Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

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Arabic not materialising on airplanes

27 September 2011 / / 1 Comment

Is there any language scarier than Arabic? (Unless you understand it, of course.) It doesn’t go in the right direction, and it looks so… foreign! No wonder it’s caused havoc before.

And when Arabic script unexpectedly appears on airplanes, well, it’s enough to make people involuntarily micturate.

Mysterious messages that appeared to be scrawled in Arabic writing on the underbellies of several Southwest Airlines jets were being investigated Wednesday by the airline and the FBI, Los Angeles radio station KNX-1070 reported.
The graffiti, which began appearing in February on 737-model planes, has been found more often in recent weeks, according to the report.
The writing appears to have been etched using a chemical process and is visible only after an auxiliary power unit is turned on.

So how do they know it’s Arabic? Gawker comes to the rescue with photos.

Where’s the Arabic? You mean those cross-looking things that look like someone wiped some dust off the plane? That’s the Arabic? Hey, wait — it looks kind of like a sword! Yeah! That’s Arabic, right? I think they have a sword on their flags.

Well, the markings are so not Arabic that even the Daily Mail has had to admit it.

The airline had suggested the symbols, which only show up with heat and are believed to be vandalism, looked like Arabic writing.

However the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. looked at the photos for MailOnline and a spokesman concluded they are ‘not Arabic script’.

It’s kind of sad: Muslims are now the most-feared group in society, just as Jews, Freemasons, and Catholics were in times past. As such, nervous people project their fears onto them. Strange markings on airplanes? Concerns over immigration? Mosque down the road? Obviously all part of a takeover attempt by Muslims.

But now, hopefully now people who work in aviation can stop being worried about Arabic script, and worry about something else, like lesbians kissing.

The Dr Fox Effect

26 September 2011 / / 5 Comments

As a lecturer, I used to worry that students would figure out how little I knew. After a while, I realised that I didn’t have to know everything, and more importantly, I probably knew ‘enough’ to be capable at my level. Now I’m quite relaxed about knowing hardly anything, as long as I keep reading and discussing things with people who know more than I do.

But this clip terrified me all over again. It’s about the ‘Dr Fox Effect‘, and it describes how an engaging lecturer can give students the impression that they’ve learned something, even when the presentation was content-free. In this clip, professors think they’re getting a lecture on game theory from an expert, when they’re really listening to complete gibberish from an actor.

Now I wonder: In a lecture, do I give students something real and useful? Or are students happy with my lectures because I’m ‘entertaining’, while getting nothing of real value?

This is really a little bit scary.

h/t/ weird experiments

Atheism and agnosticism in LDS General Conference talks

25 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

Here’s a great tool that you can use to plow through General Conference talks.

I looked for references to words relating to atheism and agnosticism. I used the wild card, so my search terms were atheis* and agnosti*.

And here is the data, converted into a handy chart. (This chart is additive, so the data for atheis* is stacked on top of agnosti*.)

Click to enlarge.

Wow! Look at that spike in the 1960s! Most of this bump is due to talks by Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, who both liked to warn people against ‘godless communism’. Petersen even invoked what he thought was Lincoln’s prophetic warning against atheism:

Masquerading under the cloak of anthropology with great emphasis upon evolution, atheism is weakening the religious faith of the nation, and thus it also becomes an ally of the adversary. Is it any wonder that Lincoln, almost prophetically, looked into our future and foretold the perils that would confront us?

without realising that Lincoln was basically an atheist himself. Oops.

I suppose part of the 1960s bump could also be because more young Latter-day Saints were attending universities at that time, becoming acquainted with secular education, and horrifying their parents on visits home.

I don’t know why, but I’m rather surprised that Orson and Parley Pratt mentioned atheism, back in the 1850s.

As for recent times, notice the lull in a*ism from the 1980s onward. I guess atheism wasn’t on the radar until, say, The God Delusion came out. (All the mentions from the 2000s are post-2006.) That’s quite a drop-off. And it’s not coming up this decade. So far in the 2010s, nothing. (There’s one reference to ‘atheist’, in a footnote.)

So why the tail-off for a*ism in recent years? Here are some possibilities.

It’s not a concern. The numbers might have to climb a bit more before the alarm bells go off.

They dare not speak its name. Perhaps they’re keeping it positive and avoiding the mention of competitors by name. The term ‘catholi*’ has undergone a similar drop-off.

Give it time. The decade is young. If someone decides to make atheism the focus of a GC talk, it may include eight or nine mentions — a whole 80s worth in one go. Double that if it gets two speakers in the next decade, which seems likely.

I find this last scenario to be the most probable.

Advance Australia what?

24 September 2011 / / 5 Comments

I’ve read that Christians in Roman times were mistrusted for having allegiance to a king other than Caesar. And now it seems that modern Christians are doing little to dispel such suspicion.

Some private Christian schools are singing an alternative version of the national anthem which promotes religious values and talks of Christ.

Instead of the official second verse of Advance Australia Fair, which starts “Beneath our radiant Southern Cross”, the alternative verse says “With Christ our head and cornerstone, we’ll build our nation’s might”.

The version of the anthem is sung every fortnight at Thornlie Christian College and Christian Schools Australia WA executive officer Ray Dallin confirmed that it was regularly sung at other school assemblies and churches.
…
Original verses from 1879 in the National Library of Australia music collection do not include the Christian verse.

A spokeswoman from the office of Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that under national protocols, the anthem should not be modified and alternative words should not be used. The two authorised verses were proclaimed in 1984.

This story has been front-page news in Perth, but I’m actually having trouble getting worked up over it. For one thing, I’ve never been big on national fervour, anthems, or the like, so I don’t feel personally affronted that someone has altered it. It’s more annoying than sacrilegious. For another, this is happening in private religious schools, which is bad, but at least I’m not paying (as much) for it.

About the worst thing is that, just like in America, Christians are trying to re-write history, claiming that the original version was intended to be more Jesus-y. This kind of revisionism is SOP for that mob.

h/t to Calico in comments

Atheist Bake Sale 2

23 September 2011 / / 5 Comments

If you like these cartoons, I have others.

Action Item: Support school secularism

22 September 2011 / / 2 Comments

There’s a primary school in Perth called Edgewater Primary. For 25 years, they forced students to say the “Lord’s Prayer” at school assemblies. Now, they’ve dropped it.

A WEST Australian government school has banned students from reciting the Lord’s Prayer before assembly in response to complaints from parents.

Edgewater Primary School, in Perth’s north, ended the 25-year practice after some parents said it contravened the WA Education Act, which stipulates schools cannot favour one religion over another.
…
“We acknowledge that of the parents who did respond to the survey, many wanted to retain the Lord’s Prayer and it is right that we continue to recite it at culturally appropriate times such as Christmas and Easter, as part of our educational program,” [Edgewater principal Julie Tombs] said in a statement.

“However, at this school we have students from a range of backgrounds and it is important to consider all views and not promote one set of religious beliefs and practices over another.”

Good on them. They made the right call.

But some people of faith are foaming about it.

A state primary school in Perth has been inundated with hate mail after deciding to drop the recital of the Lord’s Prayer at assemblies.

The Education Department says the Edgewater Primary School has received letters, emails and abusive phone calls from people around Australia, venting their anger at the decision.
…
The President of the Western Australian Primary Principals’ Association Stephen Breen says the complaints have been vengeful.

“We are getting comments like I’ll meet you in the grave, you know real loony stuff,’ he said.

“I don’t want to go on to it too much, but the receptionist is receiving phone calls and then people are slamming down the phone. It’s just gone over the top.”

I can understand that they’re not happy about losing their cultural hegemony, but as Australia and the world become more secular, it’s something they’re going to have to come to terms with.

In the meantime, I’ve written the school an email.

I just wanted to offer my support and tell you that I think your school made the right call. People can practice what religion they like, but it’s not fair for a public school to promote one religion over another. Keeping religion out of schools means that everyone’s religion is on an equal footing, and that’s good for everyone, religious or not. Good work.

If you’d like to convey your support, their email is Edgewater.PS@det.wa.edu.au.

Atheist Bake Sale 1

21 September 2011 / / 13 Comments
The UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society had a bake sale today. The cost of the baked goods: your soul.
We wanted to spark some discussion about souls; what it means to people, why we think we have one, and why people are so attached to the dubious notion that there’s a little ghost inside us making all our decisions. What I wasn’t prepared for was the reactions. Even though we were clearly ‘taking the piss’, many people showed a strange reticence. It looks like ‘selling your soul’ is a cultural taboo.
But we did give out lots of cookies.

Follow on to Atheist Bake Sale 2.

Gamers for science

20 September 2011 / / Comments Off on Gamers for science

This was exciting to see: Learning the structure of an AIDS-like virus stumped scientists for 15 years. FoldIt gamers cracked it in ten days.

“This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS,” Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can’t accomplish as easily.

“People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,” Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit’s lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. “Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans.”

I’ve done work on crowdsourcing annotation in language tasks, so it’s good to see it working in this domain. I love the idea of people putting their heads together and solving problems. For all our computing might, nothing can match human brains on some tasks.

‘is’ v ‘has’

19 September 2011 / / Comments Off on ‘is’ v ‘has’

Back in the 1600s, people used auxiliary ‘be‘ + some verbs of motion, where today we’d use ‘have‘.

Shakespeare did it with ‘is fled‘.

LENNOX
‘Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word
Macduff is fled to England.

And ‘is come‘.

LUCILIUS
He is at hand; and Pindarus is come
To do you salutation from his master.

I thought it would be fun to check it in Google Books Ngram Viewer, and see when ‘has X-en’ became more popular than ‘is X-en’. But you can’t do it with any old verb like ‘make’ — it has to be intransitive. Otherwise, you’re scooping up ‘is made’ constructions like ‘That’s how rubber is made.” Those are still okay now. I want the ones where ‘is X-en’ has been replaced by ‘has X-en’. And the pattern seems particularly common with verbs of motion.

Here’s ‘fled‘. Notice that the crossover happens around 1830ish.

And ‘come‘. They cross over at about the same time: 1840ish.

‘Arrive‘ arrives early — about 1810ish

Here’s ‘depart‘, right on the button — 1830 again.

And we see more or less the same pattern with other verbs like land, and become.

What was happening in English in 1800–1840?

When I raised this to the attention of fellow linguist Mark Ellison, he suggested twiddling the ‘Corpus’ menu between ‘British’ and ‘American’. This revealed that the stodgy conservative British books held onto the old usage longer. Perhaps the Americans were at the head of this ‘is – has’ innovation, and the rise we see in the corpus was partially due to more books being published in the Colonies.

I’ll have to do some looking around to see if anyone knows more about it. Luckily, I have two experts on present perfect in my very own department. Meanwhile, I think it’s cool that I can search centuries of language patterns in seconds.

Atheist Bake Sale

18 September 2011 / / 5 Comments

The UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society is having a Bake Sale on the UWA Oak Lawn this Wednesday (21 Sep 2011) at 1 pm. There’s an unusual twist: Rather than accept money for the baked goods, the club simply requests… your soul.

It’s an interesting experiment in superstition metaphysics. I don’t know if people will gratefully accept a cookie, get angry, or shy away. I told a Christian guy about it, and he said, no, he wouldn’t be interested in a cookie. But why not? Does he really think he has a soul, and if so, what is it? Can it be traded in a Faustian bargain? Does it hit uncomfortably close to C.S. Lewis’s witch, who offers you Turkish Delight but instead only gives you pages and pages of turgid allegory? (Or something. I always was a little fuzzy on Lewis.)

Here’s a blurb I’m working on, to hand out at the event.

Do people have souls?

If by ‘soul’ you mean, a part of you that survives your death, then no, there’s no evidence to suggest that anyone has a soul. But that’s okay. You have a brain, and it does all the things that people commonly attribute to souls.

What happens after we die?

Religions of the world have made up a lot of contradicting stories to answer this question, and some people are happy to believe (and pay) whoever tells them the biggest story. But religions offer no evidence for their claims about any sort of afterlife.

The most likely scenario is that your brain (which is the organ responsible for perception) dies, and your perception stops.

Well, that’s depressing!

It doesn’t have to be. Mark Twain once said, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Having a limited existence means you have to do all the good you can while you’re here. You need to make the most of this life, the only one we’re sure of having. You don’t get a second chance to learn, to love, to create, to make things better on this planet. So do it now.

If you’re on campus, come on down and say hi. If nothing else, we have cookies. And there’s even a guarantee: If you’re not 100% satisfied, you can have your soul back.

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