How do you type upside-down on your keyboard? No, the answer is not to turn your laptop over. If you have a Unicode-compatible system, you can use this link. It converts what you type into equivalent upside-down characters, many of them from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
I’ve just discovered the film archives of the Film Board of Canada. Not only have they served as the inspiration for a great band name, they’ve been behind some great short films. Some of them I’ve seen before, and I’m very pleased to have found them again.
The Big Snit
People in relationships really know where all the hurts are. Here, a game of Scrabble becomes all-out war between Mr and Mrs Snit. But there are funny moments here — the voice of the cat is a touch of genius. Favourite moment: Mrs Snit says, “Do you have to keep sawing on the table?” and Mr Snit stops sawing long enough to holler, “I”M NOT!” But they’ll get it back together and remember why they loved each other in the first place, and when they do, there’s a comfort that could make a nuclear war seem barely noticeable.
Blackfly
You think flies are bad where you are? Try living in Ontario. At least, that’s how this folk song has it. I’d still say they’re worse in Australia. Catchy chorus, though.
Hunger
I was especially glad to find this one. I remember seeing this with my Dad when it first came out in 1973. There was a screening in the Kennedy Library at EWU (but then it was EWSC). It was so visually arresting that I never forgot it, and have still remembered the basic plot even though I was six when I saw it. Some amazing early CG work, especially considering the state of computer animation at the time.
Neighbours
I’d only ever heard about this one. The film uses stop-motion animation to show a conflict between two neighbours that escalates into something unexpectedly savage.
A lot of these films, like ‘Hunger’ and ‘Neighbours’, address dark human tendencies like war and racism, but by examining how they play out at the level of our individual desires. They do this with lightness and humour, and a kind of high-minded earnestness that seems refreshing but anachronistic today. Imagine: perhaps someone thought these problems could be beaten in our lifetime.
Hope you had a good Darwin day. The thing I keep coming back to about Darwin is this. The guy was training to be a clergyman, but dumped it when it became clear that the facts ran counter to his beliefs. I gotta respect that. That’s tough to do.
But if you think that’s tough, here’s an act for you. This Mormon biologist can give a talk about evolution while making a sculpture of Charles Darwin. And all without his head asploding from cognitive dissonance. Let’s have a listen as he talks about his mentor, Clayton White.
“He became an important example to me of a first-rate scientist and a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Now Fairbanks believes with most biologists that evolution is the unifying theory in the field. And he is the same kind of mentor as White was to new generations of Mormon would-be scientists, helping them understand the importance of evolution without losing their faith.
Okay, full marks for accepting evolution. He’s not a dishonest idiot. But let me ask: what’s wrong with losing your faith? It hurts for a bit, sure, but then you’re free to accept reality without having to twist your brain into knots trying to make the facts fit your religious preconceptions. What’s so great about being able to do that? Shouldn’t a scientist be able to take the hit and accept reality directly? Particularly when his Mormon religion is strewn with beliefs that are explicitly refuted by evidence. (E.g. Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon, Old Testament creationism, and on and on.)
I hold to the view that science and religion conflict, and can’t be reconciled. Other people disagree, but it doesn’t help their case that some scientists go to church. That just means that people can wall off part of their brain from scientific examination. Like Jerry Coyne says in his wonderful article for the Edge:
True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.)
I’m not even saying that Dr Fairbanks can’t do good work in biology and still hold religious beliefs. You just can’t do both at the same time. Even he admits this.
“We are obligated to examine experimental data and interpret it in an objective way, without allowing nonscientific beliefs to influence our interpretations,” Fairbanks says.
Great advice — but why shouldn’t religious beliefs therefore be discarded? They’re non-scientific. Why should he get to have it both ways when it comes to religion?
He continues:
But that is no reason to reject God or Mormon scriptures, which, he says, explain why God created the world, not how.
An old canard. Science explains how, religion explains why. Except that religion doesn’t explain why. It just gives you fluffy stories that you have to maintain faith in without being able to verify them.
I used to really look up to liberal Mormon thinkers who struggled to merge facts with fables, grappled with the difficulty of such an endeavour, and copped nothing but abuse from ignorant iron-rod believers. Now I think it’s the saddest thing I can think of, like someone who’s so close to understanding, but stopping themselves from taking the final liberating step. I actually think I’d rather talk to someone who argues that science is wrong and religion is right. At least then I’d be talking to someone for whom the truth matters.
Scott Murphy is running for Congress in District 20 in the great state of New York. Not only is he a Democrat, and therefore one of the good guys, his campaign clearly has very discriminating taste.
Download the Daniel font for free from dafont.com.
God won’t heal amputees, but science sure will.
Amanda Kitts lost her left arm in a car accident three years ago, but these days she plays football with her 12-year-old son, and changes diapers and bearhugs children at the three Kiddie Cottage day care centers she owns in Knoxville, Tenn.
Ms. Kitts, 40, does this all with a new kind of artificial arm that moves more easily than other devices and that she can control by using only her thoughts.
“I’m able to move my hand, wrist and elbow all at the same time,” she said. “You think, and then your muscles move.”
…
The technique, called targeted muscle reinnervation, involves taking the nerves that remain after an arm is amputated and connecting them to another muscle in the body, often in the chest. Electrodes are placed over the chest muscles, acting as antennae. When the person wants to move the arm, the brain sends signals that first contract the chest muscles, which send an electrical signal to the prosthetic arm, instructing it to move. The process requires no more conscious effort than it would for a person who has a natural arm.
You really ought to take a look at the video. Amazing.
I think it’d be tricky to use the arm and fingers because of the lack of tactile feedback. You’d have to look at the object you’re holding to make sure you had it securely and weren’t squishing it. Maybe in future you’d be able to ‘feel’ the item you’re grasping by some kind of neural feedback.
When some new age creep wants to talk about the shortcomings of Western medicine, they’ll get a face full of this article from me.
Cheney people are having a non-stop virtual high school reunion on Facebook. I’m communicating with people that I haven’t seen in 25 years. What a great way to bring people back into your life!
One day not long ago, a guy from my old high school sent me a friend request. To preserve his anonymity, I’ll call him ‘Barry’. Barry was never very popular in school, but I couldn’t say exactly why. He was actually a pretty decent guy, as I found out when I talked to him at a chance supermarket meeting a couple of years after graduation. But not the sort of guy you’d hang out with. You’d say hi in the halls. Maybe if you were socially conscious, you’d hope no one was looking, but you’d feel guilty about it. A very high school feeling.
So when I got Barry’s friend request, I felt that old reflex. It was like Barry had come up to me and said, “Hey, guys! What are you doing?” A brief thought: would people see him on my friend list? Then I came to myself and felt ashamed of my reaction. What was this, high school all over again? I had forgotten he existed for the better part of three decades, but he remembered me, and now here he was, asking for me to be… his friend. And all it required of me was to click.
Had I learned nothing about common human decency in the last 25 years? We weren’t kids anymore — especially not Barry, by the looks of his Facebook photo. But what did that matter? I’m past all that stuff. Yes, Barry, yes! I will be your friend! And just that simply, the pettiness of adolescence was erased in one virtuous act. If Barry had only one friend, it would be me. Even if I was just a Facebook friend.
The next day, Facebook sent me an email. I had a pillow fight request. Barry had somehow hit me with the Eiffel Tower. I ignore these requests from everyone, and so I ignored it from Barry. Over the next two days, Barry hit me with four more objects, and invited me to play backgammon and Scrabulous. I was busy. I changed my email notification preferences.
I don’t hit the ‘Book often, so the next time I logged on, I found that I had been kidnapped twelve times, each time by Barry.
I tried not to feel conflicted as I clicked the ‘Ignore all requests from this friend’ button. Stupid Facebook, bringing people back into my life. Why couldn’t they stay in the past where they belonged? It was high school, all over again.
The main charges people made against the London atheist bus ad was:
1) It made claims that broke rules of substantiation and truthfulness, since the ad offered no evidence for god’s non-existence.
2) The ad was offensive.
I find both complaints questionable. The inclusion of ‘probably’ helps to tone down the claim, and as for offense, I found the ad quite positive in tone. Maybe people found it offensive that anyone would express a belief they disagreed in.
What are we to make, however, of the next round of bus ads from the believers?
The first one libels a group of people, and the second has factual problems! Both are far guiltier of the charges than the original ad itself.
If they’re so sure that there’s ‘definitely’ a god, let’s see their evidence. They don’t know their bible either; calling someone a fool puts you in danger of hellfire. Name-calling is name-calling, even if it’s biblical.
I can’t say I mind the Christian ads though. A vigorous debate is always healthy, and these ads will probably just make people think of the original.
The Problem of Evil was never a problem for me in my believing days. I always thought it was a pretty weak argument. So bad things happen to good people. It’s too bad, but why should god come running in to save us from every bad thing that might happen? How would we have free will if we couldn’t suffer the consequences of our actions? Don’t murderers have free will too? How would we have good if we didn’t have evil? And god’s intervention would ironically prove he existed, so how would we have faith in him? Besides, life isn’t so very long when we compare it to an eternity in god’s presence. It was all a case of putting unrealistic expectations on god, who after all probably had good reasons to allow kittens to drown, children to be abused, neglected, and murdered, bombs to fall, hurricanes to destroy, viruses to kill and maim, and all the other wonderful things that work towards god’s greater glory.
And so I would walk away from the Problem of Evil, dusting off my hands and whistling, thinking the matter settled. Well done, me. What I see now was that I accepted those answers not because they were all that great, but because they allowed me to put my cognitive dissonance back to sleep so I could stay in The Bubble and keep believing for yet another week.
Of course, the temptation to accept bad ideas because you like them still holds whether you’re a theist or an atheist. So I’ve been wary of throwing myself into the PoE because, until recently, I still thought it was a weak argument. This document changed my mind: The Tale of the Twelve Officers, by Mark I. Vuletic.
It was, of course, sad to hear that Ms. K had been slowly raped and murdered by a common thug over the course of one hour and fifty-five minutes; but when I found out that the ordeal had taken place in plain sight of twelve fully-armed off-duty police officers, who ignored her terrified cries for help, and instead just watched until the act was carried to its gruesome end, I found myself facing a personal crisis. You see, the officers had all been very close friends of mine, but now I found my trust in them shaken to its core. Fortunately, I was able to talk with them afterwards, and ask them how they could have stood by and done nothing when they could so easily have saved Ms. K.
Each officer has a rationalisation for their failure to act, and what do you know — all my old friends are here! Wonderful ways to explain why an all-good and omniscient god would fail to do what any normal, compassionate, sinful human being would do in the same situation.
How do their answers sit with you, whether theist or non?
Good call from U of M:
The University of Michigan-Flint is the latest school in the state to accept American Sign Language as a foreign language.
The Flint Journal reported Friday the decision follows years of effort by Jill Maxwell of [sic] for the designation. Maxwell graduated in December and substitute teaches at the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint.
The 32-year-old DeWitt resident argued it was discriminatory not to accept ASL for second language requirements.
Yes, ASL is a foreign language to English speakers. It has its origins in spoken English, but it’s grown and changed since then, and (most importantly) it’s not mutually intelligible with English.
D.J. Trela, dean of UM-Flint’s College of Arts and Sciences, says faculty studied the issue for 14 months.
I hope they spent the 14 months hashing out the procedural details, and not just wondering if it was actually a different language. They could have asked a linguist.
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