JUST WHAT I'VE ALWAYS SUSPECTED
"The study tracked subscriptions for a top-10 seller of online adult entertainment (2006-2008) and using ZIP code data associated with those subscriptions, compared the data with numbers from the FCC that tracks the amount of broadband Internet users in any given state. One of the findings from the study revealed that online subscriptions are 'more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality.' "
Source: Red Light States: Who Buys Adult Entertainment, By Benjamin Edelman ; FCC Report: High Speed Services for Internet Access
But where's the Bible Belt in this? My expectations were disappointed when I didn't see Alabama and Georgia, North and South Carolina. Florida is understandable. Lots of seniors there who might need a little lift off boost for the Viagra ride.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
FROM HUFFPO TO US:
The following reference to pain is from The Princess Bride by William Goldman: "Life is pain and anyone telling you different is selling something."
Now that's true and it goes for everybody from religious people to plastic surgeons, but, on the other hand, watch out for someone who wants to sell you a vision of the world that's all pain too. Usually, they've got something behind their back that they want to sell you after they convince you that the world's going straight to hell in a hand basket. I can always spot a fundamentally bent Christian because he's telling me how evil the world is, and, later, he wants to sell me Jesus's love to make me all better. Like most approaches to the "evils" of the world, the best view is a balanced view.
The following reference to pain is from The Princess Bride by William Goldman: "Life is pain and anyone telling you different is selling something."
Now that's true and it goes for everybody from religious people to plastic surgeons, but, on the other hand, watch out for someone who wants to sell you a vision of the world that's all pain too. Usually, they've got something behind their back that they want to sell you after they convince you that the world's going straight to hell in a hand basket. I can always spot a fundamentally bent Christian because he's telling me how evil the world is, and, later, he wants to sell me Jesus's love to make me all better. Like most approaches to the "evils" of the world, the best view is a balanced view.
Friday, July 17, 2009
MY RECENT LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Conservatives claim Sotomayor’s humanity might bias her judgments in law. Fact is, if she were liberal, she’d be less likely to enforce biased judgments. Recent brain imaging studies show that the conservative brain is less able to entertain two competing ideas. In short, conservative biases are unyielding whereas liberals might alter an outworn bias through new information. Adaptive change is the key to survival.
No one is objective, least of all someone who imagines they’re objective. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest human behavior is more robotic than we’d like to think. The synaptic connections which determine human personality are limited by genetic makeup and altered by life experience. By imaging brain activity, we observe that human actions are triggered before the brain becomes conscious of choice. For example, words form before we’re conscious of choosing them. The batter’s nervous system begins to swing milliseconds before he thinks to swing.
Conservatives claim Sotomayor’s humanity might bias her judgments in law. Fact is, if she were liberal, she’d be less likely to enforce biased judgments. Recent brain imaging studies show that the conservative brain is less able to entertain two competing ideas. In short, conservative biases are unyielding whereas liberals might alter an outworn bias through new information. Adaptive change is the key to survival.
No one is objective, least of all someone who imagines they’re objective. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest human behavior is more robotic than we’d like to think. The synaptic connections which determine human personality are limited by genetic makeup and altered by life experience. By imaging brain activity, we observe that human actions are triggered before the brain becomes conscious of choice. For example, words form before we’re conscious of choosing them. The batter’s nervous system begins to swing milliseconds before he thinks to swing.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
LONG TIME NOSEE
I've got to make an entry. It's been so long. That's because I'm working my way through an algebra textbook, working on my book Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations, and trying to keep up on my personal reading and my reading of books for "Page Turners", my book club. Currently reading Three Cups of Tea ghosted by David Relin for Greg Mortenson for the book club.
Came across this idea while reading Three Cups of Tea. The Taliban would be right at home in America's deep south Bible belt. In Afghanistan, while they were in power, the Taliban set up a "Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". These people were book burners and anti-science almost as thoroughly as Bush's White House. The Taliban wouldn't let medical students study anatomy or view drawings of human anatomy. Imagine how much they loathed evolution! That's why the Taliban is a perfect fit for the American South. All those promise keepers who've gone on to cheat on their wives would flock to the Taliban whose values are just like their own.
I've got to make an entry. It's been so long. That's because I'm working my way through an algebra textbook, working on my book Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations, and trying to keep up on my personal reading and my reading of books for "Page Turners", my book club. Currently reading Three Cups of Tea ghosted by David Relin for Greg Mortenson for the book club.
Came across this idea while reading Three Cups of Tea. The Taliban would be right at home in America's deep south Bible belt. In Afghanistan, while they were in power, the Taliban set up a "Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". These people were book burners and anti-science almost as thoroughly as Bush's White House. The Taliban wouldn't let medical students study anatomy or view drawings of human anatomy. Imagine how much they loathed evolution! That's why the Taliban is a perfect fit for the American South. All those promise keepers who've gone on to cheat on their wives would flock to the Taliban whose values are just like their own.
Friday, May 15, 2009
THOSE MIXED UP NEURONS
After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.
So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.
These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.
Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?
After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.
So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.
These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.
Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
A WHOLE IN ONE
I've been an atheist probably as far back as I can think, with some lapses and backsliding into belief under the duress of painful times. In short, when I am most weak and helpless is when I make decisions about gods and powers of greatness that I normally would not make.
I don't know why I came to be an atheist, but as a teen, I probably said I was an atheist in order to shock people. The other day, though, I understood something about atheism that I'd not noted before. I was thinking about the book I'm writing and was trying to phrase a central theme of it when I chanced upon the following thought: my life seems to be directed toward the purpose of seeing myself as I truly am beyond or outside of the consciousness of a judging god.
To live godless builds a truly human way of evaluating life. I think atheism is allowing me to quit having a split nature, seeing myself at one time as a human animal and at another time as a constructed creature at the mercy of a whimsical god like the gods of the Bible or Koran. The end of dualism is the end of being split, coming to live within existential doctrine. I'm sure that's what the existentialists were hoping for—to quit living as dual people and to be as one.
To think as an atheist one escapes the duality of good and evil. As long as one is encumbered by the good versus evil continuum, he cannot help but be judgmental. His consciousness is bathed in good and evil thinking rather than in evaluating life on less onerous and practical terms.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
WRITING FROM SPACE
Long time since last entry.
I'm at Tully's in Vancouver. Just got back from the Humanists of Greater Portland meeting. At the meeting this morning, I felt light-headed and couldn't follow the talk on "dark matter" very well. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that I didn't belong among these "smart" people so I didn't go to lunch with the sub-group that always meets for lunch following the Sunday presentations and drove straight back here to Vancouver. On the drive back I was filled with fear and a sense of worthlessness—fear and worthlessness, my old nemeses from college drinking days. As soon as I pulled into Tulley's, a place familiar to me, I was okay again.
Like most fears, this morning's fear gathered strength and spread the more I indulged it. First thing I knew I was imagining my old age, myself in a nursing home, whining for help, trembling and begging. Not a pleasant set of feelings and imaginings. But that's just the way it goes with me sometimes, rather fewer times than in my old drinking days and in early sobriety. But my bouts with insecurity seem to be increasing in frequency again. Maybe stimulated by working on Boomed Out? Dark matter indeed!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
ATHEISTS HAVE THE MOST SUSTAINABLE ETHICS
How often have we atheists been asked how atheists can have any
sense of "morality" since we have no godly law which supports our
ethical beliefs? I'm currently reading a collection of essays called,
The Sense of the Sixties, and in it, Robert Penn Warren (he wrote All
The King's Men) appeals to the same source for my guiding lights as do
most atheists and agnostics. Warren was writing an essay directed to
the situation between blacks and whites as they existed in the
mid-1960s, but his conclusions as to a good foundation for ethics is a
universal I also subscribe to.
"It would be an even more vicious illusion to think that in
trying to solve the problem he would be giving something away, would
be "'liberal," or would be performing an act of charity, Christian or
any other kind. The safest, soberest, most humble, and perhaps not the
most ignoble way for him to think of grounding action is not on
generosity, but on a proper awareness of self-interest.
"It is self-interest to want to live in a society operating by
the love of justice and the concept of law…. It is self-interest to
want all members of society to contribute as fully as possible to the
enrichment of that society…. It is self-interest to seek out friends
and companions who are congenial in temperament and whose experience
and capacities extend our own…. It is self-interest to want to escape
from the pressure to conform to values which we feel immoral or
antiquated…. It is self-interest to want to escape from the burden of
vanity into the hard and happy realization that in the diminishment of
others there is a deep diminishment of the self." —Robert Penn Warren
How often have we atheists been asked how atheists can have any
sense of "morality" since we have no godly law which supports our
ethical beliefs? I'm currently reading a collection of essays called,
The Sense of the Sixties, and in it, Robert Penn Warren (he wrote All
The King's Men) appeals to the same source for my guiding lights as do
most atheists and agnostics. Warren was writing an essay directed to
the situation between blacks and whites as they existed in the
mid-1960s, but his conclusions as to a good foundation for ethics is a
universal I also subscribe to.
"It would be an even more vicious illusion to think that in
trying to solve the problem he would be giving something away, would
be "'liberal," or would be performing an act of charity, Christian or
any other kind. The safest, soberest, most humble, and perhaps not the
most ignoble way for him to think of grounding action is not on
generosity, but on a proper awareness of self-interest.
"It is self-interest to want to live in a society operating by
the love of justice and the concept of law…. It is self-interest to
want all members of society to contribute as fully as possible to the
enrichment of that society…. It is self-interest to seek out friends
and companions who are congenial in temperament and whose experience
and capacities extend our own…. It is self-interest to want to escape
from the pressure to conform to values which we feel immoral or
antiquated…. It is self-interest to want to escape from the burden of
vanity into the hard and happy realization that in the diminishment of
others there is a deep diminishment of the self." —Robert Penn Warren
Monday, March 09, 2009
CONVICTION LEADS TO ERROR
The following paragraphs come from a book I'm reading presently, The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease. Laughing at Ehrenhaft, I'm forced to say that I'm 71 and I can't even find a podium. So my mumbling and grumbling about religion usually occurs in the presence of my lovely wife. Ehrenhaft, fundamentalist religious nuts of all religions and me...
"It took place in September 1946 in New York City at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society. At one session, the presentation by the young Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behavior of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, an elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of 'subelectrons,' charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and approached the podium demanding to be heard.
"A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein—who told me the story—was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert.
" 'Pais's theory is far crazier than Ehrenhaft's,' Goldstein asked Siegert. 'Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?'
"Siegert thought a moment. 'Because,' he said firmly, 'Ehrenhaft believes his theory.'
The strength of Ehrenhaft's conviction, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfaction. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effects of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science." —Robert P. Crease
The following paragraphs come from a book I'm reading presently, The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease. Laughing at Ehrenhaft, I'm forced to say that I'm 71 and I can't even find a podium. So my mumbling and grumbling about religion usually occurs in the presence of my lovely wife. Ehrenhaft, fundamentalist religious nuts of all religions and me...
"It took place in September 1946 in New York City at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society. At one session, the presentation by the young Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behavior of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, an elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of 'subelectrons,' charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and approached the podium demanding to be heard.
"A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein—who told me the story—was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert.
" 'Pais's theory is far crazier than Ehrenhaft's,' Goldstein asked Siegert. 'Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?'
"Siegert thought a moment. 'Because,' he said firmly, 'Ehrenhaft believes his theory.'
The strength of Ehrenhaft's conviction, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfaction. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effects of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science." —Robert P. Crease
Friday, February 20, 2009
THE SENSE OF THE SIXTIES
I'm reading a collection of materials from a book about the 60s. Almost all the essays seem to have appeared in the time frame between 1964 and 1966. I came across a couple of enticing comments. The two comments I have in mind came from the pen of Andrew Kopkind, one of which I'll bet he recalled (or not) not too long after he'd made it and wished he'd not made it. What political figure do you think Kopkind's remarks were about?
First and with a lot of spin toward the last resident of the White House: He "continually pressed the Johnson Administration on a Vietnam settlement" and "criticized the President for regarding the war as 'purely a military problem.' "
The next Kopkind comment is a stronger clue to the political identity I have in mind: "He can afford the luxury of the free rein because he has a precious commodity—time. Nothing much is likely to happen to him for five years, maybe more."
I'm reading a collection of materials from a book about the 60s. Almost all the essays seem to have appeared in the time frame between 1964 and 1966. I came across a couple of enticing comments. The two comments I have in mind came from the pen of Andrew Kopkind, one of which I'll bet he recalled (or not) not too long after he'd made it and wished he'd not made it. What political figure do you think Kopkind's remarks were about?
First and with a lot of spin toward the last resident of the White House: He "continually pressed the Johnson Administration on a Vietnam settlement" and "criticized the President for regarding the war as 'purely a military problem.' "
The next Kopkind comment is a stronger clue to the political identity I have in mind: "He can afford the luxury of the free rein because he has a precious commodity—time. Nothing much is likely to happen to him for five years, maybe more."
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