I found this article (h/t J Bowen) about a man from Huntington Beach who travelled to Lompoc to get, well, you’ll have to read the article, but it brings new meaning to the phrase sowing wild oats, deeply disturbing. And I was disturbed more than most of you, because back when I lived in Huntington Beach I stayed in Lompoc on business a couple of times. And for the record, I wore a suit and had zero contact with horses.
Archive for September, 2006
Deeply Disturbing
Sep 25
Bigger Is Not Happier
Sep 20
The latest word on breast implants is a study from Canada that concludes that breast implants are safe – however, they are not effective. The researchers studied almost 25,000 women who had implants to determine that those who had cosmetic breast implants had the same mortality rate as the general public — actually, it was lower — but they had a significantly higher suicide rate — 73% higher. The study authors concluded that the lower mortality rate was due to double selection bias – they were healthy and wealthy enough to undergo cosmetic surgery. So they compared the women who had other cosmetic surgery to the general public and got similar results – lower morality, higher suicide rate. So while the researchers say implants are safe (with reservations for individual complications), I say they are not effective since they do not seem to be a long term fix — based on the increased suicide rate, they do not do what the woman is hoping for.
Pope Benedict and Islam
Sep 19
Isn’t it amazing? The way mobs across Dar al Islam seem to hang on the Pope’s every word, even scrutinizing obscure addresses that get zero press in nominally Christian countries, unless Dar al Islam expresses its displeasure and the Western Press is forced to cover it. Considering what a wonderful address it is, I suppose I should thank them for raising such a stink that I got to read it.
Before we get to the meat of the address, I’m going to tackle the so-called offensive part of the address, which is being labled as a call for inter-faith dialogue. Well, Benedict calls it a cultural dialogue, and from his remarks he’s going way beyond churchman from Christianity and Islam having their own hootenanny. It’s a call for everybody to dialogue within a framework of reason, and he tells the story that got the the Moslem world so riled up to make this point: “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”
Now, did he have to include
“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”?
Good question, and let me bounce that right back at you, since Mohammed claimed that the Bible was garbled and he was just straightening out Jews and Christians, what did Mohammed bring that was new? What is your opinion of Mohammed’s changes?
I’d also like to point out that the press doesn’t seem to be able to quote properly, as this article on CNN has trouble:
The pope enraged Muslims in a speech a week ago in Germany quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything the Prophet Mohammed brought was evil “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
They seemed to have missed the whole “that was new” part. I suppose I should chalk it up to them having very little understanding of either Christianity or Islam. The emporer’s point is that Mohammed didn’t add anything to the Bible that wasn’t inhuman and evil. A fine distinction you might claim, but an important one since it’s saying not that everything Mohammed preached was evil, only those places where he made changes. And even more oddly, isn’t that exactly what you would expect a Christian to believe? I do, and if I didn’t, I’d be a Muslim, not a Christian.
I’m not Catholic, and I have some theological bones to pick with Catholicism, but I have to say that at least the last two popes have been extraordinary leaders, each in their own way. I’m going to have to start reading the pope more since he’s the only guy out there defending Western thought, practice,and culture these days.
I’ve excerpted the introduction and the conclusion to Pope Benedict’s address and urge you to read the whole thing:
It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas – something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned – the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason – this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Munster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the λόγος”. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (cf. Acts 16:6-10) – this vision can be interpreted as a “distillation” of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
…
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector – the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
What more can I say?
Republicans and Me
Sep 18
I admit I was wrong. I thought that the theory that American system would create two parties that would be forced to the center in order to remain competative. This hasn’t happened lately, as the two parties seem to be engaged not in a race to the center but to the poles, or in the case of the Republicans, never never land. I understand that the Democrats have moved to the left to satisfy the vocal minority out there, but I’m not entirely sure where the Republicans are going.
I don’t consider myself a Republican for the reason I plump for principle over party. So while the Republican party has been the vehicle for conservatism, my loyalty is to conservatism, not Republicans. I’m both a social conservative and a fiscal conservative, so I’m prime Republican material.
My problem with the party these days is pretty much on the fiscal side, and I want to make something clear to Republican politicians – since you have (far) more control over the government than the culture, I judge you by the government under your control, and specifically for Congress the budgets under your control and the laws you pass.
For example, I’m against abortion for any reason besides saving the life of the mother, but I understand that (1) the laws on abortion has been taken over by the courts since 1973, (2) the attitudes toward abortion are not controlled by politicians. So guess what, as long as you do a good job on judges, you’re off the hook. I realize how little you can accomplish, so I can’t hold you accountable.
One last thing. While much is made about a revolt or dissidents in the party over interrogation techniques, I have to say finally. This is what the branches of government should be doing, and I have to wonder, where are the Democrats? At last we have a real discussion over issues, and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. So why vote Democratic if all they can do is partisan sniping?
The New Reality
Sep 18
My two favorite network TV shows (actually, the only two network TV shows I watch) are back, and with an extra dose of diversity. First up, Survivor is back and as I’m sure you know if you’ve kept reading past the word Survivor they’ve divided the contestants by ethnic background. In order to do that, they had to find 5 asian-americans, 5 african-americans, 5 hispanic-americans, and 5 white-americans to appear. They have never had any problems with the white-americans, but they had to recruit extra hard for the others. Interestingly enough the 3 teams that weren’t made up of white-americans immediately worried about representing their people, as if 5 random strangers thrown together for the entertainment benefit of all americans really did somehow represent everybody of that ethnic background.
The Amazing Race launched it’s tenth season last night and while not explicit, they too seem to have worked overtime to assure diversity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The problem is that after Survivor voted off a black man, The Amazing Race took only 1 show to get rid of the Moslem AND the Hindu teams – with Phil reminding us when the Moslems got the ax halfway through the show that they promised the contestants surprises. Yeah, like early handicappers were picking those two guys to go all the way.
I suppose it’s a sign of progress that a big network like CBS can go out of their way to have minorities suffer embarassing losses on their flagship reality series without worrying about repurcussions.
The Path to 9/11 (2)
Sep 15
Yes, I actually watched The Path to 9/11, except a chunk in the middle Sunday night. First up, the negatives. I did manage to catch two glaring errors: a couple of times they talked about scrambling F-16s and they showed the same clip of a F-14. I’m sure Lock-Mart would have been happy to provide a clip of a F-16 taking off. And then when they had the Tomahawk missile strike against Afganistan, they showed video of a Harpoon leaving a canister. I suppose the marketing for the land attack capability in the latest version of Harpoon went much better than I realized. Since I worked on Harpoon for a long while, I admit I enjoyed that goof.
Seriously, while I loved the no commercials, the shaky cam started to seriously annoy long before the end. My head isn’t that unsteady, so it just comes across as fake. And I about laughed outloud towards the end when after the attacks Condoleeza Rice told Richarde Clarke, “Yes boss, we sure do need a strong white man to run things around here.” (Or words to that effect.) Perhaps I’m wrong, but it strikes me that in a meeting with Rice and Cheney in it, Clarke is in fact chopped liver. I think Condi had far more to complain about than Maddy Albright, who came across as tougher than the rest of the Clinton cabinet combined and someone who should be negotiating on behalf of our country. Hell, as peaceful as I am I’d be ready to fix bayonet and charge uphill into machine gun fire if the character in the movie were leading the way.
Could they have found an older looking guy to play Cheney? He’s not a bad looking 65 in real life, but in the movies they always have somebody playing him who looks like he hasn’t smiled in 40 years and has one foot in the grave.
Here’s the real problem with the movie, and any such look back – there are nothing but connected dots. The movie spans 8 years in 3 hours, and only included are the events that matter. So when watching the movie, of course its all so obvious. But in real life, there is all kinds of stuff going on, and separating signal from noise is very hard.
The fault for 9/11 lies squarely with al-Qaida, and neither the Clinton or Bush administrations. Yes, had some things been done differently, we might have been able to sniff out and stop the plot. So rather than looking back to point fingers, we should be looking back to figure out what are the things we can do better. And that just isn’t happening.
Social Cooperation
Sep 14
I have one last interesting bit from historian Willaim McNeil’s Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797. Of course there is a lot more there, but you’ll just have to read the book yourself.
It is more than passing interest to understand the rise and fall of particular civilizations, and to wonder at how Europe, once a backward part of the world, rose to world dominance in recent centuries. There was a time (i.e. the age of imperialism), not too long ago, that Europe pretty much ruled the world, either directly, through proxies, or through colonists. Now I’m sure there is more than a single explanation; I’ve thought about it before, and even wrote an essay stressing the importance of the political disunity of Europe, in effect, competing political firms in Europe beat monopolies in the two other great cultures of the time – Islam and China.
There is another strand to consider – social organization within Europe. Specifically, the ability of individuals to form organizations at a level other than family. McNeil addresses this phenomenon:
All complex societies develop ad hoc corporations. What was unusual about the Italian trading cities of the eleventh century (and northwestern Europe generally after about 1000) was the number and effectiveness of such arrangements. As compared to other peoples, the inhabitants of this hitherto rather backward portion of the globe proved strikingly capable of transcending kinship groupings and cooperating smoothly with persons who were not blood relatives but were recognized as belonging to some sort of wider in-group — whether that in-group comprised the inhabitants of a village, the citizens of a town, speakers of a common mother tongue, or even the bearers of a common tradition of high culture, i.i the culture of Latin Christendom. These broader groupings rarely came into play; the operationally imporant transfamilial in-groups for medieval Europe were the inhabitants of a village and citizens of a town.
One of the results of this ability to cooperate, according to McNeil, was the rise of Nothern Italian trading corporations, mainly from Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The ability to form large corporations beyond family groups led to the displacement of the prior traders, mainly Islamic and Jewish, who relied on kinship ties for organization and thus remained small, family operations. These non-family operations could scale up to a large size yet retain the trust normally found within families.
How was such an ability formed? The claim is that the moldboard plow, which was extensively used in Northern Italy and North Western Europe, forced non-family cooperation in those who used it. It was too big for a single family to use, so within the villages of the time people were forced to cooperate across family lines or lose out at plowing. This in turn fostered a culture that looked at cooperation across family lines as routine and expected in the context of another connection. This is not the case in many parts of the world, and generally in the poorer ones.
Mortality and Race
Sep 13
John Edwards liked to talk about 2 Americas while on the stump, but he was wrong according to the latest study of mortality in America. Wouldn’t that be a great headline over the articles – “Edwards Lied”? OK, turns out there are eight Americas: Asians, northland low-income rural whites, Middle America, low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, western Native Americans, black Middle America, southern low-income rural blacks, and high-risk urban blacks. Although looking at the numbers, they could have had sixteen Americas by dividing each group by gender. I guess they thought that was excessive. Or they could have just divided it between men and women and then Edwards would have been right.
Hmm, is there any link between life expectancy and test scores?
Interestingly, based on Figure 1. Alaska and the frozen north seem to have the highest life expectancies – maybe we should all move to the Arctic to maximize our life expectancy.
I like the Middle America category – its neither race nor geography based, it’s basically the left overs from the other seven. Middle America sounds so much better than Leftovers, though. Or average White People, which is overwhelmingly what the category is.
According to Figure 3, the difference in life expectancy between Asians and the next group, Americans who sey eh, is much larger than between any other groups.
Would they have made a much bigger deal about the gender difference if it were women on the short end of the life expectency? Just curious.
I guess I don’t undertand medical ethics. You’d think providing healthcare in the manner that causes the least deaths would be the most ethical way, right? Wrong, according to Dr. Sally Blower discussing the best strategy to treat AIDS in South Africa:
Using data from the KwaZulu-Natal province for their parameters, researchers from UCLA and the University of California, San Francisco, devised a mathematical model to predict the impact of drug allocation strategies that the South African government is implementing to treat 500,000 people by 2008. These data included birth rates, natural death rates and death rates stemming from AIDS.They looked at three drug allocation strategies: one that would allocate antiretroviral drugs only to the city of Durban and two making them available in both urban and rural areas.
Of those, the Durban-only strategy would be the most effective in preventing new infections, reducing them by up to 46 percent — amounting to preventing an additional 15,000 infections by 2008 — compared with the two strategies that would include both urban and rural areas. The strategy also would avert the greatest number of deaths from AIDS and generate the least amount of drug resistance.
But major problems would emerge with that approach, said Sally Blower, professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and senior author of the study. Most important, this approach is against basic ethical principles guiding treatment equity and would lead to more urban/rural healthcare disparities than already exist.
“If there was rational planning, you could determine drug allocation strategies by balancing ethical objectives with epidemiological objectives,” said Blower, a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “But it’s obviously unlikely that this type of rational planning would or could occur. So it’s much more likely that the actual drug allocation strategy will be determined by a mix of politics and feasibility.”
She added: “Unfortunately, you can’t have the maximum impact on the epidemic and be ethical.”
Forgive me, but isn’t there a difference between providing treatment for a deadly disease ravaging a continent, and handing out candy to first graders? I suppose you have to ask yourself, do we allocate scarce goods where they do the most good, or do we allocate scarce goods where we feel good about ourselves? What we have here is just creeping socialism. What we don’t have is an appreciation of the fairness of treatment to not just those who have the disease, but to those who don’t yet have the disease – they are completely ignored in conventional medical ethics, yet they are more numerous than those who have it.
I suppose it goes hand in hand with the whole no money for organ donors even if it increases organ donation because while the doctors, nurses, orderlies, janitor, and the hospital itself are being paid to perform the operation, it would just be wrong to pay the donor.
Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation to study what happens when a airplane crashes into a building for use in studying the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. The researchers had earlier developed a simulation to investigate the 9/11 Pentagon attack.
“As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity,” Sozen said. “We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.”Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane’s fluid contents.”
…
Santiago Pujol, an assistant professor of civil engineering, worked with the researchers to develop experimental data to test the accuracy of the simulation by using an “impact simulator” to shoot 8-ounce beverage cans at high velocity at steel and concrete targets at Purdue’s Bowen Laboratory. These data enabled the researchers to fine tune and validate the theoretical model for the simulation.
“We created a mathematical model of the beverage can and its fluid contents the same way we modeled the airplane, and then we tested our assumptions used to formulate the model by comparing the output from the model with that from the experiment,” Sozen said.
Who says science can’t be fun and relevant? I bet shooting the coke cans into steel and concrete targets was a blast — the Mythbuster guys are so jealous. Personally, I’d worry about scaling up from 8oz coke cans to a plane weighing over 200,000 lbs, but that’s just the engineer in me, but I understand the difficulty in trying to set up a test anywhere close to full scale. Of course, if they used beer cans, I can see that researchers might decide that enough data had been collected before they were all used.
OK, in all seriousness, this is some real science and engineering, and might even help with those people who claim it wasn’t planes that brought down the towers or hit the Pentagon.
