Week end catch up

I haven't posted for a week, but the lure of the internet remained too strong to resist. Here are some stories I would normally have posted about:

* What on earth does it take to get Channel Nine to sack Sam Newman? I'm appalled that there aren't enough people appalled by his recent, absolutely 100% offensive "monkey" comments to achieve the end of his career. What is wrong with the people of Melbourne in particular?

* Slate ran a review of a new book on "Greek Love" and suggested that it contained lessons for the current gay marriage debate:

In short, there was no single "traditional" way to conduct same-sex relationships in ancient Greece. This fact in itself might make us leery of any claims about what a "normal" or "traditional" domestic setup might look like. Love comes in many guises and gets culturally legitimized in many ways, and that has been true since antiquity. Any claim about "the way things have always been" is liable to be false.

Hmm. The only thing overlooked is that same-sex relationships have historically been "culturally legitimized" in "many" ways except marriage. See, it's not just old fuddy duddy conservative Christians saying gay marriage makes no sense, even the pagans were on side with that one.

* Let's not get overly excited about the reports of water on the moon. The quantities are not big:

So far, the water does not appear to be very abundant – a baseball-field-sized swathe of lunar soil might yield only "a nice glass of water", Pieters told New Scientist.

I'm still pinning hopes on underground ice at the poles.

* I did the truly pointless and got involved in a thread about theodicy at the Evolution blog at Science Blogs. How does Science Blogs get to pick its members? Do they have to pass some test of anti-religious sentiment before they can join the group?

* The dust cloud in Brisbane of last night (Saturday) was nearly as unpleasant in smell and sinus irritation as the day time one on Wednesday. I can recall no precedent for these at all for Brisbane. Let's hope they do not become a regular spring feature.

* Yay! Free will seems to not have been experimentally disproved after all. Always did have my doubts about the Libet experiments. (Funnily enough, the atheists calling me an idiot at Evolution blog seemed to find the idea of free will, upon which a lot of theodicy is based, a concept also not worthy of belief. Keep them away from moral philosophy, and don't let really serious scientific materialists sit on juries, I say.)

* Finally, especially for Geoff, I thought the middle section of this comment about transhumanists was very funny:

Transhumanists are like the eccentric uncle of the cognitive science community. Not the sort of eccentric uncle who gets drunk at family parties and makes inappropriate comments about your kid sister (that would be drug reps), but the sort that your disapproving parents thinks is a bit peculiar but is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas.

They occasionally take themselves too seriously and it's the sort of sci-fi philosophy that has few practical implications but it's enormously good fun and is great for making you re-evaluate your assumptions.