Over at Pharyngula, an individual by the ‘nym of Rieux and I have been discussing the work of Hector Avalos, religious-studies professor at Iowa State University and author of six books, the most notorious of which are Fighting Words (2005) and The End of Biblical Studies (2007). The former treatise lays out a theory of religious violence, proposing that religious beliefs create scarce resources over which humans then fight. Avalos illustrates this thesis with examples from Christianity, Judaism and Islam; I’d like to see similar work done with Hinduism and other beliefs from beyond the Abrahamic clutch. The latter book expounds Avalos’ position that the modern field of Biblical studies — which encompasses textual criticism, “Biblical archeology” and more — is intellectually moribund. Its only outcome has been to undermine confidence in the very scriptures it tried to uphold, showing that holy writ was the product of a civilization whose practices would be anathema in modern society.

For Avalos, the only respectable mission for Biblical scholars like himself is to become physicians, working towards their own obsolescence.

Or, in less muggled terms, Avalos kedavros!

This is heady stuff, and we could argue about it until the raptors come home, hungry and looking for dinner, but hey, it’s the weekend! So, a few thoughts of littler consequence:
Continue reading Them’s Fightin’ Words →

So, Dumbledore is gay.

Man, I remember when the Lord Protectors of Decency (TM) were all upset with Lois Lowry‘s The Giver, this despite the fact that the hero risks his life trying to return real “family” to the world. Bashing The Giver has gone out of style (well, mostly), perhaps because the mind of the censor is too small to contemplate more than one book at once, and nowadays we have Harry Potter to worry about. And I guess if your mentality is of the sort which finds it reasonable to justify your entire belief system by the supposed preponderance of sevens in ancient Greek manuscripts you’ve never actually read, then maybe you should be worried that somebody carrying a wand of yew will sneak up behind you and scream, “Avada kedavra!”

(People who know me can testify that I have the odd nervous habit of twirling things between my fingers: pens, twigs, chopsticks. I spin them about, idly tap them against a desk, click and re-click anything which is clickable. Now you know the reason why: I’m actually exhibiting my repressed inner Dark Lord nature.)

Three Harvard undergraduates were told to leave the Harvard Coop bookstore because they were copying International Standard Book Numbers from books on the shelf. The store called the Cambridge police; the officers who responded allowed the students to continue copying, and the students left of their own accord two and a half hours later.

Cops having better sense than bookstore employees. What’s the world coming to?

Revere has the details and also points to CrimsonReading.org, which looks pretty neat. Not only does it automate comparison shopping for textbooks, but it also lets you see what books Harvard requires for its courses. To be honest, I looked at their physics listings just so I could point and laugh at their effete inadequacy, but their selections actually look pretty reasonable. “Quantum Mechanics II” can’t get very far if the only book they require is Griffiths; I was expecting that an upstanding school like Harvard would at least force its students to buy Shankar, Sakurai and Cohen-Tannoudji as well. Sean Carroll will no doubt be pleased they use his book for their general relativity class.

Phil Plait points out a link to one of my favorite Asimov essays, “The Relativity of Wrong.” Like most of his essays, it begins with an anecdote: in this case, Asimov receives a letter from a fellow “majoring in English literature,” who took offense at Asimov’s implication in an earlier essay that people have made definite gains in understanding Nature.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern “knowledge” is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. “If I am the wisest man,” said Socrates, “it is because I alone know that I know nothing.” The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

Asimov goes on to defend this position. This is actually a short version of the essay which appeared in The Skeptical Inquirer; a longer one was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and later became the title essay of the collection The Relativity of Wrong (1988). The introductory anecdotes of the essays in that book also tell how Asimov met Harold Urey and, many years later, F. Murray Abraham — so, even without the science content, it’s an interesting little book.

Altogether, the fact that a non-trivial fraction of the North American population is willing to say, in so many words, that it’d be happy to collaborate in persecution and oppression is one of the most unsettling things I’ve read in a long time.

So says Cosma Shalizi about Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians (2007). Unsurprisingly, I agree.

If you haven’t done so already, kick back for an afternoon and read through Altemeyer’s book. It’s very much worth the investment. After that, we can join together in debating the details — every day, I become more convinced that a significant chunk of my species just likes to argue.
Continue reading Shalizi on Altemeyer →

It’s rush season at MIT. This is the time of year when food is free, rooms are filled with oobleck and alumni like me are roped into writing and performing spoof musicals in order to entice freshmen into choosing a living group. It’s a fun time to revisit the ol’ stomping grounds, but of course life manages to provide downsides, too. First, MIT rush is “dry,” meaning that the oobleck must be made with water and not alcohol, and that nobody can use liquid nitrogen to make a frozen tequila popsicle.

Underage drinking is endemic at the Institute, naturally, as is the case at every other university in the United States. Setting the legal drinking age at 21 makes umpteen gajilliion college students into criminals with no observable benefit, but the worst consequence may be that it means the students can’t have a rush activity where they turn beer bottles into Leyden jars to make capacitors for a Tesla coil.

The other downside of this season is that, like I said, I’m busy working on a spoof musical, which cuts into my blag-writing time. Instead of writing something shockingly original, I’ll just keep the beast at bay by feeding it a selection from Jorge Luis Borges. Today’s piece is a 1941 essay entitled “Dos libros” [Two books], originally published as “Dos libros de este tiempo” [Two Books of this Era], in La Nación (10 December 1941). This translation is by Eliot Weinberger and is found on pages 207–210 of Selected Non-Fictions. Borges is discussing H. G. Wells’ book, Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution, which had just been published.
Continue reading Sunday Borges →

Cosma Shalizi writes of a discovery — an unexpected appearance of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

An edition of the old translation of this story, illustrated by an artist signing themselves only as “Rikki”, and published in 1983 by a press called the Porcupine’s Quill in Erin, Ontario. (Found, presumably mis-filed, in the cultural studies section of one of the two decent used book stores I’ve found in Pittsburgh.) The illustrations are dedicated to Carl Sagan, among others, and are nicely weird, menacing and suggestive. The map of Uqbar is also well done. I know nothing about the artist but would like to learn more.

Re-reading, I am struck by the terrific economy with which Borges tells the story of an elaborate, centuries-spanning conspiracy to take over the world. It is only too easy to imagine how much more space any contemporary author would take to tell this story, without adding anything to the effect. For that matter, why not a summer action movie version? (It’s hardly a greater stretch than what they do to Philip K. Dick.)

Either Shalizi doesn’t know or he was prevented from saying that Borges was the uncredited original author of Fight Club (1999). Don’t believe me? Just read this excerpt from a review Borges published of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941).
Continue reading What Shalizi Doesn’t Know →