Disapproval Numbers

What an image! Bush only has a majority approval in Texas (not surprising), Alabama, Nebraska, Wyoing, Idaho, Utah and North Dakota. Makes you wonder how he could ever have been elected. Honestly. How?

Baltar And Six

My musings on Battlestar Galactica.

Okay, I’ve been crunching on this Baltar/Six thing for awhile, and I have a somewhat arcane explanation but one that seems to fit what we have seen and could open up some real possibilities. It started from the movie, when Caprica is being blown to smithereens. Baltar and Six are in his apartment when a shock-wave hits the room, destroying everything, including, seemingly, the two characters. Up to that point, Six was a real character who could interact with others. Yet later we see Baltar with only a few scratches and now Six can only interact with him. How come Baltar was not more severely injured? He should be dead. Why can Six only interact with Baltar? And, how come the only time a ‘real’ Six showed up on Galactica (Six Degrees of Separation) Baltar’s Six disappeared from his consciousness?

Could Baltar have developed the same sort of technology that allowed consciousness to be transfered to another body that the Cylons are supposed to have? So, when he died in the apartment, his consciousness was transferred to a Baltar clone. But, because there was also a Cylon transference occurring at the same time, something not expected, Six was also transferred along with Baltar into a new body. She is now disconnected from the Cylons, free to progress on her own and develop her own agenda. She really is in his head.

Because of the normal sort of communications that can occur between similar Cylon clones, Baltar’s Six had to ‘hide’ when her Cylon clone showed up. Once that Cylon was gone, she could return.

We know that Baltar was a computer genius. Why would he not be able to have developed similar technology that the Cylons had for transferring consciousness? If so, wouldn’t that be some interesting scene in an upcoming episode. Baltar is killed, definitely killed on the ship. Blackout. Then he opens his eyes in a room in Caprica! He would have some interesting explaining to do.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 15:48:29 GMT

Lazy, dumb programmers that are nothing of the sort. Philip Lenssen explains why programmers should be lazy and dumb, although of course he doesn’t mean either of those terms in the way we usually do…. [Joho the Blog]

This is a nice distillation of how many creative scientists work also. Lazy, because we want to find new tools to make our lives easier (think Lee Hood, Marv Caruthers and their confederates who created the DNA synthesis and DNA sequencing industries because they wanted to be able to synthesize and sequence DNA)(Disclaimer – Lee was the one who introduced me to immunology 30 years ago at CalTech and I was a post-doc in Marv’s lab).

And almost all great scientists are dumb, in the fashion as described. Particularly in biology, where life so often throws us a curve. If we act too smart, we will miss the important clues that lead us to the answer.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 15:37:57 GMT

Sorting is hard. According to a front page story by Kirk Johnson in the NY Times, the Denver airport is giving up on its dream of automatically sorting and mangling, um, managing luggage. Why the front page? Apparently because the story illuminates some important themes. Even before Johnson gets to the appealing Rube Goldberg elements of the system, he points to a more difficult and more significant problem: Complex, centrally managed systems don’t work so well: Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era… [Joho the Blog]

Nice discussion of one of the great failures of centralized programming of complex systems. The current decentralized apporaches seem to work much better.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 15:33:03 GMT

JOURNAL: Rapid Innovation and Infrared IEDs. The rapid innovation of the Iraqi open source insurgency is yielding improvements in guerrilla technology. In the words of one British Army bomb disposal officer, “These guys have picked up in two years what it took the IRA a quarter-century… [Global Guerrillas]

Why I love reading this:

This is another aspect of global guerrilla math: our deployed innovation is measured in years and theirs in months. -OR- that a $1.2 billion program for IED counter-measures could be trumped by a $10 burglar alarm sensor.

Until we learn how to run an army with similar approaches, we will not have great success in this sort of battlefield. A smaller army with better high tech tools (what Rumsfeld wants) is not the answer. It is creative, ‘low tech’ approaches that will succeed. We need a way for the guys on the front-line to weave their creativity into the mix. Much as they have come up with creative ways to provide armor for vehicles, they would be able to more rapidly respond, in more efficient ways than they are probably allowed to now.

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:56:36 GMT

Just Like Evolution. This story may give PZ Myers a stroke. It’s about how the Texas textbook adoption process, carefully targeted by conservative groups, is leading to widespread censorship of books not just on the subject of evolution, but also on environmental science, sex education, and even history. One book was successfully opposed because it actually explained how much Americans are contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions–a sin for which the textbook author was labeled “anti-free enterprise.” If you believe that a) facts actually exist; and b) they matter, you should be absolutely outraged by what’s happening in Texas, and how it’s affecting the whole country. [Chris C. Mooney | The Intersection]

Mooney has been tracking the continuing assault on science by the current Administration. Texas has a horrible record when it comes to actually approving textbooks that actually teach science. This scientist is called ‘anti-free enterprise, anti-Christian and anti-American’ by a group and compared to bin Laden simply because he writes scientific facts these ‘people’ do not like. Here is what the books that these morons did approve say:

Two other books were adopted instead, Chiras said. One, largely funded by the coal-mining industry, contains 62 pages on mining and only four paragraphs on its environmental impact. The other changed a time reference to avoid contradicting some fundamentalist Christians‰ belief that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. It amended a reference to ice ages from millions of years ago to read ice ages of the ‘distant past.’

It is just not evolution that is a problem for these people. It is any fact that goes against their beliefs. Ignoring reality, disregarding facts, is a sign of insanity. This just confirms in my mind the reasons for such horrible education results in Texas.

There is a group trying to change things: Texas Citizens for Science. There are some recent victories but ignorance never dies, It would be one thing if Texas was really at the forefront of education and science. But, Texas does poorly in many important categories. Read the pdf and wonder what the correlation might be between a poorly educated populace (46th in proportion of populace that graduated high school; 45th in secondary teachers with degrees in the subjects they teach; 47th in SAT scores) and some of the statistics, (first in number of adults incarcerated; 47th in eligible voters who go to polls; 2nd highest teenage birth rate). 40% of the students in Texas drop out. Texas has the highest percentage of children who are uninsured. California has 6 universities listed in US New and World Reports in the top 50, Texas has only one.

After reading this, it is understandable why idiots are able to prevent facts from being taught in school. Actually, not so idiotic. An ignorant population is one that is easy to control. The leaders of Texas have created a populace that has a high proportion of ignorant people who do not vote. Keep them stupid and afraid and you can getaway with almost anything. And this is the model for the country. This is the state we now have leadership from nationally.

I guess if the people of Texas like having such a poor education system, one that seems to be furthered by the current leaders, than whether they want actual facts taught in school is pretty irrelevant. They now want their children of poverty to remain ignorant. I suppose any teacher with any brains, and the ability to go to a state that actually values education, has already done so. Why stick around in a state that treats education so poorly? Or perhaps the wealthy can afford to pay for good teachers to stick around and teach their children. So, is America to become a country where only the rich are allowed to get a good education? Are we working towards a truly class system where the wealthy have lots of opportunity and the poor ares imply kept ignorant? Where the ability to move up to the middle class is out of the reach of most in poverty? Seems like the Texas Model is well on the way there.

It is because of attitudes such as those found in Texas that the US, if it follows the Texas model that seems to be part of this Administration’s approach, may find itself struggling to keep up with those countries that actually care about education and science. i know that if I was a starting scientist looking at what this administration is doing to my field, I would either change my focus and leave science, or go some place where science is really appreciated, perhaps another country. (Granted, we are not quite to this level of desperation yet, but we have another 3 years of Bush. It could happen. Canada looks like a good choice and they are actively recruiting Americans for their Universities.)

There are many reasons I don’t like Bill Gates, but never let it be said he is not smart or extremely perceptive.

Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ‘Now,’ Gates says, ‘I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.

The Texas Model of the Bush Administration is simply accelerating this. It used to be that geniuses came here. Now they stay and work in other countries. But, this Administration wants to continue gaining power by ignorance. It worked well in texas and may work here. If so, it may not be much longer before our geniuses leave for other places. It is a lot easier for a genius born in Poughkeepsie to move to China.

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:12:07 GMT

Vox Day responds

A few days ago
I asked
“Why don’t Republicans all agree that women have to be allowed to vote?” I was worried that people would think I was making a little straw man there, but
Vox responds
:

There is no evidence that women voting has been a positive development in any nation in the world. Should someone like to submit some for once, I’d be happy to examine it. I find it telling that no supporter of women’s suffrage has yet been able to respond with anything but naked and unsupportable assertions.






·






So, perhaps Thoughts From Kansas would do well to consider a more salient question, namely, why would any Republican, or any non-Republican like myself · agree that women have to be allowed to vote?

Women are people. How’s that for an argument? Women are people, and people have a right to self-determination, and voting is how people in democracies determine the direction their lives go. Vox apparently doesn’t think much of democracy, but I’m not going to refight the battles of 1776 right now.






Vox tosses out bullshit statistics (Correlation between rising government spending and a women’s vote? Do I really have to explain the gross methodological flaws in any such study?) and justifies his misogyny in various ways. And Jesus Christ, Singapore and Hong Kong are not democracies to be praised. One is a subservient to the repressive communist China, the other is a repressive regime that restricts free speech in ways that are intolerable. The fact that it’s undemocratic is the least of its worries.






The problem voting rights fix is that some people can’t vote. They aren’t out there so that we can reduce crime, or have lower taxes, or whatever. Monarchal Great Britain abolished slavery before democratic America did, but that’s not an argument for monarchy.






In a Kantian framework, he’s treating all women as means to an end. That’s not moral (it violates the
Categorical Imperative
) and it’s not fair. If Vox were to “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law,” would he advocate restricting the civil liberties of any person if some other person would benefit from that? What if that were a universal law, that anyone’s vote could be taken away if doing so would achieve some laudable goal? What if it were Vox’s vote, or Vox’s right to speak freely?






Yeah, I didn’t think so, either. It’s just women, and the only way to justify keeping the vote from some people is if you are prepared to compromise their personhood. I’m prepared to defend the apparently radical notion that women are people and deserve all the rights that that entails, including the vote.

– Josh Rosenau [Thoughts from Kansas]

It is interesting to watch some Republicans state that voting rights for women is not really important for a democracy. Thus, Iraq does not really need them. Isn’t it wonderful when one group flatly states that another group does not need to vote in a democracy in order to call it a democracy. I guess some of the guys just want andro-sufferage. What a bunch of maroons.

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 04:36:43 GMT

Dead Wrong. CNN reports on actual news and people watch.

Shocking. [Eschaton]

Perhaps they will learn something. People watch news, not gossip.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 23:36:37 GMT

There is an ongoing discussion at Phayngula about my comments below. I also added some comments of my own, finishing with one of my favorite quotes, by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Trial: ‘Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding.’

It was part of a larger segment describing ignorance. Now, it may be hyperbolic but it certainly describes episodes in human history fairly accurately, the ones that turn away from the facts of the surrounding world for the comfortable fictions of belief, either religious or political.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Not all religious people feel this way, but they are standing by while others are. They permit the ignorance to be fed by their silence. They become just as culpable in the retreat to the Dark Ages as the fanatics. I refuse to stand by meekly and see this happen.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:37:20 GMT

Octopus 1, Sharks 0

Week after week, the 3-4 foot sharks kept vanishing
.



Here’s a direct link to
the RealPlayer file

Thanks to
Pharyngula
.

– Josh Rosenau [Thoughts from Kansas]

This hapened up here in Seattle. The world is truly amazing.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:28:58 GMT

More on the secular

The Times remembers Kennedy’s speech at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
(my emphasis):

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absoluteöwhere no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to voteöwhere no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preferenceöand where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewishöwhere no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical sourceöwhere no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officialsöand where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jewöor a Quakeröor a Unitarianöor a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom.
Today I may be the victimöbut tomorrow it may be youöuntil the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
”

Compare that to the position of
the Student Ambassadors of Jim Ryun
, discussed yesterday: “

the shrinking religious influence in the U.S. and Europe is empowering the terrorists.”

So, who do you want to believe? A guy who could run fast a few decades ago, or the war hero and President who stared down Castro and Khrushchev?
It’s not just Ryun’s people who seem oddly unaware of our nation’s history or the secular tradition that has guided the West

since the 1500s
. The Discovery Institute’s famous
Wedge Document

states (my emphasis):

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet
a little over a century ago
, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality
eventually infected
virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.

The same rhetoric was a staple of
the Board of Education “hearings” last spring

.

Again, this idea that a secular society is a novel development of the 20th Century. Ignore the fact that people said these same things of Galileo. If the planets had moons orbiting them, what would become of the celestial spheres? Were these divinely created structures perforated with holes, so that moons could pass through? Impossible. Undoubtedly, the three popes who specifically endorsed geocentrism all said that teaching heliocentrism would lead to a decline in morality, victory of the Moors, and a materialistic society unconcerned with morality.

Some people

even say that today

:

As we know, modern man has continually used the Copernican model and its variant forms (Galileo, Kepler, et al) in an effort to weaken both the authority of Scripture and the authority of the Church to hold them accountable for the way they live their lives. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “We don’t have to take the Bible literally because, as we all know, the sun doesn’t go around the earth, but Scripture says it does. So why should I trust the Bible?”

If Scripture can be dismissed by claiming that it is mostly a collection of myths and fables from ignorant and primitive people; and if the Church can be faulted for siding with an aberrant view of cosmology; then modern man thinks he has found the ultimate excuse for relieving himself of being bound by either Scripture or the Church.

Scripture is very clear that the earth is stationary and that the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, “flat-earthers” are not accepted here, since Scripture does not teach a flat earth, nor did the Fathers teach it). If there was only one or two places where the Geocentric teaching appeared in Scripture, one might have the license to say that those passages were just incidental and really didn’t reflect the teaching of Scripture at large. But the fact is that Geocentrism permeates Scripture. Here are some of the more salient passages (Sirach 43:2-5; 43:9-10; 46:4; Psalm 19:5-7; 104:5; 104:19; 119:90; Ecclesiastes 1:5; 2 Kings 20:9-11; 2 Chronicles 32:24; Isaiah 38:7-8; Joshua 10:12-14; Judges 5:31; Job 9:7; Habakkuk 3:11; (1 Esdras 4:12); James 1:12). I could list many more, but I think these will suffice.

Isn’t there also something in the Bible about the truth setting something free?

– Josh Rosenau [Thoughts from Kansas]

UPDATE (8-8-05 2:20 PM): Figures. When I write something late at night and forget to spellcheck, that is the time I get linked to. Sometimes my fingers have a mind of their own. It is kind of like having underwear with holes in them when they get you into surgery after an accident. Their presence does not change any of the facts, just makes them a little more embarrassing. At least I am embarrassed by one of my favorite bloggers Pharyngula.

People whose faith requires them to disregard facts are deluded. The delusions of faith have resulted in millions of deaths throughout history. One would have hoped that the Enlightenment and the following centuries would have lessened the power of these people. Looks like they are a strin strain of humanity that will always be with us. God did not provide the natural world around us to fool us or to decieve deceive us. We do not have the intellect we have to waste it on idiotic delusions about a geocentric solar system. Anyone who choses to believe the multiply-translated words of a document whose provenance is not wholy wholly known while ignoring the facts of the world we live in is a waste of humanity.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:10:56 GMT

Fla. Sex Offenders Barred from Hurricane Shelters.

Why don’t we just call out the firing squad and shoot all sex offenders? That’s what it’s coming down to. Latest example: Florida has banned sex offenders from hurricane shelters. Instead, in the event of a hurricane, they are to report to prison, where they will be held in the visitor’s waiting room (so they know they are free to leave.)

Sex offenders have to sign a form that outlines instructions, wear an ID badge, and they can be searched by authorities at any time.

An ACLU official makes the appropriate point:

the more steps you take to isolate and ostracize them … there are very few options for them to live their lives and not reoffend,” he said.

[TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

Nothing to add. I have chosen to never travel to Florida again anyway. They continue to be a state run by aliens.

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:07:58 GMT

Pentagon harasses, demotes and otherwise punishes black female whistleblower for taking on the white boys at Bush & Cheney Inc., Halliburton, etc.. Long and nasty story what they did to this woman, simply because she caught them. By noemail@noemail.org (John (temporarily) in Paris). [AMERICAblog]

Nice to see that Republicans no longer seem to care about military contractors and the overspending. Used to give an award every year for such things. Now they just sit by while the Pentagon flings money at the general direction of Halliburton.

Iran/Contra Rears Its Head

Could be that Roberts was involved in Iran-Contra. Read more about the greatest irelevant scandal in America’s History. Not irrelevant because nothing was done. Terrible things were done and the Constitution was severely damaged. Irrelevant because many of these guys are still in the Adminsitraton and still thumbing their noses at the law. Bush I pardoned people to prevent them from testifying. Yep, he pardoned them before trial so that they could not testiy against him and to prevent Bush I from appearing at the trial under oath. Now Bush II will do anything to prevent these papers from seeing the light of day. His Administration has already put a hold on the transfer of many Bush I documents. I wonder why?

Watergate was a personal abuse of power. Nixon largely followed his own paranoid nature and was caught. Iran-Contra was much worse, since the Executive branch directly ignored the will of the Legislative, went behind its back to fund indedependent warfare and actually working against our best interests. All those criminals protected each other because they held the reigns of power. Who could stop them? Well, Walsh almost did but the extraordinary use of pardons got them off.

I do not doubt that the latest group will use their presidential get out of jail free card. Iran-contra is THE reason Reagan should not ever be in a top 10 list of Presidents. He abused his power, or allowed others to abuse it, to the detriment of the United States. Our government was severely hurt by this disregard for the Constitution.

What is it with Republican Presidents? Nixon had Watergate. Reagan/Bush had Iran-contra. Now this Administration. I voted for Ford in 1976 because i thought he was a good man, trying to do a tough job. I did not like the fact that Carter had little experience with national politics. Running as an outsider was not a good way to get Washington to work with you.. I refused to vote for Reagan in 1980 because his campaign in 1976 had severely damaged Ford. Turns out that he had little experience also, permitting the widespread destruction of the Constitution. Abscam, Iran/Contra, Savings and Loan Bailout. I have never voted Republicanfor a President again and I probably never will. They do too much to this country and its Constitution.

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 06:11:07 GMT

DIY man shoots himself in heart. A DIY enthusiast working on his flooring shoots himself in the heart with his nail gun. [BBC News | Health | World Edition]

The thing that kept him from being a Darwin Award winner was he did not pull the nail out. He had doctors take care of it. Thankfully.