I can’t stop drinking coffee. And I blame Butter.

Until recently, I’ve stayed away from coffee, mostly because caffeine makes me jittery, and decaf tastes funny. But when you spend time with Butter, you drink coffee. So, the social butterfly that I am, I drink it too. Last week as we were working on The Enlightenment Show at the local public access station, I was a little chilly so I got a cup of coffee to stay warm.

I realized my tolerance to caffeine was markedly stronger. I attribute that to my recent social coffee-drinkings and to a pitcher of crazy-strong iced tea that you could cut with a knife. I stopped jumping around and realized that I could control this new burst of energy, and focus it into the job at hand.

Several external factors fell in line, like a increase in work at my place of employment, and the colder weather around here. I stopped by Starbucks one morrning, took it to work, and wow! I got so much work done!

So now I’m starting to set the timer on my coffeemaker at home to start brewing when I get up, and then I can take my 24-oz travel mug to work with me. Later this afternoon, I went to Target to pick up some things, and I bought a little cup of Starbucks.

I know that this is going to bite me in the ass eventually, since as my tolerance gets stronger, I’d have to start drinking more and more not to get the sudden drag when the caffeine wears off. But I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. If I don’t fall over first.

NOTE: This is a re-post from Freethought Fort Wayne.

I just heard Bill Maher interviewed on Fresh Air on NPR today. He, along with director Larry Charles, talked about Religulous, the controversial documentary documentary lampooning religionists and their beliefs. (Check out the trailer here.)

What I want to know is, as a social group trying to be good community members while communicating our message, does this documentary help or hinder our cause?

Personally, I think Bill Maher is an ass. Having occasionally watched Politically Incorrect, I never cared for his permanent sneering face and pseudo-intellectual speech. He’s a smart guy, yes, but he has a holier-than-thou attitude (ironic!) which just rubs me the wrong way.

I’m glad that he has taken on the mission to expose religion as the ultimate “hustle” as the website’s language puts it, but does he really need to do it by directly rediculing people and their beliefs?

I realize that many freethinkers would answer “yes” to this question. But doesn’t think just add fuel to Christians’ fire? They would have an easier time dismissing the atheist cause by just pointing out that this film is pointing fingers and laughing, a la six-year-old humor.

Now, granted, I haven’t seen this movie yet. There may be some intelligent debate, and some discourse with the theist community. But I think it is safe to say that the majority of the film kinda does a Jay Leno-style “man on the street” interview, where they get people to say rediculous things. At least that’s what the trailer says about the film, and what Terry Gross talked about.

I think the best way to further our cause is to have an open, friendly, line of communication with the theist community. Let them initiate debate, and then methodically counter their arguments, point by point. That’s how my deconversion happened (Well, that, and a natural distrust of what I was being taught).

Nevertheless, I do plan to see the film, and would like to know what others might thing about this. Please feel free to use the comments of this post as a forum.

A Twitter-related cartoon from Noise to Signal

No, I’m not talking Butter and his affection for birds. I’m talking about the mini-blog web app, Twitter. It’s sort of a dedicated, more sophisticated “What are you doing” feature from Facebook. You can track what other Twitterers are doing throughout the day, and you can post what you are doing.

Now, as you read what I just wrote about it, you’re going to think about what a silly application that is. Why would I want to know what my friend Aiden in San Fransisco is having for lunch? That’s the way I felt about it, too. But I gave it a chance — I know some people who Twittered, and I wanted to see what the hubbub was about.

I have to say, it is fun. I can get insight from people I might not otherwise talk to — Leo Lincourt, who is a fellow Freethinker, for example. And from Andrew Hoffman, who is in a non-profit networking group with me and runs a great social service organization. I figure otherwise, I would see them once a month and say hi. But Twitter lets me throw little comments out there and get their take on it.

Read the rest below the fold.

Continue Reading »

The Obama and McCain campaigns responded to a set of questions on environmental policy sent to them by the Auduban Society. I thought it might be appropriate here to cite their responses to the question about bird management policy:

AUDUBON SOCIETY: Eagles are rebounding from the brink of extinction, but many other birds continue to experience serious declines. Audubon data shows even bird species we consider common today are losing ground, falling as much as 68 percent in the past 40 years. How would you use laws like the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and Clean Water Act to reverse this trend?

(The entire set of questions and answers is available in the September-October issue of Audubon magazine, pp. 58-61).

Obama’s answer at least indicates support for current wildlife-protection laws and acknowledges the Bizarro World of Bush-administration science policy. Less genericness would have been nice, though, like maybe actually using the word “bird.”

McCain’s answer scares the shit out of me. Beneath the progressive-sounding veneer is a contempt for federal regulation in general, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in particular. The Act has been a cornerstone of our country’s efforts to protect native bird species from disappearing forever since 1918. Signed by the U.S. and Canada (actually, at the time, Great Britain signed for Canada), it’s what makes it illegal for you to go out and shoot, capture, or molest any bird you like. It currently protects about 800 species from unregulated killing and entrapment, and forbids tampering with their nesting sites. I don’t want the spirit of this law maintained, I want this law. Further, a lack of “cooperation” with the private sector is hardly the current administration’s problem. Regulators are supposed to enforce the law; I expect them to do their jobs.

The bit about wetlands is encouraging; it may be a sop to the hunting enthusiasts among his base. I agree with hunters that wetlands must be managed properly and conserved to protect waterfowl populations (I respect their right to their hunt for food, although I find the glee with which some waterfowl hunters approach killing repulsive), and it’s good that private organizations of them are committed to that cause. But that management must be done under competent, objective, rational federal control, something that his party’s behavior has put in jeopardy.

Tags: Wildlife

Technorati, the closest thing we have to an authority on the blogosphere, posted a report about what we can expect from the bloggy part of the internets. They have statistics, demographics, and some editorials on everything you wanted to know about the blog world.

Here’s just a taste:

With blogging so firmly entrenched in the mainstream, the story now is about the Active Blogosphere. The trends, stories and behaviors here influence not only the rest of the Blogosphere but mainstream media as well.

Technorati defines the Active Blogosphere as: The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

For the 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report, we wanted to go beyond the numbers to deliver insights into bloggers and the state of blogging today. Who are the bloggers, why and how do they do what they do, and what is the impact on their lives and work?

To find out, we conducted a survey from a random sample from more than 1.2 million bloggers who have registered with Technorati. In addition, we have supplemented the survey results with our traditional analysis of Technorati’s index data.

Link.

We all are familiar with my favorite internet meme, LOLcats. Whether or not you call pronounce it to rhyme with “polecats” or spell out the “el-oh-el”, they are cute, funny, and, um, cute.

I want to share my collection of sci-fi related LOLs with you, too. Check these babies out:

LOLtrek

First of all, check this out when you get a chance. Someone took the TOS episode “Trouble with Tribbles” and LOL’d it.

And finally, ending the way EVERY episode of the original series ended:

LOLwho

Some of these aren’t as funny, but they’re appreciated anyway.

LOLbsg

I’m not actually sure what this genre is called, but it is the LOLized Battlestar Galactica.

I’m not entirely sure why there is a Cyberman in the corner, but I can only assume someone who isn’t familiar with Doctor Who thought it was an old-school Cylon. After all, there is a big “C” on the chest.And my personal favorite…

Thanks to all of you who created these, and to all the websites I ripped the pictures off of.

Do you have any favorites? LOLBuffy? LOLRed Dwarf? Please post them in comments.

Overheard as I was walking out of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic’s opening night concert last night:

“That’s not the sort of thing you pick if you want to get chosen for Fort Wayne.”

Context: This year the Philharmonic is auditioning eight candidates for the Music Director’s position, to replace Edvard Tchivzhel. Each gets to conduct two concerts, one with a full orchestra and one with a chamber orchestra. The opener, and the Unplugged concert at IPFW, were conducted by Tito Muñoz, currently Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. Muñoz, who’s only 25 and has a good rapport with the audience and, from a layman’s perspective at least, seems to with the musicians as well, led the orchestra in the opener in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (yes, it’s really called that).

Now, the Rachmaninoff concerto is a showpiece for a virtuoso pianist, and the guest pianist that the Philharmonic brought in, 20-year-old Yuja Wang from Beijing, was phenomenal. The piece is delicate (even to the extreme of being a little weepy) and Romantic and, in 20th-century terms at least, doesn’t take a lot of risks. The (heavily elderly) audience had no problem leaping to their feet for a standing ovation.

But the Bartók piece which followed went over rather differently. Béla Bartók fled the Nazis and his native Hungary’s pro-German government during World War II and emigrated to the United States, where he lived only a few years before dying of chronic myeloid leukemia. The Concerto for Orchestra was his penultimate major orchestral piece; he composed it during the war while waiting to die of the disease, appearing at the premiere less than a year before his death. While it’s still a traditional orchestral work in structure, it exemplifies a lot of the nontraditional elements of the twentieth century: there’s dissonant fourths all over the place, weird rhythms and irreverent nonmelodious sounds being passed back and forth during the middle movements, a parody and shouting down of a Shostakovich symphony in the lighthearted fourth-movement Intermezzo, and a couple descents into Bartók’s characteristic Night Music, described by Amherst College music prof David Schneider as “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies.” (Bartók sometimes emulated birdsong, using, for example, the song of the Wood Thrush—a close relative of the familiar and somewhat similarly sounding American Robin—in his Piano Concerto No. 3.)

The elderly audience was amusingly reluctant to stand for the ovation after that one, despite that being the end of the show. As we were shuffling out, I overheard the above contemptuous comment as the people behind me were discussing their belief that the guest conductors were allowed to select the pieces they would perform. So apparently, in Fort Wayne, encouraging your audience to step outside their comfort zone—to the extent of exposing them to something that was experimental sixty years ago—runs a significant risk of being met with fear and contemptuous church-lady glares.

Tags: Music

Here’s another example of crows doing some problem-solving, this time in Japan:
 

 
Corvids are known from other observations and experiments to be smart, so this level of problem-solving wouldn’t seem to be beyond them, but it’s always good to maintain a bit of skepticism. There may be confirmation bias at work here: there’s a population of crows in this city in Japan, dropping nuts at various places, and we notice and marvel at the ones that happen to do so at intersections, and not so much at the others. A quick search of recent journal articles didn’t reveal anything about it (well, I did find one book, but it just cited the Attenborough special); still, if the behavior here is observed repeatedly, and if, as some reports have it, they’ve been observed moving the nuts to a different location if the cars miss them, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that the purported learning is real.

The PBS companion site to the Attenborough special has a good introduction to this and other commonly known examples of avian intelligence.

Tags: Saturday Birds

This one’s adult again, so it’s after the fold. It’s from my zoo trip this summer:
Continue Reading »

Tags: LOLCats

I ran across this video on Vimeo (a YouTube alternative) — it’s sort of a Mr. Rogers-like book at a book factory, and how they are assembled, from author to distributor. As a typophile and a librophile, this is absolutely fascinating to me. I REALLY WANT a typesetting machine, now. (I’m sure Katie would have a cow.)

Here it is:

Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.

I can’t seem to find a current video on how books are made. Anyone have a link they can share?