some Christians, on the other hand, when they see unconstitutional superstitious appeals to a fictional deity that they don't believe in, attempt to disrupt and silence the invited speaker doing the praying.

These individuals apparently think that there already is an established governmental religion of Christianity. It does seem like we've moved a long way in that direction under the Bush administration.

And whatever happened to Matthew 6:5-6? Has it been removed from some Christians' Bibles?

"And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you." (NASB)

(Also see Pharyngula's take.)

Quarter billion dollar bank robbery--in Iraq

Yesterday's New York Times reports that two or three guards at the Dar Es Salaam bank in Baghdad successfully engineered the theft of $282 million in U.S. dollars from the bank. It's not been explained why the bank had that much money in U.S. dollars.