Creationist Invitational

Welcome to a comment thread where I have invited a Creationist. Or possibly several, if the first one ends up not accepting my invitation.

Drop any questions you have for me, and tell me how Creationism answers them. Expect evolution's/abiogenesis's/cosmology's answers and followup questions to Creationism's answers. (Usually asking for elaboration).

Going Over My Log...

Loading BronzeDog.exe...

Executing Plugin(SN00ze[0])...





Executing Plugin(SN00ze[1])...





Searching for Room(8ath)... Found!





Executing Plugin(SN00ze[2])





Error: Room(8ath) has been moved or overwritten.
Searching for Room(8ath)... Found!
Checking Sheets[0]... OKAY!
Checking Sheets[1]... OKAY!
Checking Spreadsheet... OKAY!





Loading Skins...
Error: Skins[00] to [1F] have been corrupted. Attempt recovery now (Y/N)? N





Searching for Room(Kchn)... Found!
Executing Plugin(SN00ze[3])
Error: This plugin has performed an unscheduled or illegal operation and has been shut down.





Loading Mi1k.dll... done.
#Include H3rsh3y.dll... done.
Integrating .DLL files... done.
Searching for M3DS.fix... Found! 23 Left.
Voices GOTO(Away)... Verified.




LOGON DVR.30.109.014... Connected!
- Gundam00[1]
- Gundam00[0]
- Colbert~[0]
- DailySh~[0]
- Transfo~[E]

Continue (Y/N/Continuous)? N

LOGON BronzeHive/SuddenLink... Connected before you even thought to ask!

GOTO http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com/
GOTO http://gmail.google.com/
*/END LOG/*

Quote of the Time Being #23

Provided by Scott, over at Orac's place:






RJ's comment #30 reminds me of a joke I heard recently which is actually quite on-point.

Two Taliban fighters are talking in Afghanistan. One of them comments, "Those American Marines are such incompetents, their marksmanship is pathetic!" The other one asks, "How do you know that?" And the first replies, "Well, I've talked to a bunch of our guys who were shot at by them - the Marines missed every time!"

If you don't see the connection, think about it for a bit. Hint: Selection effects.

What the Soul Means

As you will no doubt find out from the rest of this foamy post, I've ended up in a terribly, terribly cynical mood. And on my birthday. (Though I am glad I managed to regain my idealism after writing the first part.)

To a person like me, the soul is a convenient metaphor for all the intellectual and emotional complexities of a person. The part of a person that experiences joy and passion. The intellect that forms plans and watches for opportunities. The determination that allows them to grasp for a desired future and victory over adversity. An ideal society is one that allows every person the means to follow these. Even though such a society is more than likely impossible to achieve or maintain, I seek such an ideal. If it ever is achieved, we can only hope that we have such diverse souls of varied interests to maintain such a world logistically.

A farmer plants and grows his crop not only to provide for himself, but also to experience the joy of seeing his hard labor bring forth delicious, nourishing fruit. He can also take pride in knowing that by performing this task, he has allowed his fellow beings more time to pursue their passions, since they no longer have to perform a labor they may not enjoy as he does. Because specialized laborers can provide the basic necessities of life, other people can pursue other passions. Scientists can study increasingly subtle aspects of reality and tease out useful applications others can use. Artists can look at the world and use the tools available to society to present problems in such a way to motivate others to think of solutions or they can bring forth entertaining displays of color and sound to brighten other people's lives and expand their horizons. Police and government officials enforce laws so that individuals can feel safe and waste less time and effort engaging in security measures. Civilization is the tool we invented to make this possible, even if only imperfectly. The civilized world is a place where a soul is best able to express itself and find satisfaction. As social animals, we have an inherent desire for cooperative lifestyles such as this. By helping one another, we can enjoy greater and greater levels of freedom.

That is the basis for morality. Altruism manifests in those myriad forms. The farmer takes pride in knowing he can provide the necessity of food for his people. The scientist swells with joy when his discoveries provide new tools and insights that make life easier for others or makes the formerly impossible within another's grasp. The artist smiles when his work raises another's awareness of the world around them. The police officer gains satisfaction knowing that his vigilance helps us sleep soundly at night. A humble bureaucrat can smile if his good record keeping has prevented confusion between his fellows. Even someone who tries to produce something and fails can express his deepest gratitude for all those who provided the resources and opportunities he needed to explore his ideas, and society, in turn, can acknowledge even this person's honest efforts and intentions. Even if luck was unfavorable to him, his actions were centered around helping his fellow souls, and therefore worthy of praise. We all see farther when we stand on one another's shoulder's.

There are many people out there who despise this order the ideals it is founded upon. They are the fundamentalists, the alties, the frauds, and, to cover them all in a single word, the woos. They bite the hand of the farmer, saying we need to return to the ancient ways of parasite-ridden foods and scrounging for precious scraps of land to grow low-yield crops. They spit in the eye of the scientist, claiming their idle certainty and brief, careless glances are worth more than the insights built on the blood, sweat, and loving precision of generations. They spurn the artist who sees beauty in another soul's work and presents the quintessential truth of it so that others may be inspired to learn more and expand upon it. They ridicule and censor the writer for feeling the compassion and determination it takes to raise awareness of a problem and encourage others to seek solutions. They whine about the laws enforced by our protectors because those rights and liberties prevent them from doing harm to satisfy their selfish greed and hubris. They marginalize the bureaucrat, believing their biased memories to be more reliable than any records and their haphazard technique more perfect than procedures created to prevent confusion and discord. They mock the dreamer by claiming everything is known, and there is no room for new things. They stone the lovers for finding the comfort and joy they bring to each other more important than the production of offspring. They persecute the peacemakers, community builders, and teachers, for they believe the enrichment of these things we call souls is a meaningless endeavor in the face of hollow, efemeral pleasures.

The woo, and in particular, the fundamentalist, sees no value in the richness and depth of the soul. They crave the shallow and the empty, so they seek to suppress anything that might ignite a person's passion. They reject the social, secular world as a result. They seek to eliminate our social nature, replacing it with something akin to that of an insectine robot. Sameness is a virtue in their eyes, conformity the law. If they cannot enforce conformity on the world, they isolate themselves from it, forming insular tribes. Children are indoctrinated in tribalist ways, and taught that exposure to the outside world will turn them savage, so that they turn vicious towards peacemakers and foreign ideas instead of thinking about them. Foreign heroes are recast as villains, not based on the deeds they do, but are punished for meaningless technicalities like the genetics of the people they help or trifling details about the mechanisms behind their abilities. Love, being based on things beyond mechanical reproduction or the enforcement of random and arbitrary laws is treated as inferior to the conditional praise given for rigid obedience or the carnal lust for one's designated reproductive partner(s).

For us, a soul may only be temporary, but we seek to carry on parts of it to be remembered for generations. We feel sorrow for the loss of a loved one, and may hope they continue on in some as yet unknown fashion, but we can not allow our sorrow to lead to the sloth of believing our wishful thinking is true and absolute. Seeking out what truth really is will be far more useful to us than gambling.

When a fundamentalist speaks of the soul, however, they do not speak of the sum of a person. They speak only of an everlasting receptor of pain or pleasure. When one follows the arbitrary laws and believes in the random tenets of the faith, this receptor is sent to a place that pumps pleasure into it. It feels no sorrow for those who didn't make it because it is incapable of loving another. They speak of how our receptor will receive only pain, but even if we believed them, we would not embrace their beliefs: The joys of enriching ourselves and each other hold far more value to us than the empty promise of eternal carnal pleasure. We're not so cowardly that we would give up what we value most to appease the purposeless anger of a nihilistic stone idol.

These locusts grow fat on the labor of others. They enjoy the benefits science has brought to society in the form of tools everyone else uses in their craft, but they detest the discipline when it's personally inconvenient for them. They use the laws and bureaucracy established for the common good for their personal protection, but seek to rob others of those same protections with arbitrary, nonsensical exceptions. They attempt to conflate our restrained and perfectly legal responses to their hate and irrationality with their worst efforts to censor and bully us into submission. They harm others and yet claim to be the victims.

That is why I lay my heart and soul out on this blog for all to see.

What a Wonderful Present

I didn't want to wake up in the morning to read this on my B. I will very much embrace the meme of calling her "Cynthia Dumbar," even though it's not a terribly clever way to play on her name. I may change if someone figures out a better tweak. Either way, it looks like Texas could be heading into even deeper states of doominess than McLeroy could dream of.

One thing that strikes me about theocrats like her is how unpatriotic and ungrateful they are. They have no loyalty whatsoever to the founding principles of our nation or any of the similar ideals other developed nations have embraced. Her primitive mode of thought more readily belongs in one of those unfortunate third world countries filled with Lilliputian strife over which end of an egg you crack.

One particular aspect that sickens me is that she's being groomed to head public education, and yet apparently believes children are the property of parents, who are free to deny them the equality of opportunity public education is supposed to aim for. The implied newage (rhymes with sewage) subjectivism involved in denying them access to outside ideas and scientific consensus also strikes me as rather hypocritical: Lots of fundies like to make a big show about how they believe there's an objective truth out there, but whenever science illuminates it for everyone, suddenly they want the system to cater to every superstition out there. Because their random theory of randomness can't survive even the barest bit of scrutiny, they have to remove all sources that could cast doubt on chaos.

It leaves me to wonder if her brand of homeschooler wants to do away with human nature as social animals: Only meet the opposite sex to acquire a mate, reproduce, jealously guard offspring from any outside idea competition from your fellow species until they're old enough to mate and too old and isolated to consider there's something more to life than the rat race.

I'd rather be an intelligent social animal than just another mindless insect bot. My home state is DOOMED.

We've Always Been at War With Oceania

Imagine it's a few centuries ago, before the scientific revolution in medicine. Acupuncturists start complaining about chiropractors and the unearned popularity they have. They start emphasizing the strokes caused by chiropractors in their marketing campaign. Their campaign also emphasizes how relatively painless gently putting needles into a person's skin is, and how it doesn't cause side effects. All the while, just like the chiropractors, they neglect to demonstrate any actual effect though the scientific method. Instead, they, again, just like the chiropractors, rely entirely on anecdotal "trial and error" to determine what "works" without regard for observer biases. The acupuncturists' campaign is successful enough to wipe out chiropractic from serious consideration, and even set it up as an archetypal example of ridiculous quackery.

Now imagine it's centuries later. Acupuncture is still around. And they call aspirin "chiropractic medicine." They call chemotherapy "chiropractic medicine." They call surgery "chiropractic medicine." And they call vaccination by injection "chiropractic stealing ideas from acupuncture" because it involves a needle.

Welcome to the skeptics world in regard to the dead pseudoscience of "allopathy." One woo faction squabbled with a slightly worse but temporarily more popular woo faction and played a big part in killing them off. Once they killed off the enemy, they needed another enemy they could attempt to discredit to make themselves look good. Thus, homeopaths invented a tenuous connection between scientific medicine and homeopathy's slightly-more-evil twin, allopathy. Threatened by the genuine effectiveness of medicine coupled with the watchdog organizations that enforce that effectiveness, other woos jumped onto the propaganda bandwagon.

Really Annoying

Just a pointless meatspace complaint: My place is having a really hot summer. Finally got some rain today, which mostly only made it humid. Thankfully, my dad informed me that it's going to be absolutely frigid on Monday: A high of 83°F.

Naturally, a part of my brain wants to complain about global warming, but of course, not being a meteorologist, or even an informed layman about the topic, I know I should be wary about equating a heatwave (weather) with climate.

The Worst Kind of Woo

Now that the warm fuzzies I got from the fireworks display have worn off, I have a foamy rant to get out.

Saw a (supposed) swarm of trolls at a thread about chiropractors earlier today. A number spouted "get a life" and variants of that doggerel near the front of their comments. I couldn't see straight enough to read the rest. In fact, I'm surprised I was able to write calmly for the corresponding Doggerel entry: One of the few things I hate more than evildoers are people who demand I be unemotional about injustice and ridicule us skeptics for displaying even the slightest bit of compassion.

These people have somehow accomplished the contradiction of being militantly apathetic.

It's bad enough when they laugh at me for caring about people who are cheated out of large sums of money by psychic frauds, the topic of this thread was alternative medicine. People have died needlessly at the hands of chiropractors who ended up causing strokes. Worse still, previous commentators had mentioned babies and children who were "treated" by chiropractors.

Sometimes I wonder if they point and laugh when people cry at funerals.

We criticize because we actually give a shit about what happens to our fellow sapient beings. We're capable of sympathy. When someone is deceived for another's profit and receives no benefit, we feel sorry for the victim. We're fallible, just like they are, and we can conceive of the same happening to us. We're in the same boat, and we want everyone to have the same protections, whether it means watchdog organizations doing detailed, transparent examinations or giving everyone we can reach a lesson in critical thought. The latter is the whole fucking point behind our blogging about these topics.

These sociopathic fuckers couldn't care less about that. They're just in the trolling business for shits and giggles. Other people's emotions are nothing but their playthings to inflate their ego.

We tear down bad ideas because that's how science works: Come up with lots of ideas and tear down the ones that don't get evidence in their favor or have logical flaws. Whatever remains standing is likely to be true, and thus we can use that knowledge to better ourselves and help other people. Truth-filled ridicule is a tool to increase a person's awareness of logical fallacies.

For the nihilists, tearing everything down is its own purpose. Ridicule is its own end, and it consists only of hollow laughter directed towards anyone who expresses anything other than indifference.

So, to those of you who tell me to "get a life," I say this:

GET A FUCKING SOUL!*

*The soul I speak of is, of course, only a metaphor for all the physically-based mental and emotional complexities of a person.

Happy Fireworks!

I'm going to be seeing the local fireworks display tonight with my dad, who always brings his camera.

My birthday's on Monday, and I'm thinking about celebrating by having them over at my new place to view the wonder that is Hayao Miyazaki.

The Problem With Big Pharma Conspiracies

A while back, Orac introduced me to this cartoon. A generic pharmaceutical company tests a drug on rats and find no effects whatsoever, wasting the eight million dollars spent on research and development. So the marketing department sells it as an altie med product. I think that cartoon pretty well describes the medicine versus quackery battle just so well.

Pharmaceuticals have to do a very extensive song and dance to get approval from institutions like the FDA in the US, and analogous institutions overseas. They have to test on models, animals, and eventually, with even greater scrutiny and regulation, humans. These regulations exist because of scientific and ethical necessity. Those who understand the principles science and have a desire to help people demand watchdogs to keep an eye on the procedure.

In contrast, woos typically demand (and get) special exemptions from this oversight, often claiming that they're too poor and decrepit to actually bother testing their products before unleashing them on the public, therefore, they should have the right to haphazardly experiment directly on their consumers and cherrypick testimonials for marketing purposes. Of course, the only prep work they typically have to do for this consists of having an idea pop into their head. Then they can directly proceed to unregulated human experimentation. And being an altie means never having to say you're sorry.

So, given that state of the world, why would pharmaceutical companies bother with spending potential profits on the whole experimental phase that often ends in failure or recalls from unforeseen effects? If they were only after money, the altie situation would be much better. Take a look at homeopathy: Water, alcohol, or sugar pills and profit margin for nothing.

Speedy Q&A #4

Q. What is a "Scientific Fundamentalist"?

A. No matter what you say, I will NEVER stop doubting myself and relying on the sacred testimony of experimental data as a means of self-correction!

A Sagan of Skeptics' Circles

I missed a few:

#112 is up at Cheshire. No creepy smiles.
#113 is up at The Uncredible Hallq's place. No green body paint or shirt ripping.
#114 is up at Homologous Legs. No dirty commentary involving a play on the adjective.

Troll Roast?

I'm thinking about poking some trolls on their home turf to get a roast going on over here. I've done a few attempts over the last year, but they'd usually just do some hit and run. Any suggestions?

String Theory Thread

Pardon the pun in the title. I've seen a number of explanations on TV, as well as some science place's contest for quickie explanations, but I thought I'd go ahead and have a comment thread devoted to discussion, including going back to the basics. I do know it's not well regarded among many of my fellow skeptics as it is in the media, but I figure it's worth bringing up again, in the off chance something happened in the LHC when I wasn't looking. I like hearing about the tiny little bits of stuff the universe is made of, even if I don't understand it all.

I think it's a nifty idea, but nifty does not equate to useful or even meaningful.

The "Faith" of Not Knowing

Skeptico recently posted an excellent article I will probably link to plenty of times in the future. In fact I should probably add a link as a "see also" in the Doggerel Index. It gave me a bit of a flashback to an idiot troll calling himself "Mr. FreeThinker" who apparently thought "we don't know yet" counts as an extraordinary claim. This is, of course, to borrow a phrase from across the pond, utter bollocks.

I also had a flashback to a clip of Bill O'Reilly with Richard Dawkins. He essentially said that as long as us scientifically minded people don't know, he's free to believe whatever random stuff some guys just made up ex nihilo. That, of course, makes it a matter of pure, baseless faith.

Of course, science has given us great knowledge. We know evolution happened and have a damn good idea about many of the details. We know the Earth revolves around the sun. We know The Big Bang happened. The evidence for all of these things gives us >99% confidence. Of course, we can't know everything, since we can't shove the entire universe into an evidence locker or examine the whole of its lifespan. There are still unanswered questions, like what happened before the Big Bang, or even if that's a meaningful question.

Yes, we've got a lot of cosmologists doing mathematical calculations of what happens when you play Cat's Cradle with superstrings, trying to figure out those answers. Who knows, they might find and successfully test an answer. Right now, they don't, and many of my fellow skeptics have expressed doubts about the whole approach since testability is hard to come by. In any case, we don't know yet. Not knowing is only a mild irritation for most of us, and often exciting for those doing the research: They're going to get a surprise, no matter what the results are.

For faithheads, not knowing is somehow an indictment for science: Because science isn't perfect, they need to make up a perfect being to tell them what to believe. Of course, there are a lot of these fictional beings competing for dominance because evidence isn't involved. Seems to me you could pick one or a set at random and still be on equal ground with all the other stone idol roulette players.

Of course, I think the only winning move is not to play.

Woos and Victims

Used to, when I ran into woos espousing the power of positive thinking, the idea that if you want something bad enough, you'll get it, I'd just take it as fluffy naive stuff, and generally move onto more directly harmful sorts of woo. I ended up reevaluating that attitude around the time I started blogging. The particular triggering incident involved an advocate of The Secret who saw no problem with an implied reversal of the hypothesis: If you're doing badly, it's your fault because you obviously attracted misfortune with negative thoughts. It got up to sickening levels when rape victims and the Holocaust came up.

I haven't heard as much from the Secretards over the past year, and I hope that's a sign the hype is dying away. At least until the next positive thinking fad gets a guest on Oprah.

Blaming the victim is one of woo's favorite ways to deal with failure. Much of the time it's not deliberate: Most woos are true believers, and when their pet magic fails, one of the easiest excuses to formulate is "you're doing it wrong!" With science-based things, it's a possibility, but there's always something to examine to figure out where the problem lies. No such luck with woo: There's always large realms of vagueness, and many give excuses to claim what the victim was thinking.

Of course, the knowing frauds take full advantage of this meme: If they can blame the people paying for their services and make them believe they're the ones to blame, the huckster doesn't have to worry about getting any results whatsoever. They can prosper from inaction and deception.

Overbuilding

Not my usual topic, but it's something I've said to my dad once or twice: Okay, so we've got the F-22 Raptor. It's got stealth, supercruise, thrust vectoring, and can turn into a giant robot. This is all supremely nifty.

But really, who are we going to be using it against?

Yeah, I realize it's probably just in case relations with other developed countries goes really sour, or something like that, but it still feels off.

Free Energy Boondoggles

Well, NeuroLogica has a post up about our old friend, the Steorn device. The result of the evaluation by independent scientists is unsurprising: No free energy, and after two years, they're stopping. Apparently some cynics have come out of the woodwork to waggle their fingers spookily about cover ups.

First, let me just say that free energy would be profoundly awesome, not just from an energy policy perspective, but from a discovery perspective. The laws of thermodynamics look to be very firm on a fundamental level. Finding a consistent violation of any sort would tell us there's something we've really been missing out on. That's why it makes absolutely no sense that scientists would attempt to cover it up.

Those of us who live with the wonderful technology of developed nations should have some inkling that we're prospering because scientific knowledge informs us about how we can use our resources. Yeah, the oil companies want to stay on top, but they can't buy off everyone with a physics degree. A violation of the LoT's would have all the physicists stampeding over each other to find out what they can learn. Our understanding of physics would be torn down, and any clever physicist could get his name in the history books alongside Newton and Einstein if he could work out what allows the exception. And, naturally, they'd be able to make a lot of money and put the oil companies out of business.

So, all those woos out there who seriously think there's a cover up: Seriously, why do you consider nigh-infinite cynicism as a superior explanation than the possibility you just backed the wrong horse? Has it ever occurred to you that the people promising sunshine and lollipops are the ones lying and/or being stupid?

D&Dify Some Stuff #5

WANTED: Individuals of varied talents to join a new secretive group devoted to sabotaging aggressive military groups and retrieving stolen relics and confiscated arcane literature.

Uniform: Black and gray camo with hexagonal shoulder guard and individualized animal/magical beast mask. Each member is assigned a number.

Current members: Captains 16, 25, and 36.

Must have some talent for secrecy or stealth, or barring that, exceptional ability to avoid capture. Nonlethal methods of disabling opponents strongly preferred. We have a reputation to build.

Positions in higher demand:

Intelligence officer: 16 needs an ally to gather information on war machines in development, as well as tracking of goods stolen from recently invaded cities.

Meat Shield: Combat role of questionable glory: Must be able to protect softer, magically-oriented allies from enemy advances and be hardy enough to withstand the bulk of an assault.

Okay, now out of character: Been writing up a group like this made of some of my characters, and ideas for some additional members would be nice. The three mentioned captains are 12th level in 4th Edition stats, and have the Leader, Striker, and Controller roles filled, and need a Defender to round out. Feel free to drop in any character concepts, even if it's just for some of the lower ranks.

D&Dify Some Stuff #4

Tonight, on the Money Programme, we're going to talk about money... I always loved money...

Okay, seriously, I'm thinking about all the forms currency can come in, and for some worldbuilding stuff, I'd like ideas on what can be made into currency.

In one of my settings, I've got a chain of islands where the natives have learned the art of farming pearls. One form of currency comes in the form of rectangular pearl tiles with a hole in one end so that the tiles can be threaded together with a string. They've been known to snicker slightly when a foreigner wears it as jewelry.

Of course, pearls would probably be one of the upper tier, like gold or platinum, so I'd like ideas for what a culture with relatively little metal to work with could use for pennies.

Any other interesting forms of currency are welcome in the thread. I'll be skimming Wikipedia.