I’ve really enjoyed the Carnival Of The Godless. I’ve been meaning to write something for it, ’cause it is all right up my alley, but, alas, I haven’t. Perhaps the next one. If you are interested in issues like the separation of chuch and state, the evolution vs. religious insanity debate or other issues of the secular movement, check it out.
I was thinking about what intelligence is. We all know there are different kinds of intelligence, like people who are smart at math or vocabulary or have practical intelligence or social intelligence, etc. The word can have a very broad number of uses. Specifically, though, when I meet someone and I get the sense that they are very intelligent, what makes me think so?
In pondering this one thing that came to mind is: intelligent people get more information out of less data. They realize the implications of things and can “read between the lines”. Another way to think of this is that they “get it”. This implies there is a certain aspect of awareness to this sort of intelligence. Intelligent people are ultra-aware. In fact, when people are unaware it generally makes me think they are unintelligent. Even simple examples — when someone is standing talking in a hallway in a place where they are an obstacle and people are having to jostle around them. Or when people are talking on the phone and are walking or driving inattentively. I always think “wake up, stupid!”. You can’t be intelligent if you are unaware.
So what impresses me about intelligent people is they are very aware of what is going on, they are getting as much information as is possible out of the amount of data they have, and they put it all together quickly and in a way that emphasizes what is important. Some people are smart but they get caught up in the unimportant details of things.
As someone who is a great admirer of intelligence, the thing that scares me most is a culture that does not embrace it. Like, in school when being considered “a brain” was a bad thing. Or people who scoff at intellectuals. Or the “tall poppy” syndrome where being smart makes you get cut down. I hate the very thought of these things. I’m not some elitist who thinks that smart people are somehow “better” than less smart people. I am an elitist, though, who thinks that people who do not strive to be as smart and as educated as possible are missing out. I can’t think of anything dumber than embracing dumbness.
Human beings are marvelous creatures and 99.99% of what makes us different from the other animals on this planet are our brains. You are reading these words over a global public network using technology created by people who were smart and put that intelligence to use. We are surrounded by the fruits of the labor of centuries of smart people. Be one of them. Use your head. Think. It’s why you are here.
Am I the only one slightly bothered by all these yellow ribbons stuck on cars that say “Support Our Troops”? I don’t know a single person in this country who doesn’t support our troops. These are our sons, daughters, cousins, uncles, etc. and of course we support them. So in one sense it is like getting a bumper sticker that says “I Breathe Air”. Yes, I know you do, so do I.
But I do understand that for some people a gesture of support to their loved ones overseas is important. They want us to remember that there are people over there, far from their families, in harm’s way. That doesn’t bother me at all and I understand completely.
What bothers me is that we put these people in harm’s way because we were lied to. We were told that Iraq represented a clear and present danger to the United States. That was not true. Now we are told that Saddam was a bad man and that we have a mission to spread “liberty”. This is another lie. There are lots of bad men in power and we have historically befriended them if we thought it was in our interest. Hence the famous photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. This is not a war about bad men, it’s a war about controlling the world’s oil supply. We have our sons, daughters, cousins, uncles, etc. dying far from home so we can have cheap gas for our SUVs. That is immoral.
The disconnect here is that the United States military is being used as an economic tactic. We are killing others and getting our relatives killed to serve the interests of the oil industry, the auto industry and the military-industrial complex. That is not something that should be commemorated with little yellow ribbons. It is a deep betrayal of the American people by a bunch of ultra-rich neocons. The fact that 50% of the people of this country are too stupid to realize this is a major disappointment to the moral and fair-minded people of the world who are completely appalled by these lies and tactics.
So as you drive around in a car with 100 times more power than you need, with 100 times more room than you need for you and your briefcase, sucking down fuel at an enormous and wasteful rate, think about the child whose Dad is not coming home to keep your gas cheap. Then think a little bit about the irony of your stupid yellow ribbon.
Our troops should not be the tool of an immoral oligarchy.
A given star, at a given time, has a certain temperature and a certain luminosity. It turns out if you plot temperature vs. luminosity of a whole bunch of stars, they aren’t distributed randomly — there is a certain pattern that is apparent. The pattern is dominated by a swath that goes through the center of the plot. This swath is called the Main Sequence.
Stars spend most of their life on the main sequence.
The problem is, there are two things that can make a star appear bright or dim — the intrinsic brightness of the star and how far away the star is. If you know a bunch of star are all roughly the same distance away, like in clusters of stars, you can assume all the differences in brightness you observe are due to intrinsic brightness differences in the star. Then rather than plotting luminosity and temperature, you get the same result plotting the color of the star vs. the brightness of the star.
I tried this little experiment with my telescope on a cluster known as M38. The resulting plot showing the main sequence looks like this:
So in a very minor sense, using my own equipment, I have proven a basic observational fact in stellar evolution: the existence of the main sequence.
I don’t usually write about silly stuff like this but…
Last night I had some microwave popcorn from Pop Secret. I was disgusted by how sweet it was. I couldn’t believe someone would put sugar in popcorn. I looked at the ingredients and it had fucking sucralose in it.
I just disgusts me how these food companies think we want everything to be sweet. You can buy orange juice with high fructose corn syrup in it. Who the hell needs high fructose corn syrup in fucking orange juice?
I think these idiots get fooled by taste tests where people taste things side by side. I’m guessing your average dumb ass always prefers the sweeter one. Thus we head down this road where everything gets sweeter and sweeter and sweeter and we all get fatter and fatter and fatter.
Not to mention how fucking horrible sucralose is. It tastes like shit and it is made out of shit.
I shan’t be buying Pop Secret ever again in my life.
A-fucking-men to this:
Atheism and children By Natalie Angier.
Of particular interest is the distinction she makes between being an atheist and an agnostic. She says something to the effect that given the Gods that current relgions let us choose from, she is undoubtedly an atheist. Yet she doesn’t shy from the possibility that there may be a lot we don’t know or can’t know about the true nature of the universe. I think that is a pretty fair way to put it.
As a father, I’ve wondered how to raise my child(ren) in light of my non-religious nature. People always say things like “You need to give them a foundation in faith from which they can explore, etc.” I wonder if it is not better to give a child a foundation of rationality with a wide open sense of what may be possible. I think regligious dogma is not a particularly great foundation for children to start from. The purpose of life, in my opinion, is to forever search to answer these questions. Once you think you know the answer you stop looking and that is a sort of death.
I’m not scared of the word atheist but I still don’t think it adequately says what I am. I don’t want to put limits on what may be possible. I am leaving myself open to anything. It’s just that the mythological religions of this world are, to me, among the least probable explanations.
lolife 