Ian Plimer on climate change

As was mentioned last August by commenter Ktisophilos, Ian Plimer has a new book out on climate change, titled Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science, in which he challenges claims of anthropogenic global warming.

Plimer is an Australian professor of geology who I criticized for his methods in debate with creationists, as well as for his reliability and accuracy. He responded by criticizing me with more misrepresentation in his book Telling Lies for God, which contained numerous errors, as well as multiple cases of failure to properly quote and cite sources that he used in writing the book. (The Creation Ministries International documentary for which I was interviewed, Facing the Fire, is about Plimer's 1988 debate with Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research.)

It now appears that Plimer's latest work is also extremely sloppy and contains erroneous source attributions. Tim Lambert at the Deltoid ScienceBlog identifies a long list of problems in the book by page number, points out the facts about Plimer's misleading figure 3, which doesn't originate from the source Plimer has claimed, and about another misrepresented source and graph.

Some Christians who found Plimer to be worthless as a source on creationism as a result of my critique have nonetheless found him to be a worthwhile source on anthropogenic climate change, such as Bill Muehlenberg and some of the commenters at his CultureWatch blog. This strikes me as an inconsistent position--Plimer has demonstrated unreliability in both debates, and shouldn't be relied upon as a source for either. That doesn't mean to ignore what he says, or that everything he says is wrong--it's just that everything he says needs to be thoroughly checked for accuracy. If it checks out, then it's better to cite the original source, not Plimer.

UPDATE (May 26, 2009): Commenter Paul points out a review of Plimer's book by Barry Brook, which also includes a link to a point-by-point critique of the book by Prof. Ian Enting of the University of Melbourne (PDF). (This link has been updated as of June 1, 2009 to point to a location that will continue to maintain the most recent version of the critique, as per a comment below from Prof. Enting.)

UPDATE (May 28, 2009): Bill Muehlenberg still appears to be refusing to publish contrary opinions from me, continuing his past record. I posted the following two comments on his blog, which he has not allowed through moderation:

1. Comment submitted on the evening of May 22, 2009:

I am a critic of creationism and skeptic who challenged Ian Plimer's methods and reliability in his criticisms of creationism (cited by one of your commenters above). I am sorry to say that Plimer's methods and reliability continue to be unsound in his contribution to the climate change debate. For example, see the following two blog posts that document errors and falsehoods in his new book:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/04/the_science_is_missing_from_ia.php

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/ian_plimer_lies_about_source_o.php

I think that Plimer is mostly correct about creationism (it's nonsense) and mostly incorrect about climate change (there are real trends that correlate with human activity), but given his record he shouldn't be relied upon as a source in either debate without carefully checking up on everything he says.

2. Submitted on the morning of May 23, 2009:

Bill:

I do hope you will let my comments through moderation.

Here is another post from the Deltoid ScienceBlog about Ian Plimer misrepresenting one of his own sources:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/plimer_and_arctic_warming.php

UPDATE (September 2, 2009): Plimer has descended further into irrationality in his exchange with George Monbiot.

UPDATE (December 17, 2009): Plimer engaged in a debate, of sorts, with George Monbiot, on Australia's "Lateline" program. Monbiot offers his overview of how it went.

Tracking cyberspies through the web wilderness

Yesterday's New York Times has an interesting article about how security researchers at the University of Toronto have helped uncover online spy activity, apparently conducted by the Chinese government, against the Dalai Lama's office in India.

One odd comment in the article: "And why among the more than 1,200 compromised government computers representing 103 countries, were there no United States government systems?"

I find this particularly odd in that I've seen compromised U.S. government systems plenty of times in my information security career, including spam issued from military computers. I don't find it plausible that the U.S. government has recently improved the security of all of its computers and networks so that there are no more compromised systems.

In the context of the article, it's discussing more specifically compromises due to the particular spy ring being monitored. The preceding sentences point out that they weren't able to determine with certainty who was running it, and the immediately preceding sentence asks, "Why was the powerful eavesdropping system not password-protected, a weakness that made it easy for Mr. Villeneuve to determine how the system worked?"

The question should actually have asked why it wasn't encrypted, rather than "password-protected," but the possibilities suggested to me here are that (a) this particular activity is being run by amateurs or (b) this particular activity was intentionally detectible as either (i) a distraction from other, more hidden activity or (ii) to put the blame on China by somebody other than China.

Ambiguous letter in Smithsonian magazine

The April 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine prints two letters about February's "Darwin and Lincoln" article under the heading "Twin piques." The first reads:

The only place Darwin and Lincoln are equals is in the mind of author Adam Gopnik ["Twin Peaks"]. What a stretch to weave their lives together because they share a birthday. "High peaks [that] look out toward each other"? Total hyperbole.
Rick Munsell
The Villages, Florida

Unfortunately, Dr. Munsell, a veterinarian from Florida who got his college degrees in Mississippi, doesn't tell us which reputation he thinks is exaggerated. Given his status as a southerner, he could either be a fan of the Confederacy and southern secession, or he could be an anti-evolutionist. Then again, perhaps he just thinks nobody is ever equal to anybody else...

Lippards sight flying snakes

In any event, the next Carolina sighting is only briefly detailed, sadly, since it sounds even more interesting than most. On the afternoon of 16 September 1904, in the countryside near Troutman, North Carolina, Mrs John B Lippard and her children saw "30 or more large snakes sailing through the air" over their farm. Each was about 5ft (1.5m) long and 4-5in (10-13cm) wide. "They watched the snakes sail around and alight in a piece of thickety pine woods... Most assuredly these people saw something." (Statesville Landmark, 20 Sept)

Quoted from p. 34 of Jerome Clark, "Sky Serpents," Fortean Times magazine, #248, June 2009, pp. 30-36.

UPDATE (12 September 2014):  There are, in fact, gliding snakes in the jungles of south and southeast Asia.

Who's behind the financial meltdown?

The Center for Public Integrity, an organization I support, has just published the results of an investigation into the roots of the recent economic crisis and the major players involved:

The top subprime lenders whose loans are largely blamed for triggering the global economic meltdown were owned or backed by giant banks now collecting billions of dollars in bailout money — including several that have paid huge fines to settle predatory lending charges. The banks that funded the subprime industry were not victims of an unforeseen financial collapse, as they have sometimes portrayed themselves, but enablers that bankrolled the type of lending threatening the financial system.
...

According to the analysis:

• At least 21 of the top 25 subprime lenders were financed by banks that received bailout money — through direct ownership, credit agreements, or huge purchases of loans for securitization.

• Nine of the top 10 lenders were based in California, including all of the top five — Countrywide Financial Corp., Ameriquest Mortgage Co., New Century Financial Corp., First Franklin Corp., and Long Beach Mortgage Co.

• Twenty of the top 25 subprime lenders have closed, stopped lending, or been sold to avoid bankruptcy. Most were non-bank lenders.

• Eleven of the lenders on the list, including four recipients of bank bailout funds, have made payments to settle claims of widespread lending abuses.

Check out the full report.

Greater percentage of nonreligious join religion than vice-versa

In an op-ed at the New York Times, Charles Blow offers a rebuttal to the claim that most people follow particular religions because they are raised in those religions with the following:

Maybe, but a study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 14 percent of those raised Catholic and 13 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated.

(It should be noted that about a quarter of the unaffiliated identified as atheist or agnostic, and the rest said that they had no particular religion.)

I don't think this is particularly informative or much of a rebuttal, given that most of those "unaffiliated" were not actually raised atheist or agnostic, and that it would not be particularly surprising that someone raised in an unaffiliated-but-religious environment would end up joining a particular church that they found compatible with the views they were raised with. Without more specific data, I don't think this at all refutes the claim that most people follow the religious traditions and views they are raised with, which I think is very well supported by the geographical distribution of religious belief.

It is still interesting, however, that a majority of the unaffiliated become affiliated, and that the number one reason for that, according to Blow, is that "Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met." Blow writes:

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.

Here, I think he makes a good point, though I think the label of "spiritual needs" is a misnomer. This is, I think, the same point I've made in a few posts at this blog, including one on April 29 where I wrote that an overly intellectualized understanding of human beings is a mistake that some atheists make, and one on how Pentecostalism has been tremendously successful with its focus on these other aspects of humanity.

By the way, it's important to note that even if a greater percentage of the nonreligious join religion than vice versa, that doesn't mean that a greater number of the nonreligious join religion than vice versa, and in fact we know that isn't the case from the data that shows that the "unaffiliated" group is the fastest growing group in the U.S.

Same-sex marriage in Christian history

Jinxiboo's blog reports on Saint Sergius and Bacchus, officers in the Roman army exposed as secret Christians and martyred in the fourth century:

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.
...

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the "Office of Same-Sex Union" (10th and 11th century), and the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century).

These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiatied in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.

Such same gender Christian sanctified unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12thand/ early 13th century, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (‘Geraldus Cambrensis’) recorded.

Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, "Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union", invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to "vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints". The ceremony concludes: "And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded".

Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic "Office of the Same Sex Union", uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.

Records of Christian same sex unions have been discovered in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, in Istanbul and in the Sinai, covering a thousand-years from the 8th to the 18th century.

The Dominican missionary and Prior, Jacques Goar (1601-1653), includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek Orthodox prayer books, “Euchologion Sive Rituale Graecorum Complectens Ritus Et Ordines Divinae Liturgiae” (Paris, 1667).

While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn’t appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place.

The evangelical Christian response will likely be to either question whether these were really like "marriage" or reject them as Satan-inspired evil that shows how far astray the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have gone.

Wikipedia has more on Sergius and Bacchus.

Unconscious decision-making

Evidence continues to mount that human decision-making occurs in the brain prior to conscious awareness of the decision, which is evidence against the common religious view of a soul, separate from the brain, which is the seat of all of our mental capacities. It's also at odds with an overly intellectualized view of human beings held by some atheists (as well as all Scientologists, who consider unconscious decision-making by the "reactive mind" or festering "body thetans" to be the cause of human unhappiness), on which we must strive to make all of our decisions based on conscious, deliberative reason. I don't think this is a very common view among atheists today, who tend to have some familiarity with evolution and cognitive science, but there are still some out there who have an overly idealized view of what a rational human being should be.

A view of human beings that focuses solely on the intellectual and reason is not only at odds with the facts about how our cognition works, it gives short shrift to the importance of social bonds and emotion, which are areas that some religions focus on to the exclusion of the intellectual--with great success in expanding their memberships, at least over the short term.

George W. Bush on the difference between democracy and dictatorship

"It's important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse ... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. ... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation."

And on the treatment of war crimes: "War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders."

The former quote is from the video below, the latter quote is from this March 2003 CNN transcript.

(First quote via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, second quote via The Agitator.)

And, for your edification, please read Scott Horton's article, "Busting the Torture Myths."

"Fleeting expletives" FCC rule upheld

The FCC rule on "fleeting expletives," permitting massive fines even for individual occurrences of the "seven words you can't say on television," arguing that they always have sexual connotations even when used as an intensifier, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. The decision is noteworthy for using the terms "F-word" and "S-word" and "f***ing" and "s****" in its text, rather than spelling them out.

Clarence Thomas' concurrence in the majority, however, questioned the constitutional basis of the FCC's ability to regulate content. It should be just a matter of time before the FCC's ability to regulate indecency is curtailed, but the Supreme Court did not rule on that issue in this case.

Adam Thierer at the Technology Liberation Front has a thorough commentary:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Thierer points out that Scalia, purportedly a strict constitutionalist, in his decision has endorsed a brand-new justification for the FCC's power to regulate broadcast content. The original justification was that the airwaves were a scarce resource that needed to be protected for productive uses; the new argument is that because there are so many unregulated alternatives like cable, satellite, and the Internet, that the government needs to protect one last refuge from offensive content.

(Previously, previously.)

Obama's $100M proposed budget cut, in perspective

A nice visual depiction of what it amounts to.



(Via The Agitator.)

ApostAZ podcast #15

Whoops, forgot to report on this one when it was released last month:

Episode 015 Atheism and wheat-gluten-Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! All Music from Greydon Square- CPT Theorem and Compton Effect,Group Events, Sao Paulo- Making Hard Decisions is a Crime Against the Church, Half of UK Folks Agree that Evolution Makes God Obsolete, Thunderf00t's PEARL of a Youtube vid.

Comments: The woman who claimed that someone being "dead" and resuscitated after eight minutes was miraculous is a bit off in her claim, since hearts and lungs are routinely stopped in open heart surgery for 4-6 hours, though that involves oxygenation of the blood by a heart-lung bypass machine. Perhaps more to the point are some hypothermia near-death cases, some of which have lasted for hours, like this recent case in Minnesota.

Nassim Taleb's ten principles for a black-swan-proof world

At the Financial Times (with more detail for each item):

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning .

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

(Via Will Wilkinson.)

The banker who said no

A banker who resisted the urge to invest in toxic assets during the boom is cleaning up during the bust. Andy Beal of Beal Bank in Plano, Texas "virtually stopped making or buying loans" from 2004 to 2007, leading people around him to think he was crazy. Now he's buying up loans at fire sale prices and has tripled his bank's assets to $7 billion in the last 15 months, and without government bailout money.

Beal is also known for high-stakes poker games against the top poker players in the world, in which he has lost more than he's won, but occasionally taken for a lot of money (including an $11 million win in one day).

What the laws of physics say about sustainable energy

Cambridge University physicist David MacKay's book, Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, is available for free download or perusal in a variety of forms including HTML, PDF and PostScript, at the website www.withouthotair.com.

The ICR does law as well as it does science

The Institute for Creation Research Graduate School has filed a lawsuit in the state of Texas over its inability to advertise master's degrees in science that it is not accredited or permitted to offer in the state of Texas.

An attorney evaluates their lawsuit and finds that it's as crazy as their science, and doomed to dismissal.

(Via Pharyngula).

American Religious Identification Study 2008

The American Religious Identification Study 2008 has been published, and the only group to grow across the entire country is the "no religion" group.

Here's how Arizona's religious identifications have changed in the last decade:

1990: 24% Catholic, 57% other Christian, 3% other religions, 13% none, 3% don't know/refused to answer.

2009: 29% Catholic, 44% other Christians, 5% other religions, 17% none, 5% don't know/refused to answer.

The states with the highest percentage of persons identifying themselves as having no religion in 2008 are:

Vermont, 34%
New Hampshire, 29%
Wyoming, 28%
Maine, 25%
Washington, 25%
Nevada, 24%
Oregon, 24%
Delaware, 23%
Idaho, 23%
Massachusetts, 22%
Colorado, 21%
Montana, 21%

(Via the Secular Outpost.)

AiG/CMI dispute settled

CMI has taken down its AiG-critical material and posted a notice that reads:

CMI and AiG are pleased to inform you that the dispute between the ministries has been settled to their mutual satisfaction. Each ministry is now focused on its respective mission, having put this dispute behind them in April of 2009.

Nathan Zamprogno noted in a comment on my last blog post on this dispute that AiG still had some of its CMI-critical material about the case online, but it now appears to have been taken down as well.

Jeff Benedict and Little Pink House

This afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing writer Jeff Benedict speak about his book, Little Pink House, which is the story behind the Kelo v. New London case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. That case, which ruled that New London did have the right to use eminent domain to seize private property and turn it over to another private entity--effectively retranslating the Fifth Amendment's use of the words "public use" into the meaning "public benefit"--was a case I thought I was familiar with. But Benedict's talk revealed that while I was aware of some of the facts relevant to the legal case, I really had no idea about the whole story. In his short talk, he conveyed some of the events and details that did not make it to the national press, but which make the story all the more interesting. The political battles between state and city government, the plan to get Pfizer to stay in Connecticut when it was looking elsewhere, and the personalities involved made for a genuinely moving talk even when we already know how the story ends.

I look forward to reading his book.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

There's FUD spreading about Sec. 14 of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, maintaining that it amounts to an effective repeal of the 4th Amendment for the Internet. That's not so--the scope is restricted to "threat and vulnerability information" regarding the Internet, which I interpret to mean network service provider knowledge about compromised systems, botnets, etc., much of which is no doubt already being voluntarily shared with the government as is permissible under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, when, in the course of a provider's normal service monitoring, it becomes aware of possible criminal activity.

I expect I'll have more to say after I have a chance to read through the whole bill (PDF).

SkeptiCamp Phoenix today

Today is the big day for SkeptiCamp Phoenix, starting at about 12:30 p.m. this afternoon.

Magic Tony, one of our presenters, will be live-blogging the event at his blog, and there may also be twittering at #skepticamp. No live video this time, but there will likely be video of at least some talks put online after the event, along with photos, presentations, and recaps.

I received the t-shirts last night (the back of which is shown in the photo) and the official SkeptiCamp 2009 banner earlier in the week, and I've got boxes of Skeptic magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, and some books for distribution to participants. Thanks to the generous contributions of our sponsors, the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the James Randi Educational Foundation, who provided the materials and funds for the t-shirts (which will also defray a portion of our dinner tonight after the event at Tempe's Rula BulaBoulders on Broadway).

It looks like we'll have about twenty people physically present at the event, and twelve or thirteen presentations, some 30-minute presentations and some 10-minute presentations. The current list of presentations:

Tony Barnhart, Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic
Abraham Heward, What's the difference between skepticism and denial? (led discussion)
David Jackemeyer, Henry Hazlitt's Thinking as Science
Don Lacey, Words Important to Skepticism (PowerPoint 2007)
Jim Lippard, Positive Side-effects of Misinformation (SlideShare)
John Lynch, Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design (SlideShare)
Shannon Rankin, Skepticism for Dummies
David Weston, Creating Skeptical Happiness (PowerPoint)
Jack Ray, Skeptical Dating
Mike Stackpole, Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism
Charlie Cavanaugh Toft, Teaching Critical Thinking
Xarold Trejo, Why I am a Skeptic

SkeptiCamp Phoenix will be the first live-blogged SkeptiCamp event, and this is also the first day on which there will be two SkeptiCamp events in the same day--the other one going on today is SkeptiCamp Vancouver, which is occurring this afternoon at Langara College, with the sponsorship of the BC Skeptics.

UPDATE (April 2, 2009): Don Lacey of the Skeptics of Tucson, who participated in SkeptiCamp Phoenix, offers his thoughts at the James Randi Educational Foundation's Swift blog. ScienceBlogger and SkeptiCamp Phoenix participant John Lynch gives a recap at his blog.

Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith, in Spanish

Dan Barker's book, Losing Faith in Faith, has been translated into Spanish and is available as a free PDF download, Perder la fe en la fe.

Corrupt drug cops in Philadelphia

From the Philadelphia Daily News:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

“I so scared,” said Eunice Nam, 56. “We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants.”

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.

The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.

The Nams’ story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

Via The Agitator. Officer Cujdik has other issues.

Immigration and jobs

Despite the common concern that immigrants to the U.S. take jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens, immigrants actually create jobs and promote innovation. Two recent articles in The Economist look at this topic. In the March 7, 2009 issue, a study by Harvard economist William Kerr and University of Michigan economist William Lincoln looked at how patent production changes in response to changes in the number of H-1B visa holders, immigrants with technical skills. When the number of H-1B visas was increased by 10%, total patenting increased by 2%, caused mostly by patent activity by immigrants. However, rather than reducing the number of patents by the native population, those also increased.

In the March 14, 2009 issue's special report on entrepreneurship, it's noted that H-1B visas are capped at 85,000/year, and a maximum of 10,000 from any one country, increasing the wait for large countries such as India and China, where the wait time is about six years. There are over one million people waiting. This issue also notes that about half of Silicon Valley's startups are founded by immigrants, and about 25% of all U.S. science and technology startups have a CEO or CTO who is an immigrant, and these companies employ 450,000 people and generate $52 billion in annual revenue. A quarter of U.S. patent applications in 2006 name foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors.

Physical spam

On our dog walk this evening, we found that two neighborhoods to the south of us have been targeted by a new sort of marketing technique--in each yard was a bag containing a few rocks and a business card, apparently dropped by someone driving by who was too lazy to deliver them to the front door. In one neighborhood, these were like the ones pictured, in a ziploc bag with a card advertising a landscaping service. In another neighborhood, they were in twist-tied baggies with a piece of paper advertising a cleaning service.

This doesn't seem to me like a very effective method of advertising. The door hanger flyers are annoying already, but these are worse--it's like tossing trash into people's yards.

Some interesting technology

The March 7th, 2009 issue of The Economist Technical Quarterly has some items of interest:

Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California is using balloons as solar energy collectors.

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found a way to turn coffee grounds into biodiesel.

David Whitten of the University of New Mexico and Kirk Schanze of the University of Florida have built "micro-sized 'roach motels'" for capturing bacteria in hospitals and on the surfaces of ships.

Nicholas Kotov and his team at the University of Michigan have come up with a way to coat cotton threads with carbon nanotubes which can be used to carry electricity, and to add an additional material that reacts with human serum albumin, in order to detect bleeding, which might be used by the military in monitoring soldiers.

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001, and Glenn Greenwald discusses the evidence that he says shows it has been "an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

Answers in Genesis censorship turns old-earther into young-earther

Commenter Tim H pointed me to a post at Tim Martin's Beyond Creation Science blog about another Answers in Genesis controversy. Old-earth creationist Charles Spurgeon delivered a June 17, 1855 sermon (four years before Darwin published Origin of Species) in which he stated that the earth had to be "many millions of years" old. When Answers in Genesis published that sermon on their website, they omitted that sentence, "We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be-certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam."

After Martin pointed out the omission, Answers in Genesis inserted a footnote containing the omitted sentence, stating that this footnote was inadvertently omitted from their publication of the sermon. But they made no apologies for removing the sentence in question from its proper context and relegating it to a footnote.

UPDATE: AiG did more than just remove that sentence--they revised language throughout the sermon, which in some other areas also changed the intended meaning to bring it in line with young-earth creationist dogma.

The U.S. Nazi dirty bomb plot

Remember how the press was all over the story of the 29-year-old millionaire white supremacist and fan of Adolf Hitler in Maine who was building a dirty bomb that he planned to set off at Obama's inauguration, but it didn't happen because his wife shot and killed him?

Me neither, but James G. Cummings of Belfast, Maine, had (quoting Wikileaks) "four lots of one gallon containers of bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium (also radioactive), lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium (radiation booster), boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon" which he somehow planned to set off at the inauguration. Personally, I don't think that volume of material could have been easily smuggled in anywhere near the inauguration activities without raising suspicion.

Why no press coverage of this story, apart from the Bangor Daily News?

Wikileaks has a summary; Wonkette has summarized that; the Washington D.C. Regional Threat and Analysis Center report (PDF) is here.

Pat Robertson on Christians studying the Koran

From the J-Walk blog:

Pat Robertson answers a question from a "pastor of a ministry to international college students" who asks whether his ministry leaders should be permitted to study the Koran in order to understand Islam, which he thinks is a bad idea since "there are plenty of Christian resources out there to get information on other religions."

Robertson's reply:

Kelly, it won't be wrong if somebody studies Islam, but they need guided study, because somebody needs to go along and point out the incredible inconsistencies in that book. And if you have a guided study of the Koran and see how much in there is just repetitious, how much comes out of the Old Testament and the New Testament, how much is just plagiarism from the Bible, etc.?.

If you will go through it with them, I think it would be a very helpful exercise. But I doubt very seriously by reading the Koran they're going to get converted to Islam. I wouldn't worry about it. But I think they need to see it. They need to see what is in there. Many people who are Muslim don't know what the Koran says. And when you begin to tell them, they say, "Well, I don't believe that." And you say, "Well, it's in your sacred book. It's supposed to be holy words." So it won't hurt, but guided study.

Blogger John Walkenbach responds: "Now, turn that answer around a pretend it's in response to a Muslim asking if he should study the Bible. It still works!"

Indeed, with a few small changes. (Hat tip to Dave Palmer at the SKEPTIC list for the pointer to Robertson's Q&A.)

Copyright treaty classified on national security grounds

The U.S. government is negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty which imposes new controls over copyright, but refuses to let the general public know its specific content. In response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from Knowledge Ecology International, the Obama administration responded that the content is classified for national security reasons pursuant to Executive Order 12958, a Clinton order from 1995.

As Declan McCullagh points out, the executive order "allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do 'damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage.'" He also points out that one of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a memo that said that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."

The claim that this treaty cannot be disclosed for national security reasons sounds bogus, but if it's so, what's the purported damage being prevented? In the absence of a clear rationale, this treaty should be openly discussed and available to the general public.

SkeptiCamp Phoenix

On March 28, SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 will take place at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Participants include Mike Stackpole of the Phoenix Skeptics on "Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism," John Lynch on "Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design," and Tony Barnhart on "Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic."

The event is sponsored by the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and by the James Randi Educational Foundation. It will be the fifth SkeptiCamp, after two in Colorado, one in Vancouver, and one in Atlanta.

For more information on the event, see the SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 wiki page, the SkeptiCamp Phoenix registration site, or the SkeptiCamp Phoenix Facebook page.

For more on SkeptiCamp, see Reed Esau's "The Skepticamp Bargain" in JREF's Swift and his article "Raising Our Game" (PDF) published by the Skeptics Society.

(Previously, previously, previously.)

Scientology and religious visas

Jeff Jacobsen has a new article on Scientology's use of religious R-1 visas to bring people from other countries to the U.S. to work at menial labor for $50/week (with billion-year Sea Org contracts). R-1 visas are supposed to be for religious ministers who have been working for the U.S. organization sponsoring them for at least two years, and it appears that Scientology has abused these conditions to get cheap labor. And in the process, they've brought in people like Artur Solomonyan from Armenia, who was subsequently arrested and found guilty of illegal weapons sales after trying to sell weapons including surface-to-air missiles to an FBI informant.

Legalize pot and tax the crap out of it

Today's Overcompensating makes a timely proposal. Just as the repeal of Prohibition during the Great Depression helped economic recovery and reduced associated criminal activity, repealing the drug war could do the same. Legalizing prostitution along the lines of the New Zealand model (adopted in 2003, and in 2008 in Western Australia) is also a good idea.

Now that Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed Obama's campaign promise that the feds will not engage in drug raids against medical marijuana operations in states that have legalized such activity, the time is right.

The Arizona Republic reports:

2 fatally killed after fight near house party

by Ofelia Madrid - Feb. 28, 2009 07:51 PM
The Arizona Republic

Two men are dead after an early morning shooting in south Phoenix, police said.

Officers responded to a shooting near 36th Avenue and Broadway Road a little after midnight Friday, police said.

Officers arrived to find numerous people fleeing and were directed to a 27-year-oldman who was dead in the alley from gunshot wounds, police said.

Police later learned that another victim, a 20-year-old man, died as he was being driven to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.

Investigators received initial reports of a party in the area and a fight nearby.

No further information was available.

It's too bad they weren't non-fatal killings. (Perhaps an editor changed "shot" to "killed"?)

UPDATE: They changed the link to say "2 fatally shot" and on the story itself to "2 shot, killed after fight near house party."

Using the stimulus to accelerate the downturn

$10.1 billion in federal stimulus money has been released to the states by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Arizona is receiving more than $150 million of that. And what is that money to be used for, in a state where there are tens of thousands of homes for sale with few buyers (50,000+ in Maricopa county alone)?

Building more housing.

The Arizona Republic reports that

Millions of dollars more will go to state and local programs. That includes $32 million to begin construction of affordable rental housing, $22 million to prevent homelessness and $12 million to build or repair public housing across the state.

To the extent this money is used to build new homes, as opposed to repairing deteriorating ones, it's just going to accelerate the decline of home prices, putting more homeowners underwater and providing them with more incentive to walk away from their mortgages. Now, I think that a further decline in home prices is inevitable, no matter what the stimulus money tries to do, but it's ridiculous to throw additional money at accelerating that process. It makes about as much sense as using federal stimulus money to give grants to investment bankers to develop more complex collateralized debt obligations.

Now, this isn't actually quite that bad, since it does apparently focus on some particular communities--a third of the money is for Native American communities that didn't get a housing bubble of speculative buying. Some of it is also for families that need short-term help with utility bills, rent, or other expenses (something that the Modest Needs Foundation has been doing for years with private donations). And Tucson is apparently using it to improve energy efficiency of existing public housing units. Those are all much more reasonable uses of the money than building more houses.

Best Nigerian 419 scam ever

I just read this email this morning, which has to win a prize for the best Nigerian 419 scam I've ever seen:

Reply-To:
From: "Mrs. Mary S. Derrick"
Subject: Stop Contacting those people !!!
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:43:50 +0100
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
X-NetStation-Status: PASS

Attn: My Dear,

I am Mrs Mary Susan Derrick, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside here in New Braunfels Texas. My residential address is as follows. 108 Crockett Court. Apt 303, New Braunfels Texas, United States, am thinking of relocating since I am now rich. I am one of those that took part in the Compensation in Nigeria many years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $20,000 while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my compensation documents, And I was directed to meet Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson, who is the member of COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me. He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake.

He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am the most happiest woman on earth because I have received my compensation funds of $1,500,000.00 Moreover, Mr Henshaw I. Anderson, showed me the full information of those that are yet to receive their payments and I saw your name as one of the beneficiaries, and your email address, that is why I decided to email you to stop dealing with those people, they are not with your fund, they are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson

You have to contact him directly on this information below.

COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE
Name : Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson
Email: henshawanderson@sbcglobal.net
Phone: +234 802 739 4935

You really have to stop dealing with those people that are contacting you and telling you that your fund is with them, it is not in anyway with them, they are only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing.

The only money I paid after I met Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson was just $580 for the paper works, take note of that.

Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact Mr Henshaw I. Anderson so that he can help you to Deliver your fund instead of dealing with those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of money to complete your transaction.

Thank You and Be Blessed.

Mrs. Mary Susan Derrick.

She's being so honest about those other Nigerian scammers that ripped her off, so surely she must be honest about this compensation fund. The sad thing is that those who have been ripped off multiple times already will probably fall for this one, too.

Fourth stray dog of 2009

We found this dog--some kind of Spaniel?an Aussie sheepdog--at 20th St. and Euclid, where he appeared to be wanting to get into a mini-van with a group of mariachis. They just drove off and ignored him, so we stopped our dog walk to pick him up. He had a collar, no tags. This dog is a neutered male, unusual for the strays we find.

This could have been our seventh stray of 2009, but the pack of three dogs we saw running along the canal yesterday morning wouldn't let us near them.

UPDATE: We've been contacted in email by the owner; this dog's name is Woody and the owner will be going to pick him up at the pound.

Bristol Palin disproves intelligent design

The Weekly World News, now online only, looks like it's trying to become more like The Onion:

Bristol Palin held her first interview since giving birth Monday night with Greta Von Susteren. The 18 year old daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin talked about her experience as a mother and her mother’s policies towards education.

“Mom says that science and stuff is too hard to force kids to learn. That the world is too complicated to have just happened by accident, and things like an eyeball show signs of a designer. She’s right, Bio is totally hard. But if you work at it, it does kinda make sense.”

She then went on a diatribe about carbon dating, genetic transference, and paleoanthropology.

Bristol held up her Lisa Frank notebook filled with equations and diagrams which categorically disprove the possibility of Intelligent Design.

“It’s a nice idea, but it’s just not realistic. I mean, Lucy? The entire pre-hominid fossil record? Hello??”

Sarah Palin, who was sitting in the room at the time, looked increasingly more uncomfortable. Eventually she broke the silence saying:

“Well now none of us were there so we can’t know for sure…”

“Omigod Mom, it’s called Gene Mapping, don’t even get me started!”

The two sat in an awkward silence until Sarah went into a speech thanking Von Susteren and the other personalities at Fox News for being the last saviors of Democracy. Bristol rolled her eyes and mumbled math equations under her breath.

Mississippi's medical forensic fraudsters

Radley Balko at Reason magazine exposes video that shows Michael West in the act of falsifying evidence used to frame someone for rape and murder, by using plaster casts of the accused's teeth to make bite marks on a toddler's corpse.

This is one of three cases in which Michael West and Steven Hayne provided evidence in the form of bite marks on a body to link a murder victim to an accused rapist and murderer--and in the other two cases, the alleged killers were subsequently freed when exonerated by DNA evidence which linked the cases to the actual murderer, who confessed when they were released.

West and Hayne belong in jail, as does the judge who claimed that the referenced video contained "no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant."

Hayne performed over 80% of Mississippi's autopsies for the last 20 years, and was permitted to complete a backlog of 600 autopsies even after he was terminated as the state's coroner as a result of Balko's exposure of other misconduct. This misconduct and the state's failure to hold them accountable brings every criminal case they've ever touched into question.

(Previously on Hayne.)

Daniel Dennett at ASU

Last night, Daniel Dennett gave the 2009 Beyond Center lecture with a talk appropriate for the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday, titled "Darwin's 'Strange Inversion of Reasoning.'" While not quite drawing the crowd that last year's lecture by Richard Dawkins did (3000 people at Gammage Auditorium), Dennett filled the 485-seat Galvin Playhouse and an overflow room was set up with a video link. The Phoenix Atheists Meetup group alone had about 57 members who attended.

The talk was videotaped by the Beyond Center, and what may be an unauthorized video has been made available on YouTube.

Skyhooks and Cranes
The content of Dennett's talk was largely drawn from his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and centered on the idea that Darwin brought about a change from thinking of the world as the product of top-down design to a recognition of apparent design as the result of bottom-up processes. Dennett referred to the former as the "trickle-down theory of creation" and the latter as the "bubble-up theory of creation," and used his "intuition pump" of skyhooks vs. cranes to make the point.

"Skyhooks" are explanations of design in terms of miraculous intervention by an entity which itself has no explanation, a deus ex machina. Dennett illustrated that with the drawing above, a Guy Billout illustration titled "Deus ex Machina," from the May 1999 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. By contrast, "cranes" are built up from the ground to provide scaffolding for constructing new things. The dome of the Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore), depicted in Billout's illustration, was a marvel of engineering by Filippo Brunelleschi, which used some innovative construction techniques to build something that many thought was not possible.

Darwin's "Strange Inversion of Reasoning"
The title of Dennett's talk came from a critique of Darwin's theory of natural selection by Robert Beverley MacKenzie in 1868, who wrote (as quoted by Dennett in DDA, p. 65):

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

To which Dennett's response was: "Exactly!" He illustrated the point with an example that is now somewhat commonplace, the computer. Dennett observed that prior to Alan Turing, "computers" referred to people who were hired to perform tasks that today are performed by mechanical devices with the same name. In order to perform these functions, people had to understand arithmetic. Dennett cited Turing's 1936 paper, "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (PDF), a demonstration that arithmetic computation is a specific case where, in fact, understanding is not required to perform the action--another example of the same kind of "strange inversion of reasoning." Dennett quotes Turing: "The behaviour of the computer [meaning a person] at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing and his 'state of mind' at that moment," noting that "state of mind" is in quotes because Turing's showing a method by which no mental activity or understanding is actually required. Substituting into MacKenzie's argument, we get "IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS."

Creationists and Mind-Creationists
Dennett observed that many people cannot abide Darwin, and we call them creationists. There are also people who can't abide Turing, and he suggests we call them mind-creationists. (Steve Novella's presentation at last year's The Amazing Meeting, on "Dualism and Creationism," drew this same analogy.) Dennett said that there are some people who can't abide either--including both Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel, referring to his paper "Public Education and Intelligent Design" in Philosophy and Public Affairs vol. 36, no. 2. I think Dennett mischaracterizes Nagel's position here--Nagel is an atheist who thinks that we don't have the full account of evolutionary theory, and who also thinks that if a god exists, there's no reason to think science couldn't study such a being and its effects. I agree with Nagel about that--methodological naturalism could potentially find its own limits and suggest the existence of entities that operate independently of the laws of physics we've discovered. I think we'd end up just modifying our understanding of those laws and continuing to call the result "natural." Jake Young, at the Pure Pedantry ScienceBlog, argues otherwise, defending Stephen J. Gould's "Nonoverlapping Magisteria" (NOMA), the view that science and religion are completely distinct subjects with no intersection, a view I find implausible unless religion is restricted to matters that are completely unobservable and have no causal consequences in the empirical world--which is not the case for any actual religion that I'm aware of.

A few of the "mind-creationists" Dennett pointed out were Jerry Fodor and John Searle. Another is Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, the main argument of which I criticized in a short paper ("Historical But Indistinguishable Differences: Some Notes on Victor Reppert's Paper," Philo vol. 2, no. 1, 1999, pp. 45-47). Reppert's position is that Turing machines don't actually do arithmetic, because they have no semantics, only syntax, and that you only get meaning through original intentionality of the sort that John Searle argues is an irreducible feature of the world. Computers only have semantics when we impute it to them. My argument was that if you have two possible worlds that are exactly alike, except that one was created by a top-down designer and one evolved, there's no reason to say that one has semantics and the other one doesn't--how they got to the point at which they have creatures with internal representations that stand in the right causal relationships to the external world doesn't make a difference to whether or not those representations actually refer and have meaning. [UPDATE (March 3, 2009): Victor Reppert says I've misdescribed his position and elaborates a bit at his own blog.]

Hunting for Skyhooks
Dennett observed that people's issues with bubble-up theories of creation and design center around the fact that some designs seem to be too remarkable to have evolved. Michael Behe's notion of "irreducible complexity" is the idea that some structures require all of their parts in place to function at all, and cannot evolve step-by-step from a previous structure that doesn't also have all of those parts. (The mistake there is that the previous structure may have some other function.) So those arguing for intelligent design have gone "hunting for skyhooks," to try to find examples of design in nature that require a top-down designer's intervening hand to bring into existence. Dennett observed that all of the hunting for skyhooks has failed to come up with any actual examples, but instead has resulted in multiple new discoveries of cranes. This is certainly true for the main examples of "irreducible complexity," blood clotting systems and bacterial flagella. This has led to the quip, "evolution is cleverer than you are," which Dennett discussed in the Q&A as "Orgel's Second Rule."

Another example Dennett gave was the discovery of motor proteins, which he showed using a clip from the film "The Inner Life of the Cell," produced by XVIVO for Harvard University. Dennett didn't mention that this film was the subject of a controversy regarding the film "Expelled," pre-release versions of which used XVIVO footage without permission. Earlier still, intelligent design advocate William Dembski used an overdubbed version of their film in his lectures.

The Bubble-up Path
"We are made of trillions of mindless little robots," Dennett said, "but not a one of them knows who you are or cares." But we do know, and we do care. How is that possible? The bubble-up view has to provide an explanation. Dennett provided some examples of how certain evolutionary changes in the past have created entirely new ways for evolution to proceed. His first example was one that was championed for years by Lynn Margulis to much resistance, but which has now become mainstream, which is the idea of a symbiotic origin for eukaryotes.

For the first 2.5 billion years of life, everything was prokaryotic--single-celled organisms without a nucleus. But then, one form of single-celled organisms invaded another without destroying each other, and came to evolve together, forming eukaryotic life. Each of our cells has not only its own genome in the cell nucleus, but a separate genome in its mitochondria, which is inherited only from our mothers. This development allowed cells to become more complex and versatile, as well as allowed a division of labor that made multicellular life possible.

The Need-to-Know Principle
Dennett showed a video clip about the cuckoo (the link is to a different but similar one). The mother bird lays her egg in the nest of another bird, and removes one of the other bird's eggs. The other bird is then surprised to find that one of its eggs--the cuckoo's egg--hatches first, and the hatchling pushes the other eggs out of the nest. It seems evil, Dennett said, but "don't worry, the cuckoo chick doesn't know what it does. It doesn't need to know."

A principle something like the CIA's need-to-know principle applies in evolution as a matter of thrift, but matters are often confused because biologists tend to attribute more understanding when explaining a feature of living things than actually exists. This, Dennett says, is partly a linguistic matter, because we don't have a word for a "semi-understood quasi-representation" or a "hemi-semi-demi-understood quasi-representation." But Turing does give us models of competence without comprehension.

He then showed a video of a New Caledonian crow trying to use a bit of metal wire to get a worm out of a glass beaker. The crow bends the wire around the glass to make it into a hook, then uses it to fish the worm out of the beaker. This was an example of a creature that goes a step beyond the cuckoo chick. Dennett cited the work of Ruth Millikan, noting that the crow is an example of an animal that represents its goals in the same system in which it represents its facts--but not its reasons for those goals, which are produced by evolution and not represented within the organism.

The MacCready Explosion and Memes
Dennett observed that there has been about 3.5 billion years since the start of the whole tree of life, and only about 6 million years since the divergence of humans from chimps and bonobos, our closest hominid relatives. But a mere 10,000 years ago, as Paul MacCready pointed out, the total human population plus livestock and pets composed about a tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today, however, we consume 98% of it (most of which is cattle).

The Cambrian "explosion" in which multicellular life became dramatically more diversified took place over millions of years, while the "MacCready explosion" took place over a mere 500 generations, and the explanation is science and technology, communicated from parents to children not by biological evolution but through culture.

Here Dennett gave an introduction to memes by analogy--the cultural highway of transmission of ideas, once it exists, can be invaded by "rogue cultural variants," or "memes," as Richard Dawkins originally called them They are vehicles of information, like viruses, that invade our brains.

He then paused for a "skeptical interlude" to address the question of what's the evidence that memes even exist. He asked, "do you believe that words exist?" If so, then those are examples of a subset of memes, those that can be pronounced. (I'm not sure of the practical benefit of talk of memes as opposed to ideas, concepts, and language, but I'll save commentary on that until I read the meme chapters in DDI.)

So, said Dennett, we are apes with "infected" brains, or, on analogy to prokaryotes/eukaryotes, we are "euprimates." We carry with us virtual machines that give us new powers and versatility to bring organization of the world up another level.

Mind Tools
Dennett quoted one of his own students, Bo Dahlborn, who wrote, "Just as you cannot do very much carpentry with your bare hands, there is not much thinking you can do with your bare brain." We have conceptual tools and methods. At the very simplest level, there are words as tools, such as passwords or labels. Douglas Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop identifies a bunch of phrases that are frequently used as tools for analogies, such as "wild goose chases," "tackiness," "loose cannons," "feet of clay," "feedback," "slamdunks," "lip service," and "elbow grease." Dennett compared these to Java applets for the mind--collections of information transmitted from one person to another that allow them to do something more.

Long division is a more complex example. With a sufficiently well developed English (or other language) "virtual machine," you can "download" the procedure in the form of mathematical instruction or from a book, to be able to perform the process. Cost-benefit analysis is a bigger, more complex set of tools learned in the same way.

While some such tools have distinct authors, others have evolved. Language itself, money, and tonal music are examples of such mental tools that were not created at once by individual authors, but have evolved over time.

What this implies for who we are is that we are not Cartesian egos with original intentionality, but "an alliance of hemi-semi-demi-understood virtual machines."

Darwin's Trio
Darwin proposed three types of selection. First, two types of selection where the selective force is human beings. 1. Methodical selection, or intentional artificial selection, where humans intentionally breed creatures for particular characteristics. 2. Unconscious selection, where humans simply preferred certain organisms to others, and helped those to reproduce--such as in farming, and raising domestic animals. To those, Darwin added 3. Natural selection.

Now we've also added 4. Genetic engineering.

And the same categories can be applied to memes. There are original, synanthropic memes, those which live with us but are not domesticated, such as superstitions; these are analogous to memes created by natural selection. There are memes replicated by unconscious selection, such as differential replication of tunes based on how catchy they are. Dennett noted that the Germans call tunes that get stuck in your head "earworms." And then there is methodical selection of domesticated memes, which would include science, literature, and calculus. Dennett compared calculus to laying hens, for which broodiness has been selected out--you have to work hard to get it to reproduce.

And to these categories we can add memetic engineering--spin-doctoring, marketing, propaganda, etc.

Bootstrapping
Dennett asked, how do you draw a straight line? We use a straight edge. And how do we make straight edges? By drawing a line along a piece of metal with a straight edge, and cutting it. How do we get the first straight edge? He pointed to a book on the history of straight edges, and observed that over time we have gradually improved our technology for making straight edges, and can now measure far more precisely how we fall short in reaching the unattainable goal of a perfectly straight line. We can represent our goal, our reasons for achieving the goal, and the imperfections and errors in reaching that goal.

He suggested that the Platonic "form of the true" has a similar history, and that in science "memes have been selected for veridicality."

At this point, we really do have the capacity for genuine top-down design.

Dennett concluded his talk (apart from the next section, which seemed more like an afterword) by stating that "What makes us human is not our genetic children, but our brainchildren. We've finally reached genuine intelligent design."

Darwin Fish
Dennett concluded his prepared lecture by pointing out that he was wearing a Darwin fish lapel pin. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann observed to Dennett that this was patterned after the Jesus fish, a fish symbol which contains the Greek word for fish, which was apparently the first acronym. The Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ stand for the Greek words for Jesus Christ, God's Son, the Savior, said Gell-Mann. But what does "DARWIN" stand for?

Dennett took that as a challenge, and came up with a Latin expansion for "DARUUIN" (since there is no letter "W" in Latin):

Delere
Auctorem
Rerum
Ut Universum
Infinitum
Noscas

This translates into English as

Destroy
the author
of things
in order to understand
the infinite
universe

I'm not too fond of this--it confirms anti-evolutionists' worst fears of evolution, and refers to an "author of things" to be destroyed, as though there is one that exists, rather than a myth not to be believed. It's clever, though.

UPDATE (February 20, 2009):

Dennett then answered a few brief questions, and then signed a bunch of books. The first question (and the only one I'll note) was what it was like to work with W.V. Quine, his mentor. Dennett said that he transferred to Harvard University as an undergraduate specifically to work with Quine, and that two of the most significant influences from Quine were the view that science and philosophy are significantly overlapping and parts of the same larger project, and that the quality of Quine's writing (in contrast to his lecture style) was something to aspire to.

He's well-spoken, entertaining, and thought-provoking, and I encourage you to hear him speak if you have the opportunity. I think that his views, like those of Richard Dawkins, argue that science and evolution in particular either imply or at least cohere better with or provide evidence for atheism. I don't think there is a logical implication, and I'm not sure Dennett and Dawkins do, either--that's something that anti-evolutionist lawyer Phillip Johnson has argued, which I've critiqued at the talkorigins.org website, and which the views of Christian evolutionists like Kenneth Miller, Glenn Morton, and Mike Beidler contradict by their very existence. On the other hand, I'm not sure Miller's position is coherent (I really should get around to writing a summary of last year's Skeptics Society conference), and I reject the NOMA view that there is no overlap between the domains of religion and science and agree with Dennett's and Quine's views that there is significant overlap between science and philosophy (and history, for that matter).

The National Center for Science Education and many scientists argue for a sharp divide between science and philosophy, and between science and religion, and find cases like those made by Dawkins and Dennett (and P.Z. Myers) to be problematic, especially when it comes to the legal arena and the goal of keeping intelligent design and creationism out of the public schools (though public universities have more freedom). I think that this is ultimately due to a tension between the principles of separation of church and state, public education, and academic freedom, given that there is no sharp divide between the domains of science and religion (or science and philosophy). In my view, in any case where a religion makes an empirical claim, if there's scientific evidence against that claim, it should be legitimate to discuss that scientific evidence in a public school classroom even if that has the primary effect of inhibiting (or promoting) religion (violating the second prong of the Lemon Test for measuring whether a government action is a violation of the Constitution's establishment clause). I consider it a flaw in the Lemon Test that people can always create new religions which attempt to turn secular ideas into religious content with the specific intent of turning government actions into church-state violations (e.g., creating a doctrine that paying taxes is a sin), as well as the fact that it provides an unwarranted immunity to criticism in the classroom for religious claims, even if they are empirically falsified or conceptually incoherent. (See the comments of this Ed Brayton post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars on the Summum monument case for some legal puzzles. BTW, Justice O'Connor argued for a either a different test in Lynch v. Donnelly, the "endorsement test," which asks whether a reasonable person would conclude government is endorsing or disapproving religion from the action. This has sometimes been interpreted as a complement to the Lemon Test, and sometimes as a substitute for it. Judge Jones in the Dover case applied both the endorsement test and the Lemon Test, and argued that the Dover school district violated both, including all three prongs of Lemon.)

Another resolution is to finesse the issue by getting government out of the business of being a direct provider of education, and instead meet the goal of free public education by providing government funding and standards that include mandatory curriculum requirements that any school can exceed with content that expresses particular religious viewpoints. By providing a fixed amount of per-pupil funding and a mandatory minimum curriculum that doesn't include religious content, those two items are tied together and anything beyond it would be considered provided at the school's own expense, and thus not a church-state violation. In my view, more discussion and debate of religious claims at a younger age will yield better-educated adults (and probably more atheists). Ironically, it is western democracies without a strong history of separation of church and state where religion is weakest and acceptance of evolution is strongest.

Without finessing the problem like that or modifying the Lemon Test, views like those of Dennett and Dawkins must be excluded from public school classrooms along with creationism for the same reasons (to the extent that they express a religious viewpoint), and I think that ultimately the "exploring evolution" or "academic freedom" strategies of the creationists for getting critiques of evolution into the public school classrooms will succeed in passing constitutional muster. Ultimately, the reason their arguments should be excluded from science classrooms is not that they are religious, but that they are bad arguments, and there's no constitutional provision prohibiting the establishment of bad arguments.

Chase Bank makes stupid offers, and loses money by failing to live up to them

I recently wrote about how Chase Bank's inflexible systems just cost it money by not allowing me to make a $100 payment to my mortgage account to make up an erroneous underpayment. Instead, I had to make an entire additional payment, depriving them of a significant amount of future interest.

In January, I received an offer from Chase Bank to open a checking account with them, with a minimum deposit of $100. After I set up direct deposit, within ten business days of the first deposit they would deposit $125, which would be mine to keep so long as I left the account open and receiving direct deposits for at least six months.

I asked an online banker whether there was any minimum amount that had to be direct deposited, and was told no. I decided to set up the account in person at a branch near my office, and again asked whether there was any minimum direct deposit. The banker told me no, there was no minimum--if I wanted to deposit only $1 per paycheck, that would be fine.

As I have no interest in using Chase Bank as my primary bank--I'm quite happy with a regional bank that is one of the top-rated places to work in the country and has demonstrated reliability to me repeatedly over several decades--I decided to maximize my return on this otherwise non-interest-earning account by minimizing my deposits. My employer provides a convenient way for me to control my own direct deposits into up to three different banks, so I added a new direct deposit of $0.01 per paycheck into my new Chase Bank account.

The first $0.01 went in on January 15. On January 30, no $125 had been deposited, so I sent an online email inquiry asking when I could expect to see it. A response a couple days later told me I needed to call in to get an answer to my question, so I dialed the toll-free number, waited on hold, and finally got to a person who told me I needed to wait four to six weeks after the first direct deposit.

My second $0.01 went in on January 30. My third $0.01 went in on February 13. Still no $125.

Today, I got another $125 offer from Chase Bank, which prompted me to dig up my application materials and see that they promised my $125 would be deposited within ten business days, not four to six weeks. So I called and left a message for the banker at my branch, I sent another online inquiry asking whether Chase Bank is going to remedy its failure to honor its offer, and called in to the toll-free number again. I described the issue to my "telephone banker," and he asked for my account information. When he brought up my account, he asked if the $0.01 deposits were pre-authorizations for direct deposit, and I told him no, those are the deposits--I was told multiple times that there was no minimum deposit, and there is nothing in the written offer that mentions a minimum deposit. He was unable to solve the problem, and said he would have to send it to be researched, and I would hear back within a couple of days.

If they didn't want to honor the offer, they shouldn't have made it in the first place. By failing to live up to it, they're costing themselves even more money. It's surprising to me that this is probably the strongest of the major banks in the U.S., and the least likely of the majors to end up costing the U.S. Treasury money in the long run from the TARP's preferred investments ($25 billion put into Chase so far).

UPDATE (February 18, 2009): I received a voice mail from Chase Bank stating that the promised $125 will be deposited into my account within the next two weeks. My real-life banker left me a voice mail saying that the issue was that their system doesn't automatically count direct deposits for issuing an award if they are less than $1. So they do intend to honor their offer, it will just take longer since I used the system in a way they apparently didn't anticipate (or did anticipate with the same reasoning companies use with rebates).

UPDATE (February 25, 2009): My $125 was deposited yesterday.

6th Circuit Court of Appeals tells AiG and CMI to go to arbitration

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis to settle their dispute with private arbitration, the outcome sought by Answers in Genesis and affirming the trial court's ruling. CMI had hoped to force the U.S. dispute into the Australian courts, where a second lawsuit is ongoing and has its next hearing in April. This decision opens a route for AiG to stop the Australian proceedings in favor of the private arbitration that has been ordered in the United States.

The court's decision is here (PDF).

It appears to me that CMI is going to be held to the agreements that its previous board of directors signed, however foolish, irresponsible, or unethical it was of them to do so. As those previous board members resigned in return for indemnification, it doesn't appear to me that CMI is likely to obtain any remedy for the wrongs it alleges have occurred. It looks like AiG operated within the bounds of the law in its actions.

Our third stray of 2009

This black unneutered male Cocker Spaniel came up to us at around 11th St. and Caldwell while we were walking our dogs. There were some people nearby, and we asked if this was their dog, and they said no, so we brought him home and called Animal Care & Control.

He's wearing a spiked collar with no tags and looks like he's been wandering the streets for a couple of days or so. He was very tired and thirsty.

We've put his picture and description up on Pets911.com.

ApostAZ podcast #14

The latest ApostAZ podcast is now available:

Episode 014 Atheism and Sucker-Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Intro from Vocab Malone 'Lean Back- But think', Guest Shawn from the Tough Questions Podcast and http://www.youtube.com/user/azsuperman01 and Josh, Religion and the Workplace, Outro Music from Greydon Square- CPT Theorem

Comments:

I wish people would stop saying that you can't prove a negative. You can. (Also see this.)