Are we really going to start again with the forensic desktop publishing analysis? Last time was so tedious and annoying.

I thought the article about leap day was stupid, but today there’s this by Washington Post contributor Charlotte Allen:

I don’t mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don’t think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim. [ We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get? ]

I think I just need to stop reading the Washington Post.

It’d be unfair of me to use Mississippi Republican State Senator John Read’s bill to ban serving obese people in restaurants as an opportunity to snark about the conservative brand of paternalism. But I do think a hearty and laser-guided “go to hell” directed at the Senator is more than warranted.

Yes, he admits it’s a stunt. The legislature is not a place for stunts. The legislature is a place for making laws. If Read is so hot on the problems with obesity, maybe he can throw some state research funding that way?

There are a hell of a lot of primaries today. So I am going to talk about Bigfoot.

As a sort of diversion from political issues I’ve taken to reading weblogs of paranormal researchers and enthusiasts. I’ve also got an entertaining book called Darklore edited by the proprietor of The Daily Grail. One of the essays in this book is about Bigfoot research, and it makes a point that I’ve read some UFOligists make recently as well. Both of these fields suffer from an apparent lack of evidence — that is, there are no credible witnesses.

Not that there aren’t any witnesses. It’s just none of them are credible. In his Darklore essay, Loren Coleman makes the point that part of the reason these witnesses aren’t credible is they claim to have seen Bigfoot. That’s what you would call something of a Catch-22.

Now, if I were to see something like the creature featured in the Patterson-Gimlin film, my second thought would be that I’d seen a very large ape. (My first thought would be to get the hell out.) It might cross my mind that I’d seen Bigfoot, but then I’d play the “what’s more likely” game and decide I’d seen a large ape. In that (hypothetical) instance, I’m technically a Bigfoot witness. But I don’t even believe myself, so I’m not going to do anyone any good. My skepticism prevents me from reporting a sighting.

“But Thud,” you say. “You are not a skeptic. You believe many irrational, unsupportable things, such as the power of tarot cards and the ability of the Federal Government to improve people’s lives.” You’re right. So maybe I’m not a skeptic and I believe myself that I’ve seen Bigfoot. What am I going to do? Go on TV? Post the pictures on Flickr? People are ready to scream “Photoshopped!” at the slightest provocation. People will say I was tricked if I’m lucky or a charlatan if I’m not. James Randi will probably offer me a million-dollar-sized stack of bonds if I can get Bigfoot to fly out of my ass on command. I’d better keep my trap shut. Especially if I’m a biologist.

Unless I’m a biologist with a Bigfoot corpse.

Everyone’s laughing, my employer wonders what kind of crackpot they hired, my friends hold an intervention to make sure I haven’t started eating the wrong mushrooms — and all the while, there’s Bigfoot. Out there somewhere, really actually real, but no one can hold their laughter inside long enough to go take a freaking look for themselves.

Okay. I’m not saying that Bigfoot exists. I’m not even saying that there’s necessarily an undiscovered great ape out there somewhere staying hidden, although there could be. What I am saying is that Skepticism Unchained causes us to discard evidence out of hand that might actually deserve a cursory look. It can even be discarded by the witness him or herself.

If Bigfoot exists, there have probably been thousands of sightings. But did those people know enough to know what they were looking for? And if they did, did they just get ridiculed by people who’s idea of fieldwork is raking the lawn?

In the latest James Randi newsletter, Randi talks a little about the death of the One Million Dollar Challenge (which we discussed here). A lot of us have suspected that Randi’s challenge was not in good faith. And in his announcement, Randi says:

The purpose of the challenge has always been to provide an arguing basis for skeptics to point that the claimants just won’t accept the confrontation.

The so-called “added advantage” was that the Challenge served to convince amateurs that “they might be looking at the world through a fuzzy lens.” But the primary purpose was to be something skeptics could point at and say “so, why won’t anyone take Randi up on his offer?”

This might explain the arbitrary limitations, multi-year bureaucratic nonsense, and gag-order style rules (all described by Michael Prescott in 2006) that make it difficult to proceed to final test even without failing a demonstration. [ Newsletter: The Announcement ]

Randi’s reason for ending the test, he says, is not lack of money but:

We support the JREF through private gifts, bequests, sales of books and videos, and lecture fees. The burden of the challenge is the work and time required to handle the long-drawn-out negotiations with persons who ââ

I still haven’t moved everything over from my old host, which means I have an open account with them.

I just got a nastygram from them telling me I owe $514.27, with $484.32 past due. The past due dates are all in the future. Most of them are repeated. Apparently, accounts receivable is so eager to get through this year they got ahead of themselves. Twice.

Well, it’s an election year and we’re all excited about that. Hillary Clinton’s not running to the right since she was already there (contrary to to those Republicans who’d love you to think that center is the radical left), and Obama — with his “end of social security” rhetoric and “unity” rhetoric and slagging of Kerry and Gore, etc. etc. — to be trying to race Hillary to Fox News. These are supposed to be the front runners? Oy.

But we don’t have to worry, because as Some Call Him Tim has pointed out, the world ends in 2012. Expect to hear more about this over the next four years and (of course) nothing afterwards. Especially expect to read more of this kind of nonsense:

Calendars, in general, do not end.  The whole purpose of developing and/or keeping a calendar is to predict future events based upon the cyclical nature of the world — to keep such things as agriculture in line with the seasons or inform out-of-line politicians when their terms of office are up for reconsideration.  [In this regard, politicians are like babies.  Both need to be changed periodically, and often, for the same reason.]  But the idea that everything is coming to some sort of completion, i.e. the end of cycles, the end of days, the end… period…  This just doesn’t compute when it comes to the idea of a calendar. [ Library of Halexandria ]

Spoken like someone who hasn’t a clue about counting systems.

As someone whose lived through the “end” of one calendar — Y2K – I can assure you that calendars do end, assuming the counting method one uses is cyclical. Fortunately we use a mathematical system which imagines numbers getting progressively larger into the future. But our own calendar is cyclical. We have a seven day week, a four week month (more or less), a twelve month year, and every four years we get an extra day. Well, not quite every four years:

The Gregorian calendar, the current standard calendar in most of the world, adds a 29th day to February in 97 years out of every 400, a closer approximation than once every four years. This is implemented by making every year divisible by 4 a leap year unless that year is divisible by 100. If it is divisible by 100 it can only be a leap year if that year is also divisible by 400. [ Wikipedia: Leap Year ]

The Mayan calendar is cyclical, which means it both ends and it doesn’t. Much of the 2012 hoopla centers on the supposed “end” of the “long count” calendar — which doesn’t really end. The “long count” is linear rather than cyclical, but since the Mayan calendar is usually implemented as a wheel, you have to end the long count somewhere. The Mayans appear to have chosen to end the long count in most of their wheel calendars within a single b’ak’tun, since a b’ak’tun represents 5,125 years. It is the end of the current b’ak’tun we are apparently approaching, at least according to those modern researchers who have attempted to map the Mayan calendar onto the Aztec Gregorian. It’s a quirk of mapping a linear counting system onto a cyclical notation system.

The point is that the Mayan calendar, long count or no, doesn’t end at the end of a b’ak’tun.  The wheel calendar simply runs out of digits. It is a prehistoric Y2K bug, except the Mayans had more foresight than the Cobol programmers of old — their calendar reset once every five millennia or so, whereas ours reset on the century mark. And 5,125 years is perfectly respectable. This Perpetual Gregorian Calendar actually only runs up to 3899, after which I guess you have to do the math over again.

“But what about all the natural disasters,” you say. “The sunspots and the reversed polarity and the et and the cetera?” Well, I don’t know any more than you do. But I doubt the Mayans calculated their calendars to mark the end of time. They probably just took as many digits as they though they were going to need — at least until they could get around to printing new calendars.

Edit: Carl Johan Calleman says the calendar does not predict the end of the world, but rather a season in human evolution:

Yet, the fundamental issue at hand is not so much what is the actual end date of the Mayan calendar, but how we are to understand this calendar and its relationship to the cosmic plan. This is also why the end date question requires an open mind and even a fairly deep knowledge of Mayan calendrics to address. Those that promote the December 21, 2012 date almost invariably lack a model for understanding evolution based on the Mayan calendar and are instead placing all the importance on what will happen on one particular day; December 21, 2012. What they suggest for this date is typically an event in the sky or a pole shift, a comet that will hit the earth or some other physical or astronomical singular event. In my view the most absurd of these interpretations is probably a book that sets out to prove that this is the day when the world will come to an end because of a pole shift and there is nothing we can do about it (The Orion Prophecy). For someone who does not have a scientific training and background its purported Ã

It seemed liberal bias against conservative values on campus had gotten so bad people were afraid for their lives at Princeton, until the student who was attacked admitted fabricating the incident and writing the death-threats himself. Apparently, he claimed to have been assaulted by the pro-condom lobby.

You know, when you have to start staging your own assaults maybe it’s time to admit that campus bias really isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be.

I am leaving for a company event that will have me out of Internet range for two days. So in the meantime I will leave you with this:

At Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder writes about the a robot baby dinosaur’s response to violence, which sounds rather distressing:

The press materials that came with the Pleo suggested I hold it by its tail to see what happens. It screams and thrashes. My 4-year-old started crying. I had to promise my wife never to do that again in front of her. [ Killing a Pleo Robotic Dinosaur ]

I find the idea rather stomach-turning myself. At what point do we decide something like this is actually alive? There’s the Turing Test, of course, but that’s a test of human-level intelligence (which in the form of Captchas I routinely, embarrassingly fail) not being-ness. Is the Pleo just a machine because we understand how it works? Or because we decided how it works? Or because we created it?

These are the kinds of questions science fiction has asked until we are all bored of them. Are clones really people? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Etc. But the last few years have seen a rash of products that “simulate” life — Tamagochis, the Sea Man game, Aibos, and now this.

Mark continues:

So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.

My wife didn’t want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is “bad for your psyche,” and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too. [ Ibid., emphasis mine ]

“Even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything.” What’s our standard for that? We provide a stimulus, the Pleo provides a response. If our stimulus is violent, the Pleo reacts with an expression of pain. From a strictly materialist point of view, you could make a case that the Pleo does feel pain. We know it does because we’ve programmed it to do so.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we’re “tampering in God’s domain.” But perhaps we should re-think our assumptions on what we’re capable of. We don’t know what “life” is, anyway, so how can we know if we’ve created it?