Liquid
I know I’m on vacation, but this seems important: for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has deemed an entire state of matter to be a national security risk.
Humor
The Presence and Absence of Santa
Cornelia Dean, in today’s New York Times, has a collective review of a number of new books about the relationship between science and belief in Santa Claus. Here’s the key graf:
Of course, just as the professors of Christmas spirit cannot prove (except to themselves) that Santa Claus exists, the advocates for secular holidayism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that Santa does not exist.
This is the crucial point that can’t be emphasized enough in discussions of the Christmas problem. These scientists, always talking about how they can “prove” this or that about the universe. But, if they’re honest, they admit that they can’t prove Santa doesn’t exist. Sure, we’ve had people up at the North Pole looking around, and they didn’t see any evidence of his workshop. But the belief in an actual physical workshop, right there on the ice and with elves and whatnot, is just a colorful remnant of an earlier, less sophisticated Christmasology. Today we understand that Santa is an ineffable spirit, who doesn’t directly intervene in the physical realm (except for Christmas eve, of course). Science and Christmas should be understood as distinct and non-overlapping realms of inquiry; they may work together, but can never come directly into opposition. And yes, there’s good evidence that many presents are actually brought out by parents rather than by Kris Kringle himself, but it seems implausible that all of them are. Santa is just a more elegant hypothesis.
Most of all: without the transcendent moral guidance that Santa provides, how will we know which children are naughty, and which are nice? Are we supposed to leave that up to individuals and communities to decide? Without Santa’s equitable system of rewards and punishments (coal), there would be no reason whatsoever for kids to behave themselves. They would just run around, tearing wings of of flies, setting schools on fire, murdering their enemies. No matter what you might think about the empirical case for and against the existence of Santa, we can all agree that the world is a better place if we believe in him.
PZ has more.
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The Intelligent Designer Speaks
Hear a rare interview with the Intelligent Designer. I’m not quite sure I agree that this is his “best work,” but what can you do? Artists.
Via Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist.
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Feminism: Destroying the Planet
Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out. Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills’ New York Review of Books article on Harvey Mansfield’s studly paean to all that is virtuous and masculine, entitled simply Manliness. (Now, it’s true that the sight of Professor Mansfield giving a high-five to Stephen Colbert demonstrated pretty clearly that, on the electrical-appliances scale of manliness, Harvey is less of a drill press or band saw and more of a cappucino maker or perhaps a motorized salad spinner. But that doesn’t affect the persuasive grandeur of his argument.) At the same time, I was mulling over the implications of An Inconvenient Truth, the global-warming scare-movie from noted beta-male Al Gore. Mr. Tree-Hugger himself would prance about in front of his fancy charts and graphs that looked like this:
And then, girly-man that he is, he would act all scared that the world was going to melt or some such nonsense. Crazy alarmist.
In a flash of insight, it hit me: this must be feminism’s fault, somehow. Those pushy women have tipped the balance of the universal order, and thrown Nature’s intricate equilibrium out of whack. Fortunately, I was handed just the tool I needed to prove this obviously-correct hypothesis by Brad DeLong, in the form of Gapminder World from Google. Check it out, peeps: here is a graph of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, as a function of the ratio of girls to boys attending school in different countries.
You can see it right there, science doesn’t lie. The correlation is clear as the Los Angeles haze — countries that educate women are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, unless you’re crazy enough to think that it’s the CO2 that is causing all those girls to go get themselves an education, I think the implication is obvious: feminism is destroying the planet. We can now add this to Professor Mansfield’s insight that gender equality leads to less exciting sex lives, as one more level-headed condemnation of these tiresome females and their outdated Enlightenment aspirations.
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Treason in Base Ten
Hey, anyone remember the metric system? Perhaps some of our international readers could provide insight into what it is like to live in a world governed by units that come neatly packaged by factors of ten, rather than the charmingly anthropocentric system of ounces and inches and acres that we favor here in the U.S. True, some of us science types will occasionally speak of centimeters, but in my circles we usually set hbar=c=1 and express everything in electron volts, so it’s barely metric at all.
Via Lawyers, Guns & Money, Dean Dad reminds us of the time when a titanic struggle raged for the soul of this great nation, with the forces of American exceptionalism valiantly beating back the invaders who would have us measure football fields in meters rather than yards. (Or, even worse, “metres”!) Without the patriots of the Reagan Administration to save us from the malaisical cosmopolitan wussification favored by Jimmy Carter, the speed limit on many interstate highways might be 90 km/hour even today.
Some of our younger Gen-Y readers might be skeptical that this was ever such a big deal. One of my favorite stories recalls a discussion in an English class at the end of my first semester in college in 1984. Our mischievous professor asked each of the students to give an example of a belief we held that we thought would be controversial among our fellows. Given that this was a middle-class suburban Catholic institution, there were too many ways for me to get in serious trouble here (um, “God doesn’t exist”? “abortion should be legal”?). But I chickened out, and settled on something that I thought satisfied the letter of the assignment without being too crazy — I declared my support for the metric system.
You would have thought I had called the Pope a Communist. The class (including the professor) exploded in exasperation, rolling their eyes and moaning “Oh no, you’re not one of those people, are you?” People are very attached to their weights and measures, as it turns out. But I stuck courageously to my convictions, defending the usefulness of making easy conversions between units at different scales.
If I were to do it again, though, I might go with the god-doesn’t-exist business.
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Holy Bibble
The Bible, whatever it’s other flaws or virtues, is undeniably an impressive compendium of entertaining stories. Of course, it can be tough slogging to read the whole thing from start to finish, suffused as it is with miscellaneous begats and exhortations against the eating of shellfish.
Fortunately, you can now get your Bible stories in easily-digestible comic form, from Holy Bibble. Cannan and Lucas have set themselves the task of rewriting the entire bible as humorous sequential art. Admittedly, some poetic license is occasionally taken with the material — I’m pretty sure there was no trip to Japan in the original Scriptures. But all of the stories are based on real Bible narratives, and you do learn a lot by reading them.
For example, we’ve all heard the story of Lot and his wife. Yahweh had decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their various sinful activities. Lot, being virtuous, was given advance warning, and fled with his wife and two daughters. But his wife couldn’t resist looking back one last time, and was turned into a pillar of salt. God works in mysterious ways.
But the afterstory is so much more interesting. Lot and his daughters apparently thought they were completely alone, and there was some question as to how the family line would be able to continue. The women decided to take matters into their own hands — they got their father drunk and raped him in order to get themselves pregnant. The scheme worked, and they eventually gave birth to sons who fathered the Moabites and the Ammonites, two rival tribes to Israel.
The unwitting seductions actually happened on two successive nights, so one may question whether Lot shouldn’t have figured out what was going on. On the other hand, his daughters may have had some issues, as Lot had previously offered them up to a rampaging mob of Sodomites. At least, that’s what I gather from the comics; but apparently it’s all in the book.
Cain’s trip to Japan, though — pretty sure they made that up.
Update: David Plotz at Slate blogs the Bible!
The wrongness singularity
The blogosphere has been having its fun with this little bit of instant punditry from Glenn Reynolds:
Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.
Far be it from me to add anything to the trenchant political analysis already available. But as a Physics Blog, we feel it’s our duty here to point out the exciting scientific consequences that our more humanistical friends have thus far missed: the possibility that Prof. Reynolds has discovered a new state of wrongness.
You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can’t pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!
I count four declarative statements in Instapundit’s two sentences. (“… prices would plummet,” “dictators would be broke,” “poor nations would benefit,” “we’d be called imperialist oppressors.”) Now let’s count how many time he is wrong.
- prices would plummet — No, they wouldn’t. As it turns out, the Saudi and Iranian oil fields are running at very close to full capacity; any increase would be at most a perturbation.
- dictators would be broke — Not sure which dictators we’re talking about here — the ones we just deposed? In fact, dictators have shown a remarkable ability to not be broke even in countries without vast stores of oil wealth.
- poor nations would benefit — Because it’s really the poor countries that guzzle oil? This one baffles me.
- we’d be called imperialist oppressors — Now, in a strict sense this is not wrong. We would be called that. Because invading sovereign countries in order to take over their natural resources is more or less the definition of imperialist oppression. However, Reynolds’ implication is clearly that we should not be called imperialist oppressors, that it would somehow be unfair. Which is crazy. So can we count that as wrong? Yes!
So indeed we count four instances of wrongness in only four declarative statements — Fermi degeneracy! No more wrongness should be possible.
But as Tim Lambert points out, Instapundit managed to be wrong yet another time, by begging a question and then getting the wrong answer!
- The subjunctive clause opening the first sentence cleverly slides from invading Saudi Arabia and Iran to running pumps at full speed. Actually not something that would happen in the reality-based world! As Tim says, “Yeah, because that’s pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq.”
So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.
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Argument from banana
Kevin Schnitzius pointed me to this video, which has been around for a while but was recently mentioned by the Disgruntled Chemist. Skip to about the two-minute mark to get some deep insight into the creationist mindset, which Tara from Aetiology (which has since moved) accurately dubbed the “argument from banana.”
You really do need to see the video, but I’ll spill the beans for the impatient: bananas are the quintessentially designed object. Not only do they fit snugly into a human hand, they even have ridges to allow for a tighter grip, a built-in color-coding that lets us know when they’re ripe, and — my favorite — a convenient pull-tab at the top for easy peeling! What better proof for the existence of God could one need?
I do wonder what they make of the Durian. Perhaps the Designer has a sense of humor?
Update: If you want to know more (perhaps your faith in naturalism has been shaken?), the video comes from a series called The Way of the Master, featuring Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. It purportedly shows in 70 countries, and has been awarded honors by the National Religious Broadcasters association.
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“You’re saying he’s actually Bi?”
Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky. I’m not really sure what there is to add to that, except my admiration that they pulled it off. Check Wikipedia if you’ve never heard of Ali G, or of Noam Chomsky. Via Omni Brain, by way of Mixing Memory.
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Religious kids have all the fun
From Ernie’s 3D Pancakes, perhaps the best holiday gift ever — the Plush Plagues Bag for Passover!
Yes, you can have soft fuzzy representations of each of the ten plagues sent by Yahweh to annoy the Egyptians into letting Moses and his people go. Types of pestilence represented include:
- A spooky eyed drop of blood
- A Frog — for frogs, of course
- A Giant Lice for lice.
- Cow for cattle disease
- Black Locust for locusts
- A white satin lump of hail
- A black cube of darkness
- An icky boil on a piece of flesh!
- A snarling lion’s head for wild beasts
- and last of all a very sad head – for death of the first born.
Descriptions taken verbatim from the vendor, who goes on to say — “The frog, lice, cow and locust wriggle and roll their eyes, quiver, buzz and move when you pull their string and are apx 4.5″ long.” With toys like this, how come Judaism isn’t the world’s most popular religion?
I mean, seriously. A black cube of darkness! With eyes. Nothing could be more awesome than that.
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