2013

The Course of Their Lives – JSOnline
A fascinating series of articles on the experiences of medical students dissecting a body during their training, interspersed with the reflections of someone leaving her body to the medical school. Via Mefi.
(tags: body anatomy death medical-school dissection medicine)
What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? – Less Wrong
Chris Hallquist tries to work out what’s going on with apologetics. It’s Less Wrong, so *do* read the comments.
(tags: religion christianity less-wrong psychology apologetics chris-hallquist)
DanceSport DJ Ice
This chap has made ballroom remixes of various popular tunes. Epic (or something).
(tags: music dancing remix ballroom)
Joe Pass & Ella Fitzgerald – Duets in Hannover 1975 – YouTube
Great stuff. Via Mefi. Ella’s on about half an hour in.
(tags: singing jazz duet joe-pass ella-fitzgerald video)
Solitude and Leadership – William Deresiewicz
William Deresiewicz on the necessity for those who would lead to find time alone to concentrate their thoughts.
(tags: army leadership solitude william-deresiewicz)

The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang’s short about memory, time and loss. It’s also an alien first contact story.
(tags: heptapod story science-fiction time ted-chiang sci-fi language first-contact memory)
Cambridge: Poles apart Why Warsaw beats Cambridge Blog Mike Levy
“A weekend in Warsaw made me think about Cambridge at night. In Cambridge after 6pm the city centre empties ready for the only true night time economy: binge drinking. The Market Square alive with stall holders and shoppers at 5pm magically transforms into a ghostly empty space one hour later. It is a Cinderella midnight moment that never fails to astonish. By dusk the Cambridge ball is over and the Prince has gone home to watch T.V. Only a lonely burger van takes up residence creating a sad and soulless image that realist painter Edward Hopper could capture.” Yeah, it’s crap.
(tags: night-life drinking alcohol night cambridge warsaw)
Why You Shouldn’t Support Operation Christmas Child | Mymumdom
…unless you want to contribute towards evangelical Christian evangelising, of course. But apparently some schools in the UK are collecting shoeboxes of gifts for the Samaritan’s Purse organisation without fully realising what they’re about.
(tags: religion samaritans-purse christianity christmas-child christmas evangelism)
www.me.uk RevK’s rants: Censoring the Internet
Chap who runs an ISP goes to dinner with some MPs and discusses filtering.
(tags: politics uk porn filtering censorship isp internet)
Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab | The Economist
“Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.” Talks about the problems with reproducing research.
(tags: economist journals research statistics science)
Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation
(tags: significance experiment maths probability research mathematics statistics science)

The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm
Tells it how it is.
(tags: twitter controversy funny storm satire)
Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance — Better Humans — Medium
“If you’re irrelevant at thirty, why live forever?”
(tags: silicon-valley ageism transhumanism aging)
Ken Auletta: Can the Guardian Take Its Aggressive Investigations Global? : The New Yorker
The NYT looks at the history of the Graun and its recent scoops (the NSA files). Apparently the paper is running out of money. 🙁
(tags: journalism nsa surveillance guardian edward-snowden internet gchq newspaper)
Hard Sci-Fi Movies (HardSciFiMovies) on Twitter
Hard SF plots from Twitter. Via AndrewDucker.
(tags: science-fiction scifi movies funny space)
Saint Paul says shit
Although you won’t find many English translations admitting it (try the Vulgate).
(tags: philipians paul st-paul bible language shit)
Reverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor – /dev/ttyS0
Interesting post on using a disassembler to find a backdoor someone left in a bunch of D-Link routers.
(tags: dlink backdoor programming hacking router)

▶ Jazz Fever – Rachel Bloom ft. Seth Green – YouTube
It’s the fever that you get from too much jazz.
(tags: charleston seth-green rachel-bloom jazz funny video)
Spartacus Educational: Ralph Miliband and Lord Rothermere
The man Heil got the diary quote from explains why Miliband senior might not have felt so welcome in the UK: “The Miliband family were Jews living in Belgium who had arrived in May 1940 after fleeing persecution from the Nazis who had recently taken over western Europe. Ralph was shocked by the level of anti-Semitism that existed in England at the time. Ironically, much of this anti-Semitism and dislike of Europeans had come from the propaganda campaign that had taken place in the 1930s. The man behind this campaign was Lord Rothermere, the grandfather of the current Lord Rothermere, the owner of The Daily Mail.”
(tags: hitler antisemitism miliband ralph-miliband daily-mail facism rothermere)

Back in August, Clark at Popehat did a slightly confusing posting on how some atheists are confused about rights because they speak as if rights exist while also saying that nothing but matter exists. Clark seems to be one of those theists who thinks that gods are be required to exist for objective rights to exist, but he doesn’t really say why he thinks that. (The real trick in all these arguments is specifying quite what you mean by “objective”. I enjoyed John D’s quote from Richard Joyce: “So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction.”)

I argued that Clark had got materialism wrong. Someone asked how any atheist can avoid the conclusions of Alex Rosenberg. I slightly facetiously replied “by not being an eliminative materialist”, but I can do better than that, I think. Rosenberg gets a lot of counterargument from people who are avowed naturalists and philosophically respectable. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for an atheist, especially one who isn’t an expert on philosophy, not to share Rosenberg’s conclusions.

Typically, Christian apologists ignore any distinction between varieties of naturalistic worldview (see Luke M’s interview with John Shook) and go with something like “if atheism is true, we’re nothing but matter in motion, chemical fizzes like soda spilled on the ground”. They then make an argument which uses the fallacy of composition to “show” that properties which matter and energy don’t have can’t be real on atheism (by which they mean some kind of materialism). This is all bunk, but pretty popular bunk, at least in the blogosphere, if not in philosophy journals.

Finally, I got into Yudkowsky’s belief in moral absolutes, which is interesting as Yudkowsky’s an atheist. Massimo P had a post about that back in January, where he sort of disagreed with Yudkowsky but then actually seemed to agree with him if you stripped away the layers of words a bit. My most significant comment on that is here. Yudkowsky’s transition from what looks like mathematical Platonism to the claim that morality is absolute deserves a post of its own, which I might get around to at some point. There’s a lesson for atheists, though: atheist appeals to evolution as a moral justifier are confused. Evolution might be a (partial) answer to “why do I care about X?” but not “why should I care about X?”

I haven’t had much time for proper blogging lately, but I’ve been commenting elsewhere a bit, so I’m doing a series of short posts about that in an attempt to get back into the proper blogging habit.

Cambridge Vintage Night

I went to the inaugural Cambridge Vintage Night recently, so I was interested to read what Anthony thought of it and to stick my oar in:

One odd thing about this event was that I wasn’t quite sure what it was trying to be: it wasn’t quite advertised as a lindy event, but it was advertised to the local lindy hoppers (on Facebook) and it started with an introductory lindy lesson. There was a reasonable contingent of people from the various lindy scenes around Cambs, but we were outnumbered by muggles. I think everyone complaining about the music being too fast is a lindy hopper and so they mean “too many fast songs for (sustained) lindy” (which I’d agree with). I’m not sure what the non-dancers thought of it. The other Paul (who, if he’s who I think he is, runs a fun local event outside Cambridge, he’s probably too modest to say) has some good points on how you welcome in newbies at lindy events. There are plenty of people in Cambs who know how to do events like that if that’s what you want your event to be.

Playing for lindy hoppers is a different thing from playing from people who’ve come to bop around while wearing flapper dresses (there’s nothing wrong with the latter, of course). Lindy hoppers do turn up to things where there might be suitable music and make what we can of it without feeling hard done by if it doesn’t work out. But if you’ve sort of positioned it as a lindy thing and then it doesn’t work, the people who came thinking it was a lindy thing will be annoyed (hi Mark!)

Making Light: Victory to the People
A history of the development of the Biblical canon, recounted as if it were fan fiction.
(tags: canon religion bible nicea)
Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath? – NYTimes.com
No, but you can note that some of them are Callous-Unemotional and may grow up to be psychopaths.
(tags: psychology sociopath children brain psychopath)
Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’ | Culture | The Guardian
Russell Brand on being ejected from the GQ awards for making a joke about Hugo Boss, the sponsors. He’s a good writer.
(tags: russell-brand comedy awards hugo-boss gq)
Putting Time In Perspective
Nice little timelines zooming out from the day to human history to evolutionary history to the history of the Universe.
(tags: time physics universe evolution)