Now I know what they mean by "Not even wrong"

Warning. Watching these videos might induce intellectual comatose.




I've listened to lots of anti-evolution propaganda, but this junk makes William Lane Craig and Kent Hovind look like Nobel laureates.

Either they are deliriously incompetent, or unapologetically dishonest. They repeat that there are absolutely no transitional fossils over and over again. And say with authority that modern scientific evidence continues to disprove the theory of evolution. Believers in the theory do so because they want to live their nihilistic lifestyles without the guilt of god holding them back.

My favourite quote comes 8:40 into episode 5, "It's really not about convincing your intellect. It's about setting aside your pride and listening to your conscience."

Yes, truth is about trusting your gut. Gosh, the earth sure seems like it's the centre of the universe because I'm staying still and the heavenly bodies are all moving around me. It's obvious to me so it must be true. I won't worry my silly little intellect over all that data of planetary orbits around the sun. I'll just follow my conscience, because it knows best.

Science is hard. No one ever said that the laws of the universe have to be easy for you to understand. No scientist ever claimed that comprehending the theory of evolution was as natural as breathing. It takes effort to understand this stuff BECAUSE much of it falls outside of our common-sense experiences.

Here's another ripe quote from the videos.

The truth is the Bible is full of scientific facts. And the so-called science of evolution is the one that over time has proven itself to be the one that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Redundant grammar aside, nothing could be further from the truth. People do not find predictions in the Bible, they find postdictions. That is, quotes that can be interpreted to be consistent with something already known. Example, Esaiah 40:22 mentions the "circle of the earth", and some take that to mean that the earth is spherical. However, a circle is not a sphere. The quote is also consistent with a flat pancake earth. Any similarity the Bible has to science is strictly coincidental, or a result of post-hoc rationalization and quote mining. (BTW - Muslims make the same claim about the Quran... see the comments).

On the contrary, I really like Steven Novella's recent quote,

In fact the entire history of human knowledge (factual knowledge about how nature works) is one of cultural beliefs (largely superstition or philosophy-based or simply quirky cultural history) being systematically replaced by science-based ideas. When we started to take a rigorous systematic look at nature with methods that control for bias we found that almost everything we believed about the world was wrong.

Finally, the videos do a pretty horrendous job of taking quotes from real scientists out of context. Well, here's a quote I got from the videos, "Evolution... is... true."

Arithmetic fail

My sister-in-law asked me to clarify this simple arithmetic expression.

The question is, do they mean

(1)
Or, do they mean

(2)
In the absence of brackets to clarify, mathematical convention would suggest that option (1) is the correct interpretation since the division symbol pertains to the first operand on its right. In our case, it's a 2. If they had intended option (2), then they would have to enclose 2(9+3) all in brackets, as in


The problem is we don't know the mathematical sophistication of the person who came up with the question. How many times have I seen a "skill testing question" that looks something like this...


Following standard mathematical convention, my answer would be 16.166666... But, somehow that's less satisfying than the unconventional answer of 3.

Arithmetic fail

Looking through a book about 100 with Heather, we came across this page.

Let's recap.

3 + 7 = 10

and

30 + 80 = 100

Any questions?

Craig vs Harris debate: Does Good Come From God

I listened to this debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. Here is the first of 9 YouTube installments...




My thoughts...

Dr. Craig is a good debater. However, I disagree with most of what he said. For example, he said that the existence of God guarantees objective morals. That's not at all obvious to me. God could have simply decided that he wouldn't bother making objective morals. The Deist outlook, for example, is that God set the universe in motion (with physical laws, etc), and simply stands back to watch what happens.

Most of Dr. Craig's arguments seemed to be based on semantics.

God is intrinsically good.
Thus, good must come from God.

That's a simplified version, but captures the circular nature of the argument. I'm not buying it.

The real question is does the absence of God necessarily mean that there are no objective morals. Dr. Craig says "no". I agree with that.

And this is where Dr. Harris and I disagree. He claims that objective morals CAN come from natural causes. His book, The Moral Landscape, tries to make that argument. While I agree with almost everything that he says in the book, I don't agree that there is a universal, absolute way to define good and bad, or right and wrong. One of his arguments asks us to consider the universe with the worst possible misery for everyone. To him, this establishes a global anchoring point, and any move from that universe will result in less misery, and therefor be good. Though I haven't nailed it down yet, I feel that there is something wrong with this line of reasoning. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that -- no matter how bad the universe is -- I can always imagine a universe that's worse.

I cringe when I hear Dr. Harris authoritatively state things like female genital mutilation is objectively and universally wrong. It's not that I think genital mutilation is a good idea... I don't. But my reasoning is not motivated by a universal moral; it's based on my emotions. I would hate to see anyone subjected to that kind of torture, but that doesn't make it objectively wrong. It just feels subjectively wrong to me.

I routinely mutilate the bodies of other living organisms when I eat. Does that make me bad? Should I stop eating? And the rightness or wrongness of killing someone always seems to depend on the circumstances; were you defending yourself? These questions of morals always seem to hinge on your point of view. To me, that suggests that there are no objective morals.

My first sermon

On Sunday morning, I gave a 20-minute talk during the service of the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo. My talk was entitled "Beliefs on Trial". My main point was that we cannot trust our own subjective impressions. There are many cognitive traps that we fall into, and they can lead us to believe in things that just aren't true. I gave a number of examples, including optical illusions, confirmation bias, and change blindness. Here is a video I showed, courtesy of Prof. Richard Wiseman.



The people there were very nice, and I really enjoyed myself. If I were a church person, THIS is the congregation I would belong to.

It's kind of a strange thing... many of the members are atheists and agnostics. And yet the service starts out with "Call to Worship". Begging the question, worship who?!

My sense is that this kind of church is meant for those who have rejected the other supernatural forms of religion (ie. ones that explicitly worship a supernatural God). But not going to church left a hole, so the Unitarian church is a way to have the community of a church, but without the guilt, hell and blind faith of most religions.

I thought my talk went well, and many nice folks approached me afterward saying that they enjoyed it. I appreciate that.

I had some interesting discussions after the service. In particular, I ended up talking to a woman who said she was a physician and a therapist. We talked about beliefs and how science does not know everything. True enough. But when the conversation turned to homeopathy, it came out that she is a believer. I said that there is no known mechanism for water memory. She retorted that "water memory" was just a place-holder description for an as-of-yet undiscovered phenomenon. That may be true. But there's still no evidence that it does anything. She seemed convinced that homeopathy works. But I reminded her of the main point of my talk, that it's easy for us to fall into the psychological traps and believe in the untrue. I was happy that someone else in the conversation saw things from my perspective.

Looks like Johnny Depp to me

Check out this image of the face of Jesus that appeared in a cheese pizza in Brisbane.You can buy it on eBay. Though, you can probably get a slice of pizza and a better photo of Johnny Depp for less.

Matlab liked my idea

Matlab is one of the most frequently used programming languages for science and engineering.

Though I can't verify it, it seems that Matlab has incorporated one of my ideas into its standard distribution.

Back in 2006, I was working on reconstruction algorithms for computed tomography (CT). Here is a video I made that demonstrates CT reconstruction. It takes the radon transform (at the bottom) and constructs the image slice (top).

I found Matlab's code slow, so I replaced the time-consuming part of their code with a faster version that I wrote. It was faster because I precompiled it using mex... nerd detail. I submitted my code to their File Exchange service so other people could benefit from it.

Anyhooo, in preparing my lecture on CT reconstruction today, I was suprised to see that Matlab's code was now faster than mine. WTF?!

I looked at their code, and saw that they had replaced the exact same part with mex code, just like I did.

Here is what a snippet of their original (slow) code looked like.

I replace it with the following code that calls the program I wrote (LinearBackproject).

And now this is what their new code looks like.

They even used my 0/1 flag (the last argument) to indicate to the iradonmex subroutine whether to use nearest-neighbour or linear interpolation.

Even if Matlab did use my code directly, I have no financial recourse. But it feels nice to be appreciated.