I am pleased to report that the good old American Heritage Book of English Usage has declared that using data as a singular noun is now kosher.

Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage.

If anyone gives you a hard time about using data as a kind of stuff, just point them to the link, and then feel free to flail them with a wet towel.

Can you tell the difference between the rhetoric of the American Religious Right and that of Al Qaeda?

Take this quiz and find out!

I got 16 out of 20, so I guess that’s a B-. It’s harder than it looks.

We live in a world where we talk to people, and they understand us and respond to what we say. This happens with such regularity that it is difficult to imagine it any other way. It is therefore natural to apply this pattern (wrongly) to non-humans. We talk to the dog, and we think the dog understands us. We talk to plants, and we imagine that they ‘respond’ by growing better. We talk to empty space, and we take any unusual happenstance as a sign that the empty space is talking to us.

We live in a world of designed objects. All around us are things that someone made. It is therefore natural to think that someone made the world.

We live in a world where we go to sleep and wake up again. In our experience, this has always happened. It is therefore natural to think that when we die, we will wake up again somewhere else.

Religious belief depends on these natural but unexamined assumptions.

US Senator Russ Feingold has begun a censure resolution against Bush.

Bush has broken the law, and defends his actions. It’s the right thing to do. What’s to lose? Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet. So Democrats should be jumping on to this, right?

Nope.

Sen. Feingold said the following to Fox News’ Trish Turner: I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide.

Democrats? C’mere. I want to show you something.

This is a recent link from Opposition leader Kim Beazley on the Australian Labor Party web page. Keep in mind that this is the Opposition party, like the Democrats now. Would Democrats ever put something like this on their web page?

With the changes to industrial relations laws that he rammed through parliament in the days before Christmas, John Howard has gone too far.

He is now riding roughshod over the will of the Australian people.

These laws are a threat to the Australian way of life. They destroy rights to overtime, penalty rates, holiday pay, redundancy pay and other rights that generations of Australians have fought hard to win over the last hundred years.

There is only one good thing that can come out of these laws: the beginning of the end of the Howard Government.

Labor will urge Australians to make every member of the Howard Government personally responsible for their vote to take away the rights of working Australians.

And for the sake of working families and future generations, Labor will fight every day until the Howard Government is brought down for these vicious, unnecessary and unAustralian laws.

Page after page of this. Hammering on Howard. Keeping the pressure on. Everyone knows it’s the way they do it here.

If a newspaper reports, “John Howard says, ‘It’s a nice day,'” there’ll be a bit at the end of the story where Kim Beasley says, “John Howard might think it’s a nice day for him and the special interests that elected him. But for ordinary Australians without a job, without adequate health care, for children locked up in our detention camps, it is not a very nice day.” That’s the game! Nobody minds!

Democrats: a majority of Americans agrees with you. You have permission to sledge Bush, and sledge hard. Don’t worry — you can still be the minority party and lose elections! Labor’s done it for ten years.

Just pluck up your courage, back each other up, grab the hammer and start bashing away. America is on your side.

Every once in a while, I see Bush’s execrable poll numbers, and I think, “Maybe Americans are finally seeing the light. Maybe they’re getting tired of the bloodshed. Maybe they’re realising that the Iraq War was just a scam, devised by people who never served in the military. Maybe they’re getting smarter.”

Then I get an email like this from my sister.

Cindy Sheehan asked President Bush,
“Why did my son have to die in Iraq?”

Another mother asked President Kennedy,
“Why did my son have to die in VietNam?”

Another mother asked President Truman,
“Why did my son have to die in Korea?

Another mother asked President F.D. Roosevelt,
“Why did my son have to die at Iwo Jima?”

Another mother asked President W. Wilson,
“Why did my son have to die on the battlefield of France?”

Yet another mother asked President Lincoln,
“Why did my son have to die at Gettysburg?”

And yet another mother asked President G. Washington,
“Why did my son have to die near Valley Forge?”

Then long, long ago, a mother asked,
“Heavenly Father, why did my Son have to die on a cross outside of Jerusalem?”

The answers to all these are similar–
that others may have life and dwell in peace, happiness and freedom.

No I didn’t write this one…it was e-mailed to me with no author;
and I thought the magnitude and the simplicity were awesome…

And I realise, no, they’re not sick of it yet. It must go on a bit longer. The carnage must continue until the pile of bodies becomes impossible to ignore. When the economy grinds to a halt, when the military can no longer support the insane demends of the president, when the USA can no longer push itself upon the world because it has gone it alone one too many times, only then will the 37% wake up.

No author? I wouldn’t put my name on that either. Bush isn’t Washington, and he certainly isn’t God. He isn’t even Truman, though he would give Nixon a run for his money.

American soldiers are dying in Iraq because Bush hopelessly bungled the war effort.

And now for the morning report on how peeance and freeance are doing in Iraq:

Up to six car bombs have ripped through a Shi’ite area in east Baghdad, killing 46 people and wounding more than 200.

The apparently coordinated attacks on markets in Sadr City have raised fears sectarian reprisals could again plunge Iraq into civil war.

They happened while political leaders met to discuss forming a national unity government that might avert a bloodbath.

Oh, come on, people, turn those frowns upside down.

Meanwhile in Washington, President Bush expressed hope about the future of Iraq, saying he is optimistic that Iraqis will overcome the challenges they face.

Just believe harder, and it’ll work. Faith can do miracles. Keep the emails going. That is all.

Spoiler Alert — Amazing Race fans, beware.

I noticed another example of magical thinking on the latest episode of The Amazing Race, Season 9. (Could that be right? Nine seasons?)

As the teams frustratingly battled San Paolo traffic to get to the Pit Stop, John and Scott invoked “genie power” to try and will themselves to the finish line in time to avoid elimination. However although they claimed it had never let them down before, the invocation wasn’t enough to get them to the line before the sisters, resulting in The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan having to tell them that they were the first team eliminated from the Race.

For John, invoking “genie power” means crossing your arms in a Barbara Eden pose, and nodding vigourously twice. Though it may not win you a prize, it will earn you the attention of your cab driver.

Maybe it’s true that they always got what they wanted by doing the ‘Genie Ritual’ in the past. Or perhaps they engaged in the other two behaviours that help to prop up these kinds of false beliefs:

1) Change the parameters so you can claim a win, or
2) Forget the times that it doesn’t work.

They couldn’t do that this time though. It was caught on tape for all to see.

A harmless belief? Perhaps. And sorta cute too. But this is just one manifestation of magic thinking, which makes bogus cures and belief systems so tempting. It keeps the Gurus of Get in business, selling their message that if you only believe hard enough, you can influence the universe with your mind (or prayers, or what have you). And the more devout the believer, the more contorted the mental gymnastics when it fails to work.

I confess, I have influenced my surroundings using my mind. But only when I back it up with effort.

It was a birthday for one of the boys last week. We had it at one of those ‘laser tag’ places. It was quite fun, I must say — I found it quite easy to get into Predator mode.

Between games, I listened to the boys playing air hockey, and I kept hearing the new verb ‘to verse’.

“I’m next,” said one boy.
“No,” said another. “I’m versing him next.”

It would appear that to verse someone is to compete against them in a game or contest. I’ve only been hearing it in the last few years, only among schoolkids. Apparently they’ve backformed it from Latin versus (against), the little dickenses. It make sense though. Normally you’d hear ‘versus’ in a situation like ‘X vs. Y’. By coincidence, this sounds like 3rd person singular ‘verses’, and the kids have inferred the infinitive ‘to verse’, with its inflected form ‘versing’.

For comments: Would anyone say ‘I want to verse you’ where you are? Who would say it? How long ago did you hear it?

It’s not liberal atheists burning down black churches; it’s white Christians.

Three Birmingham college students were arrested and charged Wednesday in connection with a string of Alabama church fires that is described in court papers as a joke that “got out of hand,” authorities said.

Huh. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s Brother Theodore funny rather than Seinfeld funny.

They burned down five churches with predominantly black congregations, and four with white.

Moseley told investigators that he and Cloyd set the other four fires “as a diversion to throw investigators off,” the affidavit states. When questioned by investigators, “Moseley said the diversion obviously did not work.”

Of course, burning down black churches is a seasonal sport in the American South. I remember hearing about a similar spate of arson around 1992. I was discussing it with a Utah girl at the time. She was amazed that people were burning down black churches.

Finally she said, “Why don’t they just paint the churches a different colour?”

“God bless you, my good woman,” I said.