drorzel | October 27, 2006It's mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that's one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don't find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either.
There are two real problems I have with Dawkins (and most other militant atheists, for that matter, but we'll use him as emblematic of the whole crowd). One of those problems is a matter of tact and tactics-- I think his whole approach to the issue is obnoxious and counter-…
drorzel | October 26, 2006If my thoughts on the upcoming Big East basketball season aren't good enough for you, the New York Times gets in on the act. Actually, that's a story about the pre-season coaches' poll, in which Pitt and Georgetown are picked to finish at the top, and Syracuse is picked third, with one first-place vote.
So, I'm not completely crazy in my rough picks...
drorzel | October 26, 2006Lots of people are jumping on Gregg Easterbrook for his remarks on the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. In particular, fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert blasts him for saying:
The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the…
drorzel | October 26, 2006Our DSL was down for a good chunk of the evening, which means I didn't get to pre-write any blog posts. It also means I haven't been able to keep up with the comments on recent posts, which is actually probably a good thing, because given how tired I was last night, I probably would've said something really regrettable to a Dawkins fan by now.
However, I'm giving an exam at 9:00, and Kate's out of town, so I have to deal with Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna myself, which means I don't have time to post, well, much of anything. So, amuse yourselves with the archives, or this sory about the Barber…
drorzel | October 25, 2006The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I've been trying to make about the reviews (I thought of several nasty and inflammatory analogies without much effort, but I'm trying to be a Good Person...). Unfortunately it requires me to explain a bit of physics... Please, please, don't throw me into that briar patch.
Some people say that the last really significant…
drorzel | October 25, 2006Eugene Wallingford had a post last week about blogging, and popular misconceptions:
When I first started writing this blog, several colleagues rolled their eyes. Another blog no one will read; another blogger wasting his time.
They probably equated all blogging with the confessional, "what I ate for breakfast" diary-like journal that takes up most of the blogspace. I'm not sure exactly what I expected Knowing and Doing to be like back then, but I never intended to write that sort of blog and made great effort to write only something that seemed worth my time to think about -- and any…
drorzel | October 25, 2006Every now and then, I start poking at the stats in Google Analytics, and I almost always find something interesting. For example, in the last week, this site has been visited twice by someone from Mauritius, four times by someone from Iran, and six times by someone from Kyrgyzstan. I'm being read by somebody in a country I can't even pronounce.
Google identifies visits from 61 different contries (well, 60 countries, plus "Satellite Provider"). Just over 75% are from the US, and adding Canada, the UK, and Australia accounts for better than 90% of them. But that still leaves an amazing number…
drorzel | October 25, 2006The rant about "meme" being a stupid idea that I mentioned near the end of Monday's Dawkins post turns out to be from Mike the Mad Biologist, who reposted it yesterday. Executive summary:
The word doesn't add much, obscures important phenomena, is imprecise, and is vitalistic.
I'm sure you were dying to know this, but I'm posting the link here as much so I can find it again if I need it as because you really ought to read it.
drorzel | October 24, 2006Easterbrook on Tiki Barber:
At this point Tiki Barber, TTNY ("The Toast of New York"), should replace Brett Favre as the most admired player in the NFL, and as the one who exemplifies the best of football culture. This guy plays amazingly well -- last night when the Giants needed power running, he even did that. Barber has played at a high level for a long time. He never complains, refuses to blame others and never whines about his contract. He's well-read and well-informed. He radiates the fact that he knows football is just entertainment, that there are a thousand things in the world that…
drorzel | October 24, 2006I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB tabs open, but I've seen it with some other frequently-visited sites. It works fine for a while, but after a day or two, hitting "Reload" to, say, update comment counts, does nothing. It says that it's loading, and maybe even that it's transferred some trivial number of bytes, but then it just sits…
drorzel | October 24, 2006I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn't pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon.
So here's a question about medicine, or rather the media coverage of medicine, that has been bugging me. In stories about the bird flu or whatever, you'll frequently read statements of the form "We're closer to having a worldwide pandemic than at any time since 1918."
My question is, in what sense is that true? That is, is…
drorzel | October 24, 2006How 'bout those Giants? They keep it interesting right to the end, that's for sure...
Some links to worthwhile things elsewhere, because I don't have the time or energy for more:
The guys at the World's Fair are launching a new site that they hope will be a sort of BoingBoing for the science education/ popularization set. It's called the Filter, and they've got some nifty items. Take a look.
Rob and Sean on the ever-popular topic of diversity in science.
Dennis Overby on the Big Bang.
Physics video games (thanks, Tim).
drorzel | October 23, 2006Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic:
OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you're pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. :-)
I've already talked about the ACC, and in this post, I'll take up the…
drorzel | October 23, 2006Here's another email from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist covering Iraq's descent into civil war. In this message, he describes the hard life of a photographer in Iraq, and reports a downright Rumsefeldian analogy:
"We had our militia phase, maybe the rest of the Iraq will get over its own."
It's a nice thought, that maybe it's just a matter of time before Iraq works its way through this "phase" - sort of like braces or heavy metal music or something.
The full text is below the fold.
They beat up one of our photographers today.
And smashed his cameras. Now that's pretty tough…
drorzel | October 23, 2006A little fall foliage from Saturday's bike ride:
The bike path runs along the old Erie Canal tow path, and in a few places, they have restored/ preserved bits of the old canal. This is one of those-- you can see some of the stone wall on the left, and the wooden decking on the right is part of a structure that I think is an old lock. The canal itself is dry, and filled with these sumac trees, which have turned a really dramatic orange. Click on the image for a larger version.
There's an autumn Americana shot below the fold:
This is the baseball field at the local community college. It would…
drorzel | October 23, 2006Inspired by a thread at Fark, John Lynch asks an interesting question:
If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be?
Janet has some thoughts as well.
Leaving aside obvious stuff like "Buy Microsoft stock," what I would say to my twelve-year-old self is this:
Get over yourself.
(Continued...)
You're not getting picked on in school because your classmates are jealous that you're smarter than they are (nerd apologia notwithstanding). You're getting picked on because you're annoying about it.
You can be the smartest guy in the room without rubbing it…
drorzel | October 23, 2006This week's New York Times Book Review features a review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion that judges the book fairly harshly:
The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins's treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The "ontological argument" says that God must exist by his very nature, since he possesses all perfections, and it is more perfect to exist than not to exist. The "cosmological argument" says that the world must have an ultimate cause, and this cause could only be an eternal, God-like entity. The "design argument" appeals to special features of the…
drorzel | October 22, 2006We had some heavy rain on Friday, so when I went for a bike ride on Saturday, the Mohawk was pretty high. It was particularly impressive at Lock 8:
A closer view is below the fold:
OK, it's not exactly levee-breaking bad, but it was fairly impressive. I don't have any pictures of the normal condition for contrast, so you'll have to take my word for it that it's a dramatic difference.
drorzel | October 22, 2006The "How many people have your name?" thing has come across my RSS feed a dozen or so times already, most recently via the very common John Lynch. I was finally bored enough to put my name in, and here's what I get:
There are 0 people in the U.S. named Chad Orzel.
While both names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name.
There's also nobody in the US named "Kate Nepveu." In fact, they don't register anyone at all with the surname "Nepveu" (there are apparently 570 Orzels, many of them my cousins...). What are…
drorzel | October 22, 2006The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman:
Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when [Walter] DeNino [a technician in Poehlman's lab] took his concerns about anomalies…