When two people disagree, usually, one of them is wrong

This Peter Schiff guy got it exactly right, over two years ago. I'm sure he wasn't the only guy to have this idea, he was the guy who stuck his neck out on tv and said it would happen in a couple of years. Kudos to him.

I'm not really surprised

We elect people into public office. We'd like to think that those people have a good knowledge of basic civics. We'd like to think that, but we probably shouldn't.

It turns out that, on average, they can be more ignorant about civics than the average shmo.

Here is the quiz.

I got 88% right, or 29/33.

Are you a bad person if you got 44%? Certainly not. But of the various general knowledge that is critical to know in order to be a proficient US citizen, I'd put civics pretty high up there... I'd go as far as to say that you might want to get at least a C on this test if you want to consider yourself a knowledgeable voter. As for myself... I'm ashamed of my 88%.

Don't read webcomics in lecture.

This comic made me giggle out loud, in class. It's ok though, I'm a TA and I've already heard the lecture.



via The Joy of Tech

Genesis 8

We had recently read that 40 days (and an equal number of nights) go by with constant rain. However, in the initial few passages it seems that the waters took an additional 110 to recede.

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; ²the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, ³and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; ⁴and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. ⁵The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.

Eventually, we saw, the tops of the mountains appeared. Our author then takes us back forty days before the waters receded (I think) in verse 6.

6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made ⁷and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.

Whatever happened to the raven? Nevermore.

⁸Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; ⁹but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. ¹⁰He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; ¹¹and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. ¹²Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more.

Can you imagine a scenario where you are stuck on a mountain and you can't tell if the waters have receded from the earth, such that you need to release a dove to tell you? Remember, you are in a boat, immobilized, it seems, on top of a mountain. You'd think that if you open the boat's window and, remember you are on top of a mountain, you see water all around you, on top of a mountain, then you can be pretty sure that if you drop in elevation you are going to find more water. I guess that it's possible that you might be in a high altitude lake... One so large that you can't see land in any direction (no such lake exists on earth currently, but after a worldwide flood a temporary one may have existed). I guess my point here is that I don't understand how it's logically possible that Noah's bird could have grabbed an olive branch somewhere on earth while at the same time Noah's Ark was stuck on mt ararat. It would be possible for the dove to have gotten hold of an olive branch IF the ark was floating freely somewhere far away from any elevated place. But this simply does not fit with the events as they are chronologically described.

13 In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. ¹⁴In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. ¹⁵Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶‘Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. ¹⁷Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.’ ¹⁸So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. ¹⁹And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families.

20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar.

So we've got Noah sacrificing all the clean animals here (at least I think that's what's happening, since I'm not sure what "took of every clean animal" means). It doesn't specify whether he sacrifices all of the additional 6 pairs, or just a single animal, such that the pairs of clean animals are still grater than any individual unclean animal pair type.

²¹And when the Lord smelt the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.

God smells burning scents (either the animal's flesh or some kind of pleasant smelling herb) and decides then not to do any more mass killings, regardless of whether the human race becomes wicked again.

²²As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.’

At least this sounds like good news. But I wonder about God's intentions here. Does he simply know that we'll never be as evil again, or is he sorry he had to kill everything the first time and vows never to do it again regardless of what happens?

Despite our inability to ever truly know what God's intentions were and are, I think it's strange that we can allow ourselves to believe the stories of Noah and not question everyone's motives. If there is anything to be learned from this story, I think it's that God has the power to end everything in the an incredibly horrible way, but he promises not to do it... again.

the worst day of my life

I believe the children are our future.

out of touch

Kudos to the ASU Men's and Women's track teams for making Bush pose with the shocker.

I wonder how long that picture will be up on the white house website.

Intuiton

In popular culture "human intuition" is exalted. Intuition is what helps the clever police detective to catch the evil doer. Intuition is what helps the scientist discover flubber. Intuition gets the job done.

In reality, however, intuition probably causes more problems than it actually solves.

Let me explain.

I remember the day, many many years ago, when I first learned about the gravity experiments which claim that it doesn't matter how heavy an object is, everything is pulled to earth at the same speed. This means that if you have two iron balls of equal size and shape, but one is hollow and the other is solid, they will still hit the earth at the same time if dropped from an equal distance. Of course, there is the problem of terminal velocity, which is the maximum speed attainable by an object due to environmental drag (basically, as you fall through the air, there is wind resistance. Depending on your mass and shape, there is a critical speed at which you can no longer accelerate toward the ground due to the friction). But if you eliminate wind resistance a feather and a hammer, dropped from anywhere in the sky will fall with the exact same (incrasing) velocity and hit the ground together.

But this goes well against our intuition. I know this because I was blown away when I first learned this. I remember thinking "why is my teacher lying to us?". Then I saw the video of a tube containing a feather and a coin. Air is removed from this tube, the tube is then quickly flipped and, sure enough, the feather and the coin fall at the exact same speed and hit the other end of the tube together.

My intuition about falling objects was wrong. It was based on faulty assumptions which ignored things like friction of the air or faulty assumptions which didn't take into account what 'mass' or 'weight' actually meant or what gravity really referred to.

Throughout my life I've repeatedly learned how our human intuition is continuously wrong.

Other examples of human intution or faulty logic getting things wrong:

1. When you are hit by a bullet, your body does not fly backward. The bullet has high velocity but low mass. So the force (and momentum) is not large enough to displace your much more massive body (thanks for filming the proof, Mythbusters!)
2. The reason you shouldn't go swimming after eating is because of the exertion on your muscle tissue can cause cramps which could cause you to drown. It has nothing to do with the water making contact with your body. So it's perfectly fine to eat in the shower.
3. You can divide any finite line, say a one inch long line drawn on piece of paper, into an infinite number of segments.
4. If you give your baby up for adoption and a couple from Germany adopts her, the child will grow up speaking German. And when they start learning English in school, she will not have some kind of benefit, or advantage, learning English just because English is the native language of her parents.

Now, that last one might seem obvious, but it really isn't obvious to people who don't think through their intuition logically. In his interesting book "Mr China" Tim Clissold recounts an anecdote where he is speaking to a large community of older Chinese folks. He asks them how they feel about so many westerners adopting Chinese babies. All of the folks are actually happy that people are adopting the children. Tim is surprised by this answer and asks "well, aren't you sad that the child will grow up not knowing the culture, not speaking the language?" and the people respond with incredulity. They say "of course they'll learn the language. They're Chinese! How can they not speak Chinese?"

The people Tim was talking to had an intuition that the Chinese language was a inextricable component of the Chinese person, that it didn't matter where a Chinese person was raised, they would always be able to speak Chinese because it was in their blood (I'm not sure that they would have assumed it was genetic since I'm not sure how sophisticated their knowledge of genetics actually is).

Our human intuitions (accompanied by unexamination or faulty logic) leads us to make some pretty stupid decisions.

I believe that it is this faulty intuition that passed Proposition 8 in California. People have this intuition that the institution of marriage is inextricably linked to religion and it thusly falls under a moral rubric. Supporters of prop 8 did not see this as a proposition to take away people's right to marry. They saw this as a proposition which would redefine what marriage is. Many people who voted yes on prop 8 did so with the assumption that they weren't taking anything away since homosexual couples could still get civil unions. They just felt that marriage was a covenant of God and God does not want two men or two women entering that covenant.

There are two main failures of intuition here (probably more):

The first is that marriage acutally holds a place in our society that goes beyond the bounds of religion. It is a social institution. The feeling that marriage is religiusly bounded and therefore applicable to redefinition in a constitution is faulty intuition.

The second is that homosexuality is not a choice. If a gay person wants to get married now they can't just choose to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex. The idea that homosexuality is unnatural is faulty intuition. (God is not testing or punishing gay people either, so if you think that, you need to re-examine your logic)

These two faulty intuitions come together to trump Californian's aversion to "taking rights away". The argument that Proposition 8 is akin to the "seperate but equal," J.Crow laws is absolutely accurate. But a person who is holding the two faulty intutions above can refute this by saying:

"Marriage is a religius institution, it isn't a water fountain. You need the public service of a water fountain, but you don't need to get married. After all, you can still get a civil union! Also being black and being gay are not the same. Being black is genetic, being gay is a choice."

So prop 8 passed.

I don't think it will be long before prop 8, and all the other constitutional amendments made accross the country's states will be talked about in history classes as the Jim Crow laws are talked about now: A relic of our ignorant past.

But there are even more pressing issues, like in Arkansas.
There, the faulty intution is that kids growing up in a home with a mother and a father are better off than kids growing up in a home with a mother and a mother. This intuition is so faulty that it isn't only NOT backed up by any data, but it is actually REFUTED by the data.

I'm happy that our country was able to elect a black president but we still have a long way to go.