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Cyrillic meets Roman

17 February 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

It’s funny when people try to use Cyrillic letters as Roman ones. I understand why they do it — for English speakers, Russian has acquired connotations of militarism and toughness. And people have been tossing in the odd Cyrillic character for a long time.

(cue music)

But when you actually know how to read Cyrillic script, it’s a little jarring. Here’s a movie poster that sidled up next to me at a traffic light this morning.

More like ‘the dorkest hour’, amirite?

See, the Д that they have standing in for an ‘A’ is actually a /d/ sound, and the Я is a vowel that sounds like ‘ya’. Also, that Ц covering for the ‘U’ is the sound of /ts/ in ‘tsar’.

So really, the movie’s title should be pronounced ‘The Ddyakest Hotsr’. Or ‘Notsr’ if the ‘H’ has an /n/ sound, as Cyrillic Н does.

But let’s not be pedantic. We’re stuck with it now. We’ll be seeing posters, ads, and maybe even action figures in Toys ‘Ya’ Us.

“Inspired fiction”

12 February 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 6 Comments

While reading a post on Wheat and Tares, I tripped over this term: “inspired fiction”. I decided I’ve been ignoring it long enough.

If you want to be a Mormon, but you don’t think that the Book of Mormon is literally true, you could call it “inspired fiction”. This means that instead of thinking Joseph Smith made up a bunch of stories that aren’t true, God told Joseph Smith to make up a bunch of stories that aren’t true. (What’s the difference? Well, if God does it, it’s all right, you see.)

When I see someone taking this tack, it’s like they’re saying, “Oh, of course the Emperor has no socks, but the rest of his couture is exquisite!” It’s a partial credit situation; points for realising it’s not true, but demerits for going along with it anyway. Call me crazy, but it matters to me if my beliefs are true. If it’s not true, I don’t have time for it.

What about the idea that, although not true, the stories in the Book of Mormon are good moral stories that can help you to live a better life? That’s where it all comes down. The Book of Mormon’s a terrible guide for moral living! Here’s what you’ll find:

Cutting someone’s head off because you think God has told you to
Dark skin as a curse
Predictably Victorian notions about the chastity of women
War after tedious war
Jesus kills entire cities full of people, and brags about it from the sky while the people wail for their dead friends and family
Unforgivably torpid prose

and that’s just off the top of my head.

Are there no other fictional books that people could use as a guide for life? Of course there are, but it doesn’t really matter to these people — I suspect the reason they’ve mistaken this awful book for a guide is that either they’re tied to it by their social group, or maybe they enjoyed reading it and believing in it once, and they can’t bear to relinquish it completely. Which is kind of sad. I can understand if someone thinks these stories are a literal true account of the dealings of a cruel god that they have no choice but to obey — who can say how they’d act in a hostage situation? But imagine not thinking this stuff is true, and digging on it anyway. Somehow I think that’s worse.

To my new age friend who unfriended me

8 February 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

Dear New Age Friend,

I’ve just noticed that, next to all your comments, Facebook helpfully said we had ’18 mutual friends’, which means we’re no longer ‘friends’, which I guess means you’ve unfriended me. Boo.

Was it something I said? Was it that post where I showed how psychics use cold reading to guess things about people? Was it the one where I explained how ouija boards work? Oh, I know. It was the one where you said that we “create our own reality”, and I asked you if people who get terminal illnesses have somehow created their own reality.

Why did I comment? Well, let’s face it — I’m kind of annoying. If someone says something wrong on the Internet, I like to get in there and set things straight, like that ever works.

But there’s more. Deception pisses me off. I saw that you were getting tricked by phony psychics, buying “inspirational” books by screwy swamis, relying on astrology and numerology to guide your life. You’re getting cheated, and I hated to see that happen to you. I think I was hoping that if I gave good information, something would happen and you’d start thinking a little more critically. Guess not.

Our exchanges fell into a predictable pattern. You’d never address my comments directly, but instead you’d post some quote by Osho in new-age passive-aggressive style, like:

“The day you think you know, your death has happened – because now there will be no wonder and no joy and no surprise. Now you will live a dead life.”

Or you’d bristle at my ‘tone’, which is another way of ignoring someone’s argument.

Or else you’d say that it was wrong to talk sense and reason because I wasn’t “respecting” everyone’s points of view. It’s a funny thing about respect: People whose views are the most tenuous seem to demand most vociferously that those views be respected. What you didn’t seem to realise was that not all points of view deserve respect. Ideas deserve respect in proportion to the amount of evidence that supports them. As for me, I don’t want my views to be respected. Slash away! If they’re wrong, I’ll change them, and I’ll thank you for helping me.

You insisted that it was important to keep an open mind, and it is — when the facts aren’t available. When they are, it makes no sense to “keep an open mind” — that’s like choosing between information and ignorance. It’s true that we need to stay open to new facts, but you weren’t even open to the facts we have.

Admittedly, you played nicer than your friends. They’re the ones who put “science” in quotes. I’ve noticed that they got nastier the more money they appeared to be making off of new age woo. When science didn’t support their views, they acted as though all of science itself was wrong instead of them. They are really dishonest people, and you should have nothing to do with them.

Maybe I pushed you too hard. I wasn’t relentless, and I didn’t comment on everything you posted, but I did try to give good information. I’m an educator — that’s what I do. When I thought you were credulous, I tried to be grounded. When you spread woo-woo, I suggested that there might be another explanation. I guess I intruded too much on your idea of a world where anything was possible, and where mysteries are supposed to stay mysterious.

Heaven’s gape

1 February 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Religious people are posting this image on their walls and pages unironically as an inspirational photo.

What they’re missing is that the pic (‘shopped, natch) is actually a reference to the infamous and incomprehensibly gross ‘goatse’ image. If you don’t know what that is, don’t look it up. Just check out the Snopes page, or use your imagination: Instead of hands stretching a hole in the clouds, think ‘giant gaping rectum’.

I think the ‘goatse cloud’ image might be a perfect analogy (sorry) for religion in general. Some people find inspiration in it, but it’s just something that someone made up. There’s nobody in the sky, but if there were, he’d be a huge asshole.

Mice sing. Humans sing. Coincidence?

31 January 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Singing makes you more attractive. (Singing well, anyway.) And you don’t even have to be a human. Even now, tiny mice are singing their ear-splitting ditties to impress potential mates.

Their initial studies, the first to study song in wild mice, confirmed that males emit songs when they encounter a females’ scent and that females are attracted to the songs. The scientists also found that females can tell apart their brothers from unrelated males by their songs – even though they had previously never heard their brothers sing.

We already know that birds use song to impress mates, and now mice. What about people?

There are two main hypotheses about how language began in humans. The one that gets the most play is the gestural (or mirror) hypothesis, as articulated by Michael Arbib, which goes something like this:

We have neurones in our brains that fire when we perform an action.
We also have ‘mirror neurons’ that fire when we see someone else performing the same action.
This allows us to recognise when someone is doing something.
From here, we can imitate others, and start to communicate using gestures, including pantomime.
This allows us to represent things that aren’t in the immediate vicinity, which is a precursor to language.

But it’s not clear from this how we make the move from gesture to speech.

The other main hypothesis is that human language started from music. This was Darwin’s favoured hypothesis, and it’s found a new advocate in W. Tecumseh Fitch (who I interviewed for an episode of ‘Talk the Talk‘).

For this one,

People were able to vocalise (or sing), and if their singing was sumptuous enough, they got the mates.
At the same time, we can recognise people’s voices, and distinguish them from the voices of other people.
We can even do imitations of other people, which allows us to represent them when they’re not around.

This could have been the beginning of representing things that aren’t around, which, again, is necessary for language. And it explains the use of the vocal channel.

So, mice. They sing. They use their songs to attract mates. They can tell each other apart by voice. All very languagy. It’s not just birds.

Even though both gesture and music were probably big factors in human language at the same time, I think this tips things toward the music hypothesis.

The atheist temple

28 January 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

The big news in atheism this week: Alain de Botton wants to build an atheist temple. Which seems strange — atheism isn’t a religion, so why would it need to borrow religion’s trappings? I think de Botton tipped his hand, though, in this pronouncement:

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre tower to celebrate a ”new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Richard Dawkins’s ”aggressive” and ”destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, Mr de Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

”Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. ”That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective … Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force.”

Destructive force? For me, Dawkins and Hitchens are two guys who have come to epitomise well-tempered reason, intelligence, and courage in the face of mortality, so de Botton’s criticism doesn’t ring true for me. I’d like to suggest a little test which I’ll call the S.E. Cupp test: When someone says they’re an atheist, do they spend more time promoting atheism, or castigating other atheists because of their tone? If the latter, then what’s the difference between them and a theist?

Dawkins has called the project a waste of funds, PZ says it’s a monument to hubris.

Me? I say it’s redundant. We already have a temple. I was there earlier this month. Or, at least, at one of them.

The atheist temple I went to was the Temple of Knowledge, and it’s better known as the New York Public Library.

It gots lions.

Why would I call it an atheist temple? Because it’s filled with the work of people. People; not gods. People (and you can see them there every day) engaged in the process of gathering knowledge and combining it to make new knowledge. This is the goal of science, which is an atheistic form of reasoning.

I walked along its halls of solid marble, where generations of humans have come to read and learn.

No gothic arches, these. How could you help but be in awe of not just the building, but the building’s purpose?

Like a temple, the magnificent Reading Room prompts a hush.

And the people who built this place — yeah, they were tycoons who made their money from the skins of small furry animals. But they wanted to build a place where the knowledge of the world could be preserved, and they cared enough to make it amazing. And they inscribed this on the walls, in letters big enough for anyone to read:

“On the diffusion of education

among the people

rest the preservation

and perpetuation

of our free institutions.”

I read that, and I think, you know, they got it. They really got it! Even back then. Our society depends on education. Our freedom depends on it. You can’t preserve freedom in a population of ignoramuses; they’ll just tear it down again the instant they feel afraid. It’s such an alien concept in this age, when one political party has dedicated itself to the destruction of the Department of Education, and (through homeschooling) constantly works to undermine the public school system so that children will be protected from education. It seems like a quaint and noble sentiment, but we need to relearn this thinking that came from better minds than ours. Just as we need another quaint and antiquated notion symbolised by libraries: the public good.

But that’s not all I saw. There were treasures.

Holy shit! It’s a Gutenburg Fucking Bible! One of only 40 perfect ones left. Yes, it’s a bible because for some reason, people thought the Bible was important back then. But what this book did was make reading and publishing commonplace. That’s much more important than the book’s rather poor contents.

And check this out: it’s Christopher Robin’s toys! That’s not just Winnie a Pooh — it’s Winnie THE Pooh. And the others! It was great to see them there, even though it made me think of Toy Story 2. I look at Tigger and realise that Ernest Shepard really nailed it.

These are clay tokens with cuneiform on them, some of the earliest writing that people ever used. That made it possible for people to transmit knowledge over generations.

And while I was in this Library, I felt so connected to people in other ages and to the future. It was a feeling that I can only describe as spiritual, even though I don’t like that word. But it was the same feeling that I felt in the old religion but more intense and meaningful.

You can keep your paltry theist cathedrals. Do not copy Mormon temples — they are monuments to superstition and foolishness. Let St Patrick’s fall. Instead, build a library, Mr de Botton, or an observatory, or a university, or a museum. They’re the only temples that atheists have any business building.

Actually, St. Patrick’s will make a very nice reading room in about 100 years.

Coffee with a liberal Christian

26 January 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

I recently had coffee with a Christian friend, and the subject was religion. I was all geared up for battle, but he had to go and spoil it all by being a non-fundamentalist non-loony liberal Christian, and a good guy whose conversation I quite enjoyed! ¿What fun is that?, I ask you.

Not being a fundamentalist means that he avoided making strong claims, and he didn’t have to defend so many indefensible things. He doesn’t hate gay people, thinks that not every part of the Bible is meant as history, and recognises the difficulty in discerning the intentions of biblical authors. Wouldn’t it be somewhat better if more Christians were like this?

The one thing he kept saying, though, in response to my questions was: “I don’t know.” Was the flood literal? Will people get resurrected in some form after death? He didn’t know. And he seemed rather relaxed about that.

It’s good to say when you don’t know, if you don’t. People should do that in the sciences, too. But if there’s something you don’t know and it’s a scientific question, you can find out by experimentation and observation. If it’s a religious or metaphysical question, what do you do? Interpret inconsistent texts? Try to have a revelation? Those approaches have only ever yielded contradictory results. Metaphysical questions can’t be resolved by observing physical reality, which is why every religion has a different answer to metaphysical questions. There’s no court of appeal. Notice the difference between religion and science. Scientists eventually reach consensus; religions come to schism.

My Christian friend was honest about not knowing. What I wanted to communicate was that religions don’t provide a reliable way to know. And they really should, if they’re going to claim that they have the answers to life big questions.

The man who made too much sense

22 January 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat — I’d vote for a yellow dog in the road before I’d vote for a Republican — but I’m kind of bummed out about the end of the Huntsman campaign. Not because it signals the end of moderate Republicans; those days are long gone.

From what I saw of Huntsman, he was a smart guy who took his party to task for ignoring science. He believed the science on climate change (although he seemed to backtrack a little). He didn’t take his Mormon religion too seriously. And he had foreign policy experience. Unlike other Republicans, who were either evil (Gingrich), stupid (Santorum), crazy (Bachmann), or a mix of the three, Huntsman stood out as a sane person. No wonder he only ever polled in the single digits with Republican voters.

Could it be that he was a guy I could have voted for, under the right circumstances? Naw, there are lots of yellow dogs out there. But I would have had something other than a beer with him. And if by some chance he had won, I’d think, well, maybe this won’t be a disaster.

Big Dog gets the last word:

ESQUIRE: It’s remarkable that there would have been a time in living memory when someone like Jon Huntsman would have been regarded as the most conservative candidate in the field. Maybe even unacceptably conservative. But because of his insistence on having a grown-up discourse, he’s somehow seen as a moderate.

CLINTON: Huntsman’s economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners’. But he also doesn’t make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America’s national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.

But all of a sudden that’s disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we’re, you know, we’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.

Red Flags of Quackery

18 January 2012 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Let me be the last to share this wonderful guide to detecting BS. It’s the Red Flags of Quackery.

Just a taste:

This may not be the last word on woo, but there will always be things missing. The artist would have needed to create a patchwork about the size of a football field to include every bad rationale that the woosters are capable of pulling out. But the one I would have included is this: