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Links for January 12th from 10:14 to 15:44

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Sometime between 10:14 and 15:44, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Elements of Spam.: Form the possessive of nouns by adding 's, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. "My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u."
  • Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel: A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
  • W. and the damage done: After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy — foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial — starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay. To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms — sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.
  • Milky Way Transit Authority: I was re-reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
  • How big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground: Habib used CT scans of the bones of 155 bird specimens and a dozen species of pterosaurs and found that they were greatly different in strength, size and proportion. In birds, the hind legs were stronger than the front and in some pterosaurs the front legs were several times stronger than the hind ones. "It's a lot like a leapfrog," Habib said, describing how he figures the pterosaurs got off the ground. "They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off." That allowed some of the ancient giants to get into the air in less than a second. Habib calculated that the 550-pound pterosaur called Hatzegopteryx thambema launched at a speed of 42 miles per hour.

Versus

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What ever happened to concepts like tolerance and respect of others? Polite disagreement? Discussion as opposed to argument? Open minded acceptance of other people’s views, even if they differ from your own?

This may not be my most coherent or well-organized post, but a couple things popped up today that have been rumbling around in the back of my head, and I wanted to at least make a stab at getting some of them out.

Yesterday, I posted a link and excerpt from a story in the Seattle Times about a local Native American burial ground that has been uncovered due to construction on the Hood Canal bridge. The story caught my attention both for the archaeological significance of the find, and for the care and concern that the local tribes have for the spirituality of the site and their ancestors.

This morning, my post got a Trackback ping when Paul Myers of Pharyngula posted about the article. When I read his post, though, I was more than a little taken aback at what I felt to be the cavalier and rude tone he took in regard to the tribe’s religious beliefs.

There’s a fair bit of religious hokum in the article; goofy stuff such as the claim that pouring a concrete slab would trap the spirits forever (piling dirt and rocks on top of them doesn’t, apparently, nor does rotting into a smear), and spiritual advisors on site and ritual anointings to protect people from angry spirits. That’s all baloney….

The religious/spiritual crap cuts no ice with me….

It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with the spirituality of the tribe that bothered me (I don’t know Paul’s personal religious beliefs) — rather, it was the utter lack of respect in how he addressed it. It was the old stereotype of the scientist so convinced of the utter righteousness of the purely scientific world view that he’s utterly contemptuous of those fools who believe in any sort of higher power (see Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s Contact, for example).

That bothered me, but I wasn’t quite sure how to start expressing it, so I just filed it away on the back burner to percolate for a little bit.

A couple of days ago, I’d posted a link on my linklog to a Gallup poll which showed that only one third of Americans believe that evidence supports Darwin’s theory of evolution, and had added the comment, “how depressing.” This morning, I got a comment on that post from Swami Prem that raised my eyebrows:

What’s depressing about this? There is no evidence that supports Darwin’s theories. No scientist has ever shown that there exists a link between humans and apes. Darwin’s theories are theories afterall.

Suddenly, I found myself coming dangerously close to stepping right into Paul’s shoes, and had to wait a while before responding to Prem’s comment. My first impulse was surprise and, quite honestly, a little bit of, “oh, here we go again…” — Prem and I have had strong disagreements in the past, and while I don’t believe that he’s at all unintelligent, his earlier espousal of viewpoints that are so diametrically opposed to my own strongly colored my initial reaction to this new comment.

After taking some time to let that roll around in my brain I did respond, and Prem’s responded to that. As yet, I haven’t taken it any further, both because I want to do my best to respond intelligently and because I’m somewhat stumped as to just how to start (I probably need to take some time to do a little research [this site looks like a good place to start] — as I’ve never progressed beyond attaining my high school diploma, and I was never that good in the sciences to begin with, I’m not entirely comfortable with trying to engage in a full-on creationism-vs.-Darwinism debate without a little brushing up [and actually, Paul would probably be far more qualified than I to tackle Prem’s question, judging by his obvious interest in both biology and evolution — just check out the links in his sidebar!]).

Anyway, both of these items have been bouncing around my head all day.

I think a lot of what’s been bothering me about the exchanges is that I try hard to be polite and respectful in my discussions with people, even when (and sometimes especially when) I disagree with them, and that seems to be a trait that has gone by the wayside far too often these days. Sure, I don’t always succeed — I’ll fly off the handle and rant and rave from time to time — but I do make an effort to keep those instances to a minimum.

Unfortunately, it seems that we’re living in a world where differences are all anybody sees anymore: us vs. them, me vs. you, religion vs. science, liberal vs. conservative, democrat vs. republican, urban vs. rural, red vs. blue, etc. Nobody’s actually listening to what anyone else has to say — we’re all so sure that we’re right and everyone else is wrong, too busy banging our shoes on the table to really listen to anyone else.

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs, all told.

Bouncing back a bit, but touching on both of the incidents that started all this rambling, I think the thing that frustrates me the most about the science vs. religion debate — and creationism vs. Darwinism in particular — is that in my mind, there is absolutely nothing that says that the two theories are incompatible. It’s never seemed to me as if it was an either/or equation — coming back to Carl Sagan’s book, and most pointedly the end of it (and if you haven’t read or don’t want to read the book, feel free to watch the movie — it’s one of the single most intelligent science-fiction films I’ve seen in my lifetime), why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around the concept that it’s entirely possible that both Ellie Arroway and Palmer Joss are “right”?

I’ve always found it interesting that the most commonly known of the two creation stories in Genesis fairly accurately parallels the scientific view of the formation of the universe, our planet, and the life upon it. First space, then stars, then the earth, then oceans, then plants, then fish, then animals, then man. Two different ways of telling the same story — one measured in days and one measured in millennia, but the same story. Of course, this does hinge on the ability to accept the Bible without taking it literally (which is probably another subject for another time, but it’s probably fairly obvious that I don’t subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible), which trips up a lot of people.

Meh. I don’t know…and I think I’m starting to run out of steam. As I warned at the beginning of this, probably not the most coherent or well-organized post I’ve ever made here.

Had to get some of this out of my head, though.

Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom? Bring ’em on….

Atlantis, AI, Jay and Silent Bob, Say Anything

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While my DVD purchases are nowhere near what they used to be now that I don’t have the extra income and employee discount from Suncoast, I do still occasionally pick one up here and there. I’ve picked up four over the past month (see? Four in a month!) — here’s the scoop….

Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Disney’s most recent animated flick. I thought this one was very under-appreciated when it came out in the theaters, which was a shame — though not entirely surprising. It’s Disney’s first PG-rated animated film since The Black Cauldron, and one of their few non-musicals. It’s also got a much more adult-oriented sense of humor running through it, which I very much enjoyed. Well worth seeing, though — I really like the fact that Disney has finally decided to stray from the standard formula that they held to for so long, and I hope that the fact that A:TLE didn’t perform as well as it could have in the box office doesn’t scare them away from experimenting in the future.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: Hey — it’s Kevin Smith! Sure, there’s not exactly much in the way of a plot, and many of the jokes won’t connect with people who haven’t seen the rest of his films. Being a Kevin Smith fan, though, I think it’s pretty funny. If nothing else, the news bulletin warning people to “stay away from the C.L.I.T” (Campaign for the Liberation of Itinerant Tree-dwellers), and watching Ben Affleck and Matt Damon rip on themselves by selling out to make Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season are worth watching. At least…I think so.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: The single best film Spielberg has done, one of the best movies of last year (if not the best), and certiainly one of the few must-see “thinking person’s” sci-fi films to come out in recent years (the only others I can think off off the top of my head being Gattaca, Contact, and 2001). I watched the movie last night, and will probably be digging into the special features tonight…most likely with a seperate post to follow.

Say Anything: One of my favorite 80’s films, and the one to cement John Cusack in my brain as an actor to keep track of. This is the second in the unofficial ‘Cusack series’ that my friend Royce and I enjoy, where though they’re all seperate and unrelated films, we like to put them in a series simply because they star John Cusack, and he plays roughly the same character in each one. For the curious, here’s the series in full as it stands right now: Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer for his formative High School years, Say Anything for High School graduation, Grosse Pointe Blank for the 10-year reunion, and High Fidelity for the thirty-something years.