Why chicks don’t dig the singularity. It’s a long, but interesting read.

Why chicks don’t dig the singularity. It’s a long, but interesting read.

Why chicks don’t dig the singularity. It’s a long, but interesting read.

The new, guaranteed, stop-smoking-instantly kit. Consisting of a hammer and ice pick.

Did the anthropogenic climate-change era start thousands of years ago?

Michael Novak writes about prayer. His example of Sartre is just more evidence for my thesis, I think. If I’ve ever prayed in my life, it was only as a very young (pre-school) child, and then only because I was told I was supposed to. I don’t ever recall any sense that there was anyone home when I did so, and I haven’t done so since the age of five or so.

As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, he tried hard all his life to be a serious atheist, but even he felt himself breaking out in thanksgiving to God for certain beautiful days, certain stunning events. Of course, he then withdrew these “prayers,” but he quite recognized the naturalness of the impulse in himself. He wrote that being atheist is in practice much harder than many let on. One needs to stay on watch at every moment against little surrenders. The world so often seems “as if” there is a God.

Despite the fact that he reasoned himself into atheism, he was a natural-born believer. I’ve never felt an impulse such as that he describes, and the world has never seemed “as if” there is a God to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, and just to make clear, nothing in either of these two posts should be construed as an argument either for, or against, the existence of God. If God exists, He does so entirely independently of my, or anyone else’s beliefs about Him.

Errrr…unless, of course, you think that God exists for those who believe, and doesn’t for those who don’t. Which may actually be the closest thing to the truth.

Razib over at Gene Expression has an interesting interview with Heather McDonald on faith and conservatism, and her disillusionment with much of what conservatism seems to have become. I disagree with her that George Bush hasn’t damaged the cause of conservatism. While I agree that he’s not a conservative, and that his policies shouldn’t do so, the popular mythology is that he is a conservative, and so they will.

But more interesting to me is this tangent, brought up by the Derb:

I don’t want to rain on Heather Mac Donald’s parade, especially after the sweet compliment she paid me in that Q&A Ramesh linked to, but consider the following:

There’s an interesting discussion over at Fighting Aging, on the efficacy of the current institutional and philosophical approaches to life extension:

I think I take the opposite side of the argument from Linksvayer above: in my opinion it matters greatly as to the banner you raise funding beneath. The problem we face today is not a lack of funding for medical research per se – rather, it is a culture disinterested in tackling aging head-on. It doesn’t matter how much money is flowing into the study of aging or treating age-related disease if the defeat of aging is not a primary, agreed-upon, widely supported goal. There has never been any trouble in raising funding for new methods of tackling specific age-related disease, but look at the rate of progress today in extending healthy life span in the old; it’s faster than zero, but if healthy life extension continues to be incidental and inefficient, we will all still age, suffer and die – and not significantly later than we would have done if medical science stood still. In this context here, I rate “not significantly” as a couple of decades – sounds good, but it is enormously worse than what is possible if we get our act together.

It doesn’t have to be that way, however – we have a chance to change things quickly enough to matter. The change we need to enact is at the level of infrastructure, understanding and intent. When the expected cost of development and commercialization of new technology runs into the hundreds of billions, it doesn’t happen by accident. At that scale, the only change and progress to come about is that enacted deliberately and with intent, in an atmosphere of sufficient support and understanding to make ongoing fundraising and collaboration possible.

In other words, if you’re not working on A, don’t expect to achieve A.

For someone my age, there could be a big (as in fatal) difference between ten years and twenty, though it’s obviously much more critical for those more advanced in age than me. “Spin-off” is often used as a (flawed) argument in favor of NASA spending. It’s not flawed just because many of the things claimed for it (teflon, Tang, microchips) are patently false, but because the argument can always be made that if one wants better microchips or breakfast beverages, efforts spent directly toward those ends will be more effective. I think that “Reason” is making the same argument here, and he’s right.

I wasn’t sure how to categorize this post. This kind of research, and breakthroughs, are going to require a combination of science (figuring out how stuff works) and technology (figuring out how to make it work better).

Richard Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary theorist, and popularizer of science, but over at the NYT Review of Books, H. Allen Orr isn’t very impressed with his recent screed against religion:

Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he’s actually more an amateur.

Jane Galt talks about the not-so Bright Daniel Dennett (who I think is brilliant in many ways, but certainly not this one). He really does seem clueless about human nature, and the need for belief systems.