Do Over! Jedi Edition

You've got a time machine, and you've taken George Lucas hostage. What would you do differently with the Star Wars Trilogies?

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1. At least have Luke mention Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru once or twice after their deaths. With all the stuff blowing up and lightsaber fights, I can understand being distracted from it, like I was before a little scene in Robot Chicken, but it would be nice to see Luke bring it up at least once in the movies.

2. Dump the whole "Storm Troopers are clones of Boba Fett's 'father'" thing in Episode 2. (And get a better title by the way.) The Fett man was cool because of the Decemberween gift effect: He was cool because we didn't know the man under the mask. His mysterious past was whatever our imaginations could stretch it to be. Or even just assumed to be cooler than anything we really could imagine. Just have the storm troopers be clones of some nameless mercenary, or even just engineered from scratch.

3. Just for one of the elephants in the room: Get a better actor for Anakin. When the "romance" started, I was absolutely convinced Anakin was just playing her like a fiddle to create some kind of false "troubled but cute" image to pull Padme's heart strings. Turns out the actor wasn't acting like a bad actor.

4. Seriously trim down on the Ewoks.

5. For the prequel trilogy in general: Get George to make it very shortly after the original, and make sure he's still balanced by other directors, writers, editors and such. He was a cool guy, but getting protection from editors didn't help.

Doggerel #148: "Universe"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

This short Doggerel entry falls more into the useless pet peeve category. "Universe" is a word that's been diluted by science fiction and fantasy. Woos with delusions of coming up with a Theory of Everything without resorting to math have probably helped it along. The real meaning of "Universe" is everything. There's only one everything. Because of that dilution, when thinking of combining D&D campaign settings and such doing crossovers, I often have to start using weird words writers have come up with like 'multiverse' and 'omniverse' to describe the whole giant mess.

You can expect later entries on specific uses of 'universe' woos use, since those will generally fall into specific claims.

Doggerel #147: "I Can't Prove it or Disprove It"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

One of the things woos like to say about anything remotely "supernatural," especially "God," is that questions about it will remain forever because no one can prove it or disprove it. They usually do this by trying to define their favorite thing as being immune to inquiry. Kind of makes you wonder why someone who's already decided argument can go nowhere wastes his time. Of course, woos want to have their cake and eat it, too: They want to argue that something has effects, but make excuses as to why we can't look at those effects to increase our knowledge.

Of course, all us skeptics know the core problem with all this: It's classic shifting of burdens. First, the person making the positive claim has to make it falsifiable: They have to know how they could disprove it if they're wrong. Making a claim of yours unfalsifiable is just showing off closed-mindedness. Second, you don't blindly assume everything you can't disprove is real. Lack of negative evidence alone doesn't make something more plausible. There has to be confirming evidence. Otherwise, we'd be forced to believe in everything, including ideas people haven't defined in meaningful ways, and ideas yet to be dreamed up.

Doggerel #146: "[Famous Scientist] Said...!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

If there's a common symptom of being a woo, it's putting authority in the wrong place. When it comes to scientific investigation, you do not put authority in the hands of individual scientists: It's the experimental results, observational data, and reasoning that has the authority. I can really appreciate the Darwins, Newtons, and Einsteins out there who come up with brilliant theories, perform experiments, and collect data that end up changing the way we look at the world, and improve our ability to deal with it. But they're not individually important to the process. If Einstein didn't exist, someone else would likely have come along to work out the math and do the experiments, eventually. It's quality work that our knowledge comes from, not the (very cool, but still replaceable) people who do it.

When I celebrate a scientist, I do it the way some people celebrate sports stars (well, maybe not that fervently). There's nothing religious about it. They're people who discovered cool things, just like some athletes did cool plays. If a scientist fowls up on something else, it's still a mistake. They're human, and they're judged by their performance. Scoring a point in a manner that gets a century worth of replays doesn't make the scientist a god or a prophet. One point does not affect another. Scientists are fallible creatures, just like the rest of us. Don't dwell on what they say. Dwell on what the evidence says.

83rd Skeptics' Circle

It's up at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant. But apparently I'm FORBIDDEN from clicking over.

Doggerel #145: "We Make Our Own Reality"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

This entry in the series is a bit of a departure, since this is a silly claim as well as a buzz phrase designed to avoid debate. One of the most common sources of this claim is gross misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, where the woos claim that our observations allow us to choose how the outcome of some event is affected. Of course, this isn't true, since it's not consciousness or desire that affects stuff, it's the inherently active act of observing something that affects it. When you're dealing with very small things like photons and electrons, it doesn't take much to change the outcome.

It seems to me that knowledge would be impossible if reality was so easily molded by people's whims. Woos would never encounter me, just the straw men they invent. I'd never have an excuse to go on a foamy rant. If we created our own realities, I would think we'd all be in our own perfect solipsist worlds, and we'd never interact with each other, and we'd all see different results even if we could witness the same events. Which would kind of make communication pointless. But I don't see that sort of thing happening. The universe looks pretty consistent to me, and I'm not about to languish in solipsism.

The attitude conveyed by this doggerel, though often intended to empower people to feel in control of their lives, quite easily leads to blaming the victim. "You got mugged? Your fault for not keeping a positive attitude, or because you secretly wanted to be mugged." My attitude: The mugger's at fault, and just wishing for less crime in the world isn't going to help. Thinking that you can just wish your life better can quite easily serve to make your motivation ineffective. If you want the world to be a better place, you'll need to do something outside your head. Don't make your own reality, act to change the real world for the better. Just make sure you think things through.

Link Dump of Awesome

Yesterday, all I could do was laugh at the story. PZ had his very own Crowning Moment of Awesome last night, and word spread quickly of the abject stupidity of the Expellers. An update followed. I had to avoid reading anything this morning, since giggle fits tend to attract attention, and I work in the same building as a lot of fundies. I'll be spending my time today catching up on the massive comments in a lot of these entries, since the blogosphere is just filled to the brim with wit from my fellow skeptics, and my brother reports that the trolls have been marinating themselves in weaksauce, today.

Anyway, here's the links as I come across them. Expect the list to update, and feel free to point to your favorites if I missed them.

PZ's daughter reviews the movie. Go, Skatje!

Link love from Orac, Skeptico, Action Skeptics, The Bad Astronomer, Panda's Thumb (Cross-post), Denialism, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Greg Laden, Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes, Memoirs of a Skepchick (With update), Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Rev. BigDumbChimp (with update), The Barefoot Bum, The Uncredible Hallq, and more to likely come.

And, you can just look at the Technorati thingamjig.

(NSFW) First-hand account.

Whiny apologetics, spin, and lies:

Kevin Miller: Made of weak.

Some guy called Jimmy Everystreet: Full of contradictions and backpedals from the supportive IDiots. I love this comment tearing one of them up:

Stewart, please help me with the process for invitation and expulsion.

First this man was “apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in.”

Then “He didn’t cause a disruption per se; he was kindly escorted out.” The reason for the escort - “It was obvious he was being kicked out by theatre management because he was not invited nor was he on the pre-submitted list.”

How did management know who was invited and who was on the pre-submitted list? Was there a difference between being invited and being on the pre-submitted list? Were people who filled out the online RSVP not actually invited? How did they know they were not invited if they filled out the online RSVP?

You say, “Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket…” So one guy was asked about a ticket, but not his family or Dawkins? Or anyone else? But the RSVP site says IDs will be checked, not have your ticket ready…

So this guy’s family and Dawkins were invited and/or on the pre-submitted list? If not, why were they not kindly escorted out? How did management know that he was crashing, but not know his family and Dawkins were crashing?

Do the producers warn people the RSVP is not the presubmitted list or an invitation? Can we expect more people to be kindly escorted out of future showings?

You would have been better off sticking with the “apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in” story.

Expect me to link to Expelled's inevitable (but apparently very long delayed) spin on things.

HA!

*Snort* Hahaha! Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha hahaha! Ha-ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Haha haha haha! Ha-haaaaah!

-This post has been truncated.-

Cross-Post From Game Development Limbo: Open Rant: What Annoys You

This post was originally published on my Game Development Limbo blog, but I thought I'd open it to a wider audience:

Well, thought I'd make a post that may make commenting easy: Just think of stuff that irritates you in videogames and ramble aimlessly about it.

Some starters:

• Zelda's love for pushing blocks on ice to cover switches. They can think of better stuff.
• Metroidvania/Zelda type items you only use once or twice, especially if they're otherwise cool. I would have much rather seen the Spinner from Twilight Princess have much more utility in later areas.
• Elaborate level/power up rituals: I like customization, but it can be taken way too far, sometimes. Having to do it multiple times for each character each level just wastes my time if you're just doing crap like increasing basic stats and such. If you're going to force customization, do it for abilities we'll be actively using. A new spell or attack that gives us more options give us some visual cues. Passive numbers aren't fun. Akusai had a clever way of expressing how boring that is, compared to gaining new abilities:

It's part of what makes Metroid so damn much fun: you run around until you find this new cool thing, and then think "Oh! This new cool thing can help me do something concrete elsewhere!" and not just "Oh. Now I have more numbers that help me to do more numbers to the other numbers.

• Fake difficulty in all its forms.

Doggerel #144: "Limited"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Woos love to pretend that skeptics like us are limited in our thinking. They love to think that we can't entertain new ideas, and that science has halted all its progress. That way, they can make themselves feel heroic when we laugh at their old ideas in a fresh coat of paint.

Of course, as usual, they're quite wrong. Skepticism will lead us anywhere the evidence, the universe itself, will lead us. Quantum mechanics is downright weird to describe, and yet, because of all the evidence we find supporting it, we can accept it. Woos, on the other hand, only seem to accept whatever makes them feel comfortable. Even if they have to misunderstand it to do so.

If woos want to think of themselves as unlimited, I'd have to say that they aren't limited to the evidence, just their imagination. Unfortunately, though, my experience again tells me that the typical woo's imagination is very limited. That's why they use words like "impossible" and treat "invisible" as equivalent to "unexplainable." That's why they use doggerel and failed clichés like "How can you prove photography to a blind man?" Additionally, by divorcing themselves from evidence and reason, they're more or less opening themselves to a big empty fluff of possibilities, rather than concrete, useful probabilities.

Pointless Question #18

Why is it that every little medieval town and castle has not one, but two guards who function as greeters instead of doing something useful?

82nd Skeptics' Circle

It's up at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes.

Open thread as usual, except suggesting that there's a metaphorical interpretation is FORBIDDEN!

Doggerel #143: "That's Just My Opinion"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

We've all seen a common troll reaction: In a long thread, filled with references, explanations, chains of logic, and so forth used to back up arguments. In my experience, such things exist almost exclusively in the skeptics' side of the argument, but I digress. Eventually one troll gets sick of arguing over the facts and simply says, "that's just my opinion."

This is, of course, usually an effort to stop all debate, as if you should treat opinions as sacred and beyond questioning. Of course, there's also the difference between a conclusion arrived at through evidence and reasoning and opinion, though the media's done a fair job of covering up that distinction. If you're talking about science, you'll have to deal with the evidence.

You can believe what you want, but that doesn't take away our right to convince people otherwise. If you aren't willing to change your mind when given evidence, and don't want to be criticized for having an opinion, it's probably best that you don't express it among people who will take you to task for it. That's just a suggestion, of course.

Open Thread: A Really Bad Movie

Agony Booth recently posted one of their scathing recaps for Battlefield Earth. I actually saw that movie in the theater, expecting just another sci-fi flick, but oddly enough, I don't recall the first half hour of it, and I'm almost never late to a movie. I wonder if the projectionist mercifully removed a reel or something. The moment I snapped was when the harrier jets showed up. I couldn't look away, wondering if the badness would roll over. It overshot.

Doggerel #142: "Can Science Prove Love?!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Woos love to pretend that they have exclusive province over love, emotion, and other concepts that often have highly disputed definitions. Of course, the fact that we can recognize these things, or at least the definitions we each personally use undermines that claim.

One sickening subplot that annoys me in sci-fi series involves Straw Vulcans incorrectly suspecting one of the humans is attracted to them, complete with alleged humor to be had with resulting miscommunications. Along the way, there's another Straw Vulcan listing 'symptoms' of love, describing the various little bits of biological noise humans do with their eyes, perspiration, heart rate, etcetera. If only love were that easy to measure. A fair number of woos will now proceed to claim that skeptics like me believe it's that simple.

In real life, we perform all sorts of tests to figure out if someone's in love, usually involving predicting behavior. It's essentially a series of uncontrolled case studies, but given that it's hard to perform ethical lab tests on that sort of thing, that's generally okay. If enough of the predictions come true, it becomes reasonable to reach a tentative conclusion. It's on the messier side, but that's pretty much what science does: Use observations and evidence to verify or falsify a hypothesis. Our intuition isn't a magical process.

Doggerel #141: "Technology"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

A lot of woos out there like to complain about how "technology" is ruining our lives. They don't seem to get any more specific about what they mean "technology." Technology isn't just the stuff you need to plug into a wall to use. Technology is pretty much anything people use. It doesn't matter if we're talking about PSPs or stone knives. It's just a matter of what other technology you need to make it. I don't see any magical cutoff point where one tiny additional step of development makes something inherently bad. (Thanks go to Dunc for suggested improved verbiage)

Worse, a lot of woos don't have any real concept of what life was like before certain inventions. Many alties have no idea how common disease used to be. Some of them would benefit from seeing what life is like in countries without modern health care. Other alties complain about the commonality of cancer, trying to blame some single issue for it. Of course, it's largely thanks to advanced medicine that we can die from cancer much later in life, rather than preventable childhood diseases. I will not be surprised if they switch to complaining about people dying of old age if we manage to discover methods to prevent and cure the various forms of cancer. They will then cite how rare it was for people to die of old age back in 'the good old days' and make stuff up about the ancients knowing immortality secrets.

The issue gets a great deal more complex if you're talking about the social and economic aspects of technological advancement. A lot of woos, however, don't see it that way: They usually posit some golden age when everything was allegedly perfect, everyone read only Shakespeare, and stuff. Being able to communicate and research more quickly is apparently supposed to lower the quality of art for unknown reasons. I could go on about other issues, but that would make for a much longer post.

Still More Expansion

Still looking for more people to sign up for my Game Development Limbo. I always feel paranoid when I don't get comments for a while. That, and sometimes I just really feel like having a casual conversation about gaming in general.

So, if you haven't joined already, you can give me your email address. Just send it here:

Ranting, Ranting, Ranting

Well, PZ posted a picture made by a rather pathetic individual. I think I'll agree with some people that "Self-Portrait" would make for a more appropriate caption, since the creator apparently doesn't get out of his bleak gray room very often. Artists should do what they know, and I guess this "artist" doesn't know much at all.

One of the most foam-inducing lines in the person's bigoted screed (partially corrected with Doggerel links):

I don't think Atheists can even believe in love, which is the saddest part.

That's just pathetic. I'd love to beat some people like this over the head with my love for my family and friends. Unfortunately, intricate configurations of neurochemicals probably don't have the inertia necessary to do any damage, either physically, or to their cloistered worldview. What especially galls me about this is that even if we express our love and wonder, they'll just discount it as false because it doesn't come out of the nice, unnecessary packaging of their power structure.

Whether they like it or not, we're real people with real feelings. It's nihilists like this "artist" who sometimes make me wonder if there's anything going on behind the eyes of fundamentalists. Another alternative I wonder about is whether or not fundies are absolutely burning with jealousy. We can speak our mind without fear from a "loving" deity who always seems to take a relativistic stance about the morality of torture. We can have a will to do the right thing without fear of threats or being sidetracked by bribery. Sure, we don't have some magical, mythical comforts they like to fantasize about. But neither do we have anything to inspire complacency, like I so often see in fundies. When they're not doing something obviously immoral, they're usually advocating inaction and apathy. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. These are people who routinely deny the existence of wonders we take for granted, and typically deny that there are any that haven't already been crammed into their tiny, myopic books.

We've got the whole universe, and a planet full of people. They've only got an imaginary, abusive father figure.

Sorry if this rant isn't up to my full foamy standards. I dug up my Beatles: Yellow Submarine CD to play a few repeats of "All You Need is Love".

State of the Doggerel: March 2008

Well, I've finally gotten the buzz words on equal footing with the cliche phrases. So, any new suggestions, or old suggestions that may bear repeating?

Pointless Question #17

One of your ally's key strategic planets has fallen to the evil invading warrior race guys. They sent a fleet of ships and dropped off a million troops to do the job. How the hell did they conquer a whole planet with so little manpower?

Doggerel #140: "Emotion"

-Professor Farnsworth: "She's become a slave to her emotions! Just like every woman. Especially you, Leela."
-Leela: *SLAP*

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Since woos think logic is incompatible with emotion, many think emotion is a sign of logical shortcomings. While it's true that emotional investment can cloud someone's judgment, it doesn't mean that being emotional automatically negates the logic behind your position.

You can be jealous. You can be irritated. You can be angry and noisy. And if you've got a solid line of evidence and rational arguments, you can also be right. That's what's important in the argument, since we're out to establish the truth. A person's tone of voice does not play a role in that decision.

We are human beings, not computers. We have needs and desires, and when we've got what looks like a good grasp of a problem and its solution (or know the problems in someone else's "solution"), and if it matters to us, we're very capable of being emotional, even if we're being rational every step of the way. Skeptics like me don't like the idea of people being cheated out of money, time, and possibly even life by psychics, alties, and religious fundamentalists. We're rational because we care.

You've All Seen This by Now

We've all seen and identified with this XKCD comic making the rounds. I'll add a discussion question: What's the most trivial thing you've done this over?

An Image I Need to Use Sometime

That 123 Book Meme

I won't tag anyone, but here's what mine resulted with. Interpret it as you will.

The rules: Pick up the nearest book with over 123 pages. Go to page 123, go to the 5th sentence. Post the following three sentences:

"...And everyone looking so..." Chickenwire floundered "...happy. In a sad way, o' course."
"Yeah."

Doggerel #139: "Malpractice"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

This entry into the list isn't so much a word that's misunderstood, but one that's thrown up as a distraction. It will come up in just about any thread where a skeptic talks about quackery, in an effort to cast evidence-based medicine in the worst possible light. There's one severe problem with that, though:

Malpractice and efficacy are not related. A car is an efficacious method of transportation. You can put something in a car and observe it move. If drivers get into accidents, that doesn't change the fact that cars have efficacy. Woos are asking us to invest in flying carpets, which are no better than inaction. That's usually the issue at hand: Can the woos prove that their treatments are better than inaction? Questions about malpractice are usually just evasions of that issue.

Malpractice is the medical equivalent to a car accident. Sometimes it's bad luck, sometimes it's negligence, sometimes it's flaws in the system, sometimes it's even incompetence. Those sorts of things are important to iron out. If you want to talk about malpractice, you'll want to know where and why those problems occur. It has nothing to do with the efficacy of the treatments. The problem is not in the theory, but in the practice.

An additional problem with talking bout malpractice is that it's hard to get numbers with alties: One of the most common problems I see brought up when I read about an altie practitioner being hit with licensing issues is bad or even nonexistent record keeping. That makes it much harder to compare malpractice rates, even if woo worked. But woo doesn't work. Taking useless, and therefore unnecessary action is just as bad as malpractice. And woos are doing it every time they practice if they can't prove efficacy.

Malpractice exists in evidence-based medicine. Doctors, insurance companies, and so forth are doing their best to combat the causes. Woos, however, are seldom interested in really discussing whether or not their treatment actually works. The ones who distract with malpractice numbers effectively admit it.

Well, That's Embarrassing

I generally don't know anything about celebrities, nor do I comprehend the level of buzz about them. Well, it seems Sylvia Browne couldn't do much better than I could in regards to predicting what Jennifer Lopez was going to do with her life.

Doggerel #138: "Logic"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Woos often like to pretend that skeptics all have pointy ears, that we're beyond emotion, etcetera. Especially when we see through appeals to emotion and heartfelt, if misguided warnings. Of course, we're people, too. We're just more consistent than most people.

First, one of the woo abuses of the term implies that logic is something incredibly restrictive, and that their favorite woo is beyond it all. This usually gets into silly special pleading pretty quickly, when they claim that results exist, but they can't be measured. How they measured them is left an open question.

Second, woos will often use fallacies of "logical" people to try to convince us that we shouldn't discount stuff. One of these is the famous Sherlock Holmes quote, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." That one in particular, as well as many other lines of 'woo logic' tend to be based on a lack of imagination. Holmes's quote relies on the presumption (and hubris) that you know all the possibilities. Usually, the woos in question don't even know what a skeptic's stance is on the issue, and thus can't attack the real lines of logic and assumptions being used.

Third, woos treat logic as if it were somehow antithetical to emotion. Quite frankly, I don't see how. Emotion seems like a natural extension of logic to me. Heck, it forms a large part of my sense of humor: A lot of jokes rely on the listener being able to spot holes in someone's logic, or reversal of expectations arrived at through logic. That must be why I see so few woos with a sense of humor.

Further Expansion

Haven't been getting a lot of comments over at my Game Development Limbo blog, though I've been given some good reasons from individuals who have some log-in related hurdles. If you're interested in my random game-related thoughts and ideas, send me your email address so that I can invite you.

If you don't want to post it in a comment, you can drop your address in an email to me:

As the Pointless Fun Turns

Well, it time for a little more pointless fun. We've been extended for another infinity seasons, including plastic surgery for my character, who will now be played by a lolcat who appeals to a better demographic. He's also apparently secretly the long lost twin brother of several other people.

Anyway, onto the fun:

Retro Sabotage: Classic games with punchlines. Usual thanks to Nodwick.

---
Someone's having the time of his life:


This would be a lot better if they kept the sound at a consistent level. Silence ruins a lot of it:


Searching for random Nintendo stuff. This was weird:

81st Skeptics' Circle

It's up at the Conspiracy Factory.

Open thread as usual, except quoting the Evil Overlord List and thus revealing our secrets to the world is FORBIDDEN.

The Quackometer's Back!

You can't keep a good thing down. He's changed to an ISP with more spine, so I think he'll be safe from censorship for a while.

Doggerel #137: "Dimension"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

I've read Flatland and Sphereland. I recommend you read them, too, if you've been overly contaminated by the typical sci-fi use of the term. A lot of woos are. I think "dimension" is a poor term for alternate universes, elseworlds, different planes of existence, etcetera. "Dimension" better refers to height, width, depth, time, and the various dimensions those cosmologists are working on. I heard we're up to ten or so. If you want to add some more, show us the math.

In the old days, religion liked to hide heaven in the sky and hell deep underground. Now that we can examine those areas, some woos have resorted to hiding magic in alleged dimensions. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that their woo doesn't do what they claim it does. It only serves to make it look harder to verify, as if science only worked like sci-fi scanning devices and was so easily limited.

Another use of the term is less "scientific" and more illustrative, often dealing with convenient abstractions for complex processes. One example, from my days of playing Magic: The Gathering was "card advantage," which essentially dealt with the benefits of increasing the number of cards working for you at any time: Draw more, prevent your opponent from drawing, kill two enemy cards with one of yours, etcetera. That's one aspect of a complex process. Though I've encountered it less often, sometimes woos like to talk about these sorts of dimensions to make an issue appear more complex when such dimensions can be studied independently of others.

Doggerel #136: "Deep"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Back when I was a kid, my mind was continuously buzzing with religious questions. You know the usual conflicts: Omnipotence versus evil, precognition versus free will, etcetera. Nearly all of them were outright contradictions. People regarded as "deep" just slapped the "paradox" label on them, told stories that failed as metaphor, and just generally didn't answer it. Meanwhile, people like me who kept asking questions, pointing out the cracks in bad metaphors, and preferred uncertainty or even dissatisfaction over false certainty were labeled "shallow." This kind of experience made me wonder if the brainless blond cheerleaders on TV sitcoms grew up to be philosophy professors. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the standard case.

Needless to say, woos love to think of themselves as "deep" and will advertise. The problem that they commonly face when dealing with skeptics is that they haven't thought about their favorite transcendent woo and the implications it would have if it were true. Sometimes they'll slap on a layer of ad hoc, and then ignore the implications of that layer. For example, psychics will complain that they can't work in the presence of a skeptic, often to the point that they'll claim physical discomfort from our evil, negative thought waves. Well, then, it should be an easy matter to test their ability to sense skeptics. Lock 'em in a room and see if they get a headache when James Randi walks by. At that point, they typically drop the attempt to add "depth" to the woo and start ad hominems.

My preferred method of determining who's really "deep": who's got the most detail down with the fewest fallacies. So far, I'm seeing a very strong correlation between woo and shallowness.

The Days of Our Pointless Fun

Well, I've been leading a double life on another blog (give me your email if you want to see Bronze Dog's Game Development Limbo), been in the witness protection program, since I have to testify it was I who shot Caleb Rentpayer.

So, to keep you occupied:

Eyemaze: Website full of games, including the very cool Grow series. The creator's feeling under the weather right now, so help him get better.

Submachine 5: Interesting point-and-click exploration game. I should probably try out the earlier ones.

Here's some near-lethal nostalgia fuel:



Items on my "Definite buy" list: Fez and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

The usual thanks go to Nodwick and TIGS.

Teach This Old Dog a New Trick

I suddenly remembered a quote from a math humor book I read back in junior high. It went something like this:

"The laws of probability are so cleverly formatted that no experiment can refute or prove their validity."

It won't surprise me if there's been a lot of debate about this that may have settled the issue centuries ago, but I haven't been able to come up with a way to falsify the laws of probability from my armchair bit of math. Any particular experimental result is possible under the laws of probability: Some are just more probable than others, and there's no magical cutoff for improbability.

If I can't get anywhere with them, I think I might just have to stick them into the same category of assumptions as "the external universe exists" and "the laws of physics are consistent."

BOYCOTT NETCETERA

Le Canard Noir's blog has been taken down because the cowards at Netcetera. They caved into the threats of some nobody quack, despite being clearly legally protected. The Thought Police and book burners live.

Normally, I'd instinctively focus a lot of rage at the anti-speech actions of the quack involved and how he stands for the destruction of civilized society, but given that the same ISP has caved in for the third time to such threats, they don't deserve any revenue. If they can't offer any protection for your material, they aren't worth the money.

So, if you're expressing unpopular opinions on Netcetera, I highly recommend you find a new service and make a backup of all your stuff before they open up the doors for the internet book burners.

Comic Find

I've recently come across Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and currently going through the archives. Here's where I found out about it, and here's a comic that reminded me of twoofer logic in a way.

Doggerel #135: "Holistic"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Alties love to claim that their favorite woo "treats the whole person" or similar crap in their advertisements. The most effective criticism I can think of for the typical altie "holistic" treatment: They can't prove that it treats any part of the person.

Of course, moving beyond that obvious angle, alties often don't seem used to explaining how they treat the whole person in a way that real medicine doesn't. Real medicine has to keep track of you. That's why medical records are so important. They have to factor in things like allergies, genetic quirks, and general health to see if you can handle the side effects and such. (Naturally, anything that has an effect pretty much has to have side effects.) I don't see alties doing much on that front. As Eddie Izzard pointed out of chiropractic:

So I had to go see a chiropractor in New York, and they're different to osteopaths, chiropractors, because of the spelling. Of course, they're both very powerful figures on the Scrabble board, though... "Chiropractor... chiropractor... chiropractor... 93 letters, chiropractor." And they crack your bones, that's what they do, they crack your bones! And they take x-rays, but it’s pointless, because whatever is wrong with you… "You've got a bad back, I'm gonna crack your bones.” “You've got diphtheria, I'm gonna crack your bones.” “Your head's come off! I'm gonna crack your bones.” “It looks like your mother! I'm going to crack your bones. "

Put simply, I don't see alties doing much to take the whole person into account. They have a habit of just prescribing standard treatments.

One annoying thing that often comes up is that alties often have good bedside manner, which they'll advertise as treating the 'spirit'. Of course, they often have a lower patient load, and often don't have to do much of anything, so it's often easier for them to maintain. Would be nice if some of these people could have the cobwebs in their heads cleared out so that they could go into nursing and put that bedside manner to better use. Having a friendly relationship to the medical staff can often do good in the form of better treatment compliance and stress reduction, but people with illnesses need real medicine to go with the kind gestures.

Finally Getting to my Deityhood

Well, Tom Foss started a meme. Somewhere, I got tagged invisibly, though I was going to get around to it regardless of whether or not I got tagged. Some of this is going to involve repetition of ideas.

I'm going to have to try having some fun with the whole Bronze Dog God thing.

1. Resources will not be scarce. At least not in the "real" world. The only places I'd make scarce resources are game worlds/boards/servers. The first games to operate on those principles will be praised by the gamer community as an innovative abstract concept that livens up gameplay.

2. Time will be tangled up for maximum convenience. Go ahead and take a nap, go to work, class, get in the proper mood, or whatever. Your friends on the game server won't even notice you went afk. This, however, might lead to some interesting conversations, requiring an extensive system of grammar for all the different verb tenses. I will haven grantek everyone automatic fluency in this grammar before any problems arise.

3. Who needs death? Indefinite lifespans are fine by me. If someone manages to get bored despite everyone putting out lots of entertainment, they can pick out a memory wipe, bliss-out, or whatever. Some people will appreciate having a reformatted newb to train.

4. Not science, SCIENCE! Like Tom, I'd make Hollywood/comic book/videogame super science a possibility. Who needs square cube laws and laws of motion getting in the way of building a giant honking robot to fly over your infinite back yard?

Suggestions for expansion are appreciated.

Email Policy

I haven't been getting much direct email lately, but after reading a post here and there about others giving an expectation of privacy, I should probably outline what you can expect from mine.

1. If it's not related to the usual science/skepticism/atheism thing, I won't post your email unless you want me to.

2. If it's hate mail, it will be posted, dissected, and mocked. I don't get much at this point. This policy may change if I get a sudden influx. This is subject to some upcoming restrictions.

3. I won't post people's real names and locations unless they already use them online at a blog or something. If, for example, I get some invective from a Disco Institute top member with his name, photograph, and address on the Disco Institute website, I won't shy away from calling him by name. If I get an email labeled "Bob Smith" and he signs the email itself with "ScientologyLuvums317" or something that's obviously supposed to be an alias, I won't expose the name.

4. If you provide a link to your blog, don't be the least bit surprised if I end up dissecting and mocking pseudoscience I might find there. Your best defense is to not be silly in your email.

5. I won't out atheists without permission. I live in a chunk of the Bible Belt, and I know how hard things can be for someone not ready to expose that part of their identity. There are a lot of amoral, nihilistic bigots who seemingly live for the purpose of making life hard for atheists. For the people who can safely and comfortably live as an outed atheist in meatspace, kudos. Not all of us have the necessary bravery and/or safe locations.

Blogroll Expansion

I haven't expanded my blogroll in quite a long time. My brother's generally more exploratory than I am, so I may borrow some links from his. If you're a regular reader, drop a link to your place so that I can add it. I probably have a lot of links I need to reciprocate.

Bronze Dog's Game Development Limbo

Yesterday, I started a new blog where I spill out the videogame ideas that end up in my head. I don't expect them to go anywhere, but I might as well get them all down, just in case I end up with an actual product that'll catch the eyes of the indie game community. The blog's invite-only right now, since I'd prefer to keep my ideas among some of my gamer friends without getting stolen. If you're interested in seeing my creative efforts, ask me to invite you. Feedback and ideas from others would be greatly appreciated.

The Threat Model of Epistemology

Imagine you're watching television and a car commercial comes on. The screaming used car salesman sputters and twitches as he shows off some of the cars on his lot and their prices. Throw in some costume mascot, and a distant shot of the location, featuring some air-powered flailing critters. And then he mentions that if you don't believe his deals are the best in town, you'll be found eventually and taken to a torture chamber and left there for the rest of your life.

That's an image that comes to my mind with religion. There always seems to be a double standard. If your average person were to make such a horrible threat, everyone (or at least I hope everyone) would be shocked and inspired to retaliate with anything from vitriol to criminal charges. But for some reason, people give (thankfully fictional) deities, (unfortunately real) preachers, and generally pious people free reign to say whatever threats they like. It's even acceptable to make bigoted jokes with the threats as a premise.

What I want to know is why such exceptions exist. I want a fundie to explain it to me. For now, I've got a number of suspected reasons which they probably don't want to admit. First, they think morality is relative: The preachers can do whatever the hell they want to because they serve a deity who can do whatever the hell he wants to. Moral standards don't apply to them because they've drawn a line in the sand, declaring their side 'holy' or 'spiritual' or whatever.

Second, in something of a more specific variant of the first, they think might makes right. Because their deity is super-powered, he can do whatever the hell he wants. It's not like you could realistically rebel. I suppose I should call that 'appeal to futility' or something. Kind of reminds me of a number of strained paladin-breaking either/or decisions: "You can't win, so give up on finding a way to do the right thing."

Third, in another form of moral relativism: The ends justify the means when it's their ends being pursued. Anyone else who uses their means for a different goal is vilified while they praise their own for doing the same. When called out on this attitude, they pretend morality is beyond mortal ken, which is why double-standards are allowed, and fairness is a sin.

That, in a nutshell, is one of the core reasons why appeals to the eternal torments of Hell mean nothing to me. They're nothing but intimidation, and conversely, Heaven is only a bribe, not a reward. Naturally, the other big reason they mean nothing is because I've seen no evidence for them, but that's a topic for another post.

80th Skeptics' Circle

It's up at Bug Girl's place, and it was Valentine's.

Open thread as usual, but because Valentine's is over, now, making kissy faces at me is FORBIDDEN! ...unless you're a hot chick.

All My Pointless Fun

Well, it's been a while. I was knocked out by my evil twin brother and left for dead, only to wake up on a desert island with amnesia. But I'm back now, and I want to know who the father is.

Time for games.

An Untitled Story: Nice platforming adventure. Definitely worth donating to get the full version.

Mine Link: Simple little chain reaction game. Blow up one mine to get as many as you can per level.

The Unfair Platformer: Was I Wanna Be the Guy not enough for you? Try this.

Thanks go to Nodwick, The Independent Gaming Source, and viewers like you.

Now, to videos:

A little more stop motion gaming:


How Neo and friends play ping pong:


And soccer:

Quote of the Time Being #16

From the comments of one of PZ's posts:

"They make Ward Churchill look like Shirley Temple." -- John A. Davidson

[INTERIOR: February 9, 2009, PZ MYERS's secret lair built beneath the sprawling sewer system of Morris, Minnesota. While Western Civilization is reduced to smoldering ruins outside, MYERS sits atop the Cephalod Throne, surveying his squid aquarium. RICHARD DAWKINS stands to one side, near an old-fashioned Victrola and a dress dummy. He is using a curling iron to put ringlets into a blonde wig.]

[ENTER Tori and Dori, the contortionist twins. They are escorting at gunpoint WARD CHURCHILL.]

MYERS: Ah, Dr. Churchill. I suppose you are wondering why I've brought you here.

CHURCHILL: Wondering? Hardly, Dr. Myers. This is precisely the sort of discursive act I would expect from one so thoroughly reified in the rational-materialist hegemony. As I was saying in my recent monograph--

MYERS: Silence! I did not bring you here to hear you speak. Tori and Dori have their weapons trained on you, and should you manage to evade their gunfire, you would still need to traverse the moat of deadly Humboldt squid. I assure you, escape is impossible, and your cooperation is most necessary. Richard, help Dr. Churchill prepare for his performance.

[DAWKINS approaches CHURCHILL with the wig, a large pinafore, and tap shoes, size 11.]

DAWKINS: Dr. Churchill, it would be in your best interest to don this curly wig and pinafore. You really have no choice.

[CHURCHILL looks nervously at the twins, who raise their weapons and prepare to fire at a moment's notice. Reluctantly, he pulls the pinafore over his freshly pressed workshirt and jeans, and places the wig awkwardly on his head. As his humiliation grows, DAWKINS smears rouge on his cheeks.]

MYERS: Music, Richard, please.

[DAWKINS returns to the Victrola, gives the crank a few turns, and places the needle on the record. The unmistakable sound of On the Good Ship Lollipop is heard. MYERS settles imperiously on his throne and begins to relax. A smile plays across his face.]

MYERS: Now, Dr. Churchill. Dance!

Posted by: HP | February 14, 2008 5:37 PM

Darwin Day '08

Well, it's that time of year: Darwin Day. Though his theory's been updated again and again over the course of a century and a half, making the Origin of Species very outdated, we pay a minor bit of tribute to the guy who gave biology a productive direction to investigate. He wasn't a prophet. Just a guy who put a particular set of 2 and 2 together in a memorable way, opening new lines of inquiry.

After Darwin, life (at least in the strictly biological way) started making sense. Critters could be traced back through their ancestry to a common point. Doing that trackback, we could discover where they took different forks in the road, and so on and so forth. Yet still today, there are people who would tear down that whole thing and replace it with statements like "because I said so" and "the magic man in the sky was in a weird mood that day, we can't possibly ever know what he was thinking" to explain the hows and whys of life.

Darwin and the countless biologists who followed didn't give into such a defeatist attitude. They dared to ask questions and seek answers, regardless of what it did to lesser people's blind pride and hubris. Armed with scientific fact, scientists could work at improving our lives in ways we take for granted today and potentially in ways we can imagine tomorrow. So, celebrate the stone that caused the ever-growing ripple we're riding today.

And remember, happiness is a squishy cephalopod.

So, was I cheesy and inspiring enough, there?

Doggerel #134: "Consciousness"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Woos love to muse about consciousness. Given that we've all got it without a blue print (yet), it's kind of hard for any of us not to on occasion. I suppose one of the easiest ways to define consciousness is the ability to think and to think about your thinking. It takes quite a bit of sophistication for a critter to be able to do that.

Woos, however, seem to want to keep the complexity down. Rather than face the awesome task of cataloging countless neural connections and proportions of chemicals being juggled among those connections, they'd rather just make consciousness its own ineffable thing, rather than a complicated process. Of course, the problem that arises from this is that it involves special pleading: They have to introduce a new entity without any real sort of justification. Unless they can demonstrate something with consciousness without some sophisticated information handling 'hardware', I don't see any reason to think consciousness is separate from the brain.

One of the other reasons woos like to posit a separate consciousness is because it gives them comfort to think of something that can continue to exist. Of course, the universe isn't in the business of pleasing humans. Good luck finding the soul, but you'll have to do all the scientific footwork. Epistemological hedonism isn't a shortcut I'll accept.

Another reason they like to posit a separate consciousness: If you invent something that circumvents the natural world, it can give you the excuse to believe in other stuff that's considered "weird" like psychic powers and such. Of course, most of the latter ends up being much more mundane when examined. Consciousness has the advantage as not being as well understood as slight of hand, cold reading, and the placebo effect. Yet.

79th Skeptics' Circle

Iz up at Podblack Lolcat's place.

You can't has gud grammar. Is FORBIDDEN!