The Next Best Thing

I needed a new phone. OK maybe wanted is more accurate but the fact is my trusty Droid Eris was showing her age. Many of the apps weren't able to be updated, the phone was choking trying to keep up with my contacts lists and the phone was slow- reliable but slow.

So I spent about 2 months looking at phones-Verizon phones that is since that is the network that our family uses (Sorry Sprint). So I was reading the reviews and also spending a number of Saturdays at the local Verizon store comparing phones-asking arcane questions and just in general driving the sales people crazy. I hung out on the forums reading about the joys of owning- or all too often it seems the frustrations of owning- this phone or that phone. And I began reading about upcoming phones. I gave up paying a lot of attention to that when I read one post in a prominent tech blog about a rumored phone for which the blog seemed to have all kinds of technical details. If the phone is rumored, I thought, why the heck are you publishing these specs? What is the point? Well it turns out lots of people seem to enjoy looking for the NEXT BIG THING in phones. That plus probably a bit of subtle information placement and misdirection by manufacturers to build up anticipation seems to drive most of the digital slathering one sees on phone related blogs.

Well one of the Next Big Things was this Motorola phone called the Bionic and since it was coming out on September 8, I decided to wait and look at it when it came out. The other phones being considered were the HTC Thunderbolt, Motorola D3, Droid Incredible 2, Samsung Charge and of course the iPhone 4.  As you can guess I am not  a partisan of one operating system or another. But there are some things I wanted. First (or so I thought) was a physical keyboard. My Eris was lots of fun but typing on the little screen was not quite my idea of fun. I did it because I would rather text than talk any day.  I wanted a decent phone camera. I found with my previous phones that I really get a lot of use out of my cell phone's camera as an adjunct to my SLR or as in today when I went out with my SLR bereft of its SD card.

Cell phones represent engineering compromises and that is true for cell phone purchasers. So here is how the phones seemed to stack up. The iPhone? Real nice; in fact I bought one for my wife and I use Macs at work. But I found the display a bit too small for my taste. Plus and this may seem heresy, the display was a bit stark for my taste. Besides I like Android's flexibility. But it probably had the best camera of the bunch.  The Incredible 2 had a good camera, nice display, and I am used to HTC sense; same goes for the Thunderbolt which also runs on Verizon's fast LTE network and guess who still has an unlimited data plan. Next the D3. I really wanted to like the D3. I had never liked the other Droids with physical keyboards but the D3 has a wonderful keyboard. The D3 does not run on Verizon's fast network but that in itself was not a deal breaker since in Lawrence we don't have LTE let. But where I teach we are just inside the extended LTE range-that means maybe you can get it.  The D3's issue is the camera which renders shots way too blue. I know this is correctable to a degree but the images I saw often looked way too blue to be easily correctable. Now this brings me to the Samsung Charge and the Bionic-the most expensive phones of the lot. The Charge has a wonderfully detailed OLED display with great contrast-big screen the iPhone display on steroids. But-of course there is a but-I did not like the feel of the phone-it felt cheap and plasticy and I did not like the little physical keys at the bottom. Also the display struck me as being over saturated.  So that left the bionic. Expensive as is the Charge-really an unknown. Do I really want to get a phone that is just coming out. Hmmm and  $299 for a phone?

So I put it through its paces as best as I could. No physical keyboard-so I matched it up against the D3 and discovered that I could type faster on the Bionic's screen than I could on the D3's physical keyboard. The D3 was cheaper $199 as opposed to $299 but that camera really bugged me. The Bionic's display is a bit bigger and brighter and it runs on the LTE network so as Verizon extends service this way I will hopefully get some benefit. Plus bigger storage capacity gave the Bionic the edge.  What made me hesitate was the camera-color rendition seemed fine but it was obvious that the auto focus was sluggish and there didn't seem to be a way to turn it off.  But the display is stunning-excellent color fidelity without over saturation- to me a winner. The phone is big but it just felt solid and the screen is really responsive and the UI which is suspiciously like Motorola's stock android skin that must not be named-had lots of fun visuals that made HTC sense seem, well boring, even if the weather widget makes it rain and lightening in my Eris.

When I called the sales person over, I could hear that sigh of relief-no arcane questions-I'll take the Bionic and oh by the way do you have the Otterbox Defender? I am a firm believer in protecting my phones. What about accessories- a media dock or the Webtop adapter for your HD TV? Nope just the Otterbox, oh yes, and a car charger.  By the time I was done though I was almost $400 poorer and had joined the ranks of Early Adapters NOT  my usual position. I am technologically comfortable but normally wait a bit and let every one else have the ulcers of putting up with glitches in new devices. Remember antenna gate?

By the next day it became apparent that people had serious issues with the phone. The first issue was with the diplay-Motorola uses a pentile display which has an extra white pixel that makes the display brighter to the eye without using more power-at least that is my understanding of what this display does. I may enjoy technology and be trained as a scientist but an engineer I am not. I had heard about this controversy and had carefully compared the display to the competition and decided that the display is fine in a side by side comparisons. Not perfect but very nice. There is a sort of diagonal grid work what one commenter on the Android  forums called a half tone effect. Yup I saw it-but to me it was only obvious when I looked for it. Besides, in a perverse sense it actually made the display visually interesting. Last time I checked the world -you know that area outside the computer screen-is a many textured place. But to this day one month after the phone's introduction there are whole threads telling Motorola never to use a pentile display again!

So this is the first cost of being an early adapter. Not that there are issues and bugs- there are. The cost is that people get obsessed with what they see as imperfections in a device that really represents design compromises required to get a working phone.  And well if you don't see what 's wrong with the display you must be a dolt. The next big issue is audio-some users began to report a high pitched whine that at least by some reports was quite loud when the user did certain things with their phone. Nope my phone was and is fine, makes sounds at all the appropriate spots though after a couple of days reading the discussions about this issue I began to get paranoid at every stray sound-maybe my phone has caught the whine because some arcane grounding issue or interference from flying saucers or electric eels. Or maybe my hearing is just bad so I even tested my hearing threshold- just under 13,000 Hertz- above which any sounds get lost in my own rarefied high frequency tinnitus.  Some discussants even insisted that all Bionics had this issue those few of us who claimed not to have this whine were deluded and just not listening. One forum participant polled readers if they did or did not have this whine and 95% said yes and 5% including poor deluded me said no. Now personally I think some phones did and do have a serious audio issue-but I think that that 95% represents a load of self selection. If the problem were really widespread then the issue would be a big one mentioned in the Verizon reviews of this phone. It is not. So either Verizon is pulling negative comments off their site or the audio issues are much less ubiquitous than one might think by reading some forums.

Is the Bionic perfect?  Certainly not. First in my mind is the camera-or to be more precise the user interface Motorola provides. I have less control over the camera settings than I have with my Droid Eris. Now that said, since I am a photographer I know that stock settings are not the way to go and if you must you figure out a way of working around the limitations of your equipment. Besides specialize in macro shots which require lots of patience so I am predisposed to put up with cameras that aren't ideal. So I took the settings I had and experimented. Then bough several third party camera apps from the market and worked the camera with those and showed along with a few other people that the camera is fine (for a small camera) and that with a little work you can get some nice creative shots.  The sensor is small-representing another compromise the engineers had to make. This is not a point and shoot let along a single lens reflex-but since I always have my phone with me I can get some really spontaneous shots-again working the limitations of the camera.

Of course there are software issues. One that had me tearing my hair out was that one of my camera apps was supposed to save pictures to the phone's external SD memory card. And the software indeed saves the photos to a camera folder inside a folder called like mnt/SDcard/dcim/ . Sounds promising right? And it even matches the instructions given by the camera app manufacturer. Well it became clear that the app was saving photos to the phones internal memory. Fortunately it is easy to move files to the external memory but it is an extra step. So I wrote the app developer who merely repeated the instructions in the documentation which I had already tried.  So back to the forums where I found a post discussing the fact that the Bionic calls the external SD card - mnt/SDcard-ext/. Ha ha so back to the software which fortunately allows me to save an alternate storage spot, I found the right file in the external SD card and everything is fine. Apparently Motorola's naming convention relates to the type of memory Android uses-SD memory and so there is SD memory wired into the machine as while as the removable SD card. Problem solved, but of course it doesn't satisfy some people who scream at Motorola that they need to fix this. Maybe they do I don't know. Or maybe app developers need to be aware of these issues because other phone builders seem to adopting different names for internal vs external memory.

Other issues keep cropping up to such as how come my social networks stopped syncing with the phone the other day (solved) or how come I cannot share photos from my gallery directly to my Flickr account (not solved but there is a work around) but I get a little emotional reward when I figure something out or am surprised over some image that reminds me that its not really what our technology can do which is important but what we do with our technology. I suppose it is just a phone-but it is really more than that that. After all a recent article (http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_apple-store-apple-employees-brains?_s=PM:TECH)  suggests that Apple products can incite almost a religious experience.


Now I am NOT suggesting that our technology can replace religion but these new phones are very physical-think about  touch screens and the feeling of pinching in and pinching out to contract or expand an image. Typing directly on the screen or doodling with our fingers on the screen gives a physicality to using these devices that was missing before with keyboards and even mice. These devices (phone is so 20th century) be they iPhones or iPADS or Bionics or the NEXT BEST THING allow us to do so much so easily that for some of us it is easy to get overly caught up in debates about the merits of our respective phones or magnify what really are relatively minor flaws that hopefully will be fixed in the next update. I like to see these devices as tools for good but it seems that there is a danger that they will trap us into a desire for technological perfection where we forget that these devices are tools represent different sorts of compromises and thus keep searching for that NEXT BEST THING.





Oh and my old Droid Eris? She sits by my computer in case she is needed as a phone or an extra Wi-Fi device. Call me anthropomorphic but the Eris is still useful like a hand tool superseded by a newer electric tool only this is the 21 first century where the pace of obsolescence is such that today's NEXT BEST THING becomes just another old thing to be thrown away. 

Religious Discrimination or Mere Whining?

An astronomer is suing the University of Kentucky alleging that he was refused a position because of his religious beliefs. Martin Gaskell was supposedly the top candidate for a new observatory position but didn't get it. Dr. Gaskell is an evangelical who has written and lectured on science and his faith. Apparently this got people nervous that his religious beliefs might influence his science.

This statement in particular from an essay Dr. Gaskell wrote seems to have caught people's attention:

"The main controversy has been between people at the two extremes (young earth creationists and humanistic evolutionists). “Creationists” attack the science of “evolutionists”. I believe that this sort of attack is very bad both scientifically and theologically. The “scientific” explanations offered by “creationists” are mostly very poor science and I believe this sort of thing actually hinders some (many?) scientists becoming Christians. It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses, but the real problem with humanistic evolution is in the unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations. It is the latter that “creationists” should really be attacking (many books do, in fact, attack these unwarranted assumptions and extrapolations)."

However on the surface I am not sure his views are that much different from theistic evolutionists such as Ken Miller. But looking more closely I am bothered by his inclusion in a positive light of groups like "Leadership U" which try to push ... "Intelligent Design".

Also as noted here his attorney refers to Gaskell as an "openly Christian man". Seems like a clever appeal for sympathy in spirit of diversity promoting acceptance of GLBT people. If so this strategy is not going to garner much support from me. I have seen attempts to use this strategy by whiny conservatives whose only motivation is to use the rhetoric of diversity to silence discussion of diversity.

Related Links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/19kentucky.html

http://www.examiner.com/creationism-in-national/astronomer-alleges-anti-religious-discrimination-by-university

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20101210/NEWS01/312110011/Job+candidate+sues+UK++claiming+religion+cost+him+the+post

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2010/12/should-a-scient.html

Ah for the good old days!

...when convictions were convictions and martyrs were martyrs. Apparently William Dembski, has had to recant some of his moderate views on creation. In his latest book, End Of Christianity, he had the temerity to admit that he believes that scientists ARE right-the Universe really IS around 14 billion years old and that "the Flood" was NOT world wide. I guess that didn't set well with his overlords (I mean bosses) at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. According to Michael Zimmerman writing in the Huffington Post, Dembski was called on the carpet for his writings. Since the inquisition is long gone, presumably his bosses used less drastic means than hot pokers or racks to get him to recant. Maybe they water boarded him- I don't know.

At any rate Dembski has at least partly recanted claiming that his statement about the flood NOT being universal was based on incomplete reflection:

"Before I write on this topic ( the Flood) again, I have much exegetical,
historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6–9 but also
Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the
Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches
is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its
universality."

quoted in:

http://www.baptisttheology.org/documents/AReplytoTomNettlesReviewofDembskisTheEndofChristianity.pdf

Intelligent design advocates have long claimed that their beliefs about intelligent design are NOT Biblically motivated but I wonder how we are to take an advocate of intelligent design placing the Bible above empirical data.

To be fair, Dembski does not entirely recant but argues:

"My book The End of Christianity is a work of speculative theology. It
assumes that the earth and universe are old and, given that assumption, attempts
to answer how the Fall of humanity could be responsible for natural evil, such as
animal suffering. Since, on the assumption of an old earth, animal suffering
precedes the arrival of humans, the challenge is to explain how the effect (natural
evil) can temporally precede the cause (human sin and the Fall). My solution is to
argue that just as the effects of salvation at the Cross of Christ reach both forward
in time (saving contemporary Christians) and backward (saving the Old
Testament saints), so the effects of the Fall reach forward in time as well as
backward. What makes my argument work is the ability of God to arrange events
at one time to anticipate events at a later time."

OK so Dembski argues that the Fall was an actual event whose affects rippled both into the present and also into the past. So I guess all those veggie eating dinosaurs in the Creation Science museum mysteriously got transformed into evil T. rexes.

Speculative theology indeed!

Practical pantheism?

The movie Avatar must really be a great movie because it has struck so many nerves on the left and the right. My favorite (and I use that word advisedly) take is from the loony right by Phil Kline Kansas's former attorney general. I am not going to dissect his whole scree which you can read here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2415427/posts?page=64

Kline predictably thinks it is pro-environmental propaganda, for he writes:

"The natives are one with their native planet, including their mother-god Eywa. Eywa is the planet, and the natives reach oneness by entwining fibers from their bodies with the fibers of the planet. This representative sexual union allows them to hear their departed ancestors and gain rhythm with the planet — a séance orgy so to speak. All life on the planet is one, with one spirit and one energy."

Notice how nicely he works in the evil SEX into his rhetoric.

Later on we get the evil bugaboo of evolution:

"Such a prayer represents atheistic Hollywood's dilemma. The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion. For what greater purpose for man than to save mother earth, or Pandora? And thus, our purpose in a purposeless world."

And he says that that culture of the Pandorans is Pantheistic. Well that is true I suppose but if Kline would take off his blinders a bit he would see that it is really a practical pantheism. After all, on Pandora evolution (sorry Phil that is the way the world works) has led to a system where the Pandorans can little plug into each other and indeed that is necessary for their survival. So it's not some really some sort of mystical new age Pantheism, but quite practical.

Now we don't have the same explicit connections to our environment that the Pandorans have but we are interconnected much more and need the rest of the biosphere a lot more than Kline seems to care about. At simplest level we are not even a single organism but a community of roughly 100 trillion human cells and 10 times that many bacterial cells that are symbiotic with us. And I don't think that includes the mitochondria which were believed derived from free living bacteria. And examples of how we are interconnected can be multiplied repeatedly at other levels of biological organization.

So Kline and company may scream but maybe we need a good dose of practical pantheism.

Lunatic articles travel in packs

Here are two articles that could have been in the Onion but are meant to be serious.

First we have "The Danger of Celebrating Halloween".
http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/prophetic-insight/23723-the-danger-of-celebrating-halloween

This was posted on the CBN web site but was removed so I guess it was even too loony for Pat Robertson. My favorite part?

"During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches."

Next we have this wonderful gem and title pretty much sums the article up:

"The Golden Girls: How One TV Show Turned A Generation Of American Boys Into Homosexuals"

http://christwire.org/2009/10/the-golden-girls-how-one-tv-show-turned-a-generation-of-american-boys-into-homosexuals/

My favorite part of this article:

"The 1980s was an epoch of President Reagan’s manly wisdom and the terrifying threat of Cold War annihilation. America had sobered up from the flashy lights of 1970s disco. We were skipping all night cocaine and sex parties to focus on our careers. Spiritual leaders like Jerry Falwell were telling us that Christianity was in the majority again. On the other side, there was a subculture of homosexuality creeping up on our youths. It gave them an excuse to wear tight jeans and to sneak off to public parks for quick releases with hairy men of different ethnicities."

For the record I was not a fan and am not a fan of Golden Girls.

Tip of the Antennae to an anonymous blogger friend with whiskers for calling my attention to the first article.

File these under humor(I think).

Gasp!

Now that Sonia Sotomayor's papers have been released, conservatives have been ransacking them for juicy incriminating tidbits. For example,David Brody over at the Christian Broadcasting Network has uncovered a letter she cosigned in condemning the ransacking of a dorm room of two gay activists back in 1976.

The letter says in part:

"No matter how much one may disagree with the Gay Alliance or the policies they are advocating, no matter how repugnant one may find homosexuality, the manner of expressing this opposition should be intellectual. At this university we are dedicated to persuasion by reason, not by brute force"

Conservative Brody felt his CBN readers should read this letter. He's right especially since academic freedom has co-opted by conservative Christian groups who feel "oppressed" when they think their rights are being trampled on. But I suspect his conservative readers will cluck and see the letter as confirmation of Sotomayor's radical leftist leaning and not see the hypocrisy in their own position!

A tip of the antennae to GayNewsBlog for calling Brody's discovery to our attention.

Diversity Conservative Style

Some conservative religious groups complain about the alleged "oppression" of their point of view in secular universities. Well it seems they don't mind suppressing view points on their campuses that don't match their own. First we had the flap about Notre Dame giving Obama an honorary degree and now we have a flap over campus Democratic club at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Seems that the University's Student Democratic Club cannot be recognised any more by the school because of the Democratic party's alleged support of positions antithetical to the religious teachings endorsed by the private University.

Reverend Falwell is quoted here as saying:

“They are good, Christian kids who sit with me at ball games. I just hope they find a pro-life family organization to affiliate with so they can be endorsed by Liberty again.“

An e-mail to the leaders of the University's Democratic club allegedly explaining the reasoning for the ban says:

“The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the “LGBT” agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)”

As a private school, the University may well be within its rights to do this, but it strikes me as a bit extreme. After all Democrats are hardly uniform about the above issues, and the student leaders claim to have views in line with the University's. Plus this is a bad strategy on the part of the University-after all if Falwell wants to change the Democratic party and insure representation of conservative religious tenets, then what better way to do so than to promote conservative Democrats.

Such details

I suppose one could postulate a creator that pays special attention to us. We are made in the creator's image, right? But notice the wonderful detail of this moth:



Check out the poofy front legs.

Here's another view more from the top:



Each organism seems to be sculpted to the same detail that we are. Now who does the creator love more, me or the moth, eh?

Don't creationists ever think about the issues raised by the personal God as pet notion?

Oh the moth is a Noctuid called a Wood Nymph, genus at least is Eudryas-a true wood nymph!
See http://bugguide.net/node/view/110093

A Big Dog of a Robot

While people are running around in a panic over the economy, new innovations are constantly happening. It's beginning to look like robots are the new "Next Big Thing". Of course robots have been used for years in the assembly of automobiles, but what's new are completely independent robots that can coexist with us as part of our daily environment.

Most familiar are iRobot's rug and floor cleaning robots. But iRobot also makes a number of robots for the use in dangerous environments. If you watch CSI or similar shows, you may have seen these 'bots.

So check out this video from a start up company called Boston Dynamics which has developed an autonomous robot called Big Dog:



I am not sure what the loud noise is due to. But since Big Dog doesn't seem to make the noise when tethered to cables, perhaps the noise is due to some sort of power generator.

Speaking of iRobot, people I know who use the rug cleaning 'bots all have super neat houses and they probably really don't need the robot. So as an iRobot stockholder, I keep trying to get the company to beta test its housecleaning robots under real battle conditions- namely my house.

What are they afraid of? Don't they want to see if they can pass the cleaning 'bot Turing test?

Needless to say, these robots do raise a number of ethical issues. As robots become more and more autonomous do we want robots to make life and death decisions in the battlefield? I would argue probably not. But decision making speed is important so this will put pressure on developers such as iRobot to work towards robots that can make independent decisions to kill, at least in certain situations.

Can use of these robot weapons be justified in terms of the rules of war? Ethicists have begun wrestling with those sorts of issues. Here for instance is a paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology: Governing Lethal Behavior. It is a large file. The article notes though that we already have semi robotic systems in place that do make decisions whether or not to fire.

This paper quotes a government study which says:

"Armed UMS [Unmanned Systems] are beginning to be fielded in the current battlespace, and will be extremely common in the Future Force Battlespace…
This will lead directly to the need for the systems to be able to operate autonomously for extended periods, and also to be able to collaboratively engage hostile targets within specified rules of engagement… with final decision on target engagement being left to the human operator….

Fully autonomous engagement without human intervention should also be
considered, under user-defined conditions, as should both lethal and non-lethal engagement and effects delivery means."

Note the last sentence. Now warfare often is constrained by various sorts of rules of engagement and conventions, but what's going to happen when these systems begin to fall into the hands of a determined foe who isn't constrained by the same sorts of rules. What about our government finding some justification for a previously taboo use of these systems? And I am not being partisan here. Linguistic shenanigans are not a monopoly of Republicans or Democrats, shocking as that may be.

Suppose humans are left in the decision making loop. Is the result going to be any better? As warfare becomes more and more like a video game, will the detachment of humans from the actual battlefront lead to greater abuse of these systems?

Geesh! What ever happened to those good old ethical issues-embryonic stem cells for instance. We haven't adjusted to issues raised by those technologies and here is a whole set of new issues. And I just want a 'bot that can clean my floors!

Cross posted from Dangerous Ideas.

Fossils and Faith

I have been laid up with a virus-you know those unsung tools of the intelligent designer-but today my blogging energy got a boost or a kick from an article called "Resurrected Life" about an artist who uses fossils as the basis for religious art. At first read the article might seem to be a sincere attempt to reconcile religion and science through art. A noble idea and one I endorse.

The article left just a few questions in my mind as explained in the following excerpt from my Lawrence Journal World Blog:

"...there are just some things about it that really bother me as a scientist and as a religious person. For instance, Mr. Detrich thinks that non believers have nothing to live for. Personally I don't believe it is in my ken to say whether or not someone else has anything to live for based on their beliefs. Granted I don't know what is going on in the depths of atheist Richard Dawkins' psyche, but he certainly seems to think his life has a point.

Second of all I am bothered by this statement about nonbelievers:

"They might just accidentally come to the conclusion that life would be better if they believed in a super being, in a creator, rather than life would be better if your actions didn’t matter."

This is a kinder gentler version of Pascal's wager which basically says you should believe because the reward is eternal bliss and the penalty eternal damnation. I have never been impressed by this wager in it's original form and I am even less impressed with Mr. Detrich's kinder gentler version. Also, does Mr. Detrich's kinder gentler version extend to devotees of, say, Krishna or for that matter any sort of belief in a supreme being?

Next, I wonder why is the notion of God "creating" incompatible with scientific explanations of how life came to be and evolved? Mr. Detrich seems to at least accept the geological time scale. Well, if that scale is valid then why could not God's actions to bring change be seen from our end as being-well - evolution?

Finally what am I to make of the concluding statement in the article where he says it is "better to be on the side of good than on the side of bad." Well what about that? Is some one automatically good because they believe in a higher power and some one automatically bad because they don't? Or is some one automatically bad because they believe that evolution happens? Does Mr. Detrich still think we are "evilutionists" as he writes in his "musings"?"

Check out his musings for yourself at:

http://www.spearofjesus.com/musings.html

Remember Darwin's Day is February 12.

God Created in the Laboratory?

OK actually the Flying Spaghetti Monster and it was created in a kitchen. But check this out. I wonder if Pastafarians would consider the construction of noodley likenesses to be OK. Are there noodley iconoclasts ready to riot in the streets of Ithaca NY?

Could this be proof of the omega point getting closer and closer? A foreshadowing of what's to come when the whole universe is created in the eye of the FSM looking backward through time.

All hail the FSM!

Source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/oskay/2177296185/ via techorati

My Daemon?

Yesterday, my wife and I took advantage of school being canceled, in spite of relative benign weather in Lawrence, to go see the Golden Compass. We like this sort of fantasy and our interest was piqued because of the Catholic League's claim that the film is anti Catholic. The League claims that Catholics and other Christians should avoid the film because it it "bait" which might cause unsuspecting parents to buy the books by Phillip Pullman upon which the movie is based.

The League accuses Pullman of being a militant atheist with the goal or denigrating Christianity, especially Catholicism and the League claims that the film sanitizes much of the anti Catholic rhetoric in the book. Further, the League dismisses the claims Pullman and others associated with the film that the film is benign. You can download the League's report here.

I have not read the books, so can't comment on that particular controversy except to say that I have never been impressed with arguments that one should avoid such and such work simply because the author's theology, or lack of it, is a problem. Arguments, be they couched in fiction or not, have to stand on their own merits.

Harm to kids? I think not. Perhaps the League's leaders did not go through any sort of questioning of their faith as a teenager...but from what I remember and experienced with my kids-questioning of all sorts is part of being a teen.

Now to the movie. The movie was lots of fun. Mrs Coulter (Nichole Kidman) was the ultimate female villain; the Magisterium appropriately sinister, the good guys appropriately good. So yes, the Golden Compass's characters are very one dimensional from an adult perspective. However, what kid or adult can possibly resist having their "soul" taking the form of an animal daemon? What kid or adult can resist a film that promotes free thinking? OK... don't answer that.

Given the 'controversy' about the film, my antennae were all a quiver for anti Christian references. But aside from the the Magisterium the only swipe at Christianity was a comment Nichole Kidman makes to the young heroine, Lyra to the effect that many of our problems stem from a couple of our ancestors who did not obey authority. This could be a reference to the Fall. But that doesn't disturb me since I have strong Pelagian sympathies, as you might suspect.

The movie's pacing was a bit frenetic and choppy giving the impression that a lot was cut out..which it probably was. But I don't think the director and screen writers did as good a job as other attempts to condense large fantasy books to a movie; certainly the editing is not up to the quality of the Harry Potter films. The special effects are generally good and not too obtrusive. I really liked the daemons which by the way ranged from a snow leopard to a praying mantis to a ferret.

Oh, I suspect now we will buy the books if only to see what the League's fuss is all about. Given the overtly Christian themes of some other fantasy writing-C.S. Lewis comes to mind here-fantasy from an overtly atheist perspective might be refreshing.

The movie has an official web site of course ,and just out of curiosity I visited it and had fun with the choose your daemon game which asks you some basic personality questions and purports to match you with your daemon. Mine is below. Not sure I agree with the choice but it is appropriate for an evolutionist don't you think? At least I didn't get the praying mantis.

Teddy Bears and Symbolism

All right, I have resisted discussing the Teddy Bear controversy. After all the whole thing strikes me as a silly distraction from more pressing issues, but I found Leonard Pitts' comments: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/dec/06/how_can_teddy_bear_offend_fundamentalists/ to be a shallow analysis of the Teddy Bear incident.

Pitts writes:

"And then there is Darfur, the western region where four years of government-backed genocide has left an estimated 200,000 people dead. Some might say they are the lucky ones. Luckier than the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet. Luckier than the people burned alive inside their huts. Luckier than the women raped so brutally they can no longer walk, so brutally that urine trickles constantly down their legs.

What a pious, holy nation. Their God is offended by a teddy bear.

If anything, God is offended by them."

I agree with the sentiments but what Pitts is discounting is the power of symbols to take hold of peoples emotions. Maybe he ought to take a closer look at the equally silly things that we get incensed about in our culture. For instance, try burning an American flag and see the way many of us react. In the history of Christianity there have been huge fights over symbolism including how God is to be represented. The English word Iconoclast comes out of just such a fight. FYI I think these sorts of fights are odd too. But I am not immune to reacting to symbolism either. Books for me are highly symbolic and book burning or banning is way up there on the list of symbolic offenses one can make.

The point being that in our culture we generally chalk these sorts of offenses as the price we pay for the right to free expression and some one has to get really extreme before we consider banning them. I don't like fundamentalism any more than Pitts does, but what's going on in Sudan gets at a much deeper aspect of symbols namely their power to hook onto our emotions and I don't think those of us who are not fundamentalists are immune to the power of symbols.


What symbols and related cultural faux pas press other people's buttons?

Evolutionist bites tongue at Red Lobster

Tonight my wife and I went out for shrimp and other goodies at Red Lobster. Behind us was another couple having a conversation about the Bible and religion and the man started in on evolution about how it was incompatible with the Bible and how humans can't have evolved from other primates since we had so many unique structures.



His example was something about the little bones of the inner ear. Then he started in on how everything in the Bible is true because there are other independent writers that say the same thing. I began to feel like we had our own little 700 Club. Teachers complain about students lacking critical thinking skills but sometimes adults leave their brains behind especially in matters of Faith.

I found myself thinking about something that a historian, Brian Tierney(I Think) said. Namely, that Christianity was attractive to Greek and Roman philosophers because it was so subtle. Clearly Tierney must have been talking about a very different conception of Christianity* than what seemed to be passing for Christianity at the next table.

The ground beetle was at our light when we got home. Click on the image for a larger view.

*Tierney, Brian and Sidney Painter(1978) Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Knopf (p 26)

A very funny nail

Supposedly J.B.S. Haldane said something to the effect that God has an "inordinate fondness for beetles." Now don't quote me on this because I wonder if this isn't one of those sayings that has gotten twisted around and taken out of context. But it is a great phrase whatever the origin. (See this link for further discussion of this quote's origin.)

Finding this wonderful fig eater, Cotinis nitida got me thinking about this quote and a few more cosmic issues. I don't know. Must be incipient heat stroke.



During the intelligent design controversy, ID proponents liked to say that all we can say about the designer is that design exists and that we cannot infer anything about the designer. So I half jokingly said that maybe we can infer that the God- excuse me, designer- was really fond of beetles. The response I got was quite clever, as ID responses often are. Namely: would a carpenter be fond of nails because he needs lots of them to build a house?



If I had been a bit quicker I might have commented on what this says about the ID view point. It really is all about purpose, human purpose, just as the old style creationism is. All the creatures around us are merely nails in some sort of grand scheme. The beetle is just a nail in a house. Whose house is it? God's house or our house. And why make such intricate nails? Why make anything at all?



The belief that the universe has a purpose is so ingrained in our minds that it often hinders our ability to think about the Universe. For instance we commonly believe in the balance of nature and that every species has its place- the niche. My students will tell me that plants carry out photosynthesis to produce oxygen. Never mind that oxygen is a waste product of photosynthesis. Many of them just don't get it.

And its not just students who's sight is blinded by purpose. Otherwise sophisticated people sometimes will say that being gay is a way of population control- sort of a group selectionist idea a la V.C. Wynne-Edwards. During the 70's and 80's scientists seriously proposed that the Earth is a great self regulating system. This is the "Gaia hypothesis" of James Lovelock and that of course blends into some slippery versions of the anthropic principle which are stated as saying that the Universe is the way that it is because we are here. And that blends Frank Tipler's notions about the fate of the universe. He claims that eventually life will fill and control the universe and through its quantum mechanical interactions with the universe reach some sort of Omega Point that he identifies with God.



Now this is an appealing notion for me because it seems to be a sort of self assembly of the sort we encounter all through out biology extended to a cosmic scale. Life bootstrapping itself up into greater and greater complexity without intervention of some sort of external intelligence. To quote Tipler:



"I also argue that the ultimate future state of the universe, the Omega Point, should be identified with God. ...If we regard God as something Ultimate, then He is telling us that He is the Ultimate Future. "



So God in the future is influencing the past, presumably through some sort of quantum mechanical entanglement. Very self referential sounding indeed. And at the same time a lot like manifest destiny-only it is life that has as its manifest destiny to become God with the power to resurrect the dead.



Of course if you are Christian, God does have that sort of ultimate power. But it seems that Tipler, like the Intelligent Design advocates, and perhaps even the group selectionists and Gaia advocates, are trying to hammer the universe into a shape that is a reflection of what we are are.


Now the impulse to do that is understandable. After all, in terms of our own evolution, the ability to bend and chip matter for our own uses and by extension modify our environment to suit our very human purposes has served us in good stead. I would not want us to retreat into some sort of technological passivity. Nor do I disavow all notions of purpose. But I believe we constantly have to 'guard or minds' against the very powerful and subtle illusion that our notions of purpose have any scientific meaning in terms of the universe. A beetle otherwise becomes merely a funny looking nail and plants produce oxygen so we can breathe.

A thoughful atheist's blog.

For a bit of civilized refreshment and dare I say, pleasure, my readers might enjoy visiting Gay Species. I stumbled across this blog totally by accident and the best way to describe this blog is that it is classical without being typological.

Here are some links to interesting posts at Gay Species to get you started:
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/tuberculosis-in-news-not-news.html
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/possibility-of-spirituality.html
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/musings-on-religious-instruction.html

The blogger, D. Steven Heersink, notes that his mentors are:
Aristotle, Epicurus, Hume, Smith, Darwin, Popper. Hayek, Searle, and Solomon.

I'd like to get all of them together for dinner.

Creationist Humor?

Emmanuel Goldstein commenting on my last post said:

"We know you despise all religion.Catholics, Jews, whatever.Its what atheists do. But pretending that you are just promoting science when you are using science as a front to promote your own anti religious agenda is a huge deception.
4:43 AM"


Mr. Goldstein is associated with a wonderfully imaginative Creationist site at http://www.thebrites.org/ which features the "The Biological Research Institute for Theoretical Evolution Studies"; "The Paley Watch Company "which claims to use natural selection to assemble watches; and my favorite-"Mutation Paste" which accelerates evolution. There is also Darwin Camp where today's Darwin Youth can "live and learn natural selection. "

Great fun and a great teaching moment about the misunderstandings many people have about evolution. Even the name, by the way, is a clever take on an organisation called "The Brights" which is indeed Atheistic in slant. Visit them at http://www.the-brights.net/.

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