KEEPING UP WITH THE __________________?

What with the trend for people to buy houses way too large for their needs that would put their grand-folk to shame and with these overlarge houses being overpriced and overvalued by as much as 30% in some American neighborhoods, modest and sensible people who want modest and sensible dwellings can no longer keep up with the Joneses; they're forced to keep up with the Dunces.

VAGUENESS: ITS USES IN DIPLOMACY

Steven Pinker always uses humor to illustrate his points and often delves into literature too. Here's an old joke, included in his recent book, The Stuff of Thought (p.396), from a section discussing bribes and how to get away with them by employing the language of implicature, rather than the outright offer itself:

When a lady says “no,” she means “maybe.”
When she says “maybe,” she means “yes.”
If she says “yes,” she's no lady.
When a diplomat says “yes,” he means “maybe.”
When he says “maybe,” he means “no.”
If he says “no,” he's no diplomat.

This prompted a feminist revision:

When a woman says “yes,” she means “yes.”
When a woman says “maybe,” she means “maybe.”
When a woman says “no,” she means “no.”
If the man persists, he's a rapist.

BELIEFS CAN HAVE TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

The following passage is taken from this week's Newsweek magazine, page 16. The article is called "The Working-Class Smoker" by Jerry Adler. Thank you, Jerry. It has to do with education and how superstition can affect the way one lives and dies. Being a blue collar machinist myself, but also having a college education and also having toyed with being powerless (i.e. a fatalist) in my drinking daze, I understand the following passage. Of course, another correlation occurs between those who are believers and their lack of education. I interpret both correlations to show that if you are a believer, you are likely to have little education and to also be one who quietly and without noticing it yourself is killing oneself, either by smoking or by failing to wear your seat belt. That doesn't speak too well for religious belief, does it?

PS: While entering this, I've also been watching a piece of superstitious nonsense called, "Constantine" on the FX channel. Of course, it's inspired by a comic book. Just about the level of your average believer's emotional and intellectual life. Notice I don't use the word "intelligence". I do believe that a believer can be intellectual though not intelligent. Intelligence is the realm of reason and rationality, but a believer can be emotionally stunted even while being able to employ massive intellectual sophistication in debate. C.S. Lewis comes to mind, a great intellectual twister but really lost in his faith from reality. I also realize I have been less than generous in my judgments. I try but I fail—somewhat like Paul himself.

[SNIP]
But there's also evidence that attending college by itself encourages healthy behavior; when community colleges open in rural areas, enrolling local youths who otherwise would have gone into the work force, smoking goes down.

Perhaps there's a clue in a bit of unpublished research by Cutler on a related question: why does seat-belt use go up with education? Anyone can understand the danger of flying through the windshield in a collision. But some data suggest that the less education you have, the likelier you are to agree with the statement "It doesn't matter if I wear a seat belt, because if it's my time to die, I'll die."

So for anyone reading this who never got beyond high school, here's a bit of free advice: it does matter. Life is uncertain, but that's no reason to surrender to fate. You don't need a Harvard M.B.A. to understand that.
[PASTE]

READ BELOW AND ASK YOURSELF

The following is an excerpt from an interview. As you read the answer to the question posed, ask yourself who is answering. Answer is below the response. An upside down picture.

Question: You've done more than one life's worth of work. Why go do this at this point?

Well, you're asking a personal question. So I’ll give you an unusual personal answer. I have a very deep well of empathy, and I take my motivation from what I see around the country. And I’ll give it to you just briefly, statistically: 47 million people who make less than $10.50 an hour—six and a half, seven, eight dollars an hour before deductions; 45 million people with out health care, 18,000 of whom die every year, according to the National Academy of Sciences, because they can't afford health care; 13 million children who go to bed hungry every night; 45 million people in dire poverty; 58,000 people who die from workplace-connected diseases and trauma every year, according to [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration]; 65,000 people who can't breathe, and die because of air pollution. I mean, do I have to go on? I mean, just what more evidence is needed that each and every one of us who has an ability to improve his or her country has got to do what they have to do within the confines of the Constitution and rule of law and freedom of speech?




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PDX or PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Caught this one late morning from across the Columbia on the Vancouver side. I was taking my morning constitutional when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature roof top but no tiny reindeer. Lovely glittering sight though, eh?

Speaking of reindeer, I came across an old Harry Truman story in a book about language by Steven Pinker called The Stuff Of Thought. Or it should be a Bess Truman story. People asked her if she please couldn't get Harry to use the term fertilizer instead of referring to it as manure. She replied that she didn't know how she could do that. After all, she'd just finally gotten him to call the stuff manure.

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HERE’S MY SCIENCE HAIKU FOR THE DAY

Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:

computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road

“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)

PRAYING NO MORE THAN PREYING ON THE FOOLS

The following passages are from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (p. 63). After debating with agnostics, I find that they are dead set against accepting that the existence or non-existence of the god hypothesis is capable of proof. So let us just say that the following prayer experiment is an attempt to discover if the Universe contains any wonder-working magic in it that the act of praying can elicit from hiding. If we can design enough real experiments that test if there are wonder working marvels in the Universe, then we may not be able to prove whether or not the hypothesis of god is provable, but we can slowly whittle away at the hypothetical wonder worker's powers. We can limit its reach, whatever it is, so to speak. Anyhow, here's a report that shows the severe limitations of prayer.

[SNIP]
Dr. Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 tests for the efficacy of intercessory prayer. Group 3 tests for possible psychosomatic effects of knowing that one is being prayed for.

Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals, as explained, were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’.

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other; but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. Was God doing a bit of smiting, to show his disapproval of the whole barmy enterprise? It seems more probable that those patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered additional stress in consequence: 'performance anxiety', as the experimenters put it. Dr. Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, 'It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?' In today's litigious society, is it too much to hope that those patients suffering heart complications, as a consequence of knowing they were receiving experimental prayers, might put together a class action lawsuit against the Templeton Foundation?

It will be no surprise that this study was opposed by theologians….
[PASTIE]

And why do you suppose theologians opposed the experiment? Couldn't be because they know what nonsense their profession preaches and can't bear the thought of suffering loss of status—one of the traits left over from their evolutionary pasts?