Martin Gardner - a belief ignored

The Great Beyond: RIP Martin Gardner

So Martin Gardner, who is well known and respected in skeptic circles, has died at the age of 95.

Apart from his long running maths columns in Scientific American, he is best known for his work “discrediting scientific fraud and quackery”. This means, for example, that he is getting favourable and sympathetic comments from rabid atheist PZ Myers and his followers.

Yet, few people are noting in detail that, despite his generally skeptical take on life, Gardner never became an atheist, and wrote an entire book in which he justified his "philosophical theism."

The book is "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener", and I do have a yellowing copy on my bookshelf. As someone who wrote a review at Amazon explains:

Gardner is a "fideist," meaning that he acknowledges the impossibility of demonstrating rationally the existence of God and related issues, but insisting that faith is an appropriate mechanism for getting around these difficulties. Gardner is never heavy-handed or preachy in his positions, and he gives the arguments against him a fair hearing.

That's a position I basically agree with, and as such I did find it a very good read. Gardner did not go so far as to believe in Christianity, but his position is one that I think any thoughtful Christian could call a very reasonable "fall-back" position.

What I find a little curious, though, is how in atheist circles, like PZ Myers' blog, this aspect of Gardner seems to be being ignored, or at least downplayed. I don't really see why Gardner's views, and his deep faith in "faith", so to speak, should not be the subject of the same ridicule that Catholics and other Christians have faced from Myers. Maybe he just hasn't read the book.

In fact, I am a little curious as to whether Gardner in his later years, was starting to get a bit indignant about the aggression of the "new atheism".

Someone else has already noted that the New York Times obituary paints his religious belief quite misleadingly, if you have read his "Whys.." book. I suspect it is one of his least read, but most deserving, works.

Strangest consequence of 9/11

9/11 attacks linked to loss of male babies | e! Science News

This is a very surprising story:

The stress caused by psychological shock from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, felt even by people with no direct link to the event, may have led to an increased number of male children being miscarried in the US. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health found that the fetal death rate for boys spiked in September 2001, and that significantly fewer boys than expected were born in December of that year...

Bruckner and his colleagues used data from the National Vital Statistics System, which compiles fetal death data from all fifty states of the US, from January 1996 to December 2002 to calculate how many male fetal losses would be expected in a 'normal' September. They found that in September 2001, this figure was significantly exceeded. Speaking about the reasons for this, Bruckner said, "Across many species, stressful times reportedly reduce the male birth rate. This is commonly thought to reflect some mechanism conserved by natural selection to improve the mother's overall reproductive success."

A good comment

A woman writes a really long piece in the Guardian about how much she hated the first Sex and the City movie, even though she loved the series. She thinks the second movie looks even worse, going by the trailer.

This is a topic of mild interest to me, given that I still find it hard to believe that so many women felt that a show about gay men played by women was deep and meaningful. But my favourite comment following the article is this:

At college I wrote essays about the cultural significance of shows like Friends and Frasier, even Dawson's effing Creek.

Then I became an adult.

Read a book, love.

UPDATE: well, yeah, I should be reading a book, but if David Edelstein's take is anything to go by, I will have the pleasure of reading many bad reviews and bitchy comments soon:

The film is an epic eyesore. It’s as if they set out to make a movie that said, “You’re right! We are hideous!” It begins with the nightmarish manic gaiety of Mamma Mia!, with strenuous lockjawed smiles that make you think you’re watching stroke victims. Then Liza Minnelli shows up to perform a gay marriage. Heralded (and hooted at) as the embodiment of camp unreality, she looks more human—nervous but happy to belong somewhere—than the four leads....

Amy Odell, of nymag.com’s The Cut, accompanied me to the screening and was kind enough to whisper that a particular dress of Carrie’s cost 50 grand. But what’s the point of spending that much when the cinematographer, John Thomas, lights Sarah Jessica Parker to bring out the leatheriness of her skin? How did he manage to mummify the lovely Cynthia Nixon? Kim Cattrall, fresh off her witty, subtle work in The Ghost Writer, is costumed to look like a cross between (late) Mae West and (dead) Bea Arthur. Kristin Davis gets by (just) pulling little-girl faces, probably for the last time.

Journalists: look, over here!

I could have missed it in the Australian press, but as far as I can see from Googling, only the ABC has mentioned the important Nature paper that came out last week on ocean warming.

What is wrong with our journalists? For years they re-printed any press release regarding the more dubious possible effects of climate change, without any sign of independent thought at all. Then, when AGW skeptics use such reports as alleged evidence that global warming is not to be believed at all, the journalists say "oh yeah, we'll be rather quiet now for a while." (I guess I have put my finger on the problem with that bit about "no independent thought".)

All at a time when in fact it looks increasingly clear that:

a. "climategate" is not going to reveal any fundamental problem with the temperature record;

b. the issue of "missing heat" is more of a technical one about the difficulties of measuring ocean heat content;

c. increasing ocean heat content is pretty consistent with the models on the bigger scale, just as climate change is something that has to be looked at on the bigger scale.

Anyhow, important commentary on the ocean warming paper is to be found at Real Climate, and John Cook has a really good post about it with links that get around the Nature paywall so you can read directly the commentary by Trenberth.

My fantasy politics

Not much choice between Robopol and Terminator | The Australian

This article by Niki Savva expresses my sentiments perfectly, and helps explain why I haven't been saying much about politics here lately. Everyone with political common sense can see what's happened in Australia in the last six months, and what the cure would be: a joint address to the nation by the administrative leaders of each the major political parties in which they admit and agree:

"1. We're terribly sorry, we've both made terrible, terrible mistakes in the selection of our current leaders. Yes, we know, we're not blind: the Labor Party always knew Kevin was a jerk who faked his way into the job, but we were surprised how long it took the public to realise it. Everyone already knows Tony doesn't really want the job and is too full of self doubt and anxiety that only goes away when he is on bicycle. They are both completely hopeless as leaders, and all reasonable people, even within their own parties, can see that.

2. We've agreed, and there will be no point scoring between us: Malcolm, all is forgiven, and you can have your party back. Julia, your political appeal is undeniable, and have the Prime Ministership now; not in another 2 or 3 years of bloodless meandering by K Rudd.

3. OK, now that we know we have a real contest, let the election campaigning begin."

Still not enjoying it

Doctor Who review: Vampires of Venice - Telegraph

Well, it's good to see it's not just me. A considerable number of comments following the above review of this week's episode agree that there is just something "off" about this season's Dr Who. As commenter "Mike" says:

I do agree there's a problem with the new doctor. I can't decide what annoys me more, his occasioanl and completely unexplained rages, or the inconsistent plot lines where you're left wondering if a led to be and then to g whether you'd dropped off through c, d,e and f. It's a shame, you can't blame the cast, they're trying their best, but the writing and direction isn't working. Maybe steven should just direct from now on and have someone else write.

Pity really.

They have to get out more...

Taste Test: Passion fruit - Boing Boing

Boing Boing runs a story by someone who has only recently discovered passionfruit? As an Australian says in comments: "I had no idea passionfruit was so little-known".
(Several comments are also about how gross the insides look - like frogs eggs. They make your average Australian seem like a regular Anthony Bourdain.)

UPDATE: I mentioned this to my wife over the weekend, only to be told that she had eaten frog's eggs, as a dessert, at an expensive Chinese restaurant in Japan...

Lane on Robin

“Robin Hood,” review : The New Yorker

Anthony Lane's review of the new Robin Hood begins in amusingly bitchy fashion:

Our hero is one Robin Longstride, played by Russell Crowe, who seems a bit short for the name; it suggests someone rangy, whereas the dauntless persona that Crowe has constructed, over many films, owes less to his gait than to his lightly submerged temper and his bearish build. The solution would have been to call him Robin Phonethrow, but Scott has a thing for historical details, so I guess that didn’t wash.

Overall, his impression of the film as too dour and serious is similar to that in many reviews, and puts me off seeing it.

I am a bit surprised how so many reviewers of the new movie mention in passing how bad the Kevin Costner version was.  Yes, his accent was hopeless out of the place, but I thought RH Prince of Thieves was still quite fun and enjoyable in its way.  Certainly sounds a better experience than this present take.

Small nuclear update

Miniature Nuclear Plants Seek Approval to Work in U.S (Update1) - BusinessWeek

Maybe not too much new in this story, except for the fact that development of small scale nuclear power is proceeding, but with government certification of them not even started yet.

His "sustaining fantasy" is that he is worth reading

ABC The Drum Unleashed - Sustaining fantasy

Bob Ellis, who always now gives me the impression of writing under the influence of a bottle of red, writes of the "sustaining fantasies" that people use to get through life. It contains pearls such as this:

We are told a priest who buggers choir boys can eat Christ's flesh on our behalf and save us a billion years of fiery torture thereby, though he himself will suffer a trillion of fiery torture for buggering choir boys against God's will though God, who is all powerful, neglected to prevent him from doing this, a God who loves us all. And some of us believe that too.

I'm fairly certain it's been quite a while since he looked into Catholic theology.

And there is a distinct sense of self justification for past behaviour in this section:

We are told there are faithful husbands who spend months each year travelling the world. Who are they? I would like to see a list of ten names. Yet we base our notion of civilised society on this premise and sack our politicians if they don't live up to it. What a fantastical premise it is and how useless it is to believe it.

Adultery has been frequent since the invention of the bicycle and very, very frequent since the invention of the Pill and the universal availability of cheap interstate air travel and we should probably work out how to cope with it, in rules that won't be easy to construct. But denying it happens or saying it won't happen in particular cases is ludicrous fantasy.

It's easier to give up smoking. The wife-swapping parties of the 1950s and '60s (so well evoked in The Ice Storm) seem wiser now than they did then and the destructive, child-smashing divorces of today a moronic alternative.

Yes Bob, but I wonder what your past partners think about this.

Wacky hotel

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Inntel hotel by WAM Architecten

This is a supremely wacky looking hotel from the Netherlands.  (Maybe it's all the drugs in the coffee shops.)  Go on, have a look and tell me I'm wrong.  I can't stop looking at it.

For more information, I see the Guardian had an article about it about 6 weeks ago.

Ocean temperature rising

Robust warming of the global upper ocean : Nature

No doubt this will be a much discussed paper. The abstract above needs some interpretation, which can be found in the Physicsworld report:

After gaining an understanding of the sources of uncertainty in each OHCA curve, the team was able to combine the data to obtain a curve that is more representative of global ocean temperature than its constituents. It reveals that the oceans have warmed at a rate of about 0.64 ± 0.11 W/m² over the past 16 years. According to Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, this is "reasonably consistent with expectations from other indications of global warming".

However, the re-analysis sheds little light on why ocean temperatures appear to have remained steady since about 2004. This is at odds with satellite measurements, which suggest the Earth has continued to heat up over the past six years, leading to questions over where the "missing heat" has gone.

Indeed, Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at Potsdam University near Berlin, says that the new study does solve this problem. "The accuracy of measurements is still not sufficient to close the energy budget particularly for short-term variations, in other words, over a few years, as associated with El Niño".

Team member Doug Smith of the Hadley Centre in the UK points out that this stalling seems to occur just when the Argo floats became the primary data source. This could mean that further work is needed on how to interpret Argo results and how to integrate them into temperature records.

Well, that's still a little confusing, but I'm sure the major climate change blogs will be onto this soon.

Understatement of the month

Good news! Kentucky Fried Chicken doubles-down on the KFC Double Down

It has featured at this blog before in a very funny Colbert clip.  But the "sandwich" has turned out to be popular:

KFC says Americans are gobbling down so many Double Down sandwiches that the fast-food chain will offer the bunless, meaty sandwich longer than it had planned.

Originally the sandwich — bacon and cheese surrounded by chicken filets — was to have been available through Sunday.

But KFC said Wednesday that the sandwich will be available now for as long as customer demand remains high.

What I really like about this story, though, is this fine bit of understatement at the end:

Some have questioned the sandwiches' nutritional value.

Skepticism's wheels get wobbly

It's a peculiar thing, but just at the time when a significant part of the public seems to be thinking that "climategate" meant that global warming science has become somewhat tarnished and deserves to be taken less seriously, there has evidence gathering at skeptic blogs themselves that AGW skepticism is looking distinctly wobbly. For example:

1. Raw temperature / adjusted temperature not so different after all? Lucia's Blackboard is a well know "soft" skeptic site, but she has been running posts lately about individual bloggers attempts (if I read this right) to chart "raw" land temperature records to see how the results looks compared to the adjusted "official" temperature records. (Remembering that many a post at Watts Up With That and elsewhere loves to find examples of adjustments to individual station records that they think shows something untoward going on with the "official" adjustments.)

Well, guess what? These amateur attempts at charting raw data are not giving any reason to doubt that the official temperature charts are far off the mark. Have a look at Lucia's latest post about this.

She doesn't seem to be exactly making a clear point about this, but unless I am misunderstanding something here, this is a pretty damning indictment of the irrelevance of much of AGW skepticism when it comes to questioning the temperature record.

2. Widget fails. I have been wondering whether skeptics are starting to be a little embarrassed about the Watts Up With That's widget. It was meant to help encourage the view that there was not much of a relationship between CO2 increase and temperatures. But look at it now:

I wouldn't be surprised if some people think the purple CO2 line is just the mean of the temperature anomaly graph - which is far from the impression Anthony Watts intended.

3. Stepping out of his knowledge zone. Speaking of Watts Up With That, regular contributor Steven Goddard recently got inspired to start his own reappraisal of planetary physics, by posting that he had worked out all on his own that NASA and many, many scientists were completely wrong about CO2's role in creating a greenhouse effect on Venus.

He convinced no one, apart perhaps from some the old Velikovsky faithful (Australia's very own Louis Hissink amongst them.)

I reckon this foray into a topic he is ill prepared to fully understand has substantially harmed Goddard's (and Watt's) credibility.

4. Ice issues. While skeptics were heartened by the extent of North Pole ice cover over winter appearing to be back to being very close to average in April, barely a month later and it's virtually back to the 2007 low. (And this does not take into account the question of how much ice is "old" ice, a topic skeptics don't seem to discuss much.)

If Arctic ice this (northern) summer drops well below 2007, skeptics are going to have to start making excuses again. In fact, there's a touch of pre-emption in Goddard's recent post about it here.

Skeptical Science also had a post recently criticising WUWT's claims that sea ice is nearly "back to normal", and in particular Goddard's understanding of Antarctic ice. Goddard did not take the criticism well.

Learn about papyrology

The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology - RN Book Show - 14 May 2010

Last week I happened to hear this long interview on Radio National with an expert on Eygptian papyrology (basically, reading and studying the thousands of old bits of papyrus scrolls still being found in Egypt.)   It was very interesting, but it's only available as an audio.  Worth a listen, though.

Further doubts about Nietzsche

Gosh I'm happy that Bryan Appleyard is back blogging. He's come out and helped confirm my hunch that I don't have to bother having to read Nietzsche.

Warm weather

NOAA has announced that April was warm - warmest on record in fact:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April, according to NOAA. Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.

Go look at their map with all the dots to see where the heat anomalies were highest. (Hint: think of toy making elves wearing galoshes.)

Gospel truth

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels : The New Yorker

This is a long essay by Adam Gopnik, covering some of the latest books considering the question of the historical Jesus, and adding some of Gopnik's own thoughts, particularly in relation to the Gospel of Mark. He writes very well on the topic.

And this reminds me - I never got around to mentioning a post at First Things which led to a good article in Christianity Today by a New Testament scholar (Scot McKnight) explaining how he now believes the quest for the historical Jesus has failed. He quotes another scholar who makes some revealing points:

Allison admits this about one of his own books on Jesus: "I opened my eyes to the obvious: I had created a Jesus in my own image, after my own likeness." He's not done: "Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions." So, he ponders, "Maybe we have unthinkingly reduced biography [of Jesus] to autobiography."

On top of this genuine problem is the problem of method. Allison: "The fragmentary and imperfect nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical abilities should move us to confess, if we are conscientious, how hard it is to recover the past." With one ringing line, Allison pronounces death: "We wield our criteria to get what we want."

There is, in other words, no value-or theology-free method that will enable us to get back to Jesus. Allison is not a total skeptic; he thinks that we can get behind the Gospels to find some genuine impressions. But his book led me to conclude, "The era is over."

Earlier in his essay, McKnight writes this:

Most historical Jesus scholars assume that the Gospels have overcooked their portrait of Jesus, and that the church's Trinitarian theology wildly exceeds anything Jesus thought about himself and anything the evangelists believed. These scholars pursue a Jesus who is less than or different from or more primitive than what the Gospels teach and the church believes. There is no reason to do historical Jesus studies—to probe "what Jesus was really like"—if the Gospels are accurate and the church's beliefs are justified. There are only two reasons to engage in historical Jesus studies: first, to see if the church got him right; and second, if the church did not, to find the Jesus who is more authentic than the church's Jesus.

This leads to a fundamental observation about all genuine historical Jesus studies: Historical Jesus scholars construct what is in effect a fifth gospel. The reconstructed Jesus is not identical to the canonical Jesus or the orthodox Jesus. He is the reconstructed Jesus, which means he is a "new" Jesus.

Sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: I didn't realise I had a couple of bad links there. Been fixed now.

I'll wait for the opera version

Doctor Who: coming live to a stage near you

The Doctor – plus assorted adversaries and creatures including Daleks, Cybermen and Oods – is to tour the UK this autumn with Doctor Who Live....

The new Doctor, Matt Smith, and assistant Karen Gillan, will not appear in the stage show, which is being developed by Doctor Who's head writer Steven Moffat and will feature in "on-stage battles, pyrotechnics and special effects".

The show, produced by the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, will open in wartime London and conclude with "an epic onstage battle". There will also be a live soundtrack, performed by a 16-piece orchestra, by Doctor Who composer Murray Gold, responsible for the programme's controversial new theme tune.

Yeah, I'm not so keen on the re-arranged title music either.

Colebatch worth reading again

Swan's budget numbers hide ugly reality

Lately, it seems to be Tim Colebatch's columns which are the most readable, straight forward explanations of economic issues.  I think he does a good job again today, where (amongst other things) he covers the new mining "super profit" tax.