Boston

Yesterday two bombs were detonated at the Boston Marathon, killing several people and injuring many others. In the aftermath, I've heard laments about how such acts of terrorism show that our country has degraded. I disagree. 

It is a place where -- just seconds after explosions ripped through the crowd -- police, volunteers, photographers, runners, spectators, race officials, and national guard soldiers rushed in to help the injured, tossing barricades and debris out of the way to provide first aid and comfort to those in need. It is a place where people opened their homes and businesses to stranded, shell shocked runners. It is a place where exhausted people who had just run 26.2 miles realized a need and ran to a hospital to donate blood.

We should not let ourselves be defined by the terrible acts of a deranged few, certainly not against the contrast of far more numerous acts of heroism both large and small shown by the many who responded with immediate compassion and selflessness.

Faith vs Trust

There is an important distinction to make here. Trust is not the same thing as faith. For example, I place trust in science. That trust is always provisional, always conditional, and scales up or down based on the evidence presented and the confidence I have in it. That is not faith. It is not blind or absolute or unquestioning or unwavering. It is not strongest in the absence of evidence but instead would diminish.

Although not synonymous, faith and trust do nevertheless share something in common. They are both ways of establishing standards for deciding what to believe and how to evaluate claims about reality. They just go about this very differently, leaving faith to be little different from credulity and gullibility. As such, I do not value it or venerate it or respect it. I consider it potentially harmful, misguided, and inferior as an analytical tool.

Now that does not mean that I consider people of faith to be inferior. A person can have a bad way of doing something, that doesn’t automatically make the person bad. And just because I do not value faith does not mean I don’t value the person holding it. A person has intellect, feelings, dignity and is entitled to respect. Concepts, ideas, and beliefs do not and are not so entitled.

Gaps

There are a multitude of questions about the nature of the universe that I do not know the answers to. I am not alone in this. In fact I suspect that humanity will never know every answer because as we learn, we uncover more questions. So there will forever be gaps in our knowledge, areas of ongoing research, or questions we do not yet have the technology to explore.

However our current inability to understand some facet of the universe does not cast the whole endeavor of verifiable, scalable, human understanding into doubt. Nor should the rest of us take seriously someone who chooses to fill those gaps with untestable fantasies or mythology, even if those ideas can't be definitely ruled out.

We can't rule out invisible pink unicorns. We can't rule out a tiny teapot in orbit around the Sun, between Earth and Mars. Belief in either proposition is unreasonable, silly even. Those ideas are unsupported by evidence and inconsistent with the knowledge we currently have. Not all ideas are created equal or should be treated as though they have the same chance of being correct.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Atheist or Agnostic

A video of one of my favorite science communicators, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, has hit the internet recently. In it he explains why he does not identify as an atheist or see much need for labels like that.

Here is a link to the video in question.

Dr. Tyson has gone out of his way to not adopt the atheist label for years. He is an educator who does science outreach to a very diverse audience, many of whom would not listen to him if he were identified as an activist atheist. If he is happy with a soft approach, then I'm happy to applaud his efforts. It can be a useful method of reaching people and I'm glad to have him in that role. He's good at it.

However, I do take issue with how he seemed to discount the need for the label or for organizations of atheists. Being able to be around like minded people is something humans crave. Being an atheist in most of the US means being a vilified minority. Being an atheist in other parts of the world can be a death sentence. Which is why his analogies break down, because as annoying as skiers might be to non-skiers, there is no need to organize non-skiers to stand up to discrimination, anti-science legislation, or the trampling of rights by skiers. We need educators like Dr. Tyson, but we need activists too.

http://xkcd.com/154/

It isn't all that rare, Mr. Akin

“Akin’s belief that rape-related pregnancy is 'really rare', unfortunately, does not match the empirical evidence on the matter. In fact, results from Gottschall and Gottschall’s examination of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that the per-incident rape-related pregnancy rate is higher (6.42% to 7.98%) than the per-incident pregnancy rate of those engaging in consensual unprotected penile-vaginal sex (3.1%).”

-John Sakaluk

http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2012/8/22/of-elephants-and-onions-rape-pregnancy-and-labeling.html

Just another wave of social conservatism

In light of the controversy surrounding Republican Representative and Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri, some Tea Party supporters have been trying to distance themselves from Akin. They insist that their brand of conservatism is fiscal and above the petty distinctions between the Democrats and the Republicans. Tea Party people, they tell me, are bipartisan with diverse opinions on social policy who are united only by their shared concern over runaway government spending.

I call bullshit on that. The Republicans elected in the wave of Tea Party support in 2010 are instead full bore conservatives, up to and including being extreme social conservatives. And that is exactly what their voting record shows. In the US Congress as well as many state governments, as soon as Tea Party Republicans got seated, they began to work on that hallmark of social conservative issues: anti-abortion legislation. They were very successful at it too.

In the first six months of 2011, state legislatures enacted 162 new provisions concerning reproductive health and rights. The majority Republican US House of Representatives passed federal restrictions on abortion and reproductive health care funding in the Protect Life Act which even included some now familiar redefinitions of rape to be only “forcible rape” in early drafts. Incidentally, every single House Republican voted to pass the Protect Life Act. All told, 2011 was a record year for laws restricting abortion and limiting reproductive rights for women.

http://www.guttmacher.org/media/inthenews/2011/07/13/index.html

Even if I did agree with Tea Party Republicans on their economic and fiscal ideas (I don’t by the way) I would still not vote for them, because of their social conservatism. That they lie about that facet of their political agenda makes them even more repellant to me.

Thirteen point one miles

Today my wife and I ran the Chicago Rock 'n Roll half marathon. That's 13.1 miles and that is the second time we've done it in the last two weeks. OK, in all fairness the first time was not an official event and we just ran on a local trail for the distance to see if we could. We did then and we did today, both times managing to finish in less than three hours. My official time today was 2:57:58. I'm pleased with my results, especially as someone who has only been running for a bit more than a year, just turned forty, and smoked for more than 20 years (quit again this Summer).

My number, etc. from the race

Trying in vain to write my info on the back of the plastic race bib

Here I am ready to start

My lovely wife, Liza

Map of the course

I snapped this at about mile 6

Willis Tower is in the distance

My official results

My lovely wife, Liza, has a blog post about the race too.