I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.
My favourite podcast, SGU has a list of 20 common logical fallacies up on their website. It’s a brilliant list; you tend to come across quite a few of them in everyday arguments.
Ad ignorantiam: The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.
Argument from Personal Incredulity: I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. Creationists are fond of arguing that they cannot imagine the complexity of life resulting from blind evolution, but that does not mean life did not evolve.
Confusing association with causation: This is similar to the post-hoc fallacy in that it assumes cause and effect for two variables simply because they are correlated, although the relationship here is not strictly that of one variable following the other in time. This fallacy is often used to give a statistical correlation a causal interpretation.
False dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.
Straw man: Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.
The moving goalpost: A method of denial arbitrarily moving the criteria for “proof” or acceptance out of range of whatever evidence currently exists.
Check out the entire list. It’ll probably come in handy the next time you’re matching wits with someone as logically dissonant as Bill Maher.
Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up. Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.
Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart’s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.
The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.
But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?
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I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.
How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?
Talk about religion and you’re bound to get me all worked up; not that I don’t appreciate a good argument, just that a good argument is non existent when it comes to backing faith or the the existence of an omniscient and benevolent creator who has time to answer your petty prayers but blithely ignores starving children in Africa.
These days, creationists and right wing retards have a new ace up their sleeve. Piggybacking. Despite the Church’s open disdain for inquiry and exploration (over the last few thousand years), they seem oddly content using art and science to explain God and his mysterious ways. A few years ago, I was told that the God of the Old Testament asked for circumcision not merely as a sacrifice but (also) because of health reasons. Sadly, Mr Yahweh forgot to list out naturally occuring carcinogens and deadly viruses.
Now, the Anglicans are looking to appropriate the Doctor Who mythos to ‘explain’ to young people facts about the Bible that would otherwise seem ‘difficult’ to understand. Brilliant. So then, Jesus was a Time Lord right?
One day you distance yourself from Harry Potter and The Golden Compass because they’re well, satanic and the next day you embrace a character (immensely awesome as he is) who espouses the need for questioning and rejecting dogma. All this is probably a sign of the Curch’s waning influence. But then again, we live in a country where almost 70 percent believe in reincarnation and another sizeable number hope to get it on with 72 virgins in the afterlife. Bah.
Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.
And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:
1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.
2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.
Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.
Paranoid as I am, the first few thoughts that rushed through my head after seeing the cordoned off street opposite to the apartment complex I stay in were terrorists, dirty bombs and Britney Spears.
Flinders St is actually being used as a filming backdrop for the upcoming Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks produced WW II mini series, The Pacific (a sequel of sorts to Band of Brothers). Needless to say I couldn’t contain my excitement. I was secretly hoping that The Pacific was just a working title for the new Indiana Jones film (Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), but it turned out that The Pacific was actually just, The Pacific. As if it weren’t enough to block traffic to and from one of the busiest streets in Melbourne for 35 hours, they covered up the entire shooting area with…well…giant black drapes.
Hoping to catch a glimpse of the bearded sensei, I rushed home to get my camera; but nada.
After close to 45 minutes of sighing and dodging pangs of envy, I returned to my dreary existence.
“I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” -Woody Allen
A recent article on Wired points out that Sirtrius Pharmaceuticals treated diabetic mice by slowing their metabolism or simply by slowing down age related cellular breakdown. There have always been an umpteen number of articles on anti aging research in the past thanks to people’s obsession with death and fear of aging.
The drugs apparently work on the Mitochondria which over time accumulate damage and cause cellular breakdown; so Mitochondria rejuvenators (in lab animals) have halted diseases and extended longevity. So you basically reduce suffering before death but in spite of this it’s still known that animals inexplicably drop dead at the end of their traditional lifespans.
No matter how well anti aging drugs work, death still is an inevitability…but what had me really interested was another Wired article that ponders on how anti aging research will change the way we die thereby altering the way we live. Would we live life more fully if we knew that death was an inevitability that came without warning as opposed to long disease ridden miserable lives that preceded death (thanks to medical advances and all which in effect does nothing more than stall)?
The jury is still out but this is all very mighty interesting stuff.
Now that it’s out of the beta phase, I got myself to try out Flock 1.0. I am blown away, so much that I think I’ll be sticking with it.
Flock takes away the pain of searching for all those extensions you need for Firefox or even IE and simply integrates them into the UI of the browser. The UI itself is pretty neat to boot.
Blogger and Wordpress users can upload their posts directly via the Flock editor which sadly cannot be used to upload pictures to be used in the post; you can only link them.
There is a sidebar for Facebook which is pretty nifty come to think about it as is the Flickr and Youtube widgets. One of my favorite things about the browser is the integrated feed reader; beats using Google Reader every time I want to check out my feeds. Managing saved passwords and sessions is also fairly easy and organised.
The one thing I find a bit disconcerting is Me.dium which allows you to see what your friends are browsing. Why would I want to do that?
Every time something like this comes along, I think I’m getting more organized. But the truth is, it’s just another tool that takes me one step ahead along that path of lethargy.
