This image, captured by the Hubble Telescope, depicts the Antenna Galaxies, a pair of galaxies 90 million light years away that began colliding a few hundred millions of years ago.



In local news, there will be protests in your neighborhood because someone is trying to build a Wal-Mart somewhere in one of these galaxies.

Labels: Technology and stuff

This is Arlington National Cemetery. There's a lot of people buried here. It's tempting to count this loss of life as wasted, but to do so discounts the opinion of those who gave their lives. If they thought it was for nothing, they wouldn't have sacrificed themselves to causes.

They didn't waste their lives. They bought something precious with them, whether it was the fall of the Central Powers in World War I, the remission of fascism in World War II, or the short, tenuous period after the withdrawal of American troops from Viet Nam but before the fall of Saigon. Waste can be found in German death camps, in the mass graves discovered in Iraq, in the corpse-clogged rivers of Rwanda, where the killing had no intent beyond the mass destruction of life, where death and extermination were themselves the primary goals and where ordinary people were the principal and primary targets. American soldiers die not to perpetrate that kind of atrocity, but to take down the people who do. It takes deliberate effort to ignore this distinction.

They didn't waste their lives, but we can waste what they bequeathed us. Behind our luxuries of safety and comfort that allow us to forget about our soldiers - if we so choose - we can pull back a curtain to witness the rituals of soldiers burying their own and handing folded flags to widows. If such images evoke a feeling of insignificance in the face of life and death and forces greater than ourselves - including moral forces - this reflects a recognition of the scale of sacrifice.

Labels: Sadness and Cemeteries

Here is my review of "Sicko," without having seen it.

Labels: Apolitical cinema

Sometimes there's things actually worth seeing here in Austin, instead of (say) the geek on 38th street near Guadalupe who comes out every Sunday around noon to protest the people who went to church.

The Red Elvises strike twice here, Friday and Saturday night! And the big question is "what to wear?" I'm thinking a theatrical western shirt and a gold lame jacket.

Labels: Red Elvises

An excellent essay on the religious people vs. atheists debate by the author of the following excellent essays

Inside the Monkeysphere
The Suicide Guide
The Ultimate War Simulator
Embrace the Horror
Was 9/11 an Inside Job?
The Second American Civil War

Not to mention the greatest horror/comedy novel ever written and its excellent (presumably still in progress) sequel. Seriously, David Wong is my favorite writer ever.

This video made me ask myself: Just exactly how many rock videos feature someone pretending to be in a mental institution (not counting acts who actually performed in asylums).

[embedding disabled by request on this 'un]

Your mission is to identify how many times this meme has infected cheesy rock videos. Now go to YouTube and get hunting. The winner may or may not receive a link to a picture that shows Rick Springfield's bare behind.

Labels: Rock video cliches

I don't remember you being this happy when Saddam Hussein died. Good thing you've got your priorities straight.

Labels: Feeding your inner Ted Rall

While doing some of my usual research into the dark side of the human spirit, I started looking for information about the Armenian genocide of the World War I era. On YouTube I found a video documentary, evidently by or for Turkish interests, downplaying the subject and almost, but not quite completely, denying that it ever happened. In the scientific method you can bust a theory by analyzing the evidence or analyzing the analysis of the evidence or by failing to reproduce reported behavior; but the approach this documentary took was more akin to a courtroom method of playing the jury.

The following arguments appeared:

1. Turks and Armenians love each other.
2. Turks attempted to rescue the Armenians from it (could "it" mean the genocide which the documentary attempts to discredit?)
3. Armenians still exist, disproving genocide ("If we engaged in genocide against Armenians, why are there still Armenians?" and arguments of this form could be used to disprove any incomplete genocide).
4. Some Armenians colluded with or bought into German fascism (This argument may fall more into the "they had it coming" category).
5. Some modern Armenians glorify assassins who kill Turks (see previous item).
6. Some subset of human remains (supposedly all)? belong to Turks, not Armenians (probably easily proven or disproven, which makes it a good claim, scientific-thinking-wise).
7. The Ottoman Empire survived for centuries, and no empire could long endure by oppressing its ethnic minorities; therefore, Armenians were not mistreated (Love, love, LOVE this argument!)
8. Armenians got along with everyone before Christian missionaries stirred them up, and claims of genocide derive from this carpetbagger-induced uppitiness (Do missionaries tempt you more to invent imaginary genocides, or to engage in violence against the missionaries?)
9. Since Greece became independent from the Ottoman Empire and Armenia didn't, this means Armenians must have liked the status quo (There seems to be a timing problem here. Greek independence in the previous century does not disprove a genocide in the next one).
10. Armenian nationalist movements date from some date after the purported genocide; this raises question of timing again - if Armenians were mistreated, why didn't they agitate for nationhood earlier? (This ignores the possible cause-effect relationship between genocide and nationalist movements; the founding of Israel in the 1940s just theoretically has some relationship to genocide in Europe not long previously.)
11. George Herbert Walker Bush made a public statement about the historical tolerance and compassion of Turkey (this is the first time that I've seen the fact that a Bush said something as an argument for the truth of the statement!)
12. Other empires, such as the United Kingdom, used nationalist movements among subject ethnic populations as a method of bringing down rival empires (such as the Ottoman); therefore, no genocide occurred. (Evidently imperial powers put them up to invent a genocide as another tool of attacking the Ottoman Empire; while this strategy is common in modern times in wars that have a media/propaganda front, it may have taken the events of the 20th century genocides to make the strategy of false claims of genocide a standard polemical tool.)
13. Records of the relocations prior to the executions cite Armenian cities that defenders of Turkey claim never existed. (Another claim that, at least, could yield to concrete evidence. Archaeological digs or aerial photography should be able to confirm or debunk such a contention.)

Is it just me, or are these weak arguments? Item #6 is the closest to a plausible refutation; and if it was strong, the documentary would have attacked physical evidence. Item #13 is promising, but the German role in the genocide involved disinformation campaigns and revisionism of documents that could easily have produced things like maps which do not cite villages whose populations were relocated and/or exterminated.

Go back to law school, guys, or find an O. J. jury. Or argue that a bunch of Republicans did it, which will definitely hold water in blue country.

Labels: Ethnic cleansing and alibis

We could end the clash of civilizations, the War on Terrorism, anti-Semitism, genocide, and intolerance, if we'd just make some shirts that say "Coexist" with various religious symbols on them and a quote from Kofi Annan on the back.

...wait, someone has done that already?

How did it work out?

Labels: Snake oil

It just occurred to me after reading a post on Cold Fury about another (doubtlessly well-deserved) banning of commenters something that's rather important out here in the world of the wars of words and wars of ideas.

One of the invitations to banning included argument from authority. While this could mean stupid things like saying "Michael Moore said it, and I believe it, and that's it," we actually rely on argument from authority a great deal.

Isn't arguing that something is Science a simple resort to authority? For instance, I can argue that a hydrogen atom has a single proton and a single electron and treat this as an inarguable, unquestionable truth. But I haven't ever looked at a hydrogen atom; I've never directly done anything to prove one exists, haven't measured one, haven't analyzed one to determine properties that might convince me things like electrons and protons exist, and therefore do not argue from experience when I assert properties of hydrogen. I simply beg the question of the credibility of authority - a chain of authorities - who have transmitted to me their received wisdom.

Arguments from authority are as good or as bad as the authority they cite. The problem is not that we argue from authority - all but the omniscient must either do so or ignore topics outside of their personal experience - but that we beg the question of the credibility of our sources. Cite Trofim Lysenko, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, or swarms of names in the Sagas of The Struggle of Science Versus Ignorance and you find different degrees of credibility even if in some sense each name this babel of philosophers, frauds, mathematicians, empiricists, anti-empiricists, iconoclasts, apologists, saints, sinners, con-men, debunkers, entrepreneurs, speculators, physicians, ideologues, posers, and hands-on-experimenters practiced science.

I would be fascinated to meet someone whose knowledge of the world was entirely empirical and not based at all on resort to authority. It almost would have to be someone who did not use language.

Labels: Epistemological agnosticism

Labels: Edification