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Sex tip for gay Republicans: apricot scrub makes excellent lube.

2 November 2007 / / Comments Off on Sex tip for gay Republicans: apricot scrub makes excellent lube.

One from home: yet another Republican has been outed, this one from Washington state.

State Representative Richard Curtis says he’s not gay, but police reports and court records indicate the Republican lawmaker from southwestern Washington dressed up in women’s lingerie and met a Medical Lake man in a local erotic video store which led to consensual sex at a downtown hotel and a threat to expose Curtis’ activities publicly.

Curtis is notable for having voted against two LGBT bills.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened in dear old Eastern Washington. Anyone remember Mayor Jim West, who voted to bar gay people from teaching in schools or working in day care centres?

Republicans didn’t see it coming, not even with that mustache:

State Rep. Bob Sump, R-Republic, described Curtis as an intelligent man and an effective legislator and said he was “dumbfounded” by the reports.

“I’m sitting here in shock,” Sump said. “When we lose our moral compass, these are the things that can happen.”

Yes, without their moral compass, people can become self-hating hypocrites. Sad.

Check out this ham-handed dodge from State Rep. John Ahern, R-Spokane:

Candidates of either party who espouse family values on the campaign trail then indulge in illicit sex are hypocrites.

Of either party? How many closeted Democrats can you think of? Are there any? The false equivalence, it burns.

I decided months ago that whenever I heard someone espousing ‘family values’ or speaking against homosexuality, I’d just ask them how long they’d been gay. But, as always, Tom the Dancing Bug has beaten me to it.

Who will it be next week?

Washoe dies

1 November 2007 / / 1 Comment

First Alex the Gray Parrot, and now this: Washoe has passed away.

Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died at the age of 42 at Central Washington University.

Not exactly. Washoe was able to imitate some signs, but this doesn’t constitute human language. Human language involves putting words into syntactic patterns, and these patterns show features like recursion and structure dependence. Washoe wasn’t quite able to do this, nor has any other non-human.

I hadn’t even realised she was still alive.

But then comes the good bit of the article:

[C]laims about Washoe’s language skills were disputed by scientists who believed that language is unique to humans. Among those who doubted that chimps could use language were MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Harvard scientist Steven Pinker.

Chomsky contended that the neural requirements for language developed in humans after the evolutionary split between humans and primates.

Pinker contended that primates simply learn to perform certain acts in order to receive rewards, and do not acquire true language.

Nice. There’s a lot to say about Chomsky coming around to evolution, but I’ll tackle that a bit later.

ARIAs beef

28 October 2007 / / 1 Comment

Ain’t no way that Sneaky Sound System track was better than the TV Rock track.

Go here and click on ‘Best Dance Release’ to see what I mean.

Why science is better than religion, part eleventy-bajillion

24 October 2007 / / 35 Comments

I caught this quote from Republican presidential candidate and evolution denier Mike Huckabee.

A reporter asked Huckabee how he thought his views — including his view on evolution — might play in the general election.

“Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do,” he said. “In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.“

He’s actually hit upon the very reason why science rules and religion drools.

Yes, our scientific understanding changes. The ideas we hold as true will in 100 years’ time be superceded by better and more refined knowledge. But that’s a good thing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Science is good at changing and updating our canon of knowledge as the facts demand it. That’s why our scientific knowledge has increased exponentially, while religions… look pretty much the same as they did hundreds of years ago.

Because religions are based on beliefs instead of facts, they’re not very good at updating when new facts come in. It takes a long time for religions to change, and there’s usually a lot of resistance. To some, this looks like constancy in a world of change, but it’s actually a drag on human knowledge.

And take a look at the direction of flow. Science is considered good if it’s new and current, while there’s a very strong tendency for some Christian churches to be as ‘first-century’ as possible.

I went to an observatory with the boys the other night. I found out how we know how far away the stars are. I heard about what’s likely to happen to our Sun in the future. Best of all, I got to see clusters of nebulae. There’s so much to learn about our universe, and the scientific method is the most successful way to do that. But for people like Huckabee, if this knowledge doesn’t agree with their biblical preconceptions, they’ll stick with a cosmology made up by people who didn’t have telescopes.

Verdi Requiem

21 October 2007 / / 6 Comments

Last night I was in a performance of Verdi’s Requiem with Collegium Symphonic. Gee, I’ve done a lot of requia lately, haven’t I? Maybe people are so fascinated by them because of their gravity. Or maybe people are just interested in death.

Verdi was an opera guy, so this Requiem is like stepping up to the edge of The Pit and looking in. It’s fiery in there, orchestra and choir blazing away. Then it all pulls back suddenly and it’s quiet. Really quiet. I’ve seen a triple piano in a Poulenc number before, but what is the singer to make of the quintuple p’s in Verdi’s work? That’s pretty quiet. Do you think he really meant it?

I actually found one thing that kept bugging me, and that was the ‘Dies irae’. If you’ve heard it once, you know it. Loud bass drum, choir at full volume, plunging into the abyss. I love the tune, but the words — day of wrath. It seems to me that one thing religion is good at is frightening people. You’d better be obedient, or you’ll be cast into the lake of fire. It kind of triple-p’d me off.

Which is all the more interesting, because Verdi was an agnostic (if that). People complained that he would even write a Requiem. So Verdi’s Requiem is that of an unbeliever. After all the tempest of the ‘Dies Irae’ and the joy of the ‘Sanctus’, the Requiem ends not with the promise of Abraham (as Mozart’s does), and certainly not with a lush ‘In Paradisum’ (as Fauré’s does). Instead, the chorus drops to a triple-p, and in unison sings only ‘Libera Me’. Free me.

Fantastic experience — the choir was really on, soloists were great, and the orchestra was gorgeous. You really have to catch one of these shows if you’re in town. You won’t have as much fun as I do because you won’t be singing, but you’ll still enjoy it.

You find cognac-swilling Goethe readers in the strangest places

18 October 2007 / / 2 Comments

I found a issue of The Improvement Era the other day. This was a magazine produced by the LDS Church — this one’s from 1966 — and it actually had ads. Can you imagine the Ensign today running ads?

This caught my eye — it’s on the first page. Check the tagline for this ad for ‘Great Books’.

Why the Godless hate these books
…and why the God-fearing find daily inspiration in them

We all know that Stalin in particular hated Volume 50: Marx. And atheists today can’t stand Volume 49: Darwin.

It’s the earliest example I’ve seen of the ‘Hitler and Stalin were atheists’ trope, still seen today, and refuted somewhat ably here.

That aside, it occurs to me how little things have changed in 50 years. Atheists are, and have always been, demonised by the god-fearing. But anti-book? What an odd accusation. It’s not the secular left that’s tried to burn and ban them.

Open thread number 400!

14 October 2007 / / 15 Comments

Already it is Post 400. You may use this thread for any discussion you wish, like all the other threads. Maybe this would be a good place for comments about the ‘Who is the most batshit insane?” poll. For my part, I have to report a glaring omission: I forgot to add ‘9/11 truthers’ to the list. Oh well, maybe next time.

Milgram’s ‘learner’ reflects

10 October 2007 / / 2 Comments


Background on Milgram’s experiment.

No, really, it’s up to you.

4 October 2007 / / 1 Comment

How much would you pay for the new Radiohead album?

Then that’s what you’ll be paying.

The new album ‘In Rainbows‘ will be available only from the website, and if you opt for digital download, you may pay exactly what you like. You enter the amount you’ll pay in a field. If you click on a question mark link, it simply says, “It’s up to you.”

Would you pay less than usual, since Radiohead has a lot of money anyway, and, well, they’re offering? Or would you pay slightly more, figuring that other artists are watching, and you’re hoping they’ll try it as well?

I settled on ten pounds. You can decide from that which group I’m in.

Influence evolution now

1 October 2007 / / Comments Off on Influence evolution now

Does this picture look like a face to you? It’s been generated somewhat randomly, along with tons of others at Mutating Pictures. You decide how much it looks like a face, and the more facey ones get to produce more offspring.

It’s not really natural selection, but it is a good example of how randomness plus feedback can cause certain features to recur. It even works when the feedback is very vague — you’re not saying exactly what it is that’s more face-like, but the more facey ones survive anyway.

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