Category Archives: Wobosphere fun

Wobosphere fun

Dobson on Foreign Policy

Via the Richard Dawkins forums comes James Dobson’s take on Middle Eastern affairs. Dobson is interviewing known eschatological loonball Joel C. Rosenberg and promoting Rosenberg’s new book. Here’s Rosenberg:

We can’t say for sure that this is a prophetic event, but as followers of Jesus Christ, our command is to “be strong and courageous.” That’s what God said to Joshua four times in the first chapter of Joshua. We who have the Holy Spirit in us should not cower in the face of this, because the Muslims are lost, and because they are lost they are being driven I believe by THE ENEMY in a way that will confront us but we know that Jesus Christ is powerful and we know he is moving in the Middle East. I think what is most exciting in the Middle East is a story the media is missing: that in the last 30 years in Iran, there are now more than one million Muslims who have converted to faith in Christianity in Iran. If that’s not evidence that we are living in the last days, I don’t know what is.

Yes, it’s the end of the world as we know it. . . again! And here’s Dobson’s reply:

We know the Lord is in control. We know that he has never lost a battle. And we know he loves us, and he loves the nation of Israel and has made that clear for thousands of years. So what should we do?

There’s just one little factor which Dobson has left out of his careful foreign-policy calculations. I admit that only an expert in the field would be aware of this, but a man as influential as Dobson has no excuse for ignorance.
Continue reading Dobson on Foreign Policy →

Wobosphere fun

Categorical Indecency and Wild OATs

As part of a mysterious web-development project about which I am Not At Liberty To Speak, I have an RSS feed of news stories running through some filtering algorithms and dumping onto a local intranet page. That’s how I noticed this story on WikiNews.

The Hong Kong Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) has received more than 1,700 complaints calling for the Bible to be reclassified as “indecent”, following a heated controversy sparked by the sex column of an university student magazine, which was classified by the government classification tribunal as “indecent”.

Apparently, the Obscene Articles Tribunal (OAT) slapped a “Category II: Indecent” rating upon a student newspaper for publishing an article which asked readers if they ever fantasized about incest and/or bestiality. This means that the students publishing the newspaper will have a criminal record. Enough people got irritated by this that somebody started www.truthbible.net, whose legal disclaimer reads as follows:
Continue reading Categorical Indecency and Wild OATs →

Astronomy, Wobosphere fun

Carnivalia

The third Carnival of Space is up at Universe Today. This is a new carnival, and it looks like it might be a weekly affair.

The deadline for the eighth Carnival of Mathematics is also fast approaching. And let’s not forget the 61st Skeptic’s Circle, targeted for 24 May and hosted by the inimitable Skepchicks. In a stunning display of synchronicity, the physical-science carnival Philosophia Naturalis #10 will appear on the same day!

Bad Math, Cosmology, Popularization, Wobosphere fun

Dark Energy Weirdness

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OK, has anybody here heard of Tori Amos? She’s apparently a friend of Neil Gaiman, which is cool, but her Wikipedia article doesn’t cite enough sources for me to figure out what she’s about. Apparently, she’s releasing a music album entitled American Doll Posse; I’d tell you more, but her website requires “the latest flash player.” I did manage to find out that for this album, Amos created five alter egos, four of which are based on Greek goddesses with the fifth being Amos herself. (For the record, the goddesses are Artemis, Persephone, Athena and Aphrodite.) Eris, the patron goddess of the Internet, inspired somebody to write the following on Wikipedia:

On March 23, 2007, toriamos.com released an audio clip from Amos, stating that each of the characters from American Doll Posse has her own online blog. She urged fans to find them, saying “Happy hunting.”

Well, I know where at least one of them is. Pip (Athena) maintains a LiveJournal, on which she writes (this being the point of my odd little story),
Continue reading Dark Energy Weirdness →

Astronomy, Popularization, Wobosphere fun

Eta Carinae

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I remember a time when it seemed like I was the only person in the world who knew that stars we could see in the night sky might one day go foom, letting us read at night or, possibly, destroying the habitability of our planet. Of course, I couldn’t have been alone in knowing this, since I found out about it by reading books by other people, but in the dark times of Web 0.1, before writers and scientists were people who listened to music and got in spats with one another, it was easy to feel alone while exploring the heavens.

And now, look, everybody who reads the Washington Post knows about Eta Carinae, thanks to Joel Achenbach:

I dropped by NASA headquarters last Monday to hear about the relatively nearby and extremely massive star that might explode at any moment. Remember the name: Eta Carinae. Sounds like an Italian opera singer, or maybe a snazzy little sports car. It’s a monster of a star — something like 120 times the mass of the sun, and roiling, heaving, spewing out gobs of star stuff in what may be the prelude to a cataclysmic bang, a supernova unlike any seen before.

If it blows, you might be able to read a book by its radiance at night — unless it fires a narrow beam of gamma rays right at us, in which case all bets are off. One astrophysicist on hand said, “It would probably destroy all the ozone in the atmosphere.” Similar to what we tried to do ourselves, before we banned those nasty chlorofluorocarbons. Eta Carinae would be like a giant can of 1950s hairspray. Not a pleasant picture.

Continue reading Eta Carinae →

Pseudoscience, Wobosphere fun

The Skeptical Garden of Forking Paths

The 60th Skeptic’s Circle is up at Infophilia. Our Sunclipse contingent is represented by these three posts. Lots of good stuff is on offer; I particularly enjoyed Conspiracy Factory’s anecdote about anecdotes, and Bronze Dog’s take on vibrational woo struck a chord with me.

Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week!

Infophile clearly put some serious effort into this Circle. The end result, a fine example of hypertext fiction bent to pedagogical purposes, indicates that he truly appreciates the quantum feminist perspective:

The lurch and the jump of a browser’s deterritorialized journey through a hyperlinked text simultaneously problematizes connectivity, perspective and the nature of multidimensional space even as it explores them. […] Luce Irigaray has asked, “What do we call a gap that is full?” (qtd in Joyce, 1995, 207) and in the webbed space of hyperlinked fiction the pregnant gaps between the nodes are at least as important as the textual nodes themselves. The nodes exist in conjunction with the dynamic space of the journey and cannot be discussed in isolation. This information gap can only be travelled through and never visited directly because it is the interpolation of space and nonspace. It is mnemonic space: the fleeting space between the moment of remembering and forgetting. This is not the white space of the printed page, but instead the full, noisy gap of the cyberspatial leap through sensual and perceptual space. These gaps are felt, not seen.

Transparency, Wobosphere fun

The Algorithm Finds Brooke Shields

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It looks like those zany Englanders need some lessons in drawing muted post horns:

The Alphabet of Brooke Shields

This graffito has been puzzling people all throughout London. First described by Londonist, it remains enigmatic. Sightings throughout the Greater London Above area are tabulated here. (Something odd also seems to be happening with Frozen Indigo Angel, which sounds an awful lot like a codename Charles Stross would invent for a Bob Howard novel.) Metro.co.uk writes,

So do you have any theories? Do you know what Alphabet of Brooke Shields means? Tell us in the comments, please. We’re going mad here. In this puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in Brooke Shields, only one thing is certain — if it turns out to be just some rubbish viral marketing for a band or a perfume or a robotic dog or something, we’re all going to be very upset indeed.

I’m torn. Does this topic require more Neverwhere jokes (“Brooke Shields” is actually a warrior princess fording rivers in London Below) or more The Crying of Lot 49 references? (Weird “Alphabet” Still Teasingly Elusive. Don’t Ever Alphabetize The Horn.)
Continue reading The Algorithm Finds Brooke Shields →

Favorites, Popularization, Wobosphere fun

Cosmos 2.0

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I expect that by now we’ve all learned to be a little wary of X 2.0, just like we wonder what’s being oversimplified when we see “the New X” or, worse yet, “X is the new Y.” We know that anything 2.0 should be approached with curiosity, skepticism and a sense of humor. Such is the spirit I would like to evoke for the following post, which I’m recycling from this Memoirs of a Skepchick comment.

The subject was brought back to my attention, oddly enough, by the Time Magazine list of most hoopla-ed people about which I already ranted. In addition to bashing my head against my desk thanks to the Dawkins profile, I happened to check Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s write-up (authored by Michael Lemonick). I could only think that Lemonick exaggerates Tyson’s name-recognition factor and meme-market capitalization. He fits Tyson neatly into the “next Carl Sagan” slot, but in my humble (cough, cough) estimation, Tyson has a fair way to go. As I mentioned a few days ago, the subject of “science superstars” came up during my breakfast chat with PZ Myers. Not long after I arrived, before the others showed up, we got to talking about how one invents a scientist persona for the mass media. Adam Bly, Seed Magazine’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, appears to be taking Sagan as his archetype. Notice that we’re all still looking for “the next Carl Sagan,” not somebody who is “bigger and badder and sexier than Neil deGrasse Tyson.” In other words, I wish Tyson were as famous as Lemonick makes him out to be.

(I was also a trifle irked by Lemonick’s statement that Sagan guest-starred on Johnny Carson’s show while Tyson trades jokes with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Apples and tangerines! Three decades ago, was satire the only channel of intellect TV provided?)
Continue reading Cosmos 2.0 →

Evolution, Pseudoscience, Wobosphere fun

Call for Papers

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I find it both interesting and heartening that several people’s first reaction to this was, in a word, “Sokal.”

High quality papers for the International Journal for Creation Research (IJCR), sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research, are now invited for submission. IJCR is a professional peer-reviewed online technical journal hosted by the ICR website for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific research from the perspective of a recent Creation and a global Flood within a biblical framework.

If this were the Discovery Institute, I’d say you should go for some blather about reverse engineering and Shannon information. Unfortunately, ICR wants Young-Earth papers:

Papers should be up to 10,000 words long, and color diagrams, figures and photographs are encouraged. Papers can be in any scientific, or social scientific, field, but must be from a young-earth perspective and aim to assist the development of the Creation Model of Origins. Papers should be submitted in a plain text, single line-spaced Word or RTF file. Formatting should be kept to an absolute minimum. Do NOT embed graphics, tables, figures or photographs in the text, but supply them in separate files, along with captions.

Naturally, the minions of darkness use Word. It was there in the beginning, don’cha know? I reproduce the following paragraph merely to include their e-mail address and increase their likelihood of being spammed:

Papers should be emailed as attached files to the IJCR Editor-in-Chief at aasnelling@ozemail.com.au, and other requirements followed as per the Author Checklist in the Instructions to Authors Manual. We aim to publish submitted papers within six (6) months of receipt.

Question: given the known distaste young-Earthers have for Intelligent Design advocates, would theobabble about “complexity” meet their standards? I’m genuinely curious. Are they more likely to accept anything which supports their cause, or to reject it because it sounds too much like those Old Earth science-appeasers?

Transhumanism, Wobosphere fun

American Teens Invent Cyberbrain

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According to Thomas Hobbes, in the state of nature all men have equal power. Smarts, sticks and stones allow us to compensate for our physical differences and achieve parity. His Leviathan has its flaws, but it’s nice to see the process he described at work today, and in such an important environment as our schools. Via Orac comes the reassuring news that students continue to outsmart their teachers and administrators while learning valuable life skills:

Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.

“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”

Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.

Furthermore, the administrators’ grasp of statistics and evidence-based reasoning — essential for citizens of the Enlightenment — continues at its all-time high:

Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said she does not have hard statistics on the phenomenon but said it is not unusual for schools to ban digital media players.

“I think it is becoming a national trend,” she said. “We hope that each district will have a policy in place for technology — it keeps a lot of the problems down.”

Look, NASSP, you’ve got your priorities all backwards. Learning at a tender age how to follow prompting from a concealed “wire” is invaluable training for those of America’s youth who wish to enter politics!

To people (including Orac and Rob Knop) wondering why those darn kids are so willing to put energy into cheating when they could get good grades legitimately by putting the same effort into their studies. . . well, I should say that if you’re familiar with the tools you have, then using them isn’t much effort at all. If you have to memorize a lot of random whoosywhatsits, and you know you have a machine which can remember everything, what you do with it is a pretty simple deduction. Moreover, if you have no reason to suspect that what you’re told to memorize will ever be useful to you ever again, then you definitely burden the machine with it!

It’s really a Chinese Room problem. The student doesn’t understand the material, but the combined system student + iPod does. As long as they’re never separated from their iPod ever again, it’s fine! In fact, I believe this marks the first step on our species’ road to cyberization, a procedure which will have many benefits indeed. We should take pride in our nation’s youth and their pioneering spirit!

Popularization, Wobosphere fun

Blaggregation at Darwin’s

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I slept uneasily, my dreams full of ticking clocks, of racing the dawn, of improbable clouds just before sunsight and obscure preparations against the day. I dreamed that I could fly by selecting parts of a petroglyph body in my Firefox window and indenting them to high speed. When I tried, I fell up a Blade Runner hill, careening over an empty freeway as slick as Teflon.

I woke up to an insistently beeping cellphone alarm and got dressed to the Lola Rennt soundtrack. Clutching a bottle of soda which I knew I shouldn’t drink since, like mental illness, diabetes runs in my family (but unlike mental illness, only on one side), I stepped out into a beautiful morning slightly too cold for my tweed eigenjacket and slightly too warm for my black leather trenchcoat. (I guess it’s never springtime in the Matrix.) Forty minutes of strolling later, with a song in my heart — specifically, Infected Mushroom’s “Cities of the Future” — I arrived at Darwin’s, a sandwich, coffee and pastry place near Harvard Square. It was five minutes till eight; I was early, but PZ Myers was earlier.
Continue reading Blaggregation at Darwin’s →

Pseudoscience, Relativity, Wobosphere fun

Skeptic’s Circle

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I just came back from breakfast with PZ Myers, one of the Reveres and friends to find that the 59th Skeptic’s Circle is online at Pooflingers Anonymous. We here at Sunclipse are represented by “Michael Egnor: Manipulative Liar” and “All the News that Fits, We Print“.

There’s lots of good stuff, it appears. Head on over to Confessions of an Anonymous Coward to spot the flaw in a “disproof” of relativity, and an interesting speculation on why people try to “debunk” relativity so often. Those who enjoyed my comments on science journalism should also appreciate Junk Food Science‘s treatment of “Salt Shaking News“.

And if the Skeptic’s Circle isn’t enough, Carl Zimmer just put up a metric armful of articles he’s written since 2001. His story archive looks like a fantastic time sink.

Finally, of course, we should all welcome Phil Plait into the League of Moral Ambiguity, for while he’s still vacillating between superhero and supervillain attributes, he’s definitely in a comic book!

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Pharyngulans!