They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Robin Hanson thinks sexsomniacs (people who have sex in a sleepwalking state) should be punished just like regular rapists when they (unknowingly) begin to have sex with someone who does not consent.  To be clear:  rape is a heinous thing and, along with murder, stands in my mind as an essentially peerless crime.  There are few, if any, more fundamental or horrifying ways in which to violate another human being. Perhaps it was Hanson’s use of the imperative in his title (“Punish Sleep-Rape”) that rankled me.

To justify his point, he devises two possible arguments against punishment of sexsomniac rapists:

1. We should punish premeditated or intentional transgressions more severely than we would unconscious transgressions.
2. The mind is comprised of two distinct states: the conscious and the unconscious.  Thus, behaviors emanating from conscious processes should be punished more severely.

Hanson goes on to summarily dismiss both of these imagined arguments, presumably without … Read more

The Mammoth Reads series is to be a (hopefully) regular to semi-regular shortlist of (hopefully) interesting things I’ve read recently.  (Hopefully) you’ll click a link or two.

Most of these lists will not have long, ridiculous, impossible-to-read titles like this one, but I figured I would kick this series off in irritating fashion.

You Are a Poor Scientist, Dr. Venkman

Prof. Andrew Gelman counters a few claims from a Weekly Standard editorial by emeritus professor David Rubinstein, formerly of the University of Chicago at Illinois, in which Rubinstein claims that professors are paid too much for their “cushy” jobs.  Rubinstein is of the opinion that the current system—namely tenure track—encourages laziness.  Gelman makes some interesting observations about the function of good salaries and benefits in luring top-notch professors, and seems not to buy Rubinstein’s impression that these are necessarily bad things.  Gelman also suggests that Rubinstein simply might be a bit … Read more

On the heels of yesterday’s post, it looks like another active severe weather day in the central Plains.  The National Weather Service has issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) declaration as part of Tornado Watch #356.  Northern Texas and central Oklahoma are most likely going to see an outbreak of violent storms:  the probability of at least two tornadoes forming within the watch area before 10 p.m. currently stands at 90%, and the probability of at least one strong tornado (EF2-EF5) at 70%.  Forecasts predicting the April outbreak listed similarly probabilities, and in both cases these chances are listed at higher probabilities than I can recall seeing prior to this year.  (Perhaps 2008, another uncommonly active year, saw a couple of days with higher than 60% probabilities as well.)

I was leafing through my Google Reader subscriptions this morning and found an interesting post by Andrew Revkin, who … Read more

After news of the Joplin, MO tornado—which killed at least 89 people and carved a mile-wide rut through the town—I started thinking about how remarkably active this tornado season has been.  We are way, way above the ten-year average for this time of year, both in terms of the raw number of tornadoes as well as tornado deaths.

Dr. Greg Forbes at Weather.com has written us a brief summary of these statistics (with two nice graphs) that I highly recommend reading.  We’re already in the midst of the deadliest tornado season since 1953, and we’ve logged two of the ten deadliest tornado days in U.S. history during 2011.

Forbes mentions that forecasting and severe weather warning systems have come a long way over the course of a few decades; and he cites tornadoes hitting larger population centers this year as the primary reason for the high number of … Read more

If you take a look at my pool league’s TopGun MVP standings, you’ll see me listed right there at the top of Division 423, in first place.  There’s only one problem:  I don’t deserve it, not one bit.

Ask my teammates, and they’ll tell you I’m one of those sticky players, one of the annoying types that manages to do just enough to stay alive, to let you hang yourself on your own mistakes.  In reality, I have enjoyed a profound streak of good luck.  I haven’t lost in nine weeks.

I have the privilege of enjoying such success partially because the league is handicapped.  I am ranked as a Four—a low ranking—after spending most of the season to date as a Three; the rankings go up to Seven. If I play a Seven, I need to win two games to his/her five, if I remember correctly, in order … Read more

This is just a quick FYI for anyone in the Chicago area who would be interested:  My good friend Neil Gorman is helping to organize a CreatorCamp event in Chicago.  The event will be held on May 14 at the Bottom Lounge on Lake Street.  For more information, check out the website.

Neil is the founder of Scholar’s Tea and is the Tea Wizard behind Lao Ren Cha, where he blogs about tea and endures the occasional antagonistic tirade from yours truly.  He is a good man, and thorough. … Read more

Greater blue-ringed octopus. Photo by Jens Petersen (Wikimedia Commons).

Horseshit… ok, not exactly horseshit.  You are, I suppose, beautiful just the way you are—in the same way that a Sequoia or a blue-ringed octopus is beautiful.  The sheer mathematical improbability of your existence is a marvel, to be sure; you’re a unique snowflake who is greater than 99% similar to me and anyone else on this planet.  This is all clinically interesting, technically beautiful.  And I make these observations without trying to dull the sense of wonder that should rightfully exist about us humans.  We’re incredible creatures, certainly the most intelligent and evolved species on the planet as long as intelligence is your primary metric.

But I was once told I was a bad person for refuting the Relative Beauty Hypothesis (RBH), for claiming this is the biggest lie we like to tell people, especially our children.  (Well, not our… Read more

We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.  Marwood in Withnail & I

I’m sitting on a screed (saved as a draft) that I will never be able to post online because of the dastardly implications should I be so foolish.  Generally, the awareness that a disaster is preventable is not apparent to me until after the catastrophe hits, but this one, I’m fairly certain, is simply a lot of bad noise waiting to happen.

Not that I’d have to worry about much, anyway, even if I did post the thing.  As far as I can tell, readership on this worthless blog of mine has nearly hit zero; and the page visits these stats widgets do record can almost certainly be chalked up to random noise generated by spambots and the more than billion Google searches logged per day.  In fact, almost all of my traffic is … Read more

Well, they did it; and good for them.  The people of Egypt finally managed to run Hosni Mubarak out of town on a rail and paved the way for a democratic future—assuming the Egyptian military, which has now taken on the responsibilities of the President, doesn’t succumb to the vice grips of power and greed.  Its willingness to act as a short-lived transitional government isn’t a sure thing, but the gamble is one worth taking.  The military itself was split between those who supported the protesters and those who wanted to see Mubarak cling to life until September, when God-knows-what would happen.  Those odds are better than what Egypt would get with Omar Suleiman at the helm, though, and its beginning to sound more and more like the army will comply with quick transition.

Being a little late for work this morning, I was fortunate enough to hear the BBC’s coverage of Mubarak’s resignation … Read more

Photo by reurinkjan.

Be thankful you weren’t at 63rd Street Billiards last night to witness my return to semi-competitive pool.  The scene you would have witnessed was a bad one—one of those awful displays of human fallibility that suddenly makes hanging from a noose seem the reasonable, even proper, thing to do.  There is nothing quite so discouraging as seeing a human being consumed so fully by his basest male primate instincts over something as inane as hitting balls into pockets with sticks; but even if we can chalk my chest-beating displays and frothing, red-faced tantrums up to simple machinations of the hypothalamus and amygdala, we shouldn’t be so quick to forgive such petulant outbursts.  From me or anyone else.  (And I make this assertion in the face of emerging research that seriously calls into question whether we have any free will at all.)

Losing is emasculating.

Your standard male … Read more

Whenever one has the audacity to bring up the topic of evolution in front of a Creationist, the Creationist will invariably (if he is somewhat educated) ask to see proof of these transitional species evolutionists are always talking about. The very request is silly. All species are transitional. What the Creationist wants is a fossil of an ape-man or a fish-squirrel, some clear cartoonish symbol of movement from one species to the next. Of course, evolution doesn’t work in this way. Not remotely.

But every now and then scientists unearth a fossil that contains either vestiges of an organism’s past or early mutations that eventually led to its future.  PhysOrg.com published one such example today: a snake with legs.  Findings like this aren’t entirely novel.  Some whales, after all, have femurs and tibias.  (The NCSE article is an old one, but consider it a primer.  I’m sure the … Read more

Jay Cutler (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, User: Mike Shadle)

You try that [screaming] with a pineapple down your windpipe. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ep. 4: Owl Stretching Time, “Self Defence”

I’m no big Jay Cutler fan.  He throws off of his back foot; he holds on to the ball too long and too often when the defense is about to smash his face into the turf; he doesn’t tuck the fucking ball when he rushes.

But Cutler is a pretty good quarterback.  In fact, about twenty teams in this league don’t have a quarterback of his caliber, and what Jay did this season is impressive in its own right because he did it all with a pineapple down his windpipe.  The guy was sacked 52 times and played 15 regular season games, missing only one due to a concussion.  He was absolutely leveled a number of times and got back … Read more