Scottish Nous

Test Your Sense of Humor

I am not addicted to online quizzes.  In fact, I hate them.  But on the recommendation of a trusted friend, I was coerced into taking this quiz, which purports to predict one's future love life.  The result was SHOCKING and HILARIOUS beyond belief.  At least, it's hilarious if you have a wicked sense of humor.  In fact, if you're wondering about the status of your sense of humor, this test will provide you with some realtime feedback. A fellow test taker exaggerates slightly:

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll probably spend 10 minutes wondering what the "correct" answers are and then backing up after you see your results to try to get better ones.

A disclaimer.  I don't recommend this test for sexual prudes or people at work.

Behe Gets Destroyed

ID is supposed to be a scientific theory roughly on par with astrology, leading proponenet Behe effectively concedes:

Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.  The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board. [New Scientist]

Bravely, Behe sticks to his guns, admitting he knows of no external community that agrees with the definition he made up:

Because ID has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organisation, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper, Behe admitted that the controversial theory would not be included in the NAS definition [of a theory]. “I can’t point to an external community that would agree that this was well substantiated,” he said.  Behe said he had come up with his own “broader” definition of a theory, claiming that this more accurately describes the way theories are actually used by scientists. “The word is used a lot more loosely than the NAS defined it,” he says. [New Scientist]

ID has, once, squeaked into a peer-reviewed journal.   See here for a review of the one article I am aware of that made it.

Please Redo Questions 1, 4, 8, 9, and 17

More on Miers' brain, or lack thereof.  Everyone seems to know that she's about as smart as a Republican whip.

Damnitall!!

It's a dark day in Colorado.  The department soccer team lost the intramural championships after a grueling season filled with sweat and tears - a season in which yours truly scored not one, but two goals, both of which counted for the opposing teams.  The second goal I scored on my own team broke the 2-2 tie in the last few minutes of today's championship game and yielded up the much coveted grand prize t-shirts.

It happened thusly.   In the last few minutes of the game, the opposing team gained a throw-in close to our own goal line.  Covering the center of the box and some ways out, hoping to grab a lazily lofted ball before the expected header attempt, I was surprised when the ball was thrown low and into the corner of the goal!  (This appeared to be an attempt to score.)    I immediately dived for it, but being out of range for that sort of bizaree stunt, I only managed to graze it with the tips of my fingers as it slid past my hand and into the netting.  Now, as it turns out, a fact I learned after the play and just verified here, one cannot score directly from a throw-in.  That is, had I let the ball fly unimpeded into the goal, no point would have been awarded to our opponents.  But the ball did not fly directly into the goal, and the whistle signalled the end of the game one minute later.  Woe is me.

MegaChurch CinePlex

Left Behind: World at War, the third movie in what will probably be an almost unending series of bad Christian films based on the apocalyptic books by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins - two authors who actually believe that Armageddon is not only close at hand, but will proceed much in line with their best-selling prophetically grounded fiction - has been released in churches across the country.  (As an aside, there are unpersuasive non-religious reasons for thinking the world might end in the near future, viz, the Doomsday Argument explained here and here.)  But that's off-topic, so here's a defense of the "church theatrical release" strategy, which, according to my calculation, certainly hasn't generated any profit on its own.   

Despite their public claims, I suspect the real reason that W@W was released in churches had to do with the film sucking so badly that an insignificant number of theatres would have picked it up.  The first film, Left Behind: The Movie, grossed only $4.2 million.  Then, Left Behind: Tribulation Force managed to open on a whole twenty screens.  This means that the only way left for Cloud Ten Productions to market their quackery-cum-poor-entertainment to their paranoid audience is to use the religious distribution system already in place.  A little business savvy and a gullible audience is all you need to sell junk.  TheMegaChurch CinePlex has arrived!

Obviously, the corporate line isn't that the movie has been relegated to megachurch projection screens because it sucks.  Instead, they claim that the "church theatrical release" is designed to get Hollywood's attention by letting Hollywood know just how many concerned Christians there are out there who can't stand sex, drugs, and violence.  This (which is empirically false unless we restrict the appelation "Christian" to boring fundies) would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.  As if any of these essential "evil" plot elements are ever going to disappear.  Instead, Christians everywhere are being guilt-tripped by brilliant marketing execs into watching a crappy movie they wouldn't otherwise have watched because they need to make a religious point and take a stand for Jesus against the Hollywood empire.

According to my analysis, 2991 churches in the US and Canada paid for the rights to show W@W as many times as they liked over a three day period (which will be immediately followed by the DVD release in stores).  2811 of the churches were in the US, with only CA (221), TX (217), FL (198), PA (134), OH (132), NC (122), GA (115), and VA (115) breaking the 100 church barrier.  These numbers come from the movie's website, although the WP reports 3,200 screens.  While this is a large release screenwise, a claim that's being trumped up as some sort of religious triumph, it's meaningless.  The movie can only be shown for three days (Oct. 21 - 23).  Just how many people do you think are going to hit up these churches for a bad religious film followed by a sermon?  Some 45,000,000 people paid to see Meet the Fockers.  I suspect that well under 2,000,000 will be watching Left Behind (for a pass of the collection plate).

If we assume the average licensing fee just was the mid-range offer for $99.00 (for a church with 100-499 members), then the film's release grossed under $300,000.  If, per impossible, the average was double that (i.e., the maximum price, what a 1000+ member church would pay),  they still didn't make $600,000.  Any reasonable estimate will fall within this range, and probably on the low side as well.  Nevertheless, with the accompanying DVD value packs sold in bulk to churches at rock bottom prices, this is probably the best way for Cloud Ten to cut their losses.

The WP article quotes one of the producers as saying:

I tell everyone, the most important 10 minutes of this movie is not on film. It's when the pastor gets up afterwards and shares the gospel with the people who are there and invites them to make a decision for Christ," said Peter Lalonde, an evangelical Christian whose own conversion occurred 22 years ago after seeing a Billy Graham film, "The Prodigal."

  But while "I have my religious reasons" for releasing the film in churches, he added, "as a businessman, I also have reasons."

Ugh.  I suspect it has been a big weekend for heaven. 

For the curious, state by state data in comma seperated value form is below the fold.

Your Brain is Painting the World

It's an illusion fest!  What do we think of this argument for sense data?  Next, go experience the Motion Aftereffect.  I now bring you the Rotating Snakes.  Those damn little pinwheels will not stop spinning.  For more anomalous motion, but this time only when the illusion is seen with one's peripheral vision, check out this .pdf on "Phenomenal Characteristics of the Peripheral Drift Illusion".  Here is a startling interactive Munker illusion.  A  more colorful Munker Illusion at the very bottom of this page.  And finally, the inconceivable Devil's Fork impossibly piercing a Penrose Frame.

Weeding out the Sinful

Because I am both literate and musically conversant as hell when it come to esoteric religious matters, this article linked from Arts and Letters Daily and excerpted here prompted me to suggest two accompaniments:

The Dolley Pond Church of God With Signs Following was founded in Tennessee in 1909 by one George Went Hensley. This former bootlegger took to the pulpit in a rural Pentecostalist community in Grasshopper Valley. One Sabbath, while he was preaching a fiery sermon, some of the congregation dumped a large box of rattlesnakes into the pulpit (history does not record whether they were angry or just bored). Without missing a beat, in mid-sentence, Hensley bent down, picked up a 3ft-long specimen of this most venomous of snakes, and held it wriggling high above his head. Unharmed, he exhorted his congregation to follow suit, quoting the words of Christ: "And these signs will follow those who believe ... in my Name ... they will take up serpents."

If you want to read more about snake handling in the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, you should read The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith while listening to The Gourds (of Gin and Juice remake fame).  Apropos snake handling, the track you need is Jesus Christ With Signs Following [.mp3 - requires joining the Yahoo Group "gourdsmusic"] off the Bolsa de Agua album.

The Contentless Question in Pseudo-Science

Along with such mainstream thinkers as Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Rorty, Cavell, Feyerabend, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Unger, and such intellectual movements as semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, structuralism, archeology/genealogy, and nihilism, feminists "share a profound skepticism regarding universal (or universalizing) claims about the existence, nature and powers of reason, progress, science, language and the 'subject/self.'"

That's from the first chapter in The Science Question in Feminism, by Sandra Harding.  Harding doesn't say what I am going to, but she should have.   The feminists she is talking about in the above paragraph are silly feminists who will never persuade anybody with a brain rightly insensitive to  anti-intellectual postmodern rhetoric.  For more on bad feminists who do much to ruin the reputation of legitimate members of the movement, see Vintage Piranha.  If you were wondering just what the "Science Question" is, I won't leave you hanging:

... the Science Question critiques appear skeptical that we can locate anything morally and politically worth redeeming or reforming in the scientific world view, its underlying epistemology, or the practices these legitimate.

I would hope that by the "scientific world view" she doesn't mean the everywhere accepted (at least, until QM) realism.  Or that by "epistemology" she doesn't mean confirmation theory, the merits of inductive inference, probabilistic reasoning, and so on... (Probability theory is for the emancipation of induction, not vaginas.)  But I fear that she does.  I suppose I'll never know for sure, however, because I just don't find myself inclined to read a book that begins by favorably associating one's own position with the aforementioned list of almost global (they aren't skeptical of their own theories) skeptics (the one clear, fun read - the no longer wholly skeptical Peter Unger - excepted).  Susan Haack also seems not to recommend further reading:

Where effort is directed by the hope of large grants into, say, the relevance of feminism to philosophy of science, the probability rises that the conclusion that will be reached is that feminism requires us, as Sandra Harding preposterously puts it, to "reinvent science and theorizing." (Challenged, nearly a decade later, to say what breakthroughs feminist science had achieved, Harding replied that, thanks to feminist scientists, we now know that menopause isn't a disease. Gosh.) [Skeptical Inquirer]

I now return you to your regularly scheduled activities.

Keith Burgess-Jackson

Keith Burgess-Jackson, whom I long ago dropped from my blogroll despite my very non-discriminatory linking policy*, has popped up again.  Go see Leiter's post for a nice history of Keith's "weirdness" (to put it ever so mildly).   Keith is a clear cut case of an academic whose blogging has devastated his career.  I will refrain from further comment.

*I link to almost any blog run by M.A. students in philosophy on up.  There are also one or two links in my sidebar to blogs run by advanced undergraduates, as well as a brief smattering of political blogs with a heavy philosophical bent.

Whoever Said Philosophy Wasn't Useful?

Over at Ontology Works, some information processing folks are claiming that they apply the philosophical concept of ontology to the construction of their computer programs.  I'm not sure what this means, but Michael Hardy thinks he knows:

An ontology-based system uses the more complex web of interconnected relationships to aid information analysis.

I'm still not sure what that means.  I hope it doesn't mean that something is grounded in the way the world is if that something has parts that bear relations to more of its parts.  The content of their website strongly suggests that a philosophy student is responsible for their public face.  One of their products makes use of "de facto database integration" and "category error reduction".  Way to put that undergraduate philosophy education to marketing use, folks!