Kid Rock for President

Ed Brayton found this gem from Kid Rock

Kid Rock performed his “What if Kid rock were president of the U.S.” and pledged he would “turn churches into strip clubs” but promised, “We would remain one nation under God.” Both comments got cheers from the audience.

Looks like the Romney campaign needs to hire Kid Rock.  Romney has been taking diametrically opposed positions with different groups, on the same day.  Romney needs to learn from the Master, and be able to do this to a single group.

Juno

I saw Juno this afternoon.  While I had heard good things about the film, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  I was impressed.  While Ellen Page was great in the title role and Jason Bateman and Michael Cera were really good, it was something more than the acting.  While the soundtrack had a lot to recommend about it, that wasn’t it either.  What really impressed me was the story line and the irreverent (but so terribly real) characters.  And while the movie had the requisite twist where everything falls apart at the end of act II (one of my least favourite plot devices), it was somehow better crafted than usual.

I don’t write movie reviews.  I don’t have the eye for it.  I don’t know the language of movie reviews.  But I was impressed enough that I felt the need to comment.

Cheaper than coal?

Last week, the New York Times reported that Nanosolar, a Silicon Valley start-up company, had begun selling solar panels at a cost of $1 per watt.  This would allow the production of $2 per watt systems, making new solar power systems cheaper than coal.  (New coal power plants cost $2.1 per watt.)   They managed to do this by reducing the cost of production of solar panels.

Assuming that this works out as promised, it’s an interesting innovation.

While many photovoltaic start-up companies are concentrating on increasing the efficiency with which their systems convert sunlight, Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost.

Obviously, the usual questions come up.  Does the process really work as they say it does?  Is it really competitive with coal when you consider costs over the lifetime of the production facility?  What are the hidden environmental costs of the manufacturing process?  It’s encouraging news.  I really hope it works out as promised.

H/T Bruce Prescott.

Benazir murdered

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today at a political rally by an apparent suicide bomber.

Her father was murdered by Zia.  Now she is murdered while another general holds power in Pakistan.  While she was far from perfect, and her government was plagued by corruption, I will always remember her as she was when she first came to power in the late 1980s, as a symbol of hope and democracy after the dictatorial Zia.  While she was never really able to deliver on that hope, the memory of who she was, of how she was perceived at the time…these make her death especially tragic.

I worry all the more for the future of Pakistan.

Merry Christmas

Wishing you the best for the season

Flying Spaghetti Monster defeats Intelligent Designer?

A few weeks ago it looked like Polk County, Florida, was going to be the next Dover, Pennsylvania. With five of the seven school board members in favour of including intelligent design in science classes, it seemed likely that things might come to a head. But just a few weeks later, things appear to have changed; Billy Townsend of the Tampa Tribune writes:

Yet a few weeks later, the controversy is dying with a whimper. There’s no board support for a challenge to the proposed standards. Some of the five school board members blame the local newspaper for trying to start a fight.

And the force behind that change? The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The satirical religious Web site asserts that an omnipotent, airborne clump of spaghetti intelligently designed all life with the deft touch of its “noodly appendage.” Adherents call themselves Pastafarians. They deluged Polk school board members with e-mail demanding equal time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism’s version of intelligent design.

“They’ve made us the laughingstock of the world,” said Margaret Lofton, a school board member who supports intelligent design. She dismissed the e-mail as ridiculous and insulting.

Townsend credits PZ Myers and Wesley Elsberry with spreading the word, making it into a national issue. School boards in the US have a remarkable amount to power to determine education policy. Being a local issue, their decisions have attracted very little scrutiny, which is probably a major reason why things progressed as far as they did in the Dover case. Public ridicule is always helpful, but I hope that someone also took the time to explain to the school board members that teaching intelligent design in public school science classes violated the law.

Of course, when it comes down to it, this is only half the problem with ID. Not only is it religious, it’s also bad science and bad theology. Townsend reports that school board Margaret Lofton said:

She describes herself as secure in her beliefs. “I’m a Christian. I personally believe that the Bible is inerrant truth and the word of God.”

While believing that the Bible is “inerrant truth” is usually an indication that the person doesn’t know that Bible all that well, combining that statement with an interest in intelligent design suggests an incomplete understanding of ID. Certainly Behe’s designer is incompatible the orthodoxy Christianity: a God who tinkers with life to create evil isn’t the God of orthodox Christianity.

H/T Dave, via email.

Making ID science?

One of the major arguments made by the intelligent design crowd is that people can recognise design.  They argue that if it looks designed, then the default argument should be that it is designed.  This leads to arguments that run something like “you [scientists] need to provide a complete, step by step account of how this evolved, otherwise Darwinism is a failed theory”.  Obviously that’s nonsense…it amounts to saying that if the exact pathway is unknown, then we should reject it in favour of a totally unspecified mechanism.

Even taken from an in-universe perspective, ID hinges on the assertion that we can recognise design.  There’s a very insightful post at Ooblog which looks into the question of recognising artefacts, and asks why it is that the IDists aren’t pursuing this field of research.  Their entire “theory” hinges on the assertion that we can recognise artefacts.  If they had any sort of a scientific agenda, they should be investigating something that’s so fundamental to their “theory”.

That about sums it up…

PZ Myers on Michael Behe

It’s a good review, but does anyone care anymore? His thesis is rejected by biologists and ignored by creationists, and the man is on his way to well-deserved obscurity.

And in the comments, Abbie is informed, in no uncertain terms, that she’s a Southerner.  I suppose she’ll have to drop her Midwestern accent and adopt a southern drawl now.

Oekologie #12

The 12^th installment of the Oekologie blog carnival is up at Behavioral Ecology Blog.

LOLCreationists

Larry Moran details a conversation he had with one of the “intellectuals” over at Uncommon Descent, specifically one who goes by the name gpuccio

You ask:

“Let me ask you a question. Did the intelligent designer allow naturalistic evolution to do most of the work, saving a few well-chosen examples for special attention? Did he (making an assumption here) let photosynthesis and the citric acid cycle—and dozens of other things that we understand—evolve on their own but step in to design bacterial flagella or whatever other complex you have chosen as the evolution problem of the day?”

No. Absolutely not. Again, you have understood nothing of ID. ID maintains that practically all “macroevolution” is the product of design. Only some patterns of “microevolution” (some kinds of bacterial resistance, and so on) can be ascribed to your “mechanisms”. Please, read Behe’s last book for the details, and then answer that. Bu please, stop pretending that ID says things that it has never said.

In Edge of Evolution, Behe presents a a figure which shows what Behe claims is the limit of what evolution produces. He places that edge somewhere above the species level – either at the genus, family or order level. Even Behe allows an awful lot of “random” evolution. Since macroevolution refers to the study of evolutionary change above the species level, Behe is allowing an awful lot of macroevolution. But gpuccio first tells Larry you have understood nothing of ID, and then turns around and points him to Behe’s book. So what is he trying to do? Maybe he’s hoping to make Larry’s head explode.

Or maybe, he just doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. But then, I suppose that’s typical…after all, creationists don’t seem to know much about the bible either.