Can Texan students now claim that π=3 & still get an A? Maybe…

As we head into the new school year, the great state of Texas will start it with a bizarre new bill in force. While the bill is ostensibly to protect religious speech by students from discrimination, such protections are already law (in fact, the supposedly anti-Christian ACLU is often the one defending students who are discriminated against), and the actual language of the bill instead seems intended to mainline religious devotions led by students as standard part of all public school activities.

The pernicious effect, of course, is to change the meaning of religious freedom. Current law protects the right of any student to voluntarily attend prayer gatherings, form religious student groups, or to freely express their beliefs in any open forum. This Texas law, however, carves out a framework for all school events in which only certain students selected by the school administrators get to speak (only students that get “honors,” as defined any way the school wants, qualify). What this provides is a handy dandy way to have students preach their religion or lead the entire school in prayers on a regular and established basis. A student’s constitutional freedom to gather and be a part of religious events by their choice is replaced by a framework in which every single school event, mandatory or not, can be turned into a prayer meeting. The school needs only to include a disclaimer that the student is not speaking officially for the school (wink wink).

I’m not quite as worried this aspect of the bill as PZ Myers at Pharyngula is though. While the bill’s authors are certainly playing a clever game, they seem to be playing by the letter of the law, if not anywhere close to the spirit. And we have a good idea, in fact, how this game will likely play out.

Larry Craig was Entrapped: the case for Officer Karsnia as a blackmailer

With so many people focusing on the political aspects of Senator’s Craig’s arrest (including the outrageously hypocritical calls for Craig to resign, when no such calls were made for Senator Vitter, who outright admitted to sleeping with prostitutes) as well as the “is he or isn’t” debate over his homosexuality, something really important has been left in the dust.

Officer Karsnia should also be facing scrutiny, because the facts of the case could also support the idea that he essentially blackmailed Craig into pleading without any evidence of a crime that would have held up in court.

I do not sympathize with Craig’s politics. I do not respect his endorsement of creationism and attempt to legislate it into the school system. If he is in fact “on the down low,” then he is a hypocrite, especially as one of the architects of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. His use of his Senatorial business card, apparently to seek special treatment, is also pretty smarmy.

Irrelevant. None of that changes the fact that the police report fails to document any real, prosecutable crime as far as I can tell.

Jonathan Wells exposed: Intelligence used to design falsehoods

Peppered moths are a classic evolutionary example of how a previously unknown trait can appear in a population and then come to dominate it due to a particular environmental change. That, of course, has also made them a major target for creationists, and Discovery Institute fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells has spent much of his career in trying to discredit the example, most famously by trying to claim that a posed example picture used in introductory textbooks somehow invalidated the detailed statistical results they were used to illustrate.

Today, Mike Dunford does a fantastic job explaining exactly how Wells is still grossly misrepresenting both the original classic study as well as a recent definitive re-testing of the key predation results.

What’s really embarrassing here is that Wells, unlike many of his Intelligent Design fellows, actually has a PhD. in biology, which, if still not in quite the right field for evaluating zoological field research, at least requires one to understand how to read and evaluate a technical paper. So mere ignorance cannot be his excuse for the errors and misrepresentations Dunford highlights.

Unfortunately, Wells also has something else: directions straight from God’s final representative on Earth, the Reverend Sun Yung Moon (a man who most recently crowned himself “humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.”), to destroy “Darwinism.”

“Father’s [Sun Myung Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.” –Jonathan Wells, Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.

Just to be clear, Wells’ religion does not discredit his arguments. Rather, it is his religion that helps explain why he’s apparently sees fit to deceive people and misrepresent science.

Bonus: Another great article on The Other 95% dealing with some recent confused ID inquiries into the matter of comparative phylogenomics. Invertebrate freak Kevin makes a strong case that the critics hadn’t even read the paper they were attacking, and certainly don’t understand the scientific concepts involved.

The Blessed Virgin Mary chose this garage door for great things

I almost hate to comment on these sorts of stories, but apparently the Blessed Virgin Mary has more messages for mankind, and she’s decided to communicate them by appearing on a garage door. At around 5:30pm every day. In Minersville, PA. Conclusion?

“The Blessed Virgin Mary is trying to tell us something. A miracle is going to happen in the next few weeks. What, when, why, I don’t know but I feel she’s trying to tell us something,” said Joanne Deconcini.

Well sure: I know that whenever I want to tell my wife to pick up some more Coke Zero on her way home from work, I never outright tell her this: instead I just cryptically email her a blurry photo of myself. How, when, why this would work, I don’t know, but this one time she brought home some leftover Chinese food, which was sort of a miracle.

Seriously though: if Mary has a message, and if she has the power to bend light or burn images into garage doors, why not just write out her message in nice, big letters, or maybe at least attempt sign language? Why appear as just a jiggling indistinct blob? If this is some sort of game of spiritual charades, these aren’t exactly helpful clues.

“I think it’s wonderful, actually, that there’s actually an image on somebody’s garage door and she moves back and forth and she doesn’t stay still. To me it’s a blessing for me to have her here in Minersville,” said Peggy Mayhue. (emp added)

Moving back and forth you say? Well, that puts the Samurai Fence-Jesus in Lodi, CA to shame.

Look, obviously the people here are searching and sincere, and I hope they get a thrill out of this or even that it helps motivate them to do something good. But these have to be some of the silliest examples of pareodalia I’ve ever seen. Even Bugeyed Pancake-Jesus was a better likeness of a person.

The worst part about this story is the people’s attempt at some token skepticism: “witnesses also said if you touch the image no shadow from the sun appears. The image remains.” But if you are going to try to debunk something, why be timid? Get a heavy blanket, hold it above your head and then blot out all possible external sources of light (including those reflected from below) with you inside up against the garage: either the image will then appear on the back of the blanket instead, or it will remain on the garage with you in the dark. Either way, you’ve at least learned something, which is a whole lot better than just standing around in the street.

Update: Remember the claims about how the light cannot be put in shadow? Watch the video at this blog about the story. Sure looks like people’s shadows are blocking it out to me…

Hitchens on Mother Theresa & a pox on both the gloating & the glib

I’ve made no secret that Christopher Hitchens is my least favorite of the big three “New Atheist” writers: he’s a masterful essayist, but being deft with words doesn’t necessarily prevent your arguments from being crude. I’ve also made no secret that I think trying too hard to psycho-analyze the beliefs of others is, to put it mildly, a rather dangerously indulgent vice.

So with those two things going against him, it comes as something of a surprise that I thought Hitchen’s essay on the latest hubbub over Theresa’s missing Jesus joy is worth a read. Hitchen’s brief quotes in the original Time article were somewhat clumsy and off-key, and of course won him no love from thoughtful Catholics. In this latest article, Hitchens is no less harsh, but develops a narrative of Theresa’s life and suffering that is, if not exactly a full or fair judgment on her life, at least provides some plausible balance to all the saccharine peans to the misery of doubt.

Catholics are more than justified in defending their faith from simplistic swipes and gloating on this issue (especially from Protestants, eager for signs that Catholicism is a dead end). But at the same time, many of these defenses are just too glib and tidy to be believable. When literally anything at all is explained away as just more evidence and testimony to the importance of faith, it’s not clear that anything is being explained at all. As I said before: sometimes doubts are a message worth listening to rather than a grand opportunity for a mental passion play.

So is it really so impertinent to suggest that perhaps Theresa might have been happier if she loosened up even a little on her fanatical devotion? Or, instead of jumping straight to the conclusion that she was a saint suffering on a wondrous spiritual cross, at least entertaining the idea perhaps she suffered needlessly from untreated clinical depression? Isn’t it possible that, just as Mother Theresa exploited and was exploited by the simplistic image of herself as uncomplicated savior to the helpless people of Calcutta, her very human sufferings are now set to be endlessly exploited for the benefit of utterly unapologetic apologia?

• Sam Harris toys with some of these same themes in his latest On Faith blog entry.
• You can also watch Bill Donahue and Hitchens yell at each other if you really want.

Berlinksi, whales, and why Intelligent Design can’t get no respect

A commenter expressed incredulity about my claim that ID proponents engage in deception and gross misrepresentations of science.

So to help prove my point in a timely fashion, along comes a video of Intelligent Design mathematician David Berlinski explaining why it’s implausible to imagine a cow evolving into a whale.

As many science bloggers have pointed out, we could just stop at the title: no possible understanding of evolutionary taxonomy could possibly lead one to believe that cows are relevant comparisons to the ancestors of whales and dolphins (amazingly, he even mentions a relevant ancestor, Ambulocetus, later in the video; so where did cows come from?). The entire thought experiment makes virtually no sense on any level, and his bizarre implication that biologists do not employ mathematics, let alone quantitative analysis, is just boldly ignorant.

But none of that even compares to sheer grandiose absurdity of Berlinski’s claim that he, with his supposedly unique grasp of the quantitative (i.e., in this case, counting) “stopped at” thinking of 50,000 differences between a cow and a whale, implying that he, personally, literally really did go through the process of listing them all out, one by one.

Here’s a bit of math for Berlinski: even if he was capable of listing out these differences at an implausibly fast average rate of one every ten seconds, it would still take more than 5 days of non-stop 24hr activity to accomplish this seemingly trifling task. Does he really expect anyone to believe that he actually did this? How was he sure that he didn’t double-count something during either in one marathon session of counting, or in many many counting sessions over many weeks? If he wrote anything down to prevent this sort of thing, that would just make the time required shoot upwards dramatically.

And what happened when he hit 40,000 after a few days of solid, uninterrupted counting? Does he really expect people to believe that he shrugged and said to himself “ah well, I might as well do 10,000 more, and then arbitrarily stop, just for kicks!”

Here’s a much more plausible explanation: Berlinski is full of it, and by my calculations, it wouldn’t even take a single morphological change to turn this guy into a laughingstock.

Update: If you’re tired of just rolling your eyes at Berlinski, and want to actually, well, learn something about whales and their family tree, check out this tour de force post on the evolution of locomotion methods over at Laelaps, covering the everything from the early lobed-fishes all the way down to the glorious cetaceans. What do we find here in everything from locomotion methods to skeletal structure? Why, nested clades of course: that ever so distinctive hallmark of ancestry.

The Gay Old Party: a Republican base in denial about their party’s tolerance

Dale Carpenter over at the Volokh Conspiracy returns to a subject that I’m always amazed more people don’t talk about: the vast majority of Republican politicians and staffers in Washington aren’t actually anti-gay.  We’re not just talking about the Log Cabin Republicans either: we’re talking about many people within RNC, that work on Republican campaigns, that serve as Congressional staff, and so on.  Nor is this even a secret among Republicans in Washington.  It just isn’t talked about in public.

This most-recent case of (R)Senator Larry Craig’s arrest, supposedly for “cruising” an airport bathroom, just underscores that this is a party in which the base is grossly out of touch with the professional class that runs it in Washington D.C. While Republicans in the capitol have learned to keep their tolerant attitudes quiet by token oppositions to gay rights, this juggling act can’t go on forever. Someday, perhaps soon, the Republican party is either going to have to come to face with itself and end their de facto “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gay politicians and staffers, or outright purge the party of homosexual leaders and employees. Carpenter believes that the latter is pragmatically impossible. We’ll see if Republican leaders can gather the guts to do the former before this issue tears them apart.

(By the way, gay or straight, I think that there is a good case to be made that Senator Craig got railroaded here: nothing in his charged conduct was actually illegal as far as I can tell, and he was basically blackmailed into pleading guilty on disorderly conduct so as to avoid the publicity of trying to refute the allegations publicly in court.)

Amazing Cellphone that Recharges Itself… Somehow

“Welcome to the future” announces corporate website of AC Energy. Of course, to actually reach the future, AC Energy will naturally require your investment, today.

What will you be investing in you ask? Only the most revolutionary invention since Edison’s day: a cell phone that never needs to be recharged! Doesn’t that sound great?

… shut up, of course it does.

So how does it work? Well, according to the convenient “how it works” section of the website, there’s this one battery, and when it runs out, a second battery takes over, while in the meantime, a innovative “electro-mechanical component”/”internal generator”/”mechanical charging system” works its magic and recharges the first battery again. It’s all through the magic of “kinetic phase energy transfer.” Hmmmm… if your skeptic Spidey-senses are tingling by now, you’re not alone.

Katrina Anniversary: ain’t no relief for the weary economist

Long before the Freakonomics fad, there was a rogue economist twice as brash and incisive: Steven Landsburg. He’s written three non-technical books so far: The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, and More Sex is Safer Sex, and every single one is what I call “high information content.” By that I mean that nearly every page contains an idea or an argument that is so inventive, or intriguing, or perplexing, or maddening that it hardly matters whether it’s bad or brilliant. And while some people react to his counter-intuitive proposals and musings with all sorts of what they think are obvious objections to seeming insanity, Landsburg nearly always has more up his sleeves in defense: often exposing the clumsy assumptions behind the “obvious” in the process.

So with the Katrina anniversary today, and plenty of boring, conventional commentary, I figured I’d highlight two of Landsburg’s most thought provoking Slate columns on the subject.

Posuer Provocateurs: Intelligent Design’s unimpressive “underground railroad”

With the marketing campaign for the anti-evolutionary film Expelled! ramping up, it seems like the Intelligent Design movement is well prepared for its next big PR campaign: whiny, content-free victimhood. While I, among others, missed it when it was first announced in July, the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC)’s new Casey Luskin Graduate Award is now one of my favorite entries in this category.

Others have already deftly skewered the sheer absurdity of the award itself, where even the top prize is just a Behe book, a couple of ten dollar bills, and a certificate sure to be chiefly composed of clip-art. But the real point of the award seems to be the on-message persecution posturing: aside from Luskin’s honorary patting of himself on the back, the winners are all being kept dramatically anonymous, “for the protection of the recipient.” In fact, it’s worth quoting the litany of laughable fears in full:

The many students, professors, and scientists who have been denied degrees or tenure, and removed from positions and jobs for no other reason than acceptance of—or even sympathy to—intelligent design theory is very telling of the importance of keeping these bright young minds out of the crosshairs of those opposed to open-minded investigation and critical thought.

Oh, the phony humanity! Of course, this hushed air of secrecy is even more ridiculous in light of the fact that the mystery first-place recipient was so easy to figure out. Given the list of majors, it was almost certainly IDEA Club President Hannah Maxson, a Cornell University graduate already closely involved with the folks at IDURC (making the award even more incestuous). Worse, the fact that Ms. Maxson is already a very public and unabashed ID advocate makes this little vaudeville act about protective anonymity even more ridiculous. That said, I do hope she’s enjoying the book she almost certainly already owned, the two nights worth of bar tabs, and especially the super-duper secret club certificate she can’t show to anyone for fear of unbrightening her young mind. Luckily, next year’s likely winner, IDURC director Sam Chen, now has plenty of time to think up some better prizes to award himself.

Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Amongst Intelligent Design creationists who have no chance of winning this prestigious award is Rich Scott, who was profiled in Newsweek a while back. What horrors of oppression did Mr. Scott report?

Scott, despite his initial fears, found no such discrimination in any of West Chester’s science departments. Once his professors found out that he believed in intelligent design, they strove to help him find ways to write his papers without sacrificing either scientific knowledge or his personal beliefs. “They were very impressed that I was willing to take a stand and they helped me a lot.”

Ooooo, that’s not quite the answer IDURC was looking for. Too bad Mr. Scott, maybe you can learn to stay on message next time.

Same-Sex Unions discovered in Medieval Europe

Via LiveScience: Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.

How long before civil-union opponents start anachronistically using this to argue that gay rights will lead us right back into the dark ages?

Still, this is a pretty fascinating historical insight, if it holds up. Possibly the most compelling evidence for the practice was this ancient tapestry.

Who’s with Hitler?: Ism-ism & assault by association

Over at the Friendly Atheist, Hemant asks folks to consider the eternal issue of ism-ism: whether atrocious deeds can plausibly condemn the ideologies they are associated with. It’s an old, and, let’s face it, tedious debate, especially in religious circles, but one that is still unavoidable. Let’s all promise that this is the last time, ok?

It’s worth first noting that talking about “ideologies” can be misleading: excellent arguments can be composed around the idea that, say, communism is inherently am inescapably bad idea: that it corrupts even it’s nicest adherents. This is largely because there’s a lot to work with there: communism is a robust set of principles and values from which you can derive all sorts of inevitable problems.

But when you dial down to things that are more “category” than “manifesto,” this capability to characterize through association really breaks down. And this is never more the case than with the “atheism/theism” axis.