Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Comments: 4 Posted by david on 30 May 2005 at 9:59 PM

Just so we're clear about this: I hate "Lost." It has gone from the most intriguing show on television to the most frustrating and I am now quite confident that J.J. Abrams and the other writers had no idea what the mystery of the island was at the beginning of the series and have been making things up as they go along all season long. J.J. Abrams gave an interview to the NY Times a few months ago wen he admitted that much. But beyond that, I think that even now, after a full season, that the writers just don't know the story they're writing. Every week they add layers upon layers of intrigue, but never once do they make an attempt at resolution. The season finale was a huge cliffhanger. I was expecting a cliffhanger of some kind, but not for them to leave the main mysteries open and add new mysteries.

So now we have

1. What is in the hatch?
2. Will the people on the boat survive?
3. Who are "the others?"
4. Will Charlie start doing heroin again?
5. What do the numbers mean?
6. Why are "the others" taking children?
7. What's up with Russo?
8. What's the deal with the monster/"security system?"
9. How will Jack handle the "Locke problem?"

I'm sure there are others as well. And I'm fairly sure I'll never know the answers to most any of these questions.

The comparison with "Veronica Mars" is quite startling. "Lost" and "Veronica" started off the season as my two favorite shows. But as the season went on the writers on "Veronica" gave us some clues to the big mystery that was driving the series (Who killed Lily Kane?). And at the end of the season, they wrapped up that mystery but still left us with some decent cliffhangers to keep our interest piqued. "Lost," on the other hand, didn't resolve a damn thing and just compounded things with added questions as the series progressed. And now, "Veronica Mars" is my favorite show on television and I'm not sure that I'll be tuning in to "Lost" next season.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 May 2005 at 9:50 PM

For those of you interested in TV, here is this fall's broadcast lineup based on the networks' upfront presentations complete with a few observations by me.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 May 2005 at 6:24 PM

No one likes spam, but I am often amused by it. The flood of nationalistic, German-language messages I've gotten over the past few days has given me the opportunity to see how much of my fours years of German studies I remembered. (It turns out that the answer to that was very little.) But the newest trend seems to be spam from famous celebrities and politicians. It started off as message from Arnold Schwarzenegger(or, as one email signed him, "The Guvernator") and Brad Pitt. But the newest change is even funnier. Spammers have taken to using the names of religious icons in the From field of their messages. Yesterday I got mail from Moses, Buddha, and "The God." Today I received two emails from Jesus. It is rather ironic to send out pornographic email messages and sign the name Jesus to them.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 18 May 2005 at 5:39 PM

Will I get in any trouble if I take some pictures in a semi-public (i.e., privately owned but still public) place like a mall? Or is it best just to limit myself to outside shots?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 17 May 2005 at 6:40 PM

I probably shouldn't mention this in public, but I very much wish my apartment was outfitted with The Clapper. Sometimes I practice clapping when the lights are off in preparation for the day when I finally decide to buy The Clapper.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 15 May 2005 at 1:14 PM

A request was made for a review of "The Gnostic Gospels." I don't have the book in front of me so I can only speak to some of the main themes, but the book basically argues that many of the Christian traditions are not a rooted in faith but are instead the political by-products of the effort to establish a universal (i.e., catholic) church.

The book supports these claims by examining the gnostic Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945 and the "orthodox" response to these "heretical" ideas.¹ The Nag Hammadi texts are contemporaries of the books of the New Testament (that is, they date from about 80 - 200 AD), but offer a startlingly different view of many aspects of the catholic faith. I don't have the space to go into all the details, but I will touch on a few of the subjects covered to give you a feel for the book's arguments.

In many ways Gnosticism² can be thought of as Zen Christianity. Gnostics believed that through spiritual maturity you would gain access to gnosis, or the secret knowledge that is essential to salvation. Gnosis is supposedly the secret knowledge that Christ revealed exclusively to (possibly only some) of the apostles. Gnostic teachers would take students who would then work toward gaining spiritual maturity. Once they were sufficiently mature, the gnosis would be revealed to them by the teacher, who had learned the gnosis from his teacher, and so on back to the apostles. So, from the Gnostic's perspective, you attain salvation only through personal growth. This differs from the orthodox position, which argues that you can gain salvation merely be joining the church. This distinction matters in the context of making the catholic church truly universal. The Gnostics were selective in who they chose to teach and who they revealed the gnosis to. The goal of the orthodox church was growth and acceptance, so having a screening policy for admittance was undesired. So, they labeled the Gnostics as heretics and devoted a great deal of effort to refuting their claims.

The Gnostics differed from the orthodox church in other ways as well. It has been well established that the catholic church does not welcome females in positions of authority. This stems from the fact that the 12 disciples were all male. The Gnostics had a different perspective on things and often gave Mary Magdalene a more prominent role than the orthodox gospels do. The reason for the Gnostics' thinking on this issue is well document in "The Gnostics Gospels," but I would prefer to focus on the orthodox response to this belief. The main orthodox political objection to including females in positions of authority was that it disrupted the catholic church's authority. (Bear in mind that these arguments are taking places long after the death of Christ.) The catholics believe that the bishops' authority stems from the appointment by the apostles of their successors. By this argument the first bishops were appointed directly by the apostles and each subsequent generation of bishops was appointed by the previous generation. This apostolic succession is the source of the bishops' authority. Further, the orthodoxy believes that the bishops are all powerful and that no baptisms, for example, should take place without the bishop being present. The orthodoxy also believed in a strict bishop, priest, deacon hierarchy. All this leads to the Gnostic's arguments about the authority of women undermining the existing church hierarchy and threatening the authority of the bishops by arguing that Christ did not limit his teachings to just the apostles. So, the orthodoxy were labeled the Gnostics as heretics for this belief as well.

In addition to the two subjects mentioned above, "The Gnostic Gospels" also discusses the Gnostic and orthodox beliefs with regard to martyrdom (the orthodoxy favored martyrdom while the Gnostics thought it was a waste of human life), the resurrection (the Gnostics separated Christ's spiritual essence from his human body and argue that only the former was resurrected), and a host of other issues.

In the end, "The Gnostic Gospels" provides an interesting perspective on the origins of the catholic faith. My original goal was to get an historical analysis rather than a religious analysis of the establishment of the catholic church, but this book proved to be more than interesting enough to make up for that.

¹ Orthodox and heretical appear in quotations above because those labels represent only one viewpoint. The orthodox church -- the catholic church that still exists to this day -- created those labels as part of its attack on the Gnostics. However, they are useful labels for this discussion as they have wide-spread understanding and association, so they will reappear when necessary.

² One reason that the orthodox position won out over the Gnostics -- according to "The Gnostic Gospels" -- is that the term Gnosticism does not represent a consistent ideology. The Gnostics and heretics consisted of many different sects with similar but ultimately not identical beliefs. Future uses of the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism will therefore focus on beliefs held by the majority, but should not be taken as applying to all Gnostics or heretics.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 May 2005 at 1:35 PM

I'm tired of getting balanced news. The concept is just ridiculous. There aren't always two sides to every story; in fact, there's only one side to the truth. Factually accurate stories won't present both sides of an argument. By definition, there aren't two sides to facts. A fact is just a fact.

Somehow, Americans have been persuaded that there are layers of nuance to every issue. And because of this politicians can say and do whatever they want. Nothing is right or wrong anymore. The media will simply get two perspectives on every issue and let the reader decide. But that action is irresponsible. By giving full credence to a falsehood the media is implicitly giving an endorsement to the falsehood.

Somehow in the tightening of journalistic ethics that has occurred in the past few years it has become standard practice to replace accurate reporting with balanced reporting. As long as both sides get their perspectives covered, who's going to complain, right?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 9 May 2005 at 9:49 PM

05-05-05. Today was a pretty sweet day. Odd symmetry aside, I think he big project at work -- participating in hardware failure test to ensure that our application can survive all kinds of ridiculous failures without dropping and transactions -- is complete. We had the normal morning meeting, but we were just discussing the results of Wednesday night's test (oddly, we're ending on less than a high note as the last test had somewhat mixed results -- although our app was, but the other big player didn't come out of things so well) and we aren't planning on running any more tests for this iteration. The production release is scheduled for the night of May 18th and we're busy ironing out details for supporting the app after it goes into production these days.

On a different subject, Jeremy sent me a link a few days ago to a site that lets you compare salaries based on different areas of the country. Basically, you tell it how much you make and where you live and it will tell you how much more or less you'd need to make to maintain the same purchasing power if you lived in a different part of the country. The more I play with it, the more I appreciate living in the Midwest.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 5 May 2005 at 10:09 PM

"The Colbert Report" -- you've seen ads for it during "The Daily Show" -- is actually going into production! As early as this fall "The Daily Show" will be the lead in for Stephen Colbert's spoof of single host news shows like "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Hardball with Chris Matthews."

Via the NY Times.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 May 2005 at 11:03 PM

Sploid is calling it "COINGATE." Apparently "the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, the agency charged with paying the medical bills and providing income to workers injured on the job ... has invested $50 million in rare coin funds." The funds are "controlled by Mr. Noe, a local coin dealer and frequent contributor to local, state, and national Republican campaign committees." And now 121 coins -- worth about $393,000 -- are missing. I'm not sure I can even fathom this. Ohio invested $50 million in rare coins? Wow. Talk about an interesting investment strategy.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 May 2005 at 10:23 AM

Michael and Rachel took a charter flight to Mexico yesterday, ostensibly for a vacation. This has left me as the sole occupant of 8166 Whitburn, Apt. 6 for the next week. Evening One was spent trying and failing to get the Liferay portal to run via JBoss through eclipse. (If that sentence doesn't make much sense to you, don't worry. It doesn't make much sense to me either.) Evening Two will be spent in a similar fashion to Evening One except that I'm considering sitting at the table while I work rather than sitting in chair in the living room. Evening Three through Evening Seven do not yet have definitive plans set, but some future activities will be dictated by the status of the activities planned for this evening.

In other news, I added a sidebar to this website. I had initially planned something a bit more radical, but michael talked me out of it. Also, this sidebar was trivial to implement, which may be the only reason it ever actually got implemented. I still have a few things I want to add to the sidebar but some of them may prove difficult or impossible to do.

Also, while I'm talking about the site, I should come clean regarding something you may or may not have noticed. As I write this post the primary color of the site is blue. Over the next 30 days that color will subtly shift to grey, and in the following 30 days it will become blue again. This is accomplished by tweaking the saturation of the colors a bit each day, so the saturation will range from 0 to 30 while the hue and luminosity stay fixed. Most likely, that explanation doesn't make much sense unless you're familiar with the HSL color space.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 2 May 2005 at 9:50 AM