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Random Crap in my TabsMakes much more sense now.
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 Name's Jason. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes, and debating on-line and off. Just read my stuff, you'll get the picture.
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  | By jthibeault, on September 9th, 2010 | 65 views  | By jthibeault, on September 8th, 2010 | 137 viewsRegular reader and local heathen Clifton sent along a link describing the mounting pressure Rev. Terry Jones is facing over his ill-advised “Burn-a-Koran Day”, due to be staged on September 11, 2010.
What do you want to bet that after he prays about his decision, he will come to the conclusion that this is a really good idea? Given that for most people, praying to your deity is just a way of reinforcing your decisions by granting them extra weight (cross-reference self-projection as God), unless he suddenly has a pang of conscience for fanning the flames of this religious crusade, he’ll come to the conclusion that his god is just fine with his plans. It’s a function of the Ouroboros aspect of prayer, as outlined in my Why Prayer is Nonsense series. Forget the fact that burning books is an execrable practice carried out by cowards who feel threatened by ideas that contradict their own. Let’s say that it’s his constitutional right to burn books. There’s nothing, technically, wrong with burning a book, right? So why not get the bonfire REALLY going? I say, for every single Qu’ran that’s thrown in the pyre, a copy of the Bible (any translation will do, but especially the one Jones believes in!), the Torah, the Upanishad, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and a VHS cassette of Jerry Maguire must needs be thrown in as well. Sound fair? If Jones says “no way”, you know why. It’s not about getting back at Muslims that he feels hurt his country. It’s, instead, entirely about trying to do violence to one religion in furtherance of another, deepening the chasm between human beings that believe in Christ and human beings that believe in Muhammad. That chasm may have existed for a very long time, practically since Christianity and Islam split, but this entire escapade is about firing another salvo. It’s about subjugating one set of delusions in preference for another. It’s about fanning the flames of an existing physical conflict in which real human beings are dying over whose fan-fiction about Yahweh is better. And that’s just ass-backward. Live and let live, and let whatever deity might actually exist prove it him/herself. (Title quote by Winston Churchill.)    | By jthibeault, on September 7th, 2010 | 78 viewsYakaru of Spirituality Is No Excuse wrote up an interesting thought-experiment — what might happen if astrology started to produce scientifically verified, empirically validated results? His answer: not what the astrologers might hope.
I mentioned such a possibility in one of my comments on the gigantic astrology debunking thread, regarding what a boon to humanity the empirical verification, testing and winnowing-out of the correct interpretation of the heavens might be. I was hoping Robert Currey or some other astrologer might take the bait and agree, as frankly, this would mean well over 90% of the astrologers out there would be, ultimately, wrong. Most of their interpretations would be bunk, the vast majority of the astrologers would be cast to the wayside, and only one true set of effects could be scientifically verified and validated. That knowledge would become part of the body of human knowledge; software would be written to provide correct interpretations without the need for a “trained astrologer” to interpret the results. It would change the world of astrology from a priest-class set of authority figures, to a scientific, precise, measurable one that can be correctly interpreted. The only assumption you need to make, to understand that the world of astrology would not survive such empirical validation, is the assumption that this universe has a specific set of principles under which it operates; that it “works one way”, and that only one interpretation of the facts is correct. Then their whole house of cards falls apart. | By jthibeault, on September 6th, 2010 | 111 views
Jodi and I aren’t at Dragon*Con geeking it up with all our intertube bretheren, but apparently our names are. At CONvergence, we took part in several panels (there’s even photographic proof of the back of my and Kelly’s heads!) with Kelly McCullough, author of the WebMage series and all-around stand-up guy, the enthusiastic and incredibly sweet Dr. Pamela L. Gay, and the immensely knowledgeable Bill Keel, discussing how to go about turning the discovery and investigation of Hanny’s Voorwerp into a web comic in order to provide a manner of outreach, bringing the obvious human interest aspects of the story to the public. As it turns out, by doing so, we volunteered to help co-author the web comic. Not that I wasn’t absolutely honoured by the fact! So we wrote several of the pages’ dialogue to help shoulder some of the burden, then Kelly gave them all a going-over to ensure we were all “on the same page”, so to speak. And for what minimal amount of effort we put in, we got a co-writing credit on the front page of the comic. This of course means that, because it was just unveiled at Dragon*Con, we’re there in spirit. The comic is free to download right here, though you should really consider purchasing a real copy for a mere $5 US + tax and shipping to help defray their costs for publication and commissioning the artwork. Which, by the way, is absolutely beautiful. For the minimal amount of effort we feel like we’ve actually contributed to this process, I’m proud to have been included. I truly feel that every little contribution to the cause of scientific outreach is worthwhile, no matter how my humility keeps me from taking any sort of credit.  | By jthibeault, on September 5th, 2010 | 89 viewsSome Japanese ROM hackers — probably the same insane folks that brought you those Impossible Mario games — have figured out a way to make a level play itself so long as you don’t touch the controller. I have to say, this is some twisted kind of epic. It must have taken months to put this together, such that the sound effects sync perfectly with the custom music inserted into the ROM image. Did you catch the Megaman tribute in the song? Yes, that made me insanely happy. | By jthibeault, on September 4th, 2010 | 69 viewsThis discovery shows that our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools to kill and/or cut up ungulates, showing the earliest use of tools to be more than a million years prior than we originally thought. We came from some pretty smart stock, evidently! | By jthibeault, on September 2nd, 2010 | 1,819 viewsStephen Hawking, arguably the greatest physicist the planet has yet known, has published a new book, The Grand Design. In it Hawking has made his strongest-ever assertion against the theistic worldview, by describing the universe as, by definition, not requiring a deity to create it. This closes another gap within which God could hide.
This is the anthropic principle — the only reason we recognize this universe as existing, is because it exists in such a way that intelligent life can form. The “god hypothesis” is unnecessary to explain why we’re here, given the possibility of multiple such universes in multiple dimensions. Naturally, people are aghast, pulling out all the old fallacies to fight back against this assertion. A quick glance at the comments field on ABC’s coverage and you will notice an argumentum ad populum, references to more popular celebrities than Hawking that believe in Christianity, inversion of the burden of proof, and all sorts of special pleading. As always, in the CNN article, the faithful get a shout-out and the last word is by an Anglican preacher who claims Hawking is not arguing against the Abrahamic God; never mentioned is the fact that he’s arguing against all gods. It’s funny how the evidence points in one direction, and the faithful get the last word despite having nothing but faith in their particular stories to point in the other. Reminds me of that one time I argued against the concept of astrology, and astrologers complained that I didn’t argue about their specific methods. Good times, good times.   | By jthibeault, on September 1st, 2010 | 206 viewsEvidently Stephen Harper is not satisfied with running a minority government like one long game of chicken, or having the truth inconveniently turn up every time they try to pull the wool over Canadian citizens’ eyes (remember “unreported crimes are skyrocketing” as an excuse for pouring billions into unnecessary new jails? You should — it wasn’t THAT long ago!). Now our favorite local tin pot dictator has gotten envious of the propaganda machine available to the right-wingers in the States and wants to make a Schedule-1 cable channel (on every TV watcher’s dime!) for Fox News. But wait, you say! Fox News is already on most Canadian cable packages! Oh, but therein lies the rub — that particular channel is quite hostile to Canada, and wouldn’t toe the Canadian Conservatives’ line. That’s why Harper, Murdoch and Ailes all met to discuss creating Fox News North, a move that would be entirely funded by every cable-subscribing goon in the country, most of whom would have no idea they were doing so (and probably wouldn’t care). George W explains.
Go sign the petition. The last thing we need is a far-right propaganda machine of Fox News’ ilk, further coarsening our political dialog and driving the polarization that’s happening all around us — a polarization that smacks uncannily of having been engineered to ruin the good thing we have. Or, rather, had. At this rate, if we ever shake Harper free from his position of power, rebuilding the democratic processes that have already been shat upon is going to take far longer than a term or two. Much of the damage of polarization and of coarsening the political discourse is already done. We’re no longer, as it were, “above” that kind of nonsense. | By jthibeault, on August 31st, 2010 | 164 viewsWell argued, TheoreticalBullshit. An excellent summary of the argument between religious folks and secular folks about where morality comes from, and defines my position pretty much to a tee. Morality is entirely a social construct, for the benefit of that society and the individual members therein. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. | By jthibeault, on August 30th, 2010 | 184 viewsYou ever notice how often the right-wing authoritarian types, e.g. Glenn Beck, misuse the word “fascist” as a generic smear to mean “I don’t like the left’s ideology”? PalMD has put together possibly the best modern example of an actual fascist movement.
And you really need to read it to understand how dead-on he is. Who’s he talking about? The socialists? The rampaging horde of immigrants? The “pseudo-Muslim” in office? The “most conservative among the landowners” ought to tip you off (especially now that I’ve also linked the words to some proof of such), but you really need to read the whole post to get an idea exactly how airtight a case PalMD makes for his assertions. Well done sir. |
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