Category: Uncategorized

Actually, it occurs to me that this news may be of most interest to young women who blithely assume that the extension of the child-bearing years courtesy of modern medical technology comes without problematic consequences:

In an age of sexual liberation, marriage between cousins remains taboo, at least in the United States — and from a scientific perspective, laws against the unions are a socially legitimized form of genetic and sexual discrimination. That argument, raised Monday in an editorial in Public Library of Science Biology, may turn the stomachs of people raised to disapprove of any form of incest. But dispassioned analysis suggests that cousin marriage is no more troubling than childbearing by middle-aged women.

I have the impression that many twenty-something women might feel just a little differently about planning to put off marriage and children if they knew that their plans involved the birth-defect equivalent of MARRYING THEIR COUSIN, however low the risks might be. Anyhow, it should be amusing to learn how the homogamy advocates will defend their lack of support for cousin marriage… and even more amusing when they advocate both.

Late last night, I achieved something I had hitherto believed unthinkable. I actually managed to wrap a present in such a manner that the seasonal pattern on the wrapping paper aligned perfectly. The Christmas tree remained a flawless Christmas tree, the teddy bear remained a perfect teddy bear, and the candy cane remained an unbroken candy cane. I was surprised to experience a brief moment of melancholy, as this uncharacteristically perfect present reminded me of my father, who has always been a wrapper of presents par extraordinaire.

But it quickly passed. For Christmas is not a time for regrets, it is instead a day filled with all the joy inherent in celebrating the birth of Man’s Redeemer. The story of Christmas told in the Gospels is a dark one filled with oppression, cruelty, jealousy, and murder, and yet it is a strangely uplifting one. For the birth of the child is the birth of a new hope, and the light on the distant horizon is the Light of all the World.

Et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis; et vidimus gloriam eius, gloriam quasi Unigeniti a Patre, penum gratiae et veritas.

What I wish for all of you this Christmas is that no matter what you may happen to believe about life, the universe, and everything, today you would know at least one moment of that perfect and incredulous joy that one sees on a young child’s face upon catching sight of the Christmas tree and realizing that Santa Claus really did pay a visit the night before.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Is the urge to destroy. TMQ’s quixotic hatred for divisional rivalries demonstrates an uncharacteristic failure to understand why divisions are integral to the NFL:

When the regular season concludes, there is a chance that two 8-8 teams will advance to the playoffs, and a chance that two 10-6 teams will not. It is possible that two 8-8 teams will make the playoffs while an 11-5 team does not. The mere fact that this is possible as the final weekend arrives tells you the NFL playoff system is broken. It must be replaced by a seeded tournament.

What a great idea! In fact, why not get rid of divisions and conferences altogether? Why not get rid of the entire regular season and replace with a big 32-team tournament seeded based on the results of the previous seasontournament? TMQ appears to have forgotten that in last year’s Super Bowl, a 16-0 Patriots team was beaten by a 10-6 Giants team. Football is not all about the record, hence the expression “any given Sunday”. The NFL is arguably the most successful sports league on the planet, so why do otherwise intelligent people insist on attempting to ruin it?

Divisions are what keep people interested when their team is out of it. Simply going to a top-twelve team system will mean that far more teams will be out of contention towards the end of the season, thus reducing fan interest. TMQ should know this, since he’s the one who pointed out how total fan interest actually flags during the playoffs.

Ergo it must be Science and therefore beyond criticism from mere unscientific mortals:

[M]any producers of bogus “work” actually have high standing in academic world…. It is sad that some academic institutions and, in larger extent, some publishers back those people up. For example, Elsevier has a journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, included unfortunately in the A+ category in quality by the Australian Academy of Sciences, in a powerful commercial citation factory called Current Contents and with high “impact factor” over 3. It is not that in Chaos etc. there are no good papers, some are normal regular hard science. But, a significant and very visible percentage of papers there belong to one and the same group of people including the very editor, certain El Naschie, a person with many bogus affiliations, and writing in recent years papers with practically no arguments but high predictions based on numerology, coincidences and fancy pictures combining Lie algebras, chaos theory and so on, at the layman level.

That fine scientist Daniel Dennett would, of course, insist that non-scientists should readily place their trust in everything El Naschie publishes in peer-reviewed journals because a few physicists have really precise models that correspond very well with observable reality.

I’m not sure if the profession of science is entirely broken yet, but there’s little question that it’s breaking under the weight of its own corruption and hubris. As always, it’s the economists who have the last laugh. Well, the cynical ones, anyhow. “Dismal science” is really a misnomer; a much better description would be “the mordant science”.

UPDATE – Slashdot informs us that it just keeps getting better:

[A software-]generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE)…. Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference.

The clock is ticking down on the house price challenge. Needless to say I’m feeling even better about my estimate now that the November numbers are in.

Experts: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300.”

Vox: I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year.

Dec 23, 2008: Sales prices for existing U.S. homes fell the most on record in November, tearing a deeper hole into households’ already tattered finances. The median resale price fell 13 percent from a year before, to $181,300, “probably the largest price decline since the Great Depression,” National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in Washington.

If housing prices fall the same amount from November to December as they did the previous month, I’ll end up off by $1,100, compared to $42,200 for the experts. That would be a margin of error of less than one percent, compared to 24 percent. Now perhaps some of you will understand why I don’t tend to be impressed by many “scientific” models.

So, I’m in the market for a smartphone. Any ideas or testimonials? I looked at the Xperia X1, but absolutely hated the cheap little silver buttons, wasn’t impressed with the Panels UI, and I don’t like the idea switching to Windows mobile very much either. The HTC phones were doooogggg-sloooooow. (I swear, after looking at one badly-designed phone interface after another, I’m somewhat tempted to go into phone design.) The main thing for which I use my phone now is to run eReader and the iPhone is sort of cool with that, but I can’t believe there’s no simple way to send your books directly to your phone. I so despise Apple’s damned tech-fascism! No SD card or USB connection? What primitive techno-hell is this? And yes, I know the eReader workaround – upload your books to a server and then download it from the web – but that’s simply unacceptable. The Nokia N95 looks all right, but the screen is too small.

I’ve basically concluded that I should just wait for a great Symbian- or Android-based phone with a tallscreen, but I’m curious to know what others who read a lot on their smartphones think. My willingness to wait for another six-to-nine months is somewhat limited by the fact that my Palm-OS Treo reboots itself about twice an hour, including every third time I change applications.

AL asks for advice:

Could you write an article on how to reach a friend who is an arrogant and dogmatic atheist? This guy’s thinking is seriously messed up, and he is living in a strange self-contradictory worldview that I don’t know how to chip away at. Part of me wants to walk away because he seems a lost cause, but I hope that God can do something radical.

My recommendation would be to give him a Christmas present. According to Amazon, there is still time to get it with the one-day shipping option. Then, when you give it to him, tell him while you’re perfectly aware that he’ll disagree with it and think it’s all stupid and so forth, you’d like him, as a super-smart master of scientific and rational thought, to explain all of the numerous errors that must be contained within it to you.

It’s pretty unlikely that he’ll abandon either his arrogance or his atheist dogma, but he will almost certainly be a lot more circumspect about broadcasting that dogma in public once he’s been forced to privately acknowledge to himself – it usually seems to happen somewhere in the middle of Chapter IV – that he’s standing on an intellectual foundation of broken glass. Perhaps you’ve noted that despite the way in which very few atheists will admit to even having heard of TIA, one simply doesn’t hear the “religion causes war” theme being spouted anywhere nearly as often as prior to the book’s release.

A college student explains why college is often a waste of money:

Government figures show that of students who entered four-year colleges in 1997, just 54% had earned a degree six years later. A professor wrote about this issue in The Atlantic earlier this year, arguing that it’s immoral to tell all students they can go to college, then crush their dreams by failing half of them. But the problem has deeper effects than hurt feelings: the 54% graduation rate means that around 46% of all money used to finance college tuition results in no degree.

Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment.

This isn’t quite right. Since dropouts don’t pay for their non-attendance, the true amount of college finance being wasted is probably closer to 33 percent. Still, a one-in-three chance of blowing a significant portion of a family’s net worth means that a degree is a much riskier “investment” than it’s usually portrayed. And this doesn’t even factor in the large number of college graduates who manage to get a degree without receiving anything that remotely resembles an actual education.

Yes, Virginia, there is a 2008 VPFL champion!

84 Burns Redbeards
51 Alamo City Spartans

Congratulations to Nate, who took the Redbeards from 3-11 basement dwellers to league champions on the strength of a rookie quarterback and the Tennessee defense. Those interested in playing next year will be pleased to know that because the title was claimed by a permanent league member, there will be 7 open spots next year in addition to Mounds View, Greenfield, and Burns.

It doesn’t cause war, but it is clearly correlated in a causal sense with charitable giving. And yet, these statistical facts somehow never seem to find their way into any of the equations concerning the value of religion to society:

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals….

Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of G.N.P., according to a terrific new book, “Philanthrocapitalism,” by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.

Kristof’s column is an admirable attempt to shame liberals into giving more… and not just in the form of self-serving contributions to college endowments either. Of course, it’s not likely to be successful, because it’s not possible to shame the shameless.