I found a quote that I think is perfectly apropos of this blog in general:
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and of many things I don’t know anything about, but I don’t have to know an answer I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly. It doesn’t frighten me. – Richard Feynman
In fact, I think an excerpt of that quote will become my new sub-title for this blog.
What Breivik did was not terrorism. It was merely the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. That’s totally different from terrorism.
Plus, he’s clearly insane, which means his Christianity had nothing, I mean nothing to do with anything. In fact, I read somewhere that he was actually a Darwinist, which has everything to do with everything.
So you see, even though he was a violently insane, non-Christian, politically motivated perfectly sane Darwinist, it was the Jihadist Muslims that are ultimately responsible for the whole thing.
I know what you would say, and it would seem like logic, but for the warning in my heart
For true believers logic is only a trick. It’s a way for clever people to “convince” you that they’re right by distracting you from what you already know in your heart to be true.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. Part of the problem that many people have is that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what science and the scientific method is trying to do. There is this notion that science is the search for The Truth®. That’s simply not the case. Science is nothing more than our attempt to understand how the natural world works. That’s all. Nothing more. Unfortunately I think even a lot of scientists forget this, in part because science has been so effective that it’s easy to become overconfident.
Science deals only with what is in some way verifiable. No matter how awesome an idea is, if you can’t verify it in some way shape or form, it’s useless to science. String Theory is a perfect example of this. It’s an awesome theory that elegantly explains a lot of what we see in our universe, and hints at a lot more that we don’t see. Many if not most things explained by current theories are explained by String Theory, in many cases more simply, and it explains many other things that aren’t currently explained by any known theory. It’s everything that scientists love to see in a theory. It is very nearly perfect, except for one crucial detail.
There’s currently no way to verify it.
The predictions of string theory differ from current theory only at scales and energy levels that are unreachable now and for the foreseeable future. As awesome as the theory is in so many ways it is now recognized by most of the scientific community as essentially useless, and it has been abandoned by many for that simple reason. Those scientists who are continuing to work on it are trying desperately to eek out some method by which it could be even potentially falsified.
It looks and acts like science in many fundamental ways, but for now it simply isn’t science because it simply isn’t verifiable.
To summarize my point: Science is not a search for The Truth®. Science is a search for a very narrow subset of the truth known as The Verifiable Truth®. No, less than that it’s a search The Reasonably Verifiable Truth®. Actually, even less than that, it’s a search for The Minimally Verifiable Truth®.
Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.
Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.
Countries which I like seem to never suffer such tragedies, while countries which, for one reason or another, I dislike, suffer them all the time. The one common factor which seems to explain this has to do with my political views, and it suggests that my political views should be implemented as a matter of urgency, even though they are, as a matter of fact, not implemented in the countries which I like.
Of course this is a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.
It would be a fitting memorial.
*Shamelessly stolen from an archive at [http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html]
Okay, since I just got back to this blog thing, I figured I’d look at comments that have been filtered out by Akismet while I’ve been gone, just to see what’s there. I found this comment in my spam folder:
I feel like I’m always looking for interesting things to read about a variety of topics, but I manage to include your blog among my reads every day because you have compelling entries that I look forward to. Here’s hoping there’s a lot more great material coming!
This comment was submitted 2 days ago (Sep. 7th). At that point I hadn’t posted a new entry in almost 3 months. Apparently my last post up ’til then was so amazingly compelling that this person checked back every day to re-read it.
Akismet is awesome for finding such otherwise innocuous sounding spam.
In case you’re wondering why that can be considered spam even though there are no ads to be seen, it’s actually an attempt to game the Google search system. The username is a link to their business site, and if they get enough blogs to allow such an innocuous sounding comment it will trick Google into thinking a lot of people are linking to their site. The hope is that it will appear so popular that their site will appear in the first page or so of a search.
Okay, that title is unnecessarily crude, but fuck it. What follows is a video showing the number of asteroids that have been discovered since 1980.
Can you figure out which little dot is the earth? Here’s a hint: it’s the one going around the sun (err…which one is the sun, I wonder).
One thing you might notice is the sudden burst of discoveries at right angles to the earth right near the end of the video. I’m guessing those are discoveries made by the WISE satellite, which launched in December of 2009. The WISE satellite (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) is an infrared survey satellite that is always pointed 90 degress from the sun and earth…exactly where all those asteroids are being found.
One thing that might be making you a bit nervous is the sheer number of asteroids that we can see by the end. With so many of ‘em, the chances of being hit by one must be really high, right? Well, not really. Here, I’ll let my very close and personal friend whom I’ve never met, Phil Plait, explain why that is (from this post at his blog Bad Astronomy):
The distance between Mars and Jupiter is a bit roomier than depicted in the video. Remember, Mars is about 220 million km (130 million miles) from the Sun, and Jupiter is about 800 million km (480 million miles). That’s a whole lot of real estate: almost 2 quintillion square kilometers (670 quadrillion square miles)! Written out, that’s 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 square kilometers.
Yeah, a whole lot of real estate.
And that assumes those asteroids all lie in the same plane. In fact, many of their orbits are tilted, so we’re really dealing with volume. Even allowing that they may move above or below the plane of the solar system the paltry amount of a million kilometers, that means there’s really 2 septillion cubic kilometers: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic km! The volume of the Earth is only about a trillion cubic kilometers, so we’re talking a volume of space that could fit a trillion Earths in it!
“So you’re saying you falsified my claim, AND the claim is unfalsifiable?”
This seems to be a common response when some people are confronted with the fact that their ideas* are unfalsifiable. It’s intended to demonstrate how ridiculous such a stance is.
What’s actually happening is that a prediction is generated based on the given idea and a thought experiment is proposed which could potentially falsify the prediction. When the test is followed to it’s logical conclusion it is found to contradict the prediction and thus falsifies the claim. In rebuttal definitions are changed, values are shifted, and concepts are restated using different words, all of which serve to render that test invalid in some way, or to make the results consistent with the reworded idea. The fact that all of these change are still consistent with the original idea is a clear demonstration that it is in fact unfalsifiable.
The claim is not that “I tested it AND it’s untestable.” The claim is “I attempted to test it, but every test resulting in a falsification is simply reinterpreted in such a way as to render it unfalsified. Since this can be done at will while remaining consistent with the original idea, it is in fact unfalsifiable.”
* I am purposefully using the term “idea” here instead of “theory” because the fact that these ideas aren’t falsifiable means that they are not in fact theories at all.
