I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about WikiLeaks, and I figure I’d add my $0.02CAN to the maelstrom of debate. These sorts of debates are good for us, they help us keep tabs on public opinion, watch the various interested parties scramble to spin their point of view, and how much their spin can manipulate the common man’s opinion.
The issue, ultimately, is that we have a resource offering to reveal classified information because it’s important from a transparent good government standpoint that they do not hide from us. But the other side of the equation is that the leaker’s identity is kept anonymous, never actually known by WikiLeaks.
Frankly, I’m of two minds on the topic, which comes as no surprise to me. Being a computer nerd has taught me that just about any innovation we come up with will have its good side and its bad side. The internet, for example, gives us a tremendous access to knowledge and information that no generation has ever had so readily available, but also provides any number of negative services, from the easy dissemination of child pornography to the Americanization of the globe.
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I’m a guy who doesn’t believe. Pure and simple, I don’t pretend to be anything but what I am, and I am an atheist. I grew up a Christian and learned along the way that the basis for the faith was not something I could accept any longer. And honestly, I do have trouble understanding how grown adults can continue to believe. Some recent and interesting research has led me to the notion that, among many other issues, people use their faith as a means to control the uncontrollable. That makes sense to me. When times get tough and things are difficult, people often like to have that thing to hold on to that gets them through. I understand that, and while I don’t share it in the sense of a God watching over me or what have you, I know that my absolute certainty that I can weather any storm because I’ve weathered my share assists me.
It’s an incorrect statement, of course, as mathematically flawed as my absolute mathematical proof that I shall live forever. I take the total number of time I have died (0) and the total number of years I have been alive, and compare them in a ratio:
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Sometimes science is uncomfortable. Such is the case with some new research I just read about at Discoblog on Discover Magazine’s website. The article, entitled You Think You (And Your Parents) Are Hot is definitely fascinating, but kind of makes me want to take a shower.
I was all set to write out a layman’s terms explanation of the experiment, but Allison Bond (the writer of this piece — duh!) already did that, so just go read the article. You won’t know just how totally dirty you are until you do!
Jim
A long time ago, I made the decision to not be defined by my job. I was working full time as a web application developer and teaching full time at a technical college. I was putting in around 300 hours a month and getting paid for 180 of them, and I had the epiphany that work was ultimately not the purpose for my life, it was the thing I did to pay for the life I wanted to lead. I had missed too much of my life for work. Years later, I would sum the whole thing up in one of my rants on the old Johnny Incognito web site:
Let’s do a little math, all of which was inspired by my grandfather.
Let’s say you live to be a hundred years old. You die on the day you were born one century before. Forgetting about leap years (because at night figuring out leap years is stupid) that means you’ve lived 36500 days. That’s a good long time.
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The brain’s just neat. And really, we don’t all the way give it credit for how neat it is, and how much it does for us. Sure, it gives us cool things like our deep thoughts and our ability to do crossword puzzles, but it does so much more for us, and much of the things it does we’ve attributed to other body parts. We don’t think of our brain as being a part of a rousing game of football, but every catch, every step, and every shoulder-check we throw into some big fat bastard’s stomach while blitzing the quarterback, that’s all our brain interpreting who knows how much information every moment, controlling our physical form, keeping us safe and clear-headed, and spotting those holes in the defensive line we need before we even know we’re aware of them.
In fact, there’s been some interesting research that Jerry Coyne has been discussing on his blog of late about the idea that our brains are so bloody awesome they may have ruled out free will . I don’t understand the science behind it, but according to recent tests, it appears that we make decisions at a brain chemistry level as much as seven seconds before we realize that we’ve made a decision. I’m no Johnny Von Brainsurgeon, so I honestly can’t weigh in on the topic except to say that if my conscious free will is an illusion, it’s an awfully powerful one.
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I am what I am, and I know that I can be a dick when it comes to issues of faith. I try to keep my tongue in check, but there are times when confronted with the absolute nuttery of people that I just have to let loose. And being who I am and having the interests I have, I’m the same way with medicine. So when the two overlap, I have to admit that I become particularly snarky.
The examples of this intersecting are legion, but today I read an article and commentary on Pharyngula about a family who belong to the Followers of Christchurch in Oregan. Their baby has a hemangioma, which is not normally a particularly big deal, but the location is a critical factor in this case. “The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.”
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This article from The Guardian is just about the most awful thing I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s a story about British families who are using their summer vacation to take their kids to foreign shores for the purposes of having their genitals mutilated. And there’s a video that is horrible to watch.
There is nothing that can really be done to stop this practice. Superstitious people will go to great lengths to perform their remarkable rituals, and nobody answers “what is the purpose of your visit” with “destroying my daughter’s sexuality”. As well, I doubt there could be a charge of child abuse involved since the crime took place in a foreign (and presumably non-extradition) country. But I’m by no means an expert on international law, so that might be a mistake on my behalf.
If it’s happening in Britain, it’s happening everywhere. All I can really say about the topic is that it’s sick, and I hope really terrible things happen to the parents who arranged this and the monsters who make it their career to mutilate girls.
Female circumcision is just a polite way of saying genital mutilation. A circumcision, while not a pleasant process, is a million miles better than what is being done to women. And yes, there are a myriad of acts that lump under the female genital mutilation banner, but none are necessary, none are safe, and all result in a physically and emotionally destroyed woman. That’s not me sitting in my ivory tower of western culture and imagining that my world view is better than others; the act of disfiguring a child is despicable, and the total pre-scientific way that this ritual is performed is intrinsically dangerous and abhorrent.
Jim
I know, you’re a hardcore science buff and you understand evolution perfectly. Well, that may or may not be true. But if you want to know for sure if you’ve got the theory down correctly, I’d suggest reading PZ Myers’ recent blog post, It’s more than genes, it’s networks and systems. It’s a simple and much more accurate explanation than most of us regular folks have mastered.
Honestly, there was stuff there that was new and interesting for me, and I’m a huge nerd. So if you have a layman’s understanding of evolution, give this a read and enjoy finding out more about what is an exceptionally cool aspect of how we got here.
Jim
Your argument, if I’m understanding correctly, is that a creator, who we’ll call God for the purposes of this conversation but who could just as easily be called any number of names, triggered the Big Bang as a means to create a suitable universe for us to live in. Am I following you correctly? Okay, now I have a few thoughts.
We know that the universe has certain laws that are true everywhere. Some of these we know already, others presumably are bigger or smaller than we can currently see. Nothing strays from these laws. Everything can be traced back to that Big Bang, but if that is the case then what is the point of faith? If God put every single ounce of truth that defines the universe into that initial explosion, somehow able to imagine how he could get from a big sack of nothing all the way to an entire universe full of things, allowing for all the amazing things that need to be in place in order for the earth to exist in a way that would sustain life, allowing for all the things on earth that need to be in place for humanity to appear, and allowing for all the things that took place in human history to lead to you and I having this conversation, then why do we assume that he has any capacity to change anything?
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It’s a simple question, but one that has troubled many, and one whose solutions have had mixed results. However, the fine people in the villages of Cameroon have a solution! You simply deform your child sexually so that no man will want her! It’s a brilliant plan, and all it takes is some rocks, some fire, and your baby’s breasts.
I had never heard of this practice, but I saw a post on Pharyngula today entitled What fresh torment can we perpetrate on young girls? and it included an incredible and awful video about the practice. All I can say is that there seems to be no amount of torment we will spare our children if the mood takes us.
It’s funny, because I hear all the time about kids who say their parents are abusive to them because they give them spankings or force them to do chores when they don’t want to. There are so many more horrible things that could happen to them. Kind of makes a spanking and getting sent to your room to clean it seem minor in contrast.
Jim
