Bodega Bay and The Birds

Posted on Sunday 24 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Today we took a mid-Memorial weekend day drive, from Oakland. We’d planned a drive up to the Russian River area, thinking to drive up the coast with a stop in Bodega Bay for lunch. We left at 11am; it took 4 hours to get to Bodega Bay. Partly due to traffic getting thru SF before the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly the slow drive (including some traffic) along Route 1, a beautiful drive once you’re along the coast, but not fast.

So we mosied around Bodega Bay and called it a day. We had oysters at Fisherman’s Cove, and a nice early dinner at Terrapin Creek Cafe Restaurant, which I am happy to plug.

Bodega Bay, of course, is the setting of the Hitchcock film The Birds, and I was fascinated to look around see if I could spot any specific locations. The only one I saw was the wharf area where, in the film, locals complain in a diner, Tippi Hedren is trapped in a phone booth as the birds attack, and this attack triggers a gasoline fire at a fill-up station. The wharf is still there, the diner greatly expanded.

We drove all the way around the bay, wondering if the house where Rod Taylor’s character (Mitch Brenner) lived actually existed. No sign of it.

Of course, there are any number of websites (and I have a book, somewhere, about film locations), that explain in great detail what scenes were shot where. E.g., this one, http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/birds.html, which explains that schoolhouse where the birds sat on power lines before attacking children was actually a few miles inland, not right above the bay as it seems in the film; and this one, http://www.bodegabay.com/index.php/visitor-info/articles-reviews-and-stories/41-the-birds-and-bodega-bay, which explains that the Brenner [Rod Taylor’s character] house was used only for exterior shots and has long since been demolished. (The interior scenes of this house and other scenes were filmed on soundstages back in LA.)

No surprise of course; all films of this era mixed live locations, usually with somewhat fictitious geography, and scenes filmed on sets in Hollywood.

But it was impressive to see the general area of Bodega Bay, and how it did overall resemble the locale of the film. I don’t have a conscious bucket list — but visiting this location is something I’ve long thought about, and am happy to have fulfilled.

Posted in Films, Personal history | Comments Off on Bodega Bay and The Birds

Links and Comments: The Duggars, and other Religious Matters

Posted on Friday 22 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve been only vaguely more aware of the Duggar family, who apparently host a reality show to show off their 19 children and their piety, than I was aware of the Duck Dynasty family a year or more ago when they were in the news, but haven’t paid any close attention to them. With the scandal in the past couple days of their oldest son having been charged with molesting several girls (including his own sisters!), it seems they’re just another in a growing list of sex scandals among far-right fundamentalists. So, hypocrisy from the right; yawn.

But what’s especially interesting about the Duggars is not just that their pious zeal leads them to actively campaign against gay rights (and impugn that gays are despicable people in general — given to molesting children!), but they apparently are an extreme example of the folks — examples come from all around the world — who shield their children from the outside world, from modernity in general, and one can only suppose anything scientific that would undermine or question their faith-based worldview.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate pities Josh Duggar. (With a photo of the family having lunch with Rick Santorum…)

A boy grows up in a controlling, cultlike family that rejects Enlightenment values and closes off much of the outside world. He is deprived of any conception of morality separate from a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. His intellectual and ethical development is stunted by reactionary, dogmatic views about gender and sexuality. He is told that women were made to be subservient to men, to be obedient to their masters. How should we react when it comes to light that this boy repeatedly molested young girls?
…
Although TLC goes to great lengths to mask this fact, the Duggar family is a cult. They forbid their children from exploring outside ideas and expression, carefully monitoring every word and image they are exposed to. They forbid them from wearing shorts. They homeschool them in order to indoctrinate them with backward beliefs. They refuse to let their adult daughters kiss or hold hands before marriage and demand to read every text between their daughters and their suitors. They adhere to a fringe Christian movement called the “Christian patriarchy,” which commands total female submission to men and limited education for women. The Duggars do everything they can to control their children’s minds, then brainwash them with misogynistic dogma.

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Jerry Coyne, who just published a new book, did an interview with fivebooks.com recommending his five favorite books on “the incompatibility of religion and science” (which is the theme of his book). I’ve read one of these (Dennett), and have two others.

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Catching up with several articles last weekend at Salon.

  • The end of religion as we know it: Why churches can no longer hide the truth. Daniel Dennett has updated his book about closeted religious clergy… who go through the motions without anymore believing.

    Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

  • Richard Dawkins doesn’t “give a damn”: The big mistake he’s making about religion. The writer claims it’s more than about whether religious claims are ‘true’ (Dawkins’ mistake); it’s about

    Religions make all sorts of claims about the empirical world, almost all of which are false. Atheists are right to criticize these claims wherever they appear. But denying the truth claims of religion won’t suffice, because religion is about much more than truth; it’s about meaning, values, tradition, consolation, community, and transcendence. Dawkins flew right past this point in his response. That’s unfortunate.

    I disagree; this actually is the theme of Coyne’s book; it does matter, because in their zeal to cling to meaning and tradition, many faithful actively deny the reality of the world in which we live, to the extent of hobbling their own offspring (cf. the Duggars), but also actively imposing these views and blinders on the rest of society. Even if many religious people don’t take scriptural claims literally, it’s the minority who do who cause all the trouble, and who are a threat to the ongoing progress of an enlightened society.

  • And then Jeffrey Tayler takes on not just the Republican presidential candidates, who all pander to some degree or another to the faithful who form their base (though some of them — Cruz? Santorum? actually believe it all)– but also President Obama, for similar, if milder, pandering. This doesn’t surprise me; as I’ve said here, no politician gets elected to office anywhere, in any society, without appealing to the beliefs and prejudices of the common people. But it’s nice to see Tayler spell things out: Obama, Bush and Carson believe this nonsense? Our faith-addled, God-fearing leaders need to put superstition aside.

    But I won’t deal with the faith-imbued cretinism of the Republicans in this essay.  What concerns me now is what President Obama has just wrought to insult that most aggrieved (yet steadfastly growing) American minority, the advocates of reason, those who insist on evidence before accepting the truth of a given proposition, especially grand propositions about the origins of the universe and our species.

    Tayler takes apart Obama’s National Day of Prayer proclimation, in detail. The essay concludes:

    Religion is not some metaphysical conceit concerning only those who profess it; it menaces our national well-being and is dumbing down our people.  Faith has always stood on the wrong side of the quest for truth, starting most egregiously with Christian theologians objecting to “heresies” that posited nature following laws (an infringement on God’s “omnipotence”), the earth orbiting the sun, or humankind sharing kinship with other primates.  The last two “heresies” are alive and well: one out of five Americans believe the sun circles the earth, four out of 10 think God created humankind less than 10,000 years ago, and only 28 percent of teachers consistently teach evolution.  Surely a generation of heavily faith-polluted home-schooling plays into this, but so does God-friendly prattle proffered by politicians – including, of course, our Panderer-in-Chief and his Prayer Day Proclamation – an outrage to rationalists everywhere who expect the United States to set an example.
    …
    It’s long past time for Obama, and the pack of faith-mongering pols clambering to replace him, to realize this, and help America join the rest of the civilized world.

    H. L. Mencken once wrote of the “graveyard of the dead gods” and listed all those deities, from Resheph to Baal, Tezcatilpoca to Huitzilopochtli and dozens more, now forgotten.  Yet in their day, “To doubt them was to die,” noted Mencken, “usually at the stake.  Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children were butchered, cattle were driven off.”

    It’s time to dig one more grave – and fill it.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Progress, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Duggars, and other Religious Matters

Instant Insanity

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Does anyone remember this? Wikipedia: Instant Insanity

This was a puzzle that was produced in the late 1960s, a stack of four plastic cubes, with the sides of each cube a seemingly random pattern of red, white, green, and blue sides. The object of the puzzle, once you unwrap it and scramble it, is to restack the cubes such that each side of the stack has all four colors. (Before you unwrapped it, the cubes were stacked in the solved solution.)

Here is the solution. These are front, right, left, and back colors. Start at the top, and there is only one cube that will fit each sequence.

blue red blue white
white green red green
red white green blue
green blue white red

I think I bought this puzzle when I was… 12 or 13, in 1967 or 1968. It was after our family had moved from southern California, to Cambridge, Illinois, a small Bradbury-esque town where we stayed for a few months in my grandfather’s house until my father bought a house in a Chicago suburb (Glen Ellyn), where we subsequently lived for three years while he worked as an engineering architect for what became known as Fermilab, and where I finished junior high school and started high school (at Glenbard East — everything is online these days!).

In my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, I brought home this cellophane-wrapped Instant Insanity puzzle, bought from the local drug store/soda fountain, Swan’s — which shows up now as a liquor store! — and where I wrote down and memorized the sequence of colors around each cube, the sequences I remember to this day.

That’s how much a geek I have always been.

(Years later was Rubik’s Cube. Another post.)

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Instant Insanity

Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Our Best Presidents Are Flip-Floppers

Politicians are attacked for changing their positions due to political expediency — as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a one-time biology major, has done about the teaching of creationism in schools, to appeal to his ignorant base — but changing one’s mind in reaction to new evidence should be a measure of intellectual integrity. (That’s how science works.) Of course, the link above is about how politicians do this for political expediency…

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The event of this week is the publication of Jerry Coyne’s long-awaited book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Got my copy today. Its topics are familiar to me as themes of this blog, but it’s nice seeing all these issues summarized and encapsulated into a rigorously referenced and indexed volume. I’ll blog my own summary and responses in a week or so.

Coyne’s own distillation of the themes of this book formed this short essay at The Scientist:

But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. The tools are many, including observation of nature, peer review and replication of results, and above all, the hegemony of doubt and criticality. The best characterization of science I know came from physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

In contrast, religion has no way to adjudicate its truth claims, for those claims rest on ancient scripture, revelation, dogma, and above all, faith: belief without sufficient evidence. Is there one God, or many? Does he want us to work on the Sabbath? Is there an afterlife? Was Jesus the son of God? The problem, of course, is that faith is no way to decide what’s true. It is, à la Feynman, an institutionalized way of fooling yourself. Religion acts like science in making claims about reality, but then morphs into pseudoscience in the way it rejects disconfirming evidence and insulates its claims against testing. The toolkit of science is—and will remain—the only way to discover what’s real, whether in biology, physics, history, or archaeology. Religion can offer communality and can buttress morality, but has no purchase on truth.

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The Independent: All fiction follows one of six basic storylines, according to new research.

I recall Hemingway (or was in Heinlein?) said there are only three basic stories. Anyway, here is more evidence that I need to understand concerning my Provisional Conclusion about narratives — that we as human beings, our minds having been honed by evolution for survival, rather than accurate perception of the real world, interpret everything in terms of cause and effect, beginnings, middles, and ends — because our daily lives involve incidents that have consequences. And this is why we have such negative reactions to narratives (e.g. certain TV series) that don’t end as we think they should.

The most popular storyline, according this article:

What do the following novels have in common: Pride and Prejudice, Brideshead Revisited and Carry On Jeeves? Well yes, they’re all written in English by famous English authors, and they all feature characters and dialogue; but on the face of it, they’re completely different. Not to Professor Matthew Jockers from Stanford University, they’re not.

According to his computerised analysis, they’d all be examples of the “Man in a Hole” form of fiction – an emotional arc in which our hero/heroine starts out happy, hits a patch of unhappiness (Lizzie Bennett discovers her baby sister’s been seduced by the cad Wickham, Charles Ryder discovers his best friend Sebastian is a hopeless drunk, Bertie is tasked with stealing an embarrassing manuscript from a prospective father-in-law) and winds up happier and/or wiser at the end.

Prof Jockers suggests that 46 per cent of the world’s novels are variants of the Man in a Hole storyline. …

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There have been numerous articles in recent weeks and months about “triggering events”, about whether students in literature classes at universities, say, should be warned in advance that the various classic works of literature (Shakespeare, et al., et al.) that certain situations in these works might … upset them. That is, acknowledging the reality that many events in human history have involved murder, rape, sexism, and so on, which while hopefully will not affect any of these students’ lives, but which nevertheless actually happened in the past, might be troubling to their studies.

Here’s Jerry Coyne again, at New Republic, on this subject: Life Is “Triggering.” The Best Literature Should Be, Too.

The pathway of such trigger warnings—not just for sexual assault but for violence, bigotry, and racism—will eventually lead to every work of literature being labeled as potentially offensive. There goes the Bible, there goes Dante, there goes Huck Finn (loaded with racism), there goes all the old literature written before we realized that minorities, women, and gays weren’t second-class people. And as for violence and hatred, well, they’re everywhere, for they’re just as much parts of literature as parts of life. Crime and Punishment? Trigger warning: brutal violence against an old woman. The Great Gatsby? Trigger warning: violence against women (remember when Tom Buchanan broke Mrs. Wilson’s nose?). The Inferno? Trigger warning: graphic violence, sodomy, and torture. Dubliners? Trigger warning: pedophilia. 

Which is to say, the *whole point* of reading literature is to expose readers to other ideas and realities, about why other people have different ideas about what is true and proper, and while what you may upset about in any particular story is not something necessarily universal. Which leads us back to Coyne’s new book, about how science and faith have such different, and dramatically differently effective, methods for identifying what is real about the world.

Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Posted on Monday 18 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Major news this past week, covered by many sources.

NPR: Christians In U.S. On Decline As Number Of ‘Nones’ Grows, Survey Finds

Washington Post: Christianity faces sharp decline as Americans are becoming even less affiliated with religion

It’s often been noted that religiosity drops with rising economic conditions and educational levels, but this shift seems to be something different – the polarization of American politics, and the association of religion with retrogressive social policies.

And there have been several articles like this recently, pointing out how the modern Christian fundamentalist movement is an artifact, not of anything our ‘Founding Fathers’ did or intended, but on social and economic and political forces of the 20th century.

Salon: Christian fundamentalism is a capitalist construct: The secret history of American religion.

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Leonard Mlodinow, whose new book THE UPRIGHT THINKERS I just bought, has an associated op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago: It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science.

This is about how the common narratives about certain scientific discoveries — Darwin and the finches, Newton and the apple, Hawking and black holes [as depicted in the film The Theory of Everything] — are at best simplifications of much more complex and subtle events. To me this is about the human bias toward narrative — making complex events simple and easy to understand within some basic template.

We all run into difficult problems in life, and we will be happier and more successful if we appreciate that the answers often aren’t quick, or easy.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project summed up a recent study by saying that the negative effects of today’s ubiquitous media “include a need for instant gratification.” The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.

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Along the same lines, an NPR story this morning by Shankar Vedantam, about how TV show finales (in particular last night’s Mad Men finale) affect, of all things, the stock market. It’s about how important narratives are to our lives, and how the endings of stories by characters we’ve come to identify with leave people in a kind of mourning, and thus more risk-averse.

Some psychologists have made the argument that for most of our evolutionary history, the only characters we saw around us were real people who were physically around us. … Today, a lot of the faces and voices we hear around us come from technology. And at a conscious level, we know those people are not actually in our physical presence. But at an unconscious level, the machinery in our brains, which evolved in this different time period, makes us feel as though these people are actually our real companions. And so this is why when people hear about scandals and gossip involving celebrities or politicians, we react to those scandals and that gossip as if we’re hearing about actual people in our lives when in fact we have no connection with those people whatsoever.

Posted in Human Progress, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Bad Astronomy, 1

Posted on Tuesday 12 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m currently reading through the eponymous book by the popular ‘Bad Astronomy’ blogger Phil Plait, now posting regularly at Slate.com, where he celebrates scientific breakthroughs and criticizes anti-science movements (anti-vaxxers, state-sanctioned teaching of creationism, etc.). His first book, which I’ll review more fully once I finish it, explores various misconceptions about astronomy (thus the title), from ideas about the tides to the illusion of the moon’s size near the horizon, to the moon landing ‘hoax’, to top examples of bad astronomy in Hollywood pictures.

Some of these, e.g. the moon illusion, I’m familiar with since my earliest reading — e.g. Martin Gardner’s Science Puzzlers, which I must have bought at a book fair in the 7th grade.

Which is to say, an underlying theme of this book, and of that old book, is how human intuition and perception can be misleading. (And thus one of my provisional conclusions.) A paragraph from Plait, page 86:

My point here is that often our perceptions conflict with reality. Usually reality knows what it is doing and it’s we, ourselves, who are wrong. In a sense, that’s not just the point of this chapter but indeed this whole book. Maybe we should always keep that thought in mind.

Posted in Astronomy, Book Notes, MInd | Comments Off on Bad Astronomy, 1

Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Posted on Monday 11 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Contrast the right’s paranoid claims of a war on religion with their very real war on abortion (NYT). When laws are being passed demanding a 48 hour waiting period before being let into church, then I’ll believe there’s a war on religion.

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Mary McNamara in the LA Times discusses the approaching conclusion of Mad Men, along the way pondering why it is we (or some people at least) obsess over certain shows. It goes back, in a way, to Star Trek.

Now that ‘Mad Men’ has changed the TV landscape, what does it all mean?

Not since “Lost” has a show been so combed through, picked over and commented on. “What Would Don Draper Do?” became a cultural construct. Gothamist began a standing feature called “Unpacking Mad Men,” which details the show’s historical references in alarming detail and more general tea leaf reading quickly became ubiquitous. Aided by social media, Easter egg hunts followed virtually every episode: Was that a secret reference to “MASH” (Esquire.com)? Did someone on Reddit find the Rosetta Stone of Sterling Cooper (Uproxx.com)? Was that a dream sequence in reverse, and what did it mean (slate.com)?

Audience speculation and detailed exegesis drove certain shows before “Mad Men” —”Star Trek” built an ancillary industry on symbolism and trivia, as did the soon-to-be-resurrected “The X-Files.” Indeed, the foundation of geek culture, now a dominant force in pop culture, is careful reading, painstaking cataloging and wild theorizing.

Something here about the necessity of narrative, and of teasing meaning out of things that do not necessarily have any meaning.

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NY Times Book Review: review of ‘Speak Now’ by Kenji Yoshino, part memoir and part account of a past Supreme Court decision concerning same-sex marriage.

It’s an expression of gratitude for his own growth, from a troubled young man for whom “common milestones — falling in love, marrying, raising children — seemed unattainable,” into a happily married father of two as a result of remarkable changes in the law beginning in 2003. That year, the Supreme Court outlawed criminal bans on sodomy and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts became the first American court to legalize same-sex marriage. He writes, “My own life has deprived me of any capacity to be cynical about the law.”

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NY Times Magazine: John Herrman’s Letter of Recommendation: ‘X Minus One’, about a 1950s radio show that adapted science fiction stories of the time into radio plays. It’s an insightful look into how SF has regarded the future, and how that regard may or may not have changed since then.

Fiction about the future doesn’t often age gracefully. Its predictions harden, inevitably, into claims. At its worst, “X Minus One” is dated drama told well, but its better episodes have matured into half-hour exercises in a peculiar and intoxicating form of temporal eavesdropping. They let us watch, with great ease and clarity, people who are straining much harder to see us. Usually they’re looking just slightly off to the side. Sometimes they’re looking the wrong way entirely. But occasionally, in the show’s most thrillingly prescient moments, it’s as if they were staring straight at us.

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Friendly Atheist: Conservative Christian Comedian Doesn’t Realize His Critique of Islam Also Applies to His Own Faith

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And the latest from Jeffrey Tayler: The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face

Posted in Narrative, Religion, science fiction, The Gays | Comments Off on Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Natalie Angier, The Canon

Posted on Thursday 7 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

As I was unpacking books these past few weeks, at our new home in Oakland, I came across this book which I hadn’t yet read, but which seemed appropriate to read in the context of my current project to consolidate my thinking about science and philosophy with the perspectives of science fiction and fantasy. So here is one more piece of the puzzle I am putting together.

The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner for writing about biology for the New York Times. The introduction describes her motivation for writing this book: her dismay that her friends gave up their museum memberships as their kids grew up. She realizes most adults don’t care about science — even find it boring. Scientists are not good at promoting the relevancy of their fields, and she summarizes the familiar arguments for promoting scientific literacy. And science, she emphasizes, is fun.

The foundation of the book is hundreds of interviews Angier had done [I’m using past tense since the book was published 8 years ago] with real-life scientists [as opposed to citing and quoting from books by those scientists]. The result is, as it says, a whirlwind summary of the basic points of the major scientific disciplines.

That’s cool. But the author’s style is the opposite of matter-of-factual; it veers between ingratiating and grating. She likes cute, sometimes clever, metaphors, like, e.g., describing entropy (and potential energy):

The energy is there, but it might as well not be, like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.

Or a teenager. Cute. A longer example, about the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

The second law might also be called the “Humpty Dumpty directive.” Once the big, smirking, pedantic, cravated egg had his great fall, all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, all the plastic surgeons, duct tape, and members of the National Transportation Safety Board couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. The second law is the reason why either you or a hired professional must expend considerable effort to clean you house, but if you leave the place alone for two weeks while on vacation, it will get dirty for free. It explains why some drinks taste good cold, some taste good hot, and most taste lousy at room temperature — red wines, of course, excepted. The second law guarantees a certain degree of chaos and mishap in your life no matter how compulsively you plan your schedule and triple-check every report. To err is not just human; it’s divined.

So if you’re not completely turned off by that style, the book is useful. Especially for the first three chapters, which address general concepts about “thinking scientifically”, probabilities, and calibrations. Science is not a body of fact, but a way of viewing the world; it assumes that there is an objective reality. Evidence counts, not opinions. Mental biases are the enemy of science. Scientific thinking is about overcoming the intuitive understandings we develop in childhood.

Probabilities: a statistics teacher split her class into two parts, one to flip a coin a hundred times to capture a set of actual random results, and the other to create a list of what they thought a set of random results would look like. The teacher could always tell the difference: because randomness looks nonrandom, including runs that people think do not look random. Such patterns in randomness suggests hidden meanings… thus superstitions.

Interesting asides about Enrico Fermi’s fondness for challenging co-workers with on-the-fly estimations: how many piano tuners are in Chicago? The goal was to get within an order of magnitude of the actual right answer.

And the third chapter is about Calibration: Playing with Scales. Look at the stars, look at the Grand Canyon. “Throughout history, people have wildly misjudged distances, proportions, comparisons, the bead of being … We have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythms of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects that we can readily see, touch, and count on…”

Thus we perceive numbers of things in groups of five; our unit of time the second, is about a heartbeat. And so on.

After these three initial chapters, there are six following chapters that address:

  • Physics: Feynmann’s single sentence to leave to survivors of a worldwide cataclysm; the idea that in American high schools physics should be taught first, not last; the atom; charge; ‘electricity’; matter and energy, potential vs kinetic; electricity and magnetism; the vast range of ‘light’; the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics
  • Chemistry: Chemists have a persecution complex. But 115 elements generate a virtually infinite number of molecules, which depend on bonds: covalent, ionic, metallic, hydrogen. Why carbon is the most versatile element. The chemistry of change, from solid, liquid, gas, depends on bonds.
  • Evolutionary Biology: the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and the resistence to it. Familiar quote: “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution” (Theodosius Dobzhansky). The chapter goes on with many familiar examples and evidence. And how evolution deniers evolve, ironically, from fundamentalists to ‘intelligent design’ advocates, supporting the idea of irreducible complexity, which amounts to just giving up about any idea of coming up with an explanation for anything.
  • Molecular Biology: Bacteria are everywhere. The central structure of biology is the cell. Prokaryotic, eukaryotic. How proten shapes determines chemical interactions. DNA and genes.
  • Geology: The planet records its own history. Plate tectonics. Comets brought water to Earth; the oceans are 3 to 4 billions years old, but our present atmosphere, with its oxygen content, was not established until about 400 million years ago.
  • Astronomy: about the two big discoveries of the 20th century. Astronomy is the study of light. Hubble realized the ‘nebulae’ were other galaxies, and noticed that all other galaxies were moving away from us. Balloon analogy: dots on an inflating balloon all see themselves moving away from all others. The deduction of a beginning led to the prediction about background radiation– that was confirmed. The earliest stars exploded, creating higher elements, which enabled our planet and life. Is there anyone out there? Perhaps. But Drake Equation.
Posted in Science | Comments Off on Natalie Angier, The Canon

Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Posted on Wednesday 6 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Balancing the federal budget has a simple-minded, intuitive appeal, but it’s not actually necessary. The nation is not a family; and even families don’t balance their budgets from year to year. (E.g. mortgages.)

Vox: Families don’t balance their budgets, and neither should the federal government

Paul Krugman has discussed many times, but it’s nice to link to another source.

You’d think even Republican politicians would understand this, but of course, they’re playing to a base that doesn’t.

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Friendly Atheist: New Research Shows the Existential Threat Atheists Pose to Believers; No Wonder We’re So Disliked!

Which of course supports my Provisional Conclusion #8: the resistance by believers to anything that would threaten their worldview.

Posted in Atheism, Economics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler

Posted on Tuesday 5 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Morning Heresy, Dan Dennett is interviewed at Religion Dispatches about, among other things, why the edifice of religion seems to be cracking:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

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Re a previous post from The Atlantic about The Science of Superstition, with an item about how autism, i.e. that entails diminished social skills, is correlated with nonbelief in God and other supernatural entities, here’s the latest “Study of Studies” from The Atlantic, When Emotional Intelligence Goes Wrong, which correlates high social skills with narcissism, manipulation of others, and gullibility to charlatans.

In a 2013 study, college students were shown news footage of people pleading for a missing family member’s return—half of whom were in fact responsible for the person’s disappearance. When the students rated the sincerity of these pleas, those with higher EI were more likely to be duped, perhaps due to overconfidence in their ability to read others [11].

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Also in this month’s Atlantic: What Was the Worst Prediction of All Time?.

Examples include abolishing war by 2000, how Apple would never come out with a cell phone, that nuclear power would be too cheap to bother measuring, and others. Every one of these is very interesting, and I fit these into the framework of my worldview at item 10, as among the failures of science fiction and/or futurism in trying to predict the future. SF isn’t about predicting the future, of course, but many others do try predicting the future, and often fail. Why would this be? Something about the volatility of human culture, in contrast to the relative certainties of science.

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Latest from Jeffrey Tayler (he should write a book) at Salon: Ted Cruz, our ayatollah: Fight back now, or welcome to the 2016 religious right hellstorm.

As usual at Salon, the subtitle is more on-target than the perhaps inflammatory title. This subtitle: “Way too many of us believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of misanthropic myths”.

Much of this piece consists of Tayler’s responses to a critique of an earlier post by Tayler from Matt Barber, “a columnist for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the founder of WND’s Christian fundamentalist site Barbwire.com“. Sample:

Barber then chooses to embarrass himself with a declaration that confirms he should stick to batting in the Little League of modern-day thinkers:

Every man, woman and child understands through both general revelation and human reason that this unfathomably intricate, staggeringly fine-tuned universe didn’t create and fine-tune itself. It’s a tiny minority of angry, self-deluded materialists like Jeffrey Tayler who deny this self-evident truth.

Many believers might indeed find such a boner-studded profession of ignorance credible (and surely Barber does, given that he earned all three of his degrees at religious institutions), but secularists who read grown-up books will immediately see how it contradicts what physics and biology tell us about the cosmos.  The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions.  (And it’s still expanding.)  Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection.  This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.”  (For more information, Barber might wish to set aside his magic book and delve into the oeuvre of the theoretical physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, and, of course, Dawkins’ own “The God Delusion.”)

He does tie it back to the Salon editors’ title:

Barber’s blog is but a symptom of the seemingly incurable malady of faith. In fact there is a remedy — free speech, applied liberally to infected areas. Rationalists must resist all calls to show respect for religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other faith with universalist pretensions. Recall the damage these stultifying ideologies of control and repression have done the cause of progress throughout history. And remember the stakes now, with so many of our presidential candidates flaunting their belief, and seats on the Supreme Court likely to free up, especially post-2016. We either fight back by speaking out now, or we may end up living in a Christian-theme-park version of Iran, with Ted Cruz as our ayatollah.

This is about my Provisional Conclusion #8: Resistance. But also about #9: a species “reset” could involve a religious revolution that cancels out the progress of our 21st century. Religious forces have held humanity in thrall for centuries in the past. (And there are SF works that describe such religious revolutions, thinking of works by Margaret Atwood off-hand. The alignment of my PvC framework with SF is where this blog is going.)

Posted in Psychology, Religion, science fiction | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler