Are there some places in the world that people just shouldn't live?
I am watching with some horror as the floodwaters of the Mississippi River continue their slow progression down into my home state of Louisiana. The opening of the Morganza Spillway, done ostensibly to protect the much larger population of New Orleans, will release those floodwaters into the Atchafalaya Basin, home of thousands of people in little towns like Morgan City, Henderson, and Butte Larose.
All of this, of course, demands a question that few of us are willing to ask. Should people be living in these areas in the first place? New Orleans included?
The levy and spillway system, designed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 20th century, was intended to keep the Mississippi River in its course. The Mississippi has been "trying" to change course for hundreds of years -- this is a completely natural process, in which progressive silting and extension of the delta effectively raise the mouth of the river, slow down water flow, and gravity impels the river to find a shorter course. That shorter course is through the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp and out into the Gulf of Mexico through Atchafalaya Bay.
Of course, such a switch would leave New Orleans high and (relatively) dry, commercially irrelevant as a seaport. Politicians and business leaders declared that there was no way could that be allowed to occur. So levies were built to hold the river to its present path, with spillways to accommodate periodic flooding.
This created more problems than it solved. The levies didn't stop the silting; in fact, it made it worse, because silt that would have been deposited on the lands surrounding the river during floods was now deposited on the river bottom and delta, further raising the bottom of the river (and thus its water level). So the levies had to be raised to match. Simultaneously, the installation of huge pumping systems to deal with the saturated soil in New Orleans caused the entire city to subside, just as a sponge shrinks when it dries out.
The city is sinking; the river is rising. The response? Raise the levies again. When you're done, raise them some more. There are parts of New Orleans that are now over ten feet below the level of the river.
And then Katrina came along, and showed that the people who had said fifty years ago that this was a bad idea were actually right.
But this hasn't stopped the building and reinforcement of levies; it hasn't stopped politicians in Louisiana from pretending that this is a problem that is fixable. What no one wants to say is that maybe it's time to make the politically inexpedient call that there are places in this world where people just shouldn't live. The canyon walls of California, the sides of volcanoes in Indonesia, the barrier islands of the Carolinas -- all are places where the risks are known, and excessive, and yet we still live there, crossing our fingers and hoping that nothing bad will happen.
Don't get me wrong; I am far from immune to the emotional side of the tragedy that is unfolding in Louisiana. I haven't lived there for thirty years, but I remain a Louisianian to the core still. The idea of abandoning places where my ancestors have lived for two hundred years is a devastating idea. But shouldn't knowledge sometimes trump sentiment? There is no way to fix this problem; that is certain. Also certain is the fact that what we are currently doing is progressively making the problem worse. A "hundred-year flood," like the one currently occurring, or (worse) another major hurricane, could exact a human toll that is unacceptable given our prior knowledge of the risks.
We have a poor track record for listening to the people who know the most about the problems we face. Scientists who warn of inconvenient and expensive potential disasters on the local, national, or global scale become Cassandras, warning of dangers and going unheard. Perhaps in this case, it's time to listen. The politicians may be cheered for saying "New Orleans will rise again" -- but unfortunately, the reality is that it is sinking. Are we prepared to see "hundred-year floods" become a yearly event?
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
A Comprehensive Field Guide to Aliens
That people believe all sorts of weird things without any hard evidence is so obvious as to barely merit saying. What never fails to astound me, however, is how complex some of these beliefs are.
Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth. Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists. These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination. Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements. Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney. Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?
In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species. And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose. I'm talking some serious non-humans here.
For example, consider the Arcturians. These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand. Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency." Whatever that means. But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.
Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco. Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons. While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer. "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about. "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars! And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point! From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!" Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while. So perhaps we should just move on.
Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids. And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced. Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall. The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams. It's worth reading. I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.
Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet. The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra. The Pleaidians. The Hyadeans. The Cetians. The Orions. The Lyrans. The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.
Okay, I made the last one up. But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims. The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof. It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on. You have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle. (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)
Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem. And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens. My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success. In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.
Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!
I wonder which kind I am? I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly. Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black. I look good in black. Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.
Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth. Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists. These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination. Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements. Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney. Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?
In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species. And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose. I'm talking some serious non-humans here.
For example, consider the Arcturians. These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand. Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency." Whatever that means. But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.
Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco. Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons. While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer. "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about. "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars! And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point! From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!" Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while. So perhaps we should just move on.
Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids. And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced. Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall. The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams. It's worth reading. I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.
Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet. The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra. The Pleaidians. The Hyadeans. The Cetians. The Orions. The Lyrans. The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.
Okay, I made the last one up. But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims. The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof. It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on. You have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle. (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)
Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem. And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens. My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success. In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.
Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!
I wonder which kind I am? I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly. Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black. I look good in black. Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Warning: zombie apocalypse ahead
I'd like to wish you all a happy Zombie Awareness Month. Yes, I know its already the 14th, and therefore it's already almost half over, but my rather pathetic excuse is that I was myself unaware until yesterday.
Zombie Awareness Month is the brainchild of Matt Mogk, who founded the Zombie Research Society in 2007. (See his website, if you're curious or especially if you think I'm making any of this up, here.) Their motto is "What You Don't Know Can Eat You." At first, I thought that the Zombie Research Society and the rest of it was a spoof site, but I have this grim suspicion that Mogk is serious. Even his photograph on the website seems to say, "I am one serious badass, and if you even try to insinuate that zombies aren't real, I might just get my undead minions to eat your brains."
Actually, Mogk claims that zombies don't eat brains, that that was an invention of Hollywood. I'm a little disappointed about this, because one of my favorite songs is Jonathan Coulton's "Your Brains." If you've never heard this song, you absolutely must watch this link, but I would advise not trying to drink anything while listening, because you are likely to laugh so hard you'll choke and could end up being really dead instead of undead.
Even though Mogk doesn't think zombies eat brains, as is commonly claimed, he does believe that there will be a zombie pandemic, and looks upon Zombie Awareness Month as a way to spread information about how to avoid being zombified yourself. Zombie outbreaks have happened before, Mogk claims; and as evidence he has on his site a world map labeled with numbers to indicate historical zombie outbreaks. Curious, I took a close look at the map, and it turns out that his historical zombie outbreaks refer to events like the Mary Celeste incident, the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Mayan civilization, and an outbreak in the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador "of unknown date" which explains why there are tribes there that practice headhunting. (As everyone knows, you can kill a zombie by decapitation. The fact that you can kill a regular human that way, too, apparently never occurs to Mogk; and he's evidently also never heard of the concept of a "hunting trophy.")
Mogk, for his part, claims he's really trying to help people. He's particularly concerned about places like New Jersey, which in a zombie apocalypse would face traffic jams even worse than usual, and this would result in a lot of people being caught while trapped in their cars. He recommends that if you're trying to avoid getting zombified, you should move to a place with low population density, like Wyoming. In order to spread the word at all levels, Mogk has also written a children's book, called That's Not Your Mommy Any More, which features verses like:
Zombie Awareness Month is the brainchild of Matt Mogk, who founded the Zombie Research Society in 2007. (See his website, if you're curious or especially if you think I'm making any of this up, here.) Their motto is "What You Don't Know Can Eat You." At first, I thought that the Zombie Research Society and the rest of it was a spoof site, but I have this grim suspicion that Mogk is serious. Even his photograph on the website seems to say, "I am one serious badass, and if you even try to insinuate that zombies aren't real, I might just get my undead minions to eat your brains."
Actually, Mogk claims that zombies don't eat brains, that that was an invention of Hollywood. I'm a little disappointed about this, because one of my favorite songs is Jonathan Coulton's "Your Brains." If you've never heard this song, you absolutely must watch this link, but I would advise not trying to drink anything while listening, because you are likely to laugh so hard you'll choke and could end up being really dead instead of undead.
Even though Mogk doesn't think zombies eat brains, as is commonly claimed, he does believe that there will be a zombie pandemic, and looks upon Zombie Awareness Month as a way to spread information about how to avoid being zombified yourself. Zombie outbreaks have happened before, Mogk claims; and as evidence he has on his site a world map labeled with numbers to indicate historical zombie outbreaks. Curious, I took a close look at the map, and it turns out that his historical zombie outbreaks refer to events like the Mary Celeste incident, the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Mayan civilization, and an outbreak in the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador "of unknown date" which explains why there are tribes there that practice headhunting. (As everyone knows, you can kill a zombie by decapitation. The fact that you can kill a regular human that way, too, apparently never occurs to Mogk; and he's evidently also never heard of the concept of a "hunting trophy.")
Mogk, for his part, claims he's really trying to help people. He's particularly concerned about places like New Jersey, which in a zombie apocalypse would face traffic jams even worse than usual, and this would result in a lot of people being caught while trapped in their cars. He recommends that if you're trying to avoid getting zombified, you should move to a place with low population density, like Wyoming. In order to spread the word at all levels, Mogk has also written a children's book, called That's Not Your Mommy Any More, which features verses like:
When she's clawing at the kitchen door,So, as you can see, he's quite serious about the whole thing, as, he states, we should be. Mogk claims to have spent time training with the French Foreign Legion, so that explains his focus on survival, as well as possibly suggesting that he spent way too much time cooking his own brains in the desert sun. But far be it from me to advise a lack of caution, a breezy insouciance, a happy-go-lucky Pollyanna-ish outlook. Remember, in the movies it's always the people who have those kind of attitudes who are the first to get eaten. So wear your twist of gray ribbon on your lapel for the rest of May, and spread the word. The brains you save may be your own.
That's not your mommy any more.
When her face looks like an apple core,
That's not your mommy any more.
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Church of St. Vladimir of Nizhny Novgorod
New from the Some Guys Have All The Luck Department: there is an all-female sect in Russia that worships Vladimir Putin as a saint.
A woman who goes by the name Mother Fotina (apparently her real name is Svetlana Frolova) has founded a religion in the town of Nizhny Novgorod that claims that Putin is a reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. What you would expect to happen -- that the people of Nizhny Novgorod would say to her, "Svetlana, you seriously need to lay off the vodka" -- apparently didn't occur. Instead, she found herself surrounded by eager female devotees, who were ready to go live in a communal house with her as leader, pray to the blessed St. Vladimir, and worship his image daily. They are also willing to subsist on a diet of turnips, carrots, peas, and buckwheat, which by itself calls into question their general mental health.
A woman who goes by the name Mother Fotina (apparently her real name is Svetlana Frolova) has founded a religion in the town of Nizhny Novgorod that claims that Putin is a reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. What you would expect to happen -- that the people of Nizhny Novgorod would say to her, "Svetlana, you seriously need to lay off the vodka" -- apparently didn't occur. Instead, she found herself surrounded by eager female devotees, who were ready to go live in a communal house with her as leader, pray to the blessed St. Vladimir, and worship his image daily. They are also willing to subsist on a diet of turnips, carrots, peas, and buckwheat, which by itself calls into question their general mental health.
"In his days in the KGB, Putin also did some rather unrighteous things," Mother Fotina said, as reported in the London Telegraph (you can read the whole story, and verify that I am not making this up, here). "But once he became president, he was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and just like the apostle, he started wisely leading his flock. It is hard for him now but he is fulfilling his heroic deed as an apostle."
Reporters spoke with Father Alexei, who is the Russian Orthodox priest for Nizhny Novgorod. "Her so-called teachings are a nonsensical mixture of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the occult, Buddhism and political information," he said. "But Fotina does not come across as a mad person."
No, of course not! Worshiping Vladimir Putin as a reincarnated saint is perfectly normal! In fact, maybe there are other reincarnated bible figures out there! Maybe Barack Obama is John the Baptist! That would cast Ann Coulter in the role of Salome, wouldn't it? By that line of thought, it seems likely that Osama bin Laden was a reincarnation of Judas. In one life, the guy hangs himself and his "bowels burst asunder," and then in the next he gets mowed down by some Navy SEALs. You'd think he'd eventually learn to play nice, wouldn't you?
Oh, and what about Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's chief political rival? You have to wonder how the sect handles this guy. Is he some sort of AntiPutin, or something? I wouldn't be surprised, given the status they've accorded Putin, if they spend at least a little time during their worship services ill-wishing Medvedev.
As for Putin himself, his reaction to finding out about his status as saint was said to be "bemused." "This is the first I've heard of such a religious group," said Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman. "It is impressive that they think so highly of the prime minister's work but I would like to recall another of the main commandments: thou shalt not worship false idols."
Yeah, I guess that one covers it, given that there's no commandment that says, "thou shalt not espouse views that make thee appear to be a raving wingnut." I'm frankly rather impressed that Putin hasn't made, um, "political capital" out of the whole thing, given that he's said to be something of a ladies' man, and is frequently seen running about shirtless and flaunting what are said to be fairly impressive biceps and pecs. But thus far, he's behaving himself, as are Mother Fotina and her acolytes.
So, for the time being, all's quiet out in Nizhny Novgorod. I suppose this is a good thing. Given all the trouble the Russians have had lately with UFO sightings and chicken carcasses dressed up to look like alien corpses, it's probably best that they don't have nubile young religious wackos tackling their prominent political figures.
Of course, it's this sort of thing that keeps Skeptophilia in business, so I do have to confess to some measure of ambivalence.
Reporters spoke with Father Alexei, who is the Russian Orthodox priest for Nizhny Novgorod. "Her so-called teachings are a nonsensical mixture of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, the occult, Buddhism and political information," he said. "But Fotina does not come across as a mad person."
No, of course not! Worshiping Vladimir Putin as a reincarnated saint is perfectly normal! In fact, maybe there are other reincarnated bible figures out there! Maybe Barack Obama is John the Baptist! That would cast Ann Coulter in the role of Salome, wouldn't it? By that line of thought, it seems likely that Osama bin Laden was a reincarnation of Judas. In one life, the guy hangs himself and his "bowels burst asunder," and then in the next he gets mowed down by some Navy SEALs. You'd think he'd eventually learn to play nice, wouldn't you?
Oh, and what about Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's chief political rival? You have to wonder how the sect handles this guy. Is he some sort of AntiPutin, or something? I wouldn't be surprised, given the status they've accorded Putin, if they spend at least a little time during their worship services ill-wishing Medvedev.
As for Putin himself, his reaction to finding out about his status as saint was said to be "bemused." "This is the first I've heard of such a religious group," said Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman. "It is impressive that they think so highly of the prime minister's work but I would like to recall another of the main commandments: thou shalt not worship false idols."
Yeah, I guess that one covers it, given that there's no commandment that says, "thou shalt not espouse views that make thee appear to be a raving wingnut." I'm frankly rather impressed that Putin hasn't made, um, "political capital" out of the whole thing, given that he's said to be something of a ladies' man, and is frequently seen running about shirtless and flaunting what are said to be fairly impressive biceps and pecs. But thus far, he's behaving himself, as are Mother Fotina and her acolytes.
So, for the time being, all's quiet out in Nizhny Novgorod. I suppose this is a good thing. Given all the trouble the Russians have had lately with UFO sightings and chicken carcasses dressed up to look like alien corpses, it's probably best that they don't have nubile young religious wackos tackling their prominent political figures.
Of course, it's this sort of thing that keeps Skeptophilia in business, so I do have to confess to some measure of ambivalence.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
A question about intercessory prayer
There are many things I don't get about religion, but one of the ones I understand the least is the idea of intercessory prayer.
The bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of god's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the divine ear. In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), god apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea. Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.
All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if god could change his mind. The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, god is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing. As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what god wants is a little silly. God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why on earth would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on earth simultaneously, change that?
So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis. Even if I often disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject. Here's what I found:
Interestingly enough, such an experiment has been done, and not with "poorly trained parrots" but with entire church congregations who were honestly desirous of a positive result, despite Lewis' objections (and despite verses such as Deuteronomy 6:16, "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test."). A well-publicized experiment in 2006 called STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Efficacy of Prayer) tested the medical outcomes of over 1800 coronary bypass patients, who were sorted into three groups. Group 1 and Group 2 were both told they might or might not be prayed for; only Group 1 was. Group 3 was told that they would be prayed for (and were). The thirty-day serious complication or mortality rate was nearly identical between Group 1 and Group 2 (51% and 52%, respectively); Group 3 had a significantly higher rate of complications or death (59%).
I won't go into the possible confounding factors for the higher death rate among Group 3; what interests me is more how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, Group 1 didn't show a lower risk of complications. "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" sounds good, but my thought is, if ever there was an opportunity for god to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it. You would think that if presumably god wants people to believe, and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.
You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point. He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me." Again, I have to wonder how this would work. How on earth would praying for something, to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen," and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me? Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."
While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage. But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the bible says we have to -- never mind why." Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it -- which I would welcome -- but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.
The bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of god's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the divine ear. In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), god apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea. Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.
All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if god could change his mind. The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, god is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing. As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what god wants is a little silly. God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why on earth would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on earth simultaneously, change that?
So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis. Even if I often disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject. Here's what I found:
Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will...
I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.
The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility. (from an essay called "Does Prayer Work?")
Interestingly enough, such an experiment has been done, and not with "poorly trained parrots" but with entire church congregations who were honestly desirous of a positive result, despite Lewis' objections (and despite verses such as Deuteronomy 6:16, "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test."). A well-publicized experiment in 2006 called STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Efficacy of Prayer) tested the medical outcomes of over 1800 coronary bypass patients, who were sorted into three groups. Group 1 and Group 2 were both told they might or might not be prayed for; only Group 1 was. Group 3 was told that they would be prayed for (and were). The thirty-day serious complication or mortality rate was nearly identical between Group 1 and Group 2 (51% and 52%, respectively); Group 3 had a significantly higher rate of complications or death (59%).
I won't go into the possible confounding factors for the higher death rate among Group 3; what interests me is more how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, Group 1 didn't show a lower risk of complications. "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" sounds good, but my thought is, if ever there was an opportunity for god to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it. You would think that if presumably god wants people to believe, and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.
You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point. He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me." Again, I have to wonder how this would work. How on earth would praying for something, to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen," and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me? Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."
While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage. But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the bible says we have to -- never mind why." Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it -- which I would welcome -- but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Today's forecast: planetary alignment, with a slight chance of catastrophe
This month, four planets will seem to meet in the night sky -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter will twice form "trios," a relatively rare event in which three planets are all within five degrees of each other. The first one occurs today; Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter will all be a little over two degrees apart. The second will be on May 21, when Mercury, Venus, and Mars will be just a hair further apart. Then, at the end of the month, the four planets will be stretched out in a straight line near the horizon.
All of this has an assortment of people leaping about making little squeaking noises. Astrologers, of course, think this is some pretty heavy stuff, of huge significance to people on Earth, and of even greater importance to anyone born on those days. I could probably find more details regarding what they think it all means, but every time I read astrological predictions a few more of my brain cells die, and heaven knows I can't afford to lose many more, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Then we have the Rapture crowd, who point out that it's significant that one of these Cosmic Convergences occurs on May 21, the day when Harold Camping believes that the Good Guys will be assumed bodily into heaven, and the Bad Guys will be left behind to face months of tribulations before Satan comes and eats us all for lunch. Never mind that trios have occurred many times in the past, and Satan hasn't shown. This time, they assure us, it's really gonna happen. Me, I'm waiting for May 22, which I'm guessing will show that unfortunately Camping et al. are still alive and well and living on Earth, albeit presumably somewhat embarrassed.
Then we have the woo-woos who think that it has something to do with the Mayan calendar, a topic I'm frankly getting fed up with. One website says that it will be "one of the most exciting, powerful and transformative celestial events of our millennium, according to astronomy and astrology experts." Others think it is the first sign of the impending chaos that will peak on December 21, 2012. A website I looked at states that "the combined gravitational effects of this alignment will wreak havoc with Earth's systems."
When I read that last one, I thought, "finally, a statement we can try to apply some science to!" What would be the combined gravitational pull of those four planets, if they were in alignment? Let's just look at the gravitational pull that would come from Jupiter, since it's the most massive planet (by far) and therefore should be the biggest contributor of this force. I used Newton's law of gravitation, and the value given for the closest approach between Jupiter and the Earth (the time at which this force would be the greatest). I calculated the force Jupiter would exert on a 1 kg mass on the surface of the Earth. And I came up with a value of...
...one ten-millionth of a Newton. For purposes of comparison, this is a hundred million times smaller than the force that the Earth itself is exerting. As noted earlier, the contributions of Mars, Venus, and Mercury would all be significantly less than that. So, I think we're safe from the alignment suddenly creating a gravitational imbalance that might cause people to trip over curbs or fall headlong out of their Barcaloungers right in the middle of Jersey Shore.
Of course, this hasn't stopped the talk. Nor, apparently, has it stopped the aliens, who you would think would understand physics better given that they have interstellar spaceships, from trying to warn us of the presumed impending catastrophe. A crop circle that appeared on Milk Hill in southern England, way back in June 2009, tried to warn us about the planetary alignment, but would we listen? Nooooooo. Here's a photograph of the crop circle:
My favorite part of the caption is where they say that the hieroglyphs were "clearly" alien-made, since humans are obviously incapable of producing bunches of illegible marks. (I think the next time one of my students submits a paper with horrid handwriting, I'm going to write on it, "I think you got help from superpowerful extraterrestrials on this assignment, as these are clearly alien hieroglyphs.")
Anyway, what this crop circle supposedly shows is a sextant and a schematic of the aligned planets, and was a portent of doom that the aliens were kind enough to provide for us. I wonder what we are supposed to do with this information, however? It's not like we can stop a planetary alignment, and getting out of the way is just a wee bit impractical. So as an advance warning, it's a remarkably pointless one, a little like telling someone who has fallen off a cliff, "Watch out for the ground."
If you'd like for some reason to read the entire explanation of how that crop circle is an alien warning, go here. Me, I'm done thinking about it. I might get out my binoculars to take a look at the planetary lineup, but I'm not going to get all worked up about it. I'm suspecting that the month of May will come and go without anything much happening, and the planets will come into alignment and wander away as they've done for millions of years, and no catastrophe will occur. Unless you count the fact that Harold Camping and crew will still be around afterwards.
All of this has an assortment of people leaping about making little squeaking noises. Astrologers, of course, think this is some pretty heavy stuff, of huge significance to people on Earth, and of even greater importance to anyone born on those days. I could probably find more details regarding what they think it all means, but every time I read astrological predictions a few more of my brain cells die, and heaven knows I can't afford to lose many more, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Then we have the Rapture crowd, who point out that it's significant that one of these Cosmic Convergences occurs on May 21, the day when Harold Camping believes that the Good Guys will be assumed bodily into heaven, and the Bad Guys will be left behind to face months of tribulations before Satan comes and eats us all for lunch. Never mind that trios have occurred many times in the past, and Satan hasn't shown. This time, they assure us, it's really gonna happen. Me, I'm waiting for May 22, which I'm guessing will show that unfortunately Camping et al. are still alive and well and living on Earth, albeit presumably somewhat embarrassed.
Then we have the woo-woos who think that it has something to do with the Mayan calendar, a topic I'm frankly getting fed up with. One website says that it will be "one of the most exciting, powerful and transformative celestial events of our millennium, according to astronomy and astrology experts." Others think it is the first sign of the impending chaos that will peak on December 21, 2012. A website I looked at states that "the combined gravitational effects of this alignment will wreak havoc with Earth's systems."
When I read that last one, I thought, "finally, a statement we can try to apply some science to!" What would be the combined gravitational pull of those four planets, if they were in alignment? Let's just look at the gravitational pull that would come from Jupiter, since it's the most massive planet (by far) and therefore should be the biggest contributor of this force. I used Newton's law of gravitation, and the value given for the closest approach between Jupiter and the Earth (the time at which this force would be the greatest). I calculated the force Jupiter would exert on a 1 kg mass on the surface of the Earth. And I came up with a value of...
...one ten-millionth of a Newton. For purposes of comparison, this is a hundred million times smaller than the force that the Earth itself is exerting. As noted earlier, the contributions of Mars, Venus, and Mercury would all be significantly less than that. So, I think we're safe from the alignment suddenly creating a gravitational imbalance that might cause people to trip over curbs or fall headlong out of their Barcaloungers right in the middle of Jersey Shore.
Of course, this hasn't stopped the talk. Nor, apparently, has it stopped the aliens, who you would think would understand physics better given that they have interstellar spaceships, from trying to warn us of the presumed impending catastrophe. A crop circle that appeared on Milk Hill in southern England, way back in June 2009, tried to warn us about the planetary alignment, but would we listen? Nooooooo. Here's a photograph of the crop circle:
My favorite part of the caption is where they say that the hieroglyphs were "clearly" alien-made, since humans are obviously incapable of producing bunches of illegible marks. (I think the next time one of my students submits a paper with horrid handwriting, I'm going to write on it, "I think you got help from superpowerful extraterrestrials on this assignment, as these are clearly alien hieroglyphs.")
Anyway, what this crop circle supposedly shows is a sextant and a schematic of the aligned planets, and was a portent of doom that the aliens were kind enough to provide for us. I wonder what we are supposed to do with this information, however? It's not like we can stop a planetary alignment, and getting out of the way is just a wee bit impractical. So as an advance warning, it's a remarkably pointless one, a little like telling someone who has fallen off a cliff, "Watch out for the ground."
If you'd like for some reason to read the entire explanation of how that crop circle is an alien warning, go here. Me, I'm done thinking about it. I might get out my binoculars to take a look at the planetary lineup, but I'm not going to get all worked up about it. I'm suspecting that the month of May will come and go without anything much happening, and the planets will come into alignment and wander away as they've done for millions of years, and no catastrophe will occur. Unless you count the fact that Harold Camping and crew will still be around afterwards.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Schizophrenic software and "that's what she said" jokes
If you have any doubt that we are well on our way to emulating a human mind within a machine, two stories in today's news should go a long way toward convincing you.
First, we have a program called DISCERN, developed by Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas at Austin. DISCERN is able to learn language naturally, through being shown examples and stories. When DISCERN is told a story, it is assimilated into memory not as a string of text, but as a set of statistical relationships between words. This is very similar to the way small children learn; as a simple example, when children hear combinations of words like "big dog," "black cat," "good food," and so on, their brains eventually induce the rule "adjectives come before the nouns they modify." DISCERN learns the same way.
Importantly, DISCERN is also programmed to forget. Words or relationships that occur with a low frequency are eventually deleted from memory. Again, this is very similar to our brain's way of processing.
After being fed many stories, DISCERN could communicate quite convincingly with its creators. It is, apparently, a candidate for passing the Turing Test, which is the metric for gauging artificial intelligence. The Turing Test, formulated by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, states that basically, if a computer program can fool a human, it's intelligent. That DISCERN is getting close to passing the Turing Test is impressive enough, but I haven't even gotten to the most amazing part.
Miikkulainen and his student, Uli Graesemann, ran DISCERN, but changed one parameter -- the rate at which it forgot old information with low statistical relevance. And when they reduced the rate at which DISCERN forgot, the program...
... wait for it...
... developed schizophrenia.
I am not making this up. As the "forget rate" decreased, DISCERN's output became increasingly erratic; the output began switching back and forth between first and third person, making statements that were syntactic gibberish, digressing abruptly while conversing, and claiming to be responsible for various bad things (natural disasters and terrorist bombings) that had been in the stories DISCERN had been fed. These language outputs were so suggestive of schizophrenia that Miikkulainen and Graesemann feel that they've hit on something that is emulating what happens in the brains of actual schizophrenia victims.
"We basically simulated what would happen in the brain if there were an excess of dopamine in the memory centers of the brain," Graesemann said. "The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance -- the salience -- of experience. When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from." Graesemann stressed that the idea that schizophrenia comes from impairment in the mechanism of forgetting is still unproven, but believes that the experiments with DISCERN support the hypothesis fairly convincingly.
On a happier note, two researchers at the University of Washington, Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, have taught a computer to understand dirty jokes.
Well, specifically, one kind of dirty joke -- the "That's What She Said" joke. Double entendres have been around for years, and in fact what is now called a "That's What She Said" joke in the US was known for years in Britain as "... said the actress to the bishop." (An example: a student of mine was describing being nervous about getting a vaccination. Apparently the nurse was taking a long time getting the needle ready, and he said, "I was just sitting there thinking, 'Hurry up, just stick it in and get it over with!'" At this point, about fifteen of his friends chimed in, "THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.")
So, anyway, Kiddon and Brun characterized the double entendre as a "hard natural language understanding problem," and set about to try to see if they could teach a computer to "get the joke." They started by analyzing sentences and evaluating them for erotic or non-erotic content, and rated words for their "sexiness quotient" -- presumably a good gauge of how promising a particular phrase might be for a TWSS joke. After a lot of training, the software got a hit rate of 70%, which is pretty impressive, given that my ex-wife doesn't get jokes nearly that often.
However, it does mean that 30% of its jokes didn't work, and resulted in knee-slappingly hilarious output like "The Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871... That's what she said." So they have some work still to do. On the other hand, humor is definitely a higher-level brain function; it requires the ability to map two concepts onto one another, often in unexpected ways. The makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation understood that -- in making Data humorless, they identified one thing that is somehow quintessentially human.
Not that I think it will be impossible to emulate; Kiddon and Brun have taken the first steps. I think it's only a matter of time before we have computers that are convincingly intelligent, that could pass the Turing Test with one megabyte of RAM tied behind their CPUs. And Miikkulainen and Graesemann have shown that when that occurs, we will have to worry about the same kinds of neural net breakdowns that occur in humans, a prospect I find distinctly scary. (Did HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey just come to mind for you? Yeah, me too.)
The direction that computer science is taking is sounding increasingly like science fiction, and one has to wonder about the potential dangers -- the fictional universe is densely populated with computer networks that have gone insane and started murdering people. But that notwithstanding, I think it's worth pursuing, if for no other reason, for increasing our understanding of how our own minds work.
First, we have a program called DISCERN, developed by Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas at Austin. DISCERN is able to learn language naturally, through being shown examples and stories. When DISCERN is told a story, it is assimilated into memory not as a string of text, but as a set of statistical relationships between words. This is very similar to the way small children learn; as a simple example, when children hear combinations of words like "big dog," "black cat," "good food," and so on, their brains eventually induce the rule "adjectives come before the nouns they modify." DISCERN learns the same way.
Importantly, DISCERN is also programmed to forget. Words or relationships that occur with a low frequency are eventually deleted from memory. Again, this is very similar to our brain's way of processing.
After being fed many stories, DISCERN could communicate quite convincingly with its creators. It is, apparently, a candidate for passing the Turing Test, which is the metric for gauging artificial intelligence. The Turing Test, formulated by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, states that basically, if a computer program can fool a human, it's intelligent. That DISCERN is getting close to passing the Turing Test is impressive enough, but I haven't even gotten to the most amazing part.
Miikkulainen and his student, Uli Graesemann, ran DISCERN, but changed one parameter -- the rate at which it forgot old information with low statistical relevance. And when they reduced the rate at which DISCERN forgot, the program...
... wait for it...
... developed schizophrenia.
I am not making this up. As the "forget rate" decreased, DISCERN's output became increasingly erratic; the output began switching back and forth between first and third person, making statements that were syntactic gibberish, digressing abruptly while conversing, and claiming to be responsible for various bad things (natural disasters and terrorist bombings) that had been in the stories DISCERN had been fed. These language outputs were so suggestive of schizophrenia that Miikkulainen and Graesemann feel that they've hit on something that is emulating what happens in the brains of actual schizophrenia victims.
"We basically simulated what would happen in the brain if there were an excess of dopamine in the memory centers of the brain," Graesemann said. "The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance -- the salience -- of experience. When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from." Graesemann stressed that the idea that schizophrenia comes from impairment in the mechanism of forgetting is still unproven, but believes that the experiments with DISCERN support the hypothesis fairly convincingly.
On a happier note, two researchers at the University of Washington, Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, have taught a computer to understand dirty jokes.
Well, specifically, one kind of dirty joke -- the "That's What She Said" joke. Double entendres have been around for years, and in fact what is now called a "That's What She Said" joke in the US was known for years in Britain as "... said the actress to the bishop." (An example: a student of mine was describing being nervous about getting a vaccination. Apparently the nurse was taking a long time getting the needle ready, and he said, "I was just sitting there thinking, 'Hurry up, just stick it in and get it over with!'" At this point, about fifteen of his friends chimed in, "THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.")
So, anyway, Kiddon and Brun characterized the double entendre as a "hard natural language understanding problem," and set about to try to see if they could teach a computer to "get the joke." They started by analyzing sentences and evaluating them for erotic or non-erotic content, and rated words for their "sexiness quotient" -- presumably a good gauge of how promising a particular phrase might be for a TWSS joke. After a lot of training, the software got a hit rate of 70%, which is pretty impressive, given that my ex-wife doesn't get jokes nearly that often.
However, it does mean that 30% of its jokes didn't work, and resulted in knee-slappingly hilarious output like "The Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871... That's what she said." So they have some work still to do. On the other hand, humor is definitely a higher-level brain function; it requires the ability to map two concepts onto one another, often in unexpected ways. The makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation understood that -- in making Data humorless, they identified one thing that is somehow quintessentially human.
Not that I think it will be impossible to emulate; Kiddon and Brun have taken the first steps. I think it's only a matter of time before we have computers that are convincingly intelligent, that could pass the Turing Test with one megabyte of RAM tied behind their CPUs. And Miikkulainen and Graesemann have shown that when that occurs, we will have to worry about the same kinds of neural net breakdowns that occur in humans, a prospect I find distinctly scary. (Did HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey just come to mind for you? Yeah, me too.)
The direction that computer science is taking is sounding increasingly like science fiction, and one has to wonder about the potential dangers -- the fictional universe is densely populated with computer networks that have gone insane and started murdering people. But that notwithstanding, I think it's worth pursuing, if for no other reason, for increasing our understanding of how our own minds work.
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