On Self-Reinventing Apples and Dumpster-Fire Oranges

Julia Salazar beat eight-term incumbent Martin Dilan this past Thursday, and now Bari Weiss is calling her "the Left’s Post-Truth Politician":  "According to The Washington Post’s running count, Donald Trump is averaging 7.6 'Trumpian claims' a day. One wonders how many Salazarian claims Julia Salazar has spoken."  Hmm, that depends on how we define "Salazarian claims" - if we mean it analogically, as in "things this person is known for saying," then probably a lot?  But I think Weiss pretty obviously means it synonymously, as in "just as bad."

I'm gonna go with "not nearly as many."

Pile o' Links!

Not sausage links, though.  Or... golf links.  Or even chain links.  But hyperlinks.

Didn't realize a full week had gone by.  I mean, I traveled to the Frigid Northlands for Halloween, so I have kind of an excuse, but not really.  So here are many cool things on the internet (and one icky, terrible, horrifying thing that is neither work-safe nor mind-safe, behind the cut), which will be followed by a few 101 Interesting Things entries that have been bubbling away on my back-burner.

First, the good folks at Mr. Deity have made a nice little PSA.  Here it is for your enjoyment, just in case you both A) read this blog, and B) were going to vote Republican today:

They also made a great Chik-fil-A promo parody, which rocks socks.

I was also linked an interesting article that puts Obama's last four years in a new light (that of his childhood), and while I can't say whether the author is right or wrong (I mean, I don't know the President personally), it was certainly an interesting and new perspective.  And on the other side of the ballot, an interesting perspective on Romney's candidacy, which is pretty much exactly as opposite as you could get.

And just in case you haven't heard, a retired NSA analyst showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the Republicans have been manipulating elections since at least 2006.  And in case statistically impossible regularities don't convince you, here's the guy who wrote the software.

It looks like things are gonna be OK, though, because the weird things that predict US Presidential elections with absurd accuracy are lining up for Obama.  Say it with me, kids:  "correlation is not causation."

Finally, for something entirely non-political:  Singularity Chess!  This guys has actually made a bunch of interesting variants on Chess and Checkers, as well as a bunch of other cool stuff.  Go check it out!  Sometimes it's in French, though, so you can either struggle through Google's translation, or just look at the pictures.

OK.  Last, but not least.  This is neither work-safe nor mind-safe, so it's behind a cut.  But holy carp, this is one of those things that's so horrifying, you just have to tell other people about it.  Well, I do.  I don't know about you.

Quickies!

I have something of a tab explosion of things I want to talk about, but none of them is really worth a full-on ramble, so here's a pile just to get 'em out of the way.  On to bigger and better things!

Grammar Girl on How to Write Numbers:  I was actually going to go off on a whole rant about style and the horrors of homogeneity, but decided to skip it because fuck it.  It wasn't going to be a rant at Grammar Girl, anyhow; in truth, I was going to be railing against The System, and tooting my own horn a lot.  But after thinking it through, that's not something I really feel like doing.  The main thing is that there's an insoluble tension in a mongrel language like English:  on the one hand, there's a need for some standardization, just to make sure that we can be clear on what we're actually saying; on the other hand, if you have too many rules then you end up with only one way to express a thought, and that's awful.  If you remember your Orwell, that was the point of Newspeak in 1984.  In case you can't guess, I'm right in the middle - of course, I probably only think it's the middle because I'm the one standing there, but whatever.  I mean, we need the rules for things that ought to be clear and unambiguous, including engineering manuals and Western philosophy; but art is half knowing rules and half breaking them creatively, which we need for things like literature and poetry and Continental philosophy.  You'll notice I didn't use a serial comma there, and that was deliberate - because I wasn't pausing in my head, and I didn't want you to pause in your head, either.

Spelling a Word One Way:  I was going to open the aforementioned rant with a quote of dubious origin, which I decided to look up.  Turns out, there is no answer - or at least not one I can know with confidence - and that may or may not have been the straw that broke the camel's hump.  (The hump is my motivation.)  But now I've got a wonderful new resource for diving headlong into trivia, so hooray!  I entertained the idea of ranting on spelling instead of style, but again, fuck it.  In a language like Spanish, rigid spelling conventions make sense, because it's got enough diacritics and few enough sounds that you can tell how to spell a word by hearing it and tell how to pronounce it by looking at it.  But that won't work for English, because English has a much messier and more complicated origin.  And really, all I wanted to say was that I can effect a change in my affect to have different effects when I want to affect someone in this or that particular way.  There.  Done.  No need to conjure up a half-assed rant around it.

Garfield Minus Garfield:  I read about this some years ago, when it was a single web page (as I recall) and just kind of stayed that way for a while.  While I was away, Jim Davis applauded the derivative work, showing uncommon grace and perspective.  If you're not savvy, Garfield Minus Garfield digitally removes Garfield from his own strip, revealing Jon Arbuckle's struggles with his own unstable mind.  While the original Garfield stuck to a narrow range of the emotional palette, slightly amusing within the confines of what you could talk with your folks about at Thanksgiving dinner, the removal of the cat allows the strip to transcend those boundaries and wander all over the map.  The strips now range from bizarre, to hilarious, to depressing, to uncanny, to pitiful, to vindicating, to existential, to insightful.  I'm amazed by it, and you should check it out.

Open Letter from a Millennial:  Yowza.  I have a lot of thoughts on this one, but every time I go over them, they change radically.  Not back and forth, but round and round, in an expanding spiral that keeps touching down at various points in history and possibility.  The more I think about it, the more I think that continuing to think about it is what I should do, rather than come up with some kind of "answer."  But even that may change.  So I offer it to you without further comment.

That Reminds Me:  Stephen Colbert gave a commencement speech at Northwestern last year.  You need to watch this.  It's twenty minutes of awesome, even the "boring" introductory matter.  You owe it to yourself.

Joe Klamar takes unconventional photos of Olympians; everyone loses their shit.

On Independence Day, photos were leaked from Joe Klamar's one-minute shoots with the US Olympic Team.  They bore a certain theme to which critics and the public have reacted somewhat strongly.  I read about this on the day, but gave myself a week so my thoughts could simmer and be laid out to dry before I picked them over and made them into new ones.  Here are a couple paradigm cases:

She looks like a human instead of a doll and I can see what went into the shot.  How dare he!

That tear in the paper is destroying America.  You can see the flag wilting over it, for fuck's sake!

He's been criticized for angles, focus, lens choice, lighting, showing the set, you name it.  The technical criticisms in and of themselves are perfectly legitimate, to my mind:  you're observing compositional flaws which remind you of rookie mistakes, and you wouldn't want it in your gallery because it looks sloppy to you.  Their inclusion is a deliberate act of juxtaposition, not an unintended oversight; but this stroke is itself an element that may or may not appeal to you.  It makes a statement, and you don't like it.  Cool.  This is what art criticism is all about - every artwork is a statement, an answer to the question of what statements are worth making, and that worthiness is exactly what you ought to be evaluating  From dance to music to video games, high art gives you a contemplative experience that enriches your life - you are meant to walk away with a sense of the profound.  This didn't do that for you, and you can articulate what you feel is missing, out of place, or handled poorly.  Fair play to you.

That's not the kind of reaction I'm talking about.

Elvis Has Left the Building: Update on our cosmic voyage

I read the other day that Voyager I has left our solar system, so I decided to look into what exactly that means.  What exactly are the borders of our neighborhood?  I mean, when we're talking about cosmic distances, the sheer magnitudes we're dealing with make hard lines really tough to draw.  This is compounded by the fact that our space probes move at ponderously slow speeds (astronomically speaking).  However, cosmic weather gives us some convenient rough-and-ready figures.  So first, a little background on the structure of the solar system, and then I'll tie it back to the Voyager mission.

Earth, technically, is in space.  What makes us consider something as "on Earth" but not in space is being within Earth's atmosphere, though I suppose you might consider the magnetosphere or our moon as a boundary, and that's not entirely unreasonable.  But just like Earth has an atmosphere and a magnetosphere, so our star also has a local "sphere of influence" that separates it somewhat from the galaxy at large.  This is called the heliosphere, and while the boundaries are fundamentally fuzzy, it gives us something useful to work with.  What makes the heliosphere "be what it is" is solar wind, charged particles emanating from the Sun.  As the Sun rotates, these emanations twist and ripple in a rad-looking sheet that looks kinda like this:

It's like a cosmic bathtub drain, but in reverse.

The Higgs Boson!

Two electrons are sitting opposite each other at a lunch table.  A third electron walks up with its lunch on a tray and asks, "Can I sit with you?"  To which one electron replies, "What do you think we are, bosons?"

Electrons are fermions, and only one fermion can occupy a quantum state at a time - unless some other property is different (like spin, represented in the joke as the opposite sides of the table).  This is why you can only have two electrons in an orbit around an atomic nucleus.  Bosons operate under no such restrictions, which makes the joke funny, if you already know all of that.  If not, well, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog:  few are interested, and the frog dies of it.

Mary Midgley says you can't rock someone's world. Everyone and their grandma disagrees.

PZ calls her a twit, and another hip & cool professor (name of ArithmoQuine) tries a more charitable interpretation.

PZ's right, but ArithmoQuine is being more helpful to the dialogue. Midgley is being a twit, saying that we ought not to turn the world-views of others upside-down and shake them for loose change. From her first sentence, "Science really isn't connected to the rest of life half as straightforwardly as one might wish", you can tell that she's arguing from human foolishness - just because people don't unfailingly connect science to their everyday lives doesn't mean that the connection isn't there. And yeah, sure, there's no One True sure-fire method for changing someone's mind on this or that topic (unless we count brainwashing, can we please count brainwashing?), but people change their own minds all the time and the words of other people often have something to do with it. Fuckin' duh. You'd think that a fellow philosopher, of all people, would have a clue about that. I mean, our favorite activity is sitting around in the lotus position trying to find ways to blow our own minds, and our second-favorite activity is sharing these techniques with others so we can watch them try it out.

ArithmoQuine takes a more effective tack and tries to grant Midgley the strongest case he can piece together from her writing. This is called the principle of charity, and it's how you avoid straw-manning the opposition: you help your opponent into the very best suit of armor the two of you can agree upon, and then proceed to show that not even this can withstand your A-bomb. (The A is for Argument.) And really, all Midgley can possibly be saying is that if you take on the underpinning of someone's whole damn world-view, then you're going to run into cognitive dissonance. Which is true. Who gives a shit?

Well, of course, we all give a shit. I mean, cognitive dissonance - well, our drive to resolve cognitive dissonance, more precisely - is what makes the rational world go 'round. And the irrational world. Rational folk, upon noting such dissonance, will reconcile the mis-match between their imperfect minds and obstinate reality by changing their minds to be more in-line with the observed facts. For clarity, I don't mean that this is how "people I'd call rational" consistently behave, I mean that when you do this, you are behaving as a rational person. The alternative, of course, is to try to force the world to fit your idea of how it ought to be when it's clearly not. This can often take the form of kicking the shit out of whoever's existence is causing you angst in order to preserve your idea of moral order in the world.

This is the kind of bullshit we're up against, and I don't just mean atheists: I mean people who accept reality and try to work within its confines. See, dropping your preconceptions about how you first happened to believe the world ought to be, and then accepting implacable reality for what it is, can help produce a kind of serenity that will allow you to become a peaceful, permissive, moral, fun-loving Dane. Siding with your preconceptions in opposition to implacable reality will cause you to brainwash your family and other miscellaneous fuckwits into becoming a national disgrace. Of course, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum and your mileage will vary: Denmark is towards the Very Good end, and Fred Phelps is towards the Fucking Horrible end, and most people pile up to form that smooth bell shape in the middle.

But this spectrum is a moving one, more of a travelling wave as we become ever more civilized over time. Those fuckers on the hump are better than the Phelpses of the world, but they sure provide a lot of dead weight for the Danes to haul along as they (i.e. the majority) passively reinforce the status quo by comprising it. This is where Midgley really screws the pooch: she claims in her closing that we need to try to improve existing world-views and take them on as wholes (good so far), with the implication that trying to actually change anything is a fool's errand. The comparisons to other changes in the status quo are numerous, easy, and left to the reader; ours is a campaign of memocide, and if ideas were people, then we'd be rotten to the core for even considering it. But they're not, so we can keep on truckin'.

Midgley is right, however, that plucking a few hairs from the beast won't kill it. The memes we're up against are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and they're deeply entwined with other memes we don't like, such as patriarchy and tribalism, and the whole rotten thicket is itself a perfectly natural outgrowth of our very own psychological flaws, so excising this cultural tumor is going to be a task and a half. I said a-good-God-damn.

Midgley does make one profoundly stupid error, though, and I haven't seen anyone call her out on it yet, so I'm gonna. See, Midgley says,

Belief in God is not an isolated factual opinion, like belief in the Loch Ness monster – not, as Richard Dawkins suggests, just one more "scientific hypothesis like any other". It is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit. We all have these visions.

I call equivocation! See, the phrase "belief in God" could be understood either as the genuine world-view of theism, or as the "isolated factual opinion" of a particular person's particular belief in a particular deity (it might not be a clear idea, but it is a particular one). By not clarifying this ambiguity and then immediately trading on it, Midgley has committed textbook equivocation and should brush up on her basic logic. Sure, theism isn't an isolated factual opinion, but believing in this or that god sure the Hell is!

I want to note that believing in the Loch Ness monster requires belief in Loch Ness, and in general requires some sort of world-view. We all have them, as Midgley correctly points out, and there's no "escaping" from them. You can't just "step out" from your world-view without "stepping into" another one, since world-views are the very framework within which we evaluate our experiences. Formally, this is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis, and it says that no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation because every testable hypothesis rests on background assumptions. So naturally, every belief in particular gods is going to go along with some sort of world-view in the actual minds of actual people in the actual world. Those world-views are, by virtue of accommodating one or more gods, categorically theistic. Successfully excising particular god beliefs from a theistic world-view will require one of two things:

1) A different god must be placed in the god-spot, or
2) The world-view itself must be exchanged for a new model without a god-spot.

Since the god-spot holds up huge chunks of the cognitive tapestry for many, of course most theists will shuffle gods in and out of their god-spots, taking great pains to ensure that any god in which they can no longer bear to maintain belief is taken out of the rotation. This helps them avoid the trouble of opting for number two, which is shit. But shit is natural and if you try to avoid it then you'll end up full of it, and I suddenly don't feel like pursuing this metaphor any further.

Point is, it will eventually be cognitively easier to opt for #2 than to continue avoiding it, but there's no telling when for a particular person, and individuals vary wildly in this respect. Son of a bitch, you mean this is going to be hard? Oi, if I'd known that, I never would'a signed up!

Just kidding. All Midgley has done with the best possible version of her point is to clearly outline the problem before us with two scoops of pessimism. What does she want, a pat on the head and a warm glass of milk?

OMFG, the news is SUNG now?!

Yes. Yes, it is. I give you auto-tuned news:

Seriously, this is the only way it could be made more of a spectacle, and less of a ridiculous circus. Ooh, and this one is good, too, because it involves autotuned talking heads talking about exceptionalism and smoking lettuce:

It's not a weekend. I need sleep. G'night!

Wait. OK, you also need to learn about the Federal Commission of T-Pain (bonus dragon charts included at no extra cost!), and the three greatest keywords EVAR for press coverage: pirates, drugs, gay marriage. News just don't get any better than this. I mean, unless it's good news, that is.

Dear The Internet: Today I made the cutest blasphemy EVAR*!

Better late than never, right? OK, so Steve Bowen informed me on Thursday that Thursday was "Everybody Draw Muhammad" Day, which would have been cool if I weren't working fourteen hours that day. BUT! It reminded me that I had made a previous commitment, in a proud tradition of blasphemy, to blaspheme some more. Without further ado:

Click for huge. Oh, and also for ALL FOUR PANELS. It didn't take long because I'm un-skilled, it took long because I forgot. (My lack of skill is irrelevant to the delay.) Anyway. I think I hit the big five: pigs, dogs, the Kaaba, and liquor, all while drawing the prophet Muhammad and me spending some quality time together. Rock most hard.

If you're interested in the individual panels: 1, 2, 3, 4. Enjoy!

EDIT: Photobucket does not want to give me the full-size version of the four-panel thing in all of its irreverent glory, for some reason. If anyone knows of an image hosting service that's man enough to put up a 1044x3122 image on the free, let me know - otherwise I can be e-mailed for full-size versions, if anyone wants 'em.

* - With the possible exception of Moo-ham-ed, I must admit.

The Wrongest of Wrongnesses in the History of Wrongitude

Editor's Note: Do I count as my own editor? I mean, I edit my own stuff, but... nevermind. Look. My last post was a little vapid, pontificating as I was on an overnight webcomic kerfuffle that ended up being wiped off the face of the internet anyhow. I feel kinda bad about it. So I'm breaking my "weekends-only" rule to say something of a little more substance. This is also the third post in recent memory where I have used the word "kerfuffle" for lack of a better term. Should I consult a doctor? Or just a thesaurus?

I recently read on Pharyngula about a paper by Doug Theobald (subscription to Nature required) calculating the likelihood that the proteins shared by all organisms on the face of the planet came to be shared by a concatenation of events besides common descent. In other words, regardless of the likelihood that life came to be in this or that particular way (which Creatards frequently yammer on about, assuming evolutionary teleology and all sorts of other bullshit), what are the odds that life came to be, as it in fact did, by other means than common descent?

PZ's summary and the news coverage make for fascinating reading - really, you should check it out - but I'm going to jump right to the number at the end and play around with it. That number is 1:10^2,680 against. So, sure, the common proteins shared by all modern organisms could have come about by some other means than common descent, but the odds are real fuckin' long against it. How long? So long. Like, it's hard to think of a way to be wronger, mathematically speaking - these guys are wronger than anyone has ever been wrong in the history of wrongitude (sounds like "longitude").

I have a phrase I use to describe "as sure as I get," and that is, "As sure as I am that the Sun's coming up tomorrow." This is meant to convey pretty fuckin' sure but not quite 100% certain (because I'm not 100% certain of anything, other than the fact that I am now having some kind of experience, and that I've always got room for doubt). Sure, something could happen so that the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, but the data so far suggest extremely otherwise. Just how much otherwise? Well, let's take every day in Earth's 4.54-billion-year history as a data point.*

4,540,000,000 x 365.25 = 1,658,235,000,000

(1.66 trillion, or 1.66 x 10¹²)

Hmm... that leaves us a shit-pot of orders of magnitude to make up. But yeah, it's settled: we're surer of common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow!

"But wait," comes the Creatard rebuttal, "You can't just count the days up like that, you have to take into account how many of us there are! After all, a large enough number of rabid IDiots can't be wrong!" Well, OK. It doesn't work that way, but we'll humor you. Let's just say that all 6.8-billion of us are Christians, and we have been since the Earth was formed. Not only is this over-generous to the literalists in giving them the actual age of the Earth rather than their Reader's Digest Condensed Books version, giving them all of the current population throughout all of Earth's history, and giving a decidedly democratic bent to our epistemology, it doesn't even come close.

(1.66 x 10¹²) x (6.8 x 10⁹) = 1.13 x 10²²

"But... but... twenty-two isn't nearly close enough to two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty," replies the anti-science crusader. "And I believe that your numbers are wrong with every fiber of my being." You know what? That's still not good enough. I'll give you a data point for every nucleotide base pair inside of every single cell of every person now living on the planet for every day throughout all of Earth's history - and you know what that nets us? Take a look:

(3.1647 x 10⁹ base pairs) x (1 x 10¹⁴ cells) x (1.13 x 10²²) = 3.58 x 10⁴⁵

Fuck! That's still not enough! OK, but what if every atom in the observable universe, itself a number beyond ordinary human comprehension, spawned a Universe with a special Earth with seven billion humans believing in Creation with every fiber of their being? Yeah, what then?! This is what:

(1.5 x 10⁸² atoms in the observable Universe) x (3.58 x 10⁴⁵) = 5.37 x 10¹²⁷

Just to recap, we've given a data point in favor of the Sun rising tomorrow for each of 3-billion-odd nucleotide base pairs inside of all hundred trillion cells in the bodies of six to seven billion people observing a sunrise for every single day (including leap years!) across Earth's four-and-a-half billion year history, repeated for every atom in the observable Universe. And given all of that, we're still surer that all life is related by common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow.

Suck on those numbers! Tomorrow's a dark day for creationism, epistemologically speaking. Yeah, I'd say the future prospects for monotheistic creation myths are looking pretty dim. We should just turn the light out on intelligent design, and leave the real science to light our path into the future.

OK, I'm done now, for real. Man, playing around with degrees of certainty is fun!

* - Yes, OK, to calculate the actual odds of the Sun not coming up tomorrow, I would have to calculate the odds of something happening which would prevent the Sun coming up. Fine. Not the point, and that's why this entry gets the "humor" tag. I'm just going to treat it as a chance event and assume the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, making it 1 failure out of 1.6 trillion successes. I need to keep this back-of-the-envelope compatible, after all.

Video Games as Art

As I said earlier, I'm breaking my "weekends only" rule to talk about aesthetics for a little bit. I don't talk about aesthetics a whole lot, mainly because it's almost entirely subjective, and I've been told I have a rather Vitruvian sense of beauty. Probably a relic of my Objectivist days. Anyway.

Roger Ebert says, and I'm quoting here, "I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art." Horse-shit, says I. To his credit, Ebert goes on to say, "Perhaps it is foolish of me to say 'never,' because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form." Still horse-shit, says I. Ebert's entire argument seems to consist of two scoops of snobbery, a dash of bluster, and his statement, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." Apparently, poetry is doubly artistic to Ebert. Also, by this line of reasoning, cooking can never be an art form because I have never eaten a steak that tastes as good as watching The Shawshank Redemption*.

PZ got in on the action, too, and pretty much everyone seemed to jump down his throat for agreeing with Ebert; I said what I wanted to say over there, so I'm going to say something different here. I could trot out my nihilistic "art is just a word and words are made up" routine, tearing down the enterprise of art so that any action could fit in - it would work, too, because art is a word and words are made up, and whatever you can do with a book/movie/canvas/rock can also be done with ones and zeroes on microchips. Not joking. But instead, I'd rather make a positive case for the game Braid, because everything in that game is done artfully, i.e. fuckin' full of art.

Below is the trailer for Braid, a nifty little number which I like to call "Mario with time powers." That's what it is. Ebert says of the game, "You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game." Way to completely miss the point:

"Taking back your moves" is the point in Braid; one of the first bits of text you encounter says,

Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.

Not just one. He made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one remains clear: the princess turning sharply away, her braid lashing at him with contempt.

He knows she tried to be forgiving, but who can just shrug away a guilty lie, a stab in the back? Such a mistake will change a relationship irreversibly, even if we have learned from the mistake and would never repeat it. The princess's eyes grew narrower. She became more distant.

Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we've learned from a mistake and became better for it, shouldn't we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?

What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell her: "I didn't mean what I just said," and she would say: "It's okay, I understand," and she would not turn away, and life would really proceed as though we had never said that thing? We could remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience.

Tim and the Princess lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds. Their mistakes are hidden from each other, tucked away between the folds of time, safe.

In fact, all the game mechanics are similarly justified. The game does quite a bit of mucking about with the flow of time (Cracked parodied it with Time Travel Understander): the "time shadow" is about being able to pursue multiple courses of action at once in pursuit of a goal; the ring, which slows time as you near it, represents the burden of commitment; and so on and so forth. One may, of course, play the game only for the puzzles; one may also watch movies only for the action sequences. What is artful about Braid is that it incorporates its mechanics into the story, and at the end, turns the tables on the player:

After getting used to manipulating the flow of time, the player learns that Tim "lives backwards" from other people, kind of like Merlin. The end of the story shows the full meaning of this, when the player rewinds the entire level and sees that the princess has not been helping Tim, but running desperately to escape him. It's about the tremendous difference perspective can make, about communication breakdown, about the pain of regret and being unable to "fix it all." It's also, in a rather literal sense, about a bomb.

What I think is artful about this is that these ideas are encoded as metaphors into the game mechanics. The player's ability to solve the puzzles is taken for granted, the point is what the mechanics mean as a part of Tim's life. This is the art of Braid as a game: it is not an imitation of real life, but a way to experience someone else's life. It is a distillation of experience (Tim's) in which we may find parallels to our own lives, and this enables us to identify with the protagonist. Mashing buttons to get a man on the screen to move from A to B is how this idea is conveyed, but that is no more to the point than it is to say that ink stains on a bunch of paper stitched together are what make up every single book - in philosophical circles, this is known as the fallacy of composition (more specifically, the fallacy of mediocrity).

With that established, the rest is a piece of cake: the visuals are simple and elegant, the backgrounds are like watercolor in motion; the music is lovely, and becomes increasingly haunting throughout the game; and the story, while by no means completely original, is a good blend of homage to the hero's journey and literary puzzle (by which I mean you're not spoon-fed the answers, you need to piece it together yourself - making it far superior to most of the literature available today, to my mind). It's artful. It's artistic. It's art.

Ebert doesn't like it, and that's fine. He can stick to his pictures on a screen with accompanying soundtrack. Not every art form needs to be moving to every critic. But I think it's rather telling that Ebert closes his missive with a snipe at Kellee Santiago's acknowledgment that art requires patronage. I can think of no more powerful metaphor to illustrate the concept of an established snob trying to keep out the whippersnappers trying to break into his establishment.

* - I had several candidates for this statement, and I'd like to share them with you, The Reader, now:

• Architecture will never be art because no building has moved me like a symphony.
• Sculpture will never be art because no statue can capture the fluid grace of dance.
• Photography can never be art because it cannot express the unlimited imagination like painting can.
• Humor can never be art because it doesn't have the enduring resonance of tragedy.

I could go on comparing apples and lawn mowers all night, or at least find some humorous way to meaninglessly compare knitting and carpentry, but I'm sure you get the point.

Tsujigiri, by any other name...

If you're a US citizen, then you're obligated to be aware of this (I had to hear about it from Pharyngula).

The news should be all over this - by the stars, that's what journalism is for - and yet we hear not a peep. The below video is probably not for the faint of heart. I watched it, and you'll get much more gruesome scenes out of Hollywood, but the problem is that it's real here, and what it shows is US troops firing on unarmed civilians including children:

For those who declined to desensitize themselves a bit more, here's the skinny: on the 12th of July 2007, a couple of Reuters reporters and about half a dozen other civilians were walking through town. Then, out of nowhere, gunships opened fire on them for no reason at all. Apparently, these boys never saw the training video on distinguishing cameras from AKs & RPGs. When guys in a van with kids showed up to help one of the wounded escape, the troops fired upon the van. Afterwards, as the children were being carried from the scene, someone remarked, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Way to blame the victim.

In the New York Times, Lt-Col Scott Bleichwehl said, "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force." This is beyond lying and beneath contempt - this was not combat, it was cold-blooded murder. Aside from "coalition forces", every single word of that statement is misleading euphemism or blatant falsehood. Let me fix it for you, Scott, since you're apparently truth-impaired: "There is no question that men with guns were clearly engaged in reckless homicide against unarmed civilians."

Back in feudal Japan, samurai did something called tsujigiri, which was explained as a test of the samurai's sword. A warrior's life depends largely on his weapon (more on his skill and cunning, but still), so this is an understandable practice. Oh, except for the part where they test their swords on civilians in the street. That makes it ruthless savagery, plain and simple.

Life is Complicated, but Ingrid Newkirk is Simple

On Thursday I caught a couple minutes of the Orcas Gone Wild episode of Larry King Live as I made my "I'm almost out of here but I need one more" cup of coffee in the break room at work. I paid attention instead of tuning it out because I saw the smiling face of Ingrid Newkirk, PETA president and terrorist backer, arguing with what to all appearances was a Paul Hogan lookalike. I'm speaking, of course, about Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo. Just look at these guys! I'll bet if I asked, "Who wants an ice cream cone?", both of them would say yes.

I make fun of Jack Hanna because I like him. At least, based on this first impression, I do. I dunno, maybe he eats babies when he's not being tag-teamed by Ingrid Newkirk and Bob Barker (you can read the transcript of the episode here - not a whole lot actually happened, in truth). From what I saw, though, he seemed like a level-headed guy who argued from a position along the lines of, "Dying sucks but these things happen, and giving people exposure to animals is educational and fun." Ingrid Newkirk, however, is the president and co-founder of PETA, a double-speechy organization for which I hold quite a bit of animosity.

Now, I want to say here that I am all for the ethical treatment of animals. It's just that I suspect I disagree with Ingrid on exactly what that pesky word "ethical" means. I certainly don't think that it means, for example, paying for the legal defense of a man who firebombs a research lab - and if you have any qualms about animal research in principal, while we're on the topic, PZ lays out an excellent defense of just why we need to use other animals for practice, with a close to home case-in-point. At the end of the day, I think animals are deserving of rights when they're capable of upholding the responsibilities that come with them. This doesn't give humanity a license for fuckery, you understand, it just means that wild animals have a tough time playing the civilization game (Hell, humans have a tough time playing the civilization game). You can read a summary of PETA's foolishness here, and of course consider the source. I, for one, am suspicious of anyone and anything that claims to undertake an intellectual endeavor on my behalf, but I have to say they've got their shit together on this one (PETA makes it real easy for them, as it happens).

Anyway! This is about an orca, I swear! I think my favorite moment was when Newkirk blathered on about stuff everybody knows: this is a wild frickin' animal, a male as it happens, "raging with hormones" an' stuff. Christ on a bike, he killed his trainer, he didn't fuck her. According to witnesses - I couldn't get video of the actual incident - the orca grabbed his trainer Dawn Brancheau around her waist, thrashed her about, and then dragged her underneath the water where she drowned. This is how orcas kill their prey sometimes, and the orca probably thought of it as horseplay (but I'm not an orca psychologist, so you can take that with a grain of sea salt). Now, this is a fuckin' tragedy, OK? I understand that. It's awful that a human being died such a brutal, painful, death doing her dream job. But everybody dies, and I think it's better that she died doing something she loved rather than growing old and bitter doing something safe which she hated (after which she'd retire and have to deal with the problem of dying anyway).

This is what I think Paul Hogan Jack Hanna was going for when he said, "This young lady sacrificed her life and she would be sitting here today saying that she'd do it again for the great work she's done and Sea World has done to educate tens of millions of people over the last 46 years." Hanna also took some flak for making what I thought was an entirely appropriate analogy, saying that the dangers of working with orcas don't stop people from working with orcas just like the dangers of working in outer space don't stop people from working in outer space. Oh, and double points to abc10 in California for this report: after seeking to do some sort of exposé, I guess, they dug up all of four incidents across three decades and two continents, peppering their narration with weasel words and loaded language. But then, that's news for you, I suppose.

So while I'd agree that it's "unnatural" in the warm & fuzzy sense for an orcinus orca - which is more like a giant dolphin than it is like a whale, anyhow - to be taken out of its natural habitat and placed into an enormous aquarium where it does things that make people pay money to see it, I'd say that it's just as unnatural in the same warm & fuzzy sense for a homo sapiens to be placed into an enormous steel termite mound where it does things that make people pay money to not have to do them. Oh, I also don't think that there's anything wrong in principle with being "unnatural" in the warm & fuzzy sense, and I don't think there's anything particularly good about being natural in the first place (is there really an alternative, anyhow?), because I don't buy into the naturalistic fallacy. Now, sure, things like consent matter (really and truly!), but I'd wager that if orcas could talk, they'd say that choosing between cooped-up existences where they get steady meals and the total wild where they'll probably starve or be eaten is a tough choice to make. Or if you don't dig that, then at least dig my actual point, that life is complicated and this shit ain't as simple as Newkirk makes it out to be. I mean, she said that the animals at Sea World are swimming in their own diluted urine, as if that's not also true in the goddamned ocean. Fuck's sake.

I need to stop watching TV at work. It rots my brain and makes me ranty.

The Importance of Perspective, or: Who WOULDN'T Want a Personal Slave?

I'd like to say two things up front: first, that I definitely sympathize with those who suffer from ennui, from wanting more out of life, from a numbing dissatisfaction with the way things are going; second, that I don't know these women from Eve and their situations are probably more complicated than they've even openly and candidly admitted.

That said, Rant: On.

This past Sunday, I read Delia Lloyd complain that modern life is hard work. Fucking surprise! I read two of the pieces she linked by Sandra Tsing Loh, one transparently escapist fantasy which I can't tell if Loh actually pines after or not, and one rather longer slice-of-life lament which smacks of teenage angst in middle-aged terms. I'm sympathetic to Loh, I really am - but for shit's sake, this lady has some growing up to do.

The cockles of my heart are not nearly so opening to Lloyd (and that ain't much to begin with), probably for this bit alone:

...here's what we ate: cold pasta covered with leftover Tikka Masala sauce (tomato sauce inexplicably AWOL in kitchen cupboard), some soggy carrots cooked four hours earlier for kids' dinner, and the coup de grace: canned sardines. Yum.

This may not strike you, General Reader, as particularly infuriating, but what you have to consider is context, which at present means, "whatever the Hell I was thinking about five minutes earlier." In this situation, the context is that I had just woken up from dreaming about snowmobiling, which I have never done but long to do, and I marveled at the fact that our intellects have afforded us as a species the opportunity to transform what would normally be a difficult and harrowing experience (i.e. trekking across harsh, snowy landscapes) into leisure activity. Awesome! And while thinking of this, I assembled for myself a breakfast of leftover chili with fried eggs and Tabasco sauce mixed in, topped with cheddar cheese and green chiles for garnish. It was delicious, and it was reheated leftovers.

So I hope you understand what I mean when I say that I find Delia Lloyd's attitude comparable to a moist, aromatic pile of dogshit. It's unpleasant to step in, to look at, to smell, just to be around in general.

Seriously, this whining fuck-stain goes through a busy day doing things that most people regard as hallmarks of success, and complains at the end that she wants someone else to go through the boring parts so she doesn't have to. What is this happy horse-shit? She engages in a day's work of her chosen career path, has the resources to meet the wants and needs of her children, spends some quality time involving herself in her children's lives, then does a little more work before having a late dinner with her husband. Note that she does not reheat it at her option. And rather than just, oh, hire someone, she pines after someone to do the extra business of cooking, cleaning, and clothes-shopping for free? I am simply baffled by the... the... I dunno, the presumption of affluence, I guess? Maybe just the laziness.

To be fair, I'll bet she wasn't thinking about the day-to-day lives of our genetic ancestors as she went about her business. I'll bet she wasn't thinking as she prepared that day's meal, as I had been, of the marvels found in nearly every kitchen that allow us to prepare and store food from miles away, grown and prepared by someone we'll probably never meet, for consumption whenever we fucking feel like it. And I'll bet she also wasn't thinking about how children were our first retirement plans, about how the shotgun approach to child-rearing is regrettably still a necessity in certain parts of the world, or about how indulging the desires of said progeny is a luxury afforded to a precious and relatively modern few in the grander scope of our shared history.

In short, to understand Mrs. Lloyd's perspective, I have to concede an awful lot to general thoughtlessness. It's just a goddamned shame that she can't be more thoughtful in appreciating her life.

Then again, I guess I'm fucking lucky. I mean, my father taught me how to clean floors and sinks, but he also taught me the art of hinokishin. When I punched a hole through my bedroom door, he disciplined me by teaching me how to cut a door to size and hang it, making me fix the mess I had made. He taught me to thank lightning-struck trees for the wood they gave us for carving walking sticks, and to leave campsites better than I found them because it's the right thing to do and I'm not any more important than the next person to come along. And I guess Rant is Off now, because I find myself feeling sorry for these sorts of people who fantasize for something more without appreciating the full value of what's right the fuck in front of them.

Quickies Before Bed

Arguing with a cyberspace publisher is probably easier than arguing with a meatspace publisher. Still, it's frustrating to hear that my cover image needs at least 0.125" bleed on all sides after forgetting it from the first time; then to remember, "OK, I'll just add 0.25" to each dimension in Photoshop," but forget that it's 0.25" total and instead add 0.5" total; then to be told that I still don't have at least 0.125" bleed on all sides. Last I checked, 0.25 is at least 0.125.

Keep in mind that I'm doing all this fancible graphics work on a Mac I bought when I graduated high school in 2002. Yeah, the RAM upgrade I got with it put it at a total of half a gig. It takes me several minutes to open Photoshop, I have to watch a progress bar creep along every time I save, and making the .psd into a .pdf gives me nearly enough time to write another book.

Then again, I'm glad that it still just works. But still. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I've been looking at on the internet, which I think you should look at, too:

• Via Rhodopsin, here is the most useful Amazon product review I've seen in a while.
• That reminds me of this shirt, sent to me by Silver Garou (but, like, months ago). Look, if you haven't seen this before, you need to read the reviews. It's almost as good as this.
• Via Pharyngula, The Counter-Creationism Handbook now has its own iPhone app! Awesome!
• Via my crazy browsing habits, I somehow started by looking at Rise Against music videos, and ended at the most effective commercial in the world. I hate myself for liking this, you have to believe me.
• Rhodopsin also just now sent me an interesting article where a dude takes an idea and some numbers and mashes them up with another idea and other numbers, and while I'm no longer really qualified to check his work (Hell, I can't even check calculus limericks any more!), it is at least an interesting coincidence.
• I've also started reading Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and I wish I'd read it back in 2007. Then I wouldn't be tempted to say that he stole my idea and went back in time to do actual research on it. (This happens more often than I'd like to admit. See also: James Downard's An Ill Wind in Tortuca, brought to me via Silver Garou.)

OK, that's enough out of me. I need sleep. And to get this damned book finished!

Dear The Internet: Today I made another blasphemy!

OK, so I'm all about doing those things I say I'll do. Really, I am, I'm just a procrastinator, too. At any rate:

You can click that for huge. And, y'know, complete. So far. Look, this is like a progress report because I wanted to put something up, I'm just sick of Photoshop right now.

Anyway, in all my dawdling, I came up with a far grander vision for what I wanted this to be (with a little prodding help from Silver Garou and Rhodopsin), and I've scaled it back to something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. Two weeks isn't already past unreasonable, is it? I think I can safely tell you that a pile of puppies is involved. Stay tuned!

Hating on Haiti

So Rhodopsin told me about this enormous earthquake in Haiti a couple of nights ago, right after it happened. I was doing Something Else at the time, and the numbers he was saying weren't really registering with me, so I kind of ignored it (my apologies for that). Turns out, it was kind of a big deal.

Like, the biggest deal of its kind.

PZ and Ebonmuse have already talked about this, and about Pat Robertson's bat-shit fucking loco assertion that Haiti somehow deserved this for making a deal with The Goddamned Devil to gain independence. Not a joke. Here's the clip:

Robertson hasn't been the only one to spout inanities over this, either.

I wonder how much money Pat Robertson has? I wonder how much good he could do for the people of Haiti who have been devastated by this completely natural disaster? I wonder how much good he will actually do for these people? My initial guesses are, in order, "a fuck-ton," "a fuck-load," and "fuck all."

Well, I just went and did a milli-load of good for Haiti. Hey, Pat! What would Jesus do? You think he'd blame the victim? Eh, maybe you're right - that guy's got a spotty track record.

No, seriously, Haiti doesn't even have a FEMA, they need all the help they can fucking get. Direct Relief is one of the most efficient charities in the world. You can also choose to donate specifically to their Haiti response.

Legal Round-Up!

So it's been a new year for almost a week, but I've been in the frigid northlands since the 23^rd which basically means that I'm incommunicado because one of my family's computers has like forty-five viruses (that I could find), and the other is a five-year-old Mac. Argh.

Anyway, we've got a bevy of new laws going into effect, so I thought I'd take some time to go over a few of them. In completely arbitrary order:

Three States Forward: ...and one state back. New Hampshire and DC joined Vermont and Iowa in legalizing gay marriage, bringing the total to five states. Maine backed out like California in a November referendum (Iowa is poised to do the same, if things don't go well), Massachusetts and Connecticut are still going strong.

Drive-by Communications: Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas banned texting while driving, bringing the total number to 28 states to pass such measures. You also can't use cell phones at all if you're in a school zone (hands-free devices are still allowed). In the sensible traffic laws department, Wisconsinanians are now allowed to pass on the shoulder and make U-turns when the Moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Eat Right, Or Else: Raise your hand if you know why trans fats are bad for you. OK, if your hand is in the air, you can scroll past this. If not, then you should read up: our enzymes suck at breaking down trans fats, and they're accordingly more likely to accumulate in your bloodstream and clog your tubes. So California banned them.

Oregon Recognizes Religion as Disability: Well, sort of. Oregon passed a law that "redefines 'reasonable accommodation' to be more in line with the ADA." Consider the definition of delusional disorder:

Delusional disorder is characterized by the presence of recurrent, persistent non-bizarre delusions.

Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief... Typically, while delusional disorder sufferers may be distressed about the delusional "reality," they may not have the insight to see that anything is wrong with the way they are thinking or functioning. Regarding the earlier example, those suffering delusion might state that the only thing wrong or upsetting in their lives is that the government is spying, and if the surveillance would cease, so would the problems. Similarly, the people suffering the disorder attribute any obstacles or problems in functioning to the delusional reality, separating it from their internal control. Furthermore, whether unable to get a good job or maintain a romantic relationship, the difficulties would be blamed on "government interference" rather than on their own failures or omissions. Unless the form of the delusions causes illegal behavior, somehow affects an ability to work, or otherwise deal with daily activities, the delusional disorder sufferer may adapt well enough to navigate life without coming to clinical attention.

Die In a Fire of Cancer: Florida, Michigan, and Arkansas joined nine other states in requiring cigarettes to turn off when not in use. North Carolina and Virginia joined 28 other states in passing some manner of smoking ban, refusing to let restaurant owners (or bars in 25 states) decide for themselves whether they'll be smoking or non-smoking. Oh, and you can't smoke with someone under 16 in your car if you live in New Brunswick.

Fun fact: the EPA's infamous December '92 study linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer was shot down in July '98 in a 92-page Federal trial for basically being a piece of shit (less-than-92-page rundown here). The short version is that secondhand smoke is gross to some people, which is a reason to allow business owners to forbid it on their property, but it is ultimately no more harmful than seeing boys smooch each other - though it's really gross to some people!

There are over 40,000 laws going into effect, and I'm not even going to bother summarizing them all (especially the silly ones, like Texas teens being unable to go to tanning salons without parental consent). But if you, Alert Reader, can come up with some more interesting ones that are either new or changing as of 01/01/2010, I'll be happy to add them in with credit!

Dear The Internet: Today I made a blasphemy!

Ahem. Inspired by Saturday's Daylight Atheism, I cooked up a little blasphemy in my kitchen just now to tide me over until I get the rest of my stuff in the mail. All of the below photographs can be clicked for huge.

Can you guess where this is going?

Wait for it...

I'd say "boo-yah," or something similarly triumphant, but the thing is, I don't give a fuck. Like, I know that some book-burning, cartoonist-threatening, bacon-hating shit-heads with carp for brains would get their undies in a bind over this, but they're stupid, so who cares what they think?

OK, that's enough pointless nonsense for now. I'll wait for the death threats to roll in, and follow them up with Miss Piggy kissing Mohammed (unless you, the General Reader, can give me something even more blasphemous to draw).

Follow-up here.

Call Ripley! A little bit of Holiday Honesty, for a change.

I totally stole this from the Atheiskeptihumanist forums (so extra-special thanks to UberPest!). My "penance" is to tell you all to go register there! It's a pretty simple portmanteau, you can bookmark it if you can't spell it, and the community needs more members - which means that the earlier you get there, the more relevant you'll be! And while you're at it, you should also check out Atheist Nexus, too. It's like the Facebook of atheism. On to the news!

Boss Creations is dedicated to putting Christ back into Christmas. Don't laugh, this is Serious Business. OK, laugh because it's stupid and nobody with half a brain gives a shit. Also, laugh because they're literally jamming their symbol of medieval torture into a pagan symbol of a pagan holiday in a desperate bid for cultural relevance, just like the church did in metaphor when they tried to co-opt the holiday all those years ago. You see, the church can't torture people into believing any longer, so now they just bludgeon us all with symbolism - as Boss' front page says, "It's not just a tree - it's a movement!"

What. The. Fuck.

So I'm kind of alarmed by this whole thing, but I find their misguided attempt at cultural dominance to be cutely honest. I'd like to see Jesus up there, myself, beaten bloody with a little INRI above his head, maybe a banner wrapped around his naughty bits saying something like, "Blood Sacrifice is Just Awesome! Fuck Yeah!" Oh, for a fun time, ask any Christian away from the internet what INRI stands for - ten bucks says they won't know, but we need a statistically relevant sample, and I guarantee I'll come out on top across, say, a couple hundred randomized trials.

I also wish these nutters were somehow forced to accept the historical fact that Christmas was co-opted from pagan solstice celebrations. Seriously, the evergreen decked out with shiny baubles and fairy lights, the gift-giving, mistletoe, all that crap - pagan, pagan, pagan! The real killer, though? Christmas trees are against the Bible, for serious! Someone needs to inform Marsha Boggs, Boss Creations' owner-slash-crazy-ho-bag-in-residence, who apparently hates inclusion because it doesn't show her particular sect the special deference it does not deserve at all. I'd love to see the look on her face when Jeremiah 10:2-4 is read to her.

Of course, she'd probably do the Christian thing and ignore reason. She knows what she believes, don't confuse her with the facts. Christianity is whatever she says it is, godammit, and there's no way the Bible could be against her because... wait, there is no because, that's just a fact. Right, guys?