They’ve done away with all the one- and two-cent coins in Australia. If you want to buy something worth $9.98, you have to round up to $10.00. On the other hand, if the item costs $10.02, you get to round down to the same ten bucks. It’s something a canny shopper has to keep track of when trying to save those extra couple of cents.

I was at the store yesterday, and the total came to $29.98. Which meant that I was going to have to pay $30. But I was not just going to capitulate like that. I had a trick up my sleeve.

“I’m going to use a credit card,” said I to the check-out girl. “Which means I pay only $29.98. In your FACE!”

She just looked at me for a moment, and said, “Now you don’t get your petrol voucher.”

A petrol voucher makes a liter of petrol four cents cheaper. You only get one if you spend… thirty dollars or more. She was right.

For a moment I wavered, but it was too late to go back.

“You may have won this one,” I said evenly, taking the groceries, “but there will be a next time.”

Oh, yes. There will.

Yes, I am in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, I tend to keep a close watch on U.S. politics. I am registered to vote in Washington, after all.

I’ve been watching the (inevitable?) confirmation of Alito to the Supreme Court with some anxiety. And so yesterday I did something I’ve never done before: called my senators to encourage them to perpetuate Senator Kerry’s filibuster.

So three cheers to Senator Patty Murray for voting ‘no’ on cloture.

Senator Cantwell voted ‘yes’ on the filibuster, but says she’s going to vote ‘no’ on Alito’s confirmation. I’d say don’t bother. The filibuster was the chance.

Congratulations to Murray for showing some spine and acting like a member of a real opposition party. That can’t have been easy.

Update: Senator Cantwell voted ‘yes’ on cloture, one of only three blue-state Dems to do so. But what do you know! she’s up for re-election this year. I will do everything I can to make sure she loses the primaries. Which, unfortunately for me, is limited to voting for the other candidate, and writing on a blog that hardly ever gets read.

We need Democrats who aren’t afraid to act like Democrats. The cloture vote really showed me what side people came down on, for better or worse.

I overheard this exchange between a nine-year-old boy and his mom’s wimpy new-age boyfriend, who I’ll call Claude.

The boy said, “I hate you, Claude.”

“Thank you,” said Claude.

“No, I hate you, Claude.”

“Thank you,” said Claude.

“Why are you saying thank you?” asked the boy.

“Because you expressed an emotion that was authentic at the time that you expressed it, which was hate,” said Claude. He said it very fluidly, as though he’d said this many times before.

So I said, “Now I really hate you, Claude.”

I’m so disappointed.

The award for Australian of the Year has gone to Ian Frazer, the creator of a vaccine that is 100% effective against human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer. One hundred percent.

So why am I disappointed? Two reasons.

First, a Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has tried to dampen the enthusiasm by citing concerns that the fear of HPV might be the only thing holding teenagers back from indiscriminate fornication.

“There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, ‘don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous’,” he said.

Senator Joyce – who has four daughters – said he would be “personally very circumspect” about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of sexual activity.

If you’ve been paying attention, you may be saying “Wait, didn’t this happen two months ago?”

Yep, but it’s happening again now. Senator Joyce has blundered into exactly the same rhetoric that the Christian Right used waaay back then. They have learned nothing. And that’s the second reason I’m disappointed.

Smarter idiots, please.

The hunt for esoteric meaning continues apace.

Remember how they used to tell you that records contain backwards satanic messages? And “The Bible Code” has turned a new generation on to twiddling letters to find the Real Meaning of the Text.

Well, twiddle this. A new anagram for ‘presbyterians’.

Beats the previous best anagram, “Best in prayers” by a long shot.

It’s Australia Day, and I’m heading for the beach. While lying on the warm sand, or dipping into the cool blue Indian Ocean, I’ll spare a thought for those of you who are shivering in the frozen North.

I ran across this piece of research on a site called LiveScience.

Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds

The study observed brain activity in subjects who were asked to reconcile contradictory political statements. What they found was that subjects ignored the contradictions in their own point of view, but (surprise) had no trouble finding problems for the other team. And neurochemistry rewarded them heartily for it.

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, [Drew] Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

So, a neurochemical payoff for the reduction of cognitive dissonance.

I didn’t like the title of the article at first (oh boy, another he-said-she-said), until I understood that they were talking about the phenomenon on the individual level. While individuals on either side do have trouble thinking critically about their own cherished viewpoints, there’s a case to be made that Republicans as a party benefit greatly from their current strategy of disinformation, noise, and obfuscation. Democrats, on the other hand, have real trouble getting the facts out there in public view, and would benefit if people didn’t ignore the facts quite so much.

And while I’m posting on evolution…

I found this absolutely fascinating run-down of the continuum that exists between creation and evolution.

The categories: (from most to least literal)
Flat Earthers
Geocentrists
Young-Earth Creationism
Old Earth Creationism
Gap Creationism
Day-Age Creationism
Progressive Creationism
Intelligent Design Creationists
Evolutionary Creationism
Theistic Evolution
Materialist Evolutionism

Latter-day Saints find justification in the Book of Moses for the Day-Age view, although many I have talked to actually slide up toward the Evolutionary Creationism side of things.

Of particular interest was the graphic that shows the ancient Hebrew conception of the universe.

Last week in church (yes, I do still go, it’s very complex, more later), they did the lesson on the Creation, and everyone’s all “What’s the firmament?” So the chart does double duty: it explains what the firmament is, and shows how loony you’d have to be to take any of it literally.

Update: Oh, all right, not loony. But in this day and age, you’d have to have something wrong with your mind to reject what we know about space in favour of the view of a nomadic people that didn’t have telescopes.

Or else you’re just not thinking. That was my problem. Everything was just, “Oh, I’ll figure that out later,” and then I would never think about it again. Too often, smart people in a religious tradition (which is how I somewhat conceitedly classify myself) make no attempt to apply sound reasoning to religious belief. It’s like that whole domain is exempt from analysis. Or they know the belief won’t stand up, and ditching it is too painful. So — blackout.

I have no idea whether anyone’s reading this because
a) I haven’t bothered to go out and find a counter to use (come on, Blogger, it’s not that hard to supply a basic one)
and b) no one has commented yet.

But comments are enabled, so please feel free to engage in spirited commentary, or just say hello and tell me what you’re listening to right now.

This was mentioned in Gilovich’s “How We Know What Isn’t So“, but it happened to me, so I’m going to mention it.

I was talking to a person who says that she can get a parking spot just by believing she’s going to get a parking spot. She swears it works.

It’s easy to see why she would think so. We’re good at detecting patterns that we’re looking for. So she goes to find a spot and sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t. But perhaps she used to think she wasn’t going to get a spot, and only noticed all the times she didn’t. Now she thinks she’s going to get a spot, and only notices the times she does. In either case, she’s not influencing the universe; she’s just altering her perception. Which, to many people, is the same thing.

This is the way that faith works. Faith is a kind of biased reasoning in which we interpret essentially random data in a way that benefits patterns we already believe in. Then when we see the patterns, we take it as validation for our theory. It’s very difficult to avoid this kind of thinking, even for people who are trained to watch out for it, but critical thinking helps to control for this kind of bias. In particular, statistics has many ways to test whether a pattern is essentially random or whether it’s significant.

I’m going to start calling this the ‘parking spot’ effect.

I did ask my ‘parking friend’ to keep track of the times she did and didn’t find a spot. If she actually comes back with results, I’ll have to crunch some numbers. But if she’s really committed to her belief, I think I’m pretty safe.

PZ Myers takes down Orson Scott Card on the subject of intelligent design.

I read Card’s original article. He takes the tack of not exactly defending ID, but taking the piss out of ‘Darwininsts’ who try to quash it. Whoever they are. Both of them.

An understanding of good science is always enough to sweep away the overclaiming of those “scientists” who, as the religious fanatics they are, wish to impose their faith on everyone.

Geez, I really hate it when people claim that evolution is a religion! Or that science is somehow a religion that people exercise ‘faith’ in. I suppose this is the kind of thinking you can expect from religious folk — everything looks like a religion to them because it’s a salient concept for them. But religion differs from science and evolution in a few key respects.

Science v. religion A belief system is a body of doctrines, or statements about the way things are. Science is not a body of doctrines. It’s more like a system of tools (or methods) to try to distinguish true propositions from false ones. (I like Richard Feynman’s quote: Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.) So science and religion are really not describing the same kind of thing at all. (In another sense, science and religion are opposites because science is about accepting ideas that are well-supported, but religion is about accepting ideas that are unsupported. But that’s for another post.)

Evolution v. religion The main difference here is that evolution generates testable hypotheses that can be verified (and has been, over and over). Religion offers no testable hypotheses, and advances propositions that can never be verified.

The next person that tries this on me will get a stern but patient explanation.