This is the nitty gritty

Finally getting around to reading some of those articles that have been lying around for months ...

Like this, for instance, by John Seabrook in The New Yorker on the Antikythera Mechanism, which I got halfway through before I was finally convinced it wasn't just some elaborate hoax, like the archaeological equivalent of Sidd Finch.

Or James Surowiecki's financial column, "Fuel for Thought," which puts the current debate over CAFE standards into historical perspective:

In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster. In the nineteen-twenties, Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors, insisted that the company could not make windshields with safety glass because doing so would harm the bottom line. In the fifties, auto executives told Congress that making seat belts compulsory would slash industry profits. When air bags came along, Lee Iacocca told Richard Nixon that “safety has really killed all our business.” A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create “massive financial and unemployment problems.

Speaking of both articles I should've read before now and of fuel economy, Co-op America's summer newsletter takes a long look at alternative fuel options. You can read the entire issue at that link, but here's the Cliff's Notes version.

The bottom line: They think plug-in electric hybrids are a Very Good Thing and that corn-based ethanol is a Very Bad Thing.

* * * * * * * * *

The Alliance Defense Fund is mostly a pernicious group. They've made a career out of nurturing and feeding off of the absurd notion that evangelical Christianity is a persecuted majority, rather than an integral part of the civil religious hegemony that has become so thoroughly tied up with American culture that it can no longer distinguish where the one starts and the other stops.

Every once in a while, though, they take up a case with some merit, like this one:

An evangelical Christian campus group that was expelled from Savannah State University is in a legal battle with the college over the question of whether the practice of foot-washing can be considered hazing. ...

Off campus, the group held a weekend retreat at a nearby beach at which members washed the feet of new members, following a practice instituted by Jesus with his disciples.

* * * * * * * * *

Have your Cake and download it too. Free and legal, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," from Cake's recent B-Sides and Rarities collection.

(Speaking of free music on the Internets, Nettwerk Records, home to Hem, Neil Finn, Gogol Bordello and Leigh Nash, among many others, is offering a free download this weekend of a compilation album featuring songs from "Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, The Be Good Tanyas and many more.")

* * * * * * * * *

OK, so, I knew about Jesurgislac's Journal and bulbulovo, but it took me way too long to figure out that Jake also had a blog (full of fine rants and links to others' fine rants, like this one).

So 'fess up people, who else out there has got a blog? Cut-and-paste me some links in comments below.

(Jesu link fixed. Sorry 'bout that.)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Update: In retrospect, just linking to the Amazon page for the Plimpton novel seems lame. The original article was a lot more fun. You can read the whole thing (minus the photos or a sense of how to spell "Stottlemyre") at Boston Baseball: "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch." See also the Museum of Hoaxes.

Comments

[sophia8]

My blog. Not very interesting.

[sophia8]

Hah! First comment at last!

[Jos]

Well, I don't have a blog or a journal.

I do write fanfiction, though, which should probably give you more insight into my person than you'd ever wanted to have.

Not that I'm going to leave a link to those atrocities, though.

[cjmr's husband]

If a thread is specifically set aside for blogwhoring, is it a blogredlightdistrict?

[JPL]

Warning: Profanity, irregular updates, and a blog written by someone who read 1984 more often than is healthy.

[mcc]

I have a blog here, but I'm basically just a lurker here... also the blog only updates once every few months, and it's mostly about math/science stuff. But it has pretty animated GIFs!

[Eric]

It's usually a fairly mundane personal journal, but you're welcome to read (and if you have an account or an openID, you're welcome to see not-public entries).

[Chris_C]

You've heard of Hem? The tallest guy in that band (I assume, he was taller than everyone, including me) lived around the corner when we were in gradeschool.

[Jeff]

Like this, for instance, by John Seabrook in The New Yorker on the Antikythera Mechanism, which I got halfway through before I was finally convinced it wasn't just some elaborate hoax, like the archaeological equivalent of Sidd Finch.

I'm still not 100% convinced it's not a hoax. [grin] Very interesting device, and makes Indiana Jones, Relic Hunter and all those other ridiculous shows seem just a weeeeeee bit plausible.

They've made a career out of nurturing and feeding off of the absurd notion that evangelical Christianity is a persecuted majority, rather than an integral part of the civil religious hegemony that has become so thoroughly tied up with American culture that it can no longer distinguish where the one starts and the other stops.

I've heard the plot for the latest Rambo movie. He has to rescue missionaries in Burma Myamar. Because the biggest problem they have is the poor widdle Christians.

So 'fess up people, who else out there has got a blog?

I've thought about one, but it seems like a lot of work, and I don't much care for really sporadic blogs. I really appreciate the people who have active blogs, but I don't think it's for me, at least right now. (Stop cheering, y'all.)

[Jeff]

BTW, Jesu's current blog is here (with a post on Riverbend's journey from Iraq to Syria).

[damnedyankee]

I don't have a blog per se, but I do have a StumbleUpon page.

Or is that just a blog by another name?

[damnedyankee]

(Nearly faints with relief that Riverbend is safe, though understandably not happy, to say the least.)

[cjmr]

I put the blog link back over there on my signature.

[Linkmeister]

I've had a blog for a while (5+ years? Yi-yi-yi!). Quality's spotty, quantity's not.

[hapax]

Mmm. It's an interesting ethical dilemma. Or perhaps a social dilemma.

I have a personal LiveJournal, which is, well, personal. And private. It's only available to people who I absolutely trust not to abuse some of the information contained therein (it includes medical information, identifying info about my children, and absolutely-true-but-not-for-public-consumption info about various political and other well-known figures I am either related to or hang with.)

I have a professional blog, which is, well, professional. Although I don't exactly spout institutional propaganda, I am also constantly aware that I post there as a representative of my institution, not as my personal ownself. I wouldn't object to being held accountable for what I do say there, but I would rather object to being called on the carpet for what I don't.

And then there's here, and various other places, where I post under a pseudonym. I rather enjoy having a third sphere, outside the "private" and the "professional", in which it is possible to discuss affairs of world-shaking import *and* swap recipes, without slopover from the other two selves.

I rather dislike the current social trend, in which people do not seem to distinguish between their private, their professional, and their public citizen selves. Although maybe its not too current. I know an awful lot of physicians who are asked to provide diagnoses at committee meetings, and lawyers asked for legal opinions at cocktail parties.

But perhaps I'm just dreadfully stuffy.

[Peter]

Lurker-with-blog alert. Cactusblog. Just what it sounds like - a blog about cactus (and succulents too). Very big in the cactus world, so I'd like to think.

[Peter]

Lurker-with-blog alert. Cactusblog. Just what it sounds like - a blog about cactus (and succulents too). Very big in the cactus world, so I'd like to think.

[Geds]

If anyone wants to read rants about anything and everything vaguely history- or theology-like, I've been known to occasionally update my Accidental Historian page. I keep thinking I should do things with it again...

[twig]

If you have time to kill I suggest Overheard In the Office and its associate aggregates Overheard in New York and Overheard Everywhere. Hiliarous.

Also Waiter Rant, although I highly suspect you're already familiar with it.

[Bugmaster]

I used to have a blog, but I stopped updating it a long time ago, because it got to be too much work. You wouldn't have liked it anyway, there was absolutely zero politics in it.

[g]

I'm pretty occasional here, but I have a blog. Rather low, and variable, volume. Not much politics. Maths, science, philosophy, computers, occasional bits of good-humoured atheism, and random things that happen to have taken my fancy.

[Dahne]

Oh, I do, I do! Mostly it's dumb RL stuff, or ramblings about video games, or language. Or pictures of me painted blue and dressed as a ninja sharkman.

I remember seeing something about the Antikythera Mechanism long enough to go, "Pfft, yeah, sure." Looks like I was too hasty to jump to conclusions.

[Mike Timonin]

http://little-carrot.livejournal.com/

[Richard]

Since you actually called out for blogs I will yield a link to mine, called the Honest Hypocrite. I typically leave the politics to others, except for the local Delaware stuff that drives me crazy. I usually write about whatever strikes my fancy, but will often try to link my love of science, science fiction, and general rational thinking to some event of the day. It's title reflects the fact that I know and you know that I might be bullshitting you and you should make up your own mind about whatever topic I choose to discuss.

I found slacktivist a long time ago based on your detailed exposition of Left Behind, and stayed for the local news and the thoughtful Christianity.

[wintermute]

that corn-based ethanol is a Very Bad Thing.

Hasn't Brazil been using ethanol as a fuel for several years, now? I remember reading about it in school, at least a decade ago.

Anyone have any idea how that's working out for them?

I have a 'blog at wmute.livejournal.com, but it's pretty dull.

[cminus]

Hasn't Brazil been using ethanol as a fuel for several years, now? I remember reading about it in school, at least a decade ago.

Anyone have any idea how that's working out for them?

Very nicely, but it's sugarcane-based, not corn-based.

Sugarcane-based ethanol is a Good Thing, or at least it is if you're as well-suited to sugarcane production as is Brazil.

[Alexis]

The **AAs have been doing the same doomsaying routine pretty much every time a new music or movie technology comes out. VHS, it was said, would kill the movie business...and we all know how that one turned out.

They're just afraid of having to do any actual adaptation or work once they're figured out a successful business model. It's a bit pathetic.

[MikeJ]

Sugarcane based ethanol can be a good thing, if you don't burn down rainforest to increase acreage of sugar. But for the most part, yeah, good thing.

[Scott]

Right, forgetting about how its really bad to tear down the rain forest for a sec, Brazil has tons of sugarcane they can use for this where as the US does not. Additionally - yes, corn ethanol is not as good which we have in the US. I do some work with the AAM and I think any movement we can make towards more hybrids is a good thing - and as long as we're positively pushing for new technologies on this front I believe it will benefit us in the long run.

At the same time its important that we are working to encourage change and not regulate it as many in Washington think we should do. Simply hiking CAFE standards way isn't the way to go. We need effective change and we can't just expect we can legislate our way through this. Bipartisan approaches that take into account the differences between cars and trucks, that work with - not against - consumer choice, and other similar approaches are the way to go. Its too important an issue to pick the easies option.

[Jeff]

Sugarcane-based ethanol is a Good Thing, or at least it is if you're as well-suited to sugarcane production as is Brazil.

As noted here and on the Co-op America's site (see the E80 page), most sugar ethanol is being grown on clear-cut rain forest which makes it a Very Bad Thing.

[Edo]

I've a blog, but I don't update nearly as much as I did with its previous incarnation.

Working on that, though.

[Jesurgislac]

Hapax: But perhaps I'm just dreadfully stuffy.

If you are, I am too: I do much the same.

[85% Duane]

I have a blog about my lifelong struggle with shyness but it isn't public. Sorry.

[Barry]

Note that James Surowiecki's column starts with the fact that auto makers have repeatedly predicted disaster from various regulation, have repeatedly be wrong - but might be right this time!

[ffeJ]

I have a blog about alternate univeses. Unfortunately, it's in an alternate universe.

[1982_Cygni]

They've made a career out of nurturing and feeding off of the absurd notion that evangelical Christianity is a persecuted majority, rather than an integral part of the civil religious hegemony that has become so thoroughly tied up with American culture that it can no longer distinguish where the one starts and the other stops.

This reminds me of a line in The Birdcage, which I believe is one of the funniest and most pointed satires of the 1990's, when the son of Robin Williams' character explains to him about the prospective in-laws: "They're conservative, like 50% of America." Given that the majority of Americans are against gay marriage, believe in a 6,000-10,000 year-old Cosmos, are pro-choice, and pro-death-penalty, I doubt that Joe and Zoe Evangelical are going to die out immediately. Although we could be reaching the peak of such a movement due to its hubris if the outcome of the Iraq War goes badly, as Kevin Philips suggested in his book American Theocracy.

[the opoponax]

VHS, it was said, would kill the movie business...and we all know how that one turned out.

This is quibbly of me, but to be honest, VHS did pretty much kill the movie industry. At least the movie theater industry, anyway. The advent of video rental (and premium cable) was the point at which it suddenly cost absurd amounts of money to go see a movie in the theater. At this point the theatrical system is pretty much held aloft by the fact that it costs $11 to see a movie in the big markets (where people other than teenagers actually still go to the movies), and $4 for popcorn.

And it could be argued that VHS killed the movie industry, period, anyway. That's when marketing the big summer blockbusters became a bigger deal than the films themselves (trying to convince people they couldn't wait for the video, they HAD to see it opening weekend in the theater). That's when the butts-in-seats concept and the obsession with opening weekend numbers started up. That's when movie attendence by anyone old enough to get into a bar withered away to practically nothing everywhere except New York and Los Angeles. Which means that almost all films are marketed to kids and teenagers and released with them in mind (even the ones obstensibly not made for kids and teenagers).

A lot of bad has come into the movie industry because of video. It might not have been enough to kill it outright, but it definitely changed things, and definitely for the worse.

[the opoponax]

Given that the majority of Americans are against gay marriage, believe in a 6,000-10,000 year-old Cosmos, are pro-choice, and pro-death-penalty, I doubt that Joe and Zoe Evangelical are going to die out immediately.

Do you have stats on this? Because everything I know about politics, America, etc (including actual facts based on polls and statistical analyses) tells me it's not. I know that it's definitely not true that most Americans are anti-choice -- a HUGE majority are in favor of legal abortion. Barely 50% of Americans are even practicing Christians anymore. American culture really is growing more and more secular, especially compared to 30-40 years ago, when Christian religious practice was just what you did, unless you were a practicing member of another religion. Evangelicals dominate not because they have the numbers, or because most Americans are really on their side, but because they happen to be the loudest voice right now. They also have a disproportionate political voice, because of their coalition with shady Republican governments (who, remember, generally have to cheat their way into power).

Every once in a while, I hear a stat like 60% of Americans believe the world is 6K years old, or whatever -- I'm pretty sure this doesn't correspond very closely with religious behaviors, but does probably correspond quite handily with education levels. We're talking about a country here where a good portion of the people were made to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi.

[Spalanzani]

If it turned out that Scott had a blog, would I be the only one perversly interested in seeing it? I imagine him having this bizarro version of Slacktivist with Fred Clark Fridays and posts illustrating libertarian ideas with Dracula references (or whatever would count as the opposite of Buffy).

[Scott]

Sorry Spalanzani, my only 'blog' is just an anonymous list of article snippets and links for things I want to be able to hunt down later - stories about Progressive and their mirror image 'opponents', the Neoconservatives. Two sides of the same controlling coin.

[hapax]

Yay! Scott, things must be going better for you! Your last few posts have posts have actually been sensible, reasonable, on topic,somewhat constructive, and even amusing.

Not that I agreed with them -- but that would be too much for another cell in the hive-mind.

Still, I have been worried about you. You sounded so unhappy and angry of late...

Edit: Urghh. That looks so patronizing. But really, I mean it sincerely.

[MichaelR]

I'd imagine Fred explicitely calling him out on making things up and then attacking based on these fantasies plays some part of it.

[LL]

Sure, I'll blogwhore too:

http://zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.blogspot.com/

Just random bitching, mostly to minimize the smartassery and the ranting at my job, which tends to alienate coworkers.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

OK. So, I blog here about my writing, here about Denver/Boulder stuff, here about fifteen times a month, and here whenever something distracts me and I remember to blog about it.

Which is too many bookmarks, really, so I made one big uberRSS uberRSS for 'em all. A friend imported that to LJ so it can go on friends lists.

Well, that was a lot of self-pimpage... Enjoy!

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Jeez, LL, and I thought I'd overdone it with the four "i"s in my blogspot blog. ("Shiny", "shiiny", and "shiiiny" were all taken.) Do you type that from memory? Do you have to count the key strokes?

Also, recent conversation (as in, "Hi, Scott!") reminded me of this, which I believe I got to via a Making Light particle.

[bad Jim]

The opoponax, here's a link from Pew describing various polls concerning attitudes towards evolution, faith and science. From there you can find further polls measuring other attributes of religious behavior.

Indeed, according to a 2006 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 42% of Americans reject the notion that life on earth evolved and believe instead that humans and other living things have always existed in their present form. Among white evangelical Protestants – many of whom regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God – 65% hold this view. Moreover, in the same poll, 21% of those surveyed say that although life has evolved, these changes were guided by a supreme being. Only a minority, about a quarter (26%) of respondents, say that they accept evolution through natural processes or natural selection alone.

This is the salient finding for me:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll.

[trevor]

That last point interests me. I think this boils down to a question of which authorities people choose to trust. Given that the typical respondent in such a survey has neither a deep theological education, nor their own research lab in which to carefully reproduce scientific results, they are, like the rest of us, left having to base their beliefs on the the statements of others.

For example, I have a degree in Physics, I'm reasonably content with the standard model that tells us that the universe has a finite age and has been expanding since the big bang, but I've never actually personally looked through a telescope, recorded the emission lines from distant galaxies and calculated their redshift myself. So I'm left having to rely on the trustworthiness of other sources. Now, I'm happy doing this, because I know these sources, I've studied under them, their work is consistent, the academic environment, at least in the hard sciences makes deception very difficult, and when I have tested their claims experimentally in the lab the data has agreed with what I've been taught. But to the average 'man in the pew', both science and religion are stories that are told to describe the world around us, and the inner workings of both are a mystery.

So choosing a belief system just comes down to deciding whether to trust the man in a suit at the front of the church who did such a nice presiding at your daughter's wedding, or a bunch of slightly other-worldy guys in white lab coats. And before we criticise people who do this, remember that we do this all the time - we're constantly choosing who we're going to trust on subjects in which we're not experts and for which independently verifiable data isn't accessible.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

I think, in addition to what trevor said, that also maybe the hypothetical nature of the question ("if scientists were to disprove a particular religious tenet) makes it more likely for people of faith to answer as they do. And the question itself almost guarantees that answer; it triggers a certain kind of religious persecution complex to go on the defensive. When all it takes to prove one's faith in front of the skeptical masses is to say "My faith is unshakable," well, that's a blow easily struck for God. One can feel like one has been a martyr for the faith without actually having to go through with any of the unpleasantness of actual martyrdom. (Plus, some of them may conflate ridicule with persecution anyway.)

The other problem is, what tenet might we suppose scientists might disprove that actually has a personal here-and-now impact on a believer? If tomorrow scientists revealed new proof of God's nonexistence, or that certain incidents in the Old Testament never really happened, it's very easy to discount that and go on with one's life. It doesn't put a believer's life in danger or force him to pretend not to see something that's in front of his eyes right now to say "I don't care, God *does* exist!" or "Moses *did* lead his people out of Egypt!" or "They didn't actually disprove the efficacy of prayer in that study; God answers prayers in the manner of His choosing, not as a repeatable laboratory phenomenon!" Or even, "Evolution is wrong! God did it!" These are probably the kinds of hypothetical disproven tenets that survey respondents are thinking of.

Can anyone think of a religious tenet whose scientific disproof would require a believer to actually ignore the evidence of his own direct observation in order to continue believing in it?

The only thing that I can think of that comes close is those sects who eschew medicine in favor of prayer. Not an exact match; rather than continuing to believe something that science may one day disprove, they are believing in a tenet that requires them to abstain from a live-saving advantage science has already brought us. Serious as that problem is, I doubt it represents a significant portion of the survey's numbers.

And even the creationists seem to be ok with evolution disproving special creation enough to benefit from antibiotics and vaccinations, don't they?

[Raka]

To hell with ethanol: algae-based biodiesel for t3h win. Grow your feedstock in the desert on sunlight and sewage!

I have a blog at rakafkaven.livejournal.com. It's basically a stereotype model of unfocused blogage: progressing from angsty diary to dull daily minutia to idiotic "memes" to overheated and underconsidered outrage to self-indulgent silliness to a near-complete lack of posting. All that in a mere six years!

[Ann]

I'm really commenting to say that the guy who was photographed for the Sidd Finch article was my Jr. High Applied Arts teacher. His part of the story is, of course, my favorite thing about the hoax.

But I've been meaning to leave a note for a while, to say thanks for a couple of posts I've referred back to in my own blog, so your invitation's quite timely.