Today this comic showed up on RichardDawkins.net:

lol.

Well, yeah, it’s funny, but something here caught my attention and made me flex my Google muscles and that is…

Norway is ranked first in the world in life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living.

Hold on… Norway has the highest life expectancy, literacy rate, education, and standard of living? Well… let’s take a look at a few links.

• Norway is ranked 19th by the CIA World Factbook in terms of life expectancy at 79.78
• Norway’s literacy rate is ranked 17th at 99.0%
• The Organisation for Economie Co-operation and Devlopment ranked Norway 8th in terms of education (sorry, couldn’t find original source).
• Mapsofworld.com (small digression) ranks Norway as one of the top ten highest living standards.

Well, it’s not actually first at any of the things listed in the comic so it’s not exactly honest, is it? But yes, that is damned good, and it shows that nations can be just as good as the U.S. with a primarily atheistic population…

But might I point out one thing? Canada ranks higher in life expectancy than Norway, ranks equally in literacy, is in first place for most educated, and is also among the top ten countries with highest living standards. The U.S. also doesn’t do too shabby with a life expectancy of 78.06 (so Norwegians get one or two more years), a shared literacy rate, second place in education, and also has a place on highest standards of living.

I’m going to go ahead and say, though it’s not as secular, statistically speaking…

Canada > Norway

Update: I present a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

If there is anyone who still wonders why this war is being fought, let him look to Norway. If there is anyone who has any delusions that this war could have been averted, let him look to Norway; and if there is anyone who doubts the democratic will to win, again I say, let him look to Norway.

You know what this means? FDR had the foresight to know that Norway would be the cause of the Iraq War! Another reason why Canada > Norway!

Ideas don’t need rights. People do.

There are certain taboos that we coexist with in our society, constricting the wide range of things we could be talking about. Deviants of these taboos are often met with hostile reactions. If you’ve ever openly criticised, say… religion, but never heard somebody say something to the effect of “stop talking about religion! You offend me!” I’d love to move to your planet.

For those of us on Earth, however, there’s the Center for Inquiry’s Campaign for Free Expression. Over the course of the year, CFI will be supporting free expression in taboo topics by holding contests, participating in International Blasphemy Day (September 30, 2009), and much much more. Check out their website at the sexy domain name, pleaseblock.us, as well as the video below. And, yes, they are trying to get blocked in Iran, China, Malaysia, Cuba, etc.

On a relevant side note, the last time I was in China I found that foreign news sources, Wikipedia, and many blogs (including all of WordPress and all of Blogspot) were blocked by the infamous Great Firewall (on an irrelevant side note, I once climbed the physical Great Wall in houseslippers ’cause my pair of shoes broke). I’ll be going again sometime in July. I don’t know about Teen Skepchick, but you can be assured that I’ll still find a way to keep blogging my dissenting and non-dissenting opinions for the three or so weeks.

SecondLife is on the whole a boring game. Small modicums of entertainment can be gained by seeing people attach couches to themselves as outfits. It is no wonder people are wondering “is there something more than this virtual 3D world?”

Out of boredom, and seeking answers to the great mysteries of SecondLife, I decided to attend a meeting on “spiritual darkness”. Surprisingly, the spiritual people seemed resistant towards me talking about silly scientific concepts like gravity.

Today I learned:

1. We can’t explain consciousness, therefore atoms are conscious.
2. Thinking scientifically = cynicism
3. I am living in spiritual darkness because I’m too attached to intellectual enlightenment.
4. “multi-dimensional realities make sense to me. this band of frequencies experiences a duality principle that is holographic to the rest of thee system” (see chat log below)
5. Couch monsters are freaking hilarious.

A lengthy chat log follows. It can be seen either as depressing or entertaining, depending on the sort of person you are. Feel free to read it.

[14:28] Braeden Maelstrom: alcheemy teaches that two states, though they appear as opposites, are two degrees of the same thing. Like, when does warm become cold? it’s a matter of perception, no specific degree, and it’s all one thing: temperature

[14:28] Ka Brevity: they need more quality time later

[14:28] Maia Avedon: ahhh

[14:29] Seth Haalan: yes all things diverging fromt he prima materia braeden

[14:29] Braeden Maelstrom: exactly

[14:29] Seth Haalan: or the first mass of big bang theory

[14:29] Maia Avedon: yes

[14:30] Braeden Maelstrom: i liked that oxidation and everything is burning point you made yesterday seth, really made alot of sense

[14:30] Maia Avedon: yes that was cooool

[14:30] Braeden Maelstrom: from the singularity or big bang

[14:30] Seth Haalan:

[14:30] Seth Haalan: ty

[14:30] Braeden Maelstrom: after all we are essentially plasma energy condensed and coolling

[14:30] Maia Avedon: gots some antioxidants in my leaves. cheap. free. make tea.

[14:31] Seth Haalan:

[14:31] Seth Haalan: and that was actually something i was going to ask

[14:31] Elles Silvercloud: Plasma is essentially a solid state of matter excited to a higher energy state.

[14:31] Braeden Maelstrom: nothing is solid

[14:31] Seth Haalan: would the native ahwaiian spirituallity be fairly described as living peacefully with the spirits?

[14:31] Seth Haalan: hawaiian*

[14:32] Maia Avedon: oh yes and no .. but moslty yes. we know the waays

[14:32] Maia Avedon: oopsa typos

[14:32] Braeden Maelstrom: an attitude of gratitutde

[14:32] Maia Avedon: they are part of us physically, spiritually and mentally

[14:32] Seth Haalan: are the spirits really inconsistant about anything?

[14:32] Maia Avedon: yes Braden

[14:32] Elles Silvercloud: Solid still is a term of a state of matter where the atoms are moving at a slower pace due to having less energy.

[14:32] Maia Avedon: oh no they live withing their realms very consistently

[14:33] Maia Avedon: solid is agreement too to stay at a certain state

[14:33] Seth Haalan: the human inconsistant isnt about humans having any programming i feel

[14:33] Braeden Maelstrom: and that is my point, big bang happens and that heat and energy condesnes and cools over time, complexifying itself as it goes on

[14:33] Seth Haalan: its more about them not knowing that they arent actually prgoramed

[14:33] Braeden Maelstrom: plasma was the wrong word really

[14:33] Elles Silvercloud: It’s not a matter of conscious agreement, is it? It’s the atoms following laws of nature.

[14:33] Seth Haalan: wont actually claim their domain

[14:33] Maia Avedon: ohhh

[14:33] Maia Avedon: yes yes

[14:34] Braeden Maelstrom: well the laws of nature could be as natural as the laws of C++. someone created it

[14:34] Seth Haalan: how does nature have any laws elles?

[14:34] Seth Haalan: how is it at all consistant?

[14:34] Elles Silvercloud: Law in its semantical form.

[14:34] Seth Haalan: and what isnt semantic?

[14:34] Maia Avedon: metaphor too

[14:35] Seth Haalan: why doesnt matter shift amoprhously?

[14:35] Elles Silvercloud: Airplanes consistently don’t fall out of the air.

[14:35] Ka Brevity: probability

[14:35] Seth Haalan: indeed

[14:35] Elles Silvercloud: Stars consistely condense out of clouds of gas.

[14:35] Seth Haalan: this is true

[14:35] Seth Haalan: question is why?

[14:35] Elles Silvercloud: Stars consistently clump together in galaxies.

[14:35] Elles Silvercloud: Gravity.

[14:35] Seth Haalan: what is gravity and why is it?

[14:35] Maia Avedon: cuz god said not to. shup Maia shup

[14:35] Maia Avedon: hahaha

[14:35] Braeden Maelstrom: haha

[14:36] Seth Haalan: and how is it we can periceve and make any intelligible sense of any of it?

[14:36] Maia Avedon: shup Maia shup

[14:36] Elles Silvercloud: Gravity is the curvature of space time due to mas.

[14:36] Elles Silvercloud: *mass

[14:36] Maia Avedon: Maia goes for a coffee break

[14:36] Seth Haalan: ok more human observations

[14:36] Maia Avedon: brb

[14:36] Ka Brevity: lol

[14:36] Elles Silvercloud: How mass curves space time, we don’t know, but it does.

[14:36] Seth Haalan: ok why is any of this intelligble to any of us?

[14:37] Seth Haalan: at any point?

[14:37] Elles Silvercloud: I imagine it was conducive to our survival, the survival of our genes, to not consistenly walk of cliffs.

[14:37] Elles Silvercloud: *off

[14:37] Braeden Maelstrom: this is like seeing a car and explaining how the mechanisms work. the real question is who is driving the car, and where is it going?

[14:37] Seth Haalan nods

[14:38] Elles Silvercloud: Whys it got to be a conscious agent driving the car?

[14:38] Seth Haalan: even science is reliant on the premise of a valid and viable dialectic

[14:38] Braeden Maelstrom: elles, anything and verything is conscious

[14:38] Seth Haalan: a reliable dialogue between observer and observed

[14:38] Seth Haalan: more simplyput

[14:38] Seth Haalan: communication

[14:38] Elles Silvercloud: It is, Braden?

[14:38] Ka Brevity: it is

[14:38] Seth Haalan: elles

[14:39] Braeden Maelstrom: how does the atom know when to give up or attract electrons?

[14:39] Elles Silvercloud: Yes?

[14:39] Seth Haalan: following the rules of science itself

[14:39] Seth Haalan: we observes the sturcture that is supposedly the seat of human consciousness

[14:39] Seth Haalan: and we cannot percieve or deduce how consciousness arises

[14:39] Seth Haalan: now science cant leave this alone

[14:39] Seth Haalan: because the henomenon cant be reduced

[14:40] Seth Haalan: so if their observation is correct

[14:40] Elles Silvercloud: Okay, on some far out corner of the universe, past the cosmic background radiation that we can’t see, are atoms behaving differently because they dn’t have our socially constrcuted science thing?

[14:40] Seth Haalan: then if the matter than makes a human brain is cpapable of being conscious

[14:40] Seth Haalan: then it must naturally cfollow that all matter is capable

[14:40] Seth Haalan: or humans are not conscious

[14:40] Seth Haalan: and our experience refutes that

[14:41] Elles Silvercloud: How much have you read into the neuroscientific literature to make that conclusion?

[14:41] Seth Haalan: the idea that some is conscous and other is not has some seroisu logic breaks

[14:41] Braeden Maelstrom: News Flash! Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibbration. We are all one conscioussness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourrselves. Here’s Tom with the weather!

[14:41] Seth Haalan: quite a bit elles

[14:41] Ka Brevity: bill hicks ㋡

[14:41] Seth Haalan: especially neuro-physics

[14:41] Ka Brevity: and it’s just aride braeden

[14:41] Elles Silvercloud: There are many things that we thought we’d never be able to reduce to physics to explain.

[14:42] Braeden Maelstrom: indeed Ka

[14:42] Elles Silvercloud: And then one day, natural selection, Genesis account gets thrown out the window.

[14:42] Seth Haalan: ok well can argue all knowledge is subjective

[14:42] Maia Avedon: thought they tossed that already

[14:42] Maia Avedon: back

[14:42] Ka Brevity: wb maia

[14:42] Elles Silvercloud: Today there are still some that say it’s too complex to be explained by natural selection, they don’t study their subject as well as most people who hold fancy positions at universities.

[14:42] Maia Avedon: ty ty

[14:43] Elles Silvercloud: Seth, do airplanes fall out of the sky when you fly over some lost tribe of the amazon?

[14:43] Seth Haalan: and actually recent theory does suggest that not only can matter deviate but it does as the configuration of subatomic “strings” is potentially infinite

[14:43] Maia Avedon: hahaha elles

[14:43] Elles Silvercloud: As far as they’re concerned, objects that big don’t fly.

[14:43] Braeden Maelstrom: your thinking too small Elles

[14:43] Braeden Maelstrom: narrow band

[14:43] Maia Avedon: lol

[14:43] Braeden Maelstrom: think cosmically

[14:44] Braeden Maelstrom: sure these laws are all over, and one culture, or one planet doesnt change them

[14:44] Elles Silvercloud: Yeah, we’re not in any of those nebulae right now, and yet stars are forming according to our understanding of gravitational law.

[14:44] Seth Haalan: well here is an example of spiritual darkness

[14:44] Seth Haalan: and i relent elles

[14:45] Ka Brevity: i relented a long time ago ㋡

[14:45] Seth Haalan: there is no substance or valditity to consciousness and no reasson why all of these scientific laws are intelligible they just are

[14:45] Seth Haalan: works for me

[14:45] Ka Brevity: ㋡

[14:45] Ka Brevity: ok there is darkness for ya

[14:45] Ka Brevity: lol

[14:46] Seth Haalan: well another class soon on cynicism

[14:46] Maia Avedon: ha

[14:46] Elles Silvercloud: I said that an ability to understand reality is conducive to not falling off cliffs.

[14:46] Seth Haalan: feel free to remain and chat

[14:46] Braeden Maelstrom: multi-dimensional realities make sense to me. this band of frequencies experiences a duality principle that is holographic to the rest of thee system

[14:46] Ka Brevity: oh yes…will be a fun day

[14:46] Maia Avedon: oh yess

[14:46] Elles Silvercloud: And I’m not cynical.

[14:46] Ka Brevity: cynicism after darkness

[14:46] Maia Avedon: thanks Seth

So myself, my mother, and two guests walk into a Chinese restaurant. Part of the conversation goes like this.

Mom: The way they grow food here in the US is different from the way they grow food in China. That must be the reason why people have allergies here.

Me: Have you ever heard of the phrase correlation does not equal causation? Yes, thats a possible cause i suppose, but you haven’t said anything to say why it is a better explanation than, say, genetics. Let me give you an example… Chinese people are lactose intolerant. Chinese people eat rice. Rice causes people to be lactose intolerant. Where was my use of a logical fallacy?

Mom: Well… Stop talking about scientific things with people who don’t understand science.

Me: Mom, you do realise that airplanes don’t fall out of the sky just because you don’t understand how they work. I know that this sounds crazy, but the same laws of reality apply to everybody, anywhere, no matter what your cultural predisposition is. Like… this is really insane but whenever you cross the International Date Line in an airplane you don’t fall out of the air.

Lunch Guest: How old are you?

Me: Sixteen.

Lunch Guest: You’re going to change your mind about a lot of things as you get older.

Me: … ?

Mom: That’s right. There are a lot of things that you don’t know yet.

That’s right. Because I’m a teenager, when I grow up I’ll come to realise that correlation does equal causation. And I will come to embrace the fact that the laws of nature operate differently for different people, and that the world is flat if only you believe it is.

Note to adults: Saying that a logical fallacy isn’t fallacious because the person telling you it’s fallacious is young doesn’t make it less fallacious. Also, if you really have some kind of knowledge that we lowly adolescents haven’t got then how would we ever grow older if you didn’t tell us? What good does it do to say “there are a lot of things you don’t know” and not tell us? Absolutely nothing.

A 250 meter long jelly fish has appeared on a farm in England, so reports the BBC. But note the following sentence from the article…

She said she was not concerned about tracking down the culprits and the incident has not been reported to the police.

What’s missing from this sentence?

They’re not jumping to the conclusions that it was created by an intelligent extraterrestrial agent! I’m going to go ahead and say that the public, at least the media, has reached a more educated level. Go ahead, read the whole article. At least these farmers have come to appreciate crop circles for what they are: practical jokes which can be beautiful but also costly.

At the beginning of the school year, I asked my biology teacher if I could borrow his Planet Earth DVDs. He went ahead and let me take it home for the weekend and I never brought it back (actually I returned it to him today). This is because I have a huge crush on Sir David Attenborough (the real reason is that I just had no time to finish watching it and I didn’t want to give it back without seeing all of it).

Anyway, I remembered to give it back to him when I stumbled upon and old chat log from September which ended when I told my friend that I had to finish watching Planet Earth so I could give it back to my biology teacher. A quick glance at my Planet Earth calendar hanging on the wall told me that it was now May so I went ahead and posted that on Twitter like so:

Found a message dated 9/13/2008 that I sent to a friend saying that I need to return Planet Earth to my biology teacher soon. I never did.

Shortly after posting this I got several messages from three other Facebook friends telling their stories of how they “borrowed” something and never gave it back. Finding them too amusing to restrict to the confines of comments in my Facebook status message I decided to post them here for your enjoyment.

I have a stapler from the eighth grade.

On my last day at the middle school, one of the people in the office lent it to a group of us to make paper chains to decorate the cafeteria. Somehow, I got stuck with it at the end of the day, but the office was closed for the summer by the time that I got to it.

It’s sitting on my desk. I plan to keep it in my classroom whenever I start teaching.

Katherine

My teacher once let me borrow a book about “divine suffering” or some such Catholic thing, along with some pamphlets about bread and wine turning into actual flesh and blood. She really needed them back eventually b/c they were precious to her, and irreplaceable.

Then Hurricane Katrina happened.

Jason

I stole a tenor recorder and a whole lot of library books when my primary school closed down. It wasn’t like they were going to be using them…

Wazza

Interesting stuff happens on Twitter sometimes.

It all started with ghosts.

Actually it started with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, but then it moved on to ghosts. A friend of mine from Atheist Nexus, Edwin, said that he believe in ghosts. When asked why he basically cited anecdotal evidence. When it was explained to him why it was not the case that anecdotal evidence is good evidence he simply said “I’m just not as nihilistic as you guys”.

My friend Chris continued the conversation with him…

Edwin (Lahash) says:
you don’t know my logic
Nerdfighters [rawr] says:
that doesn’t mean anything, you’re just firing back comebacks so you won’t have to deal with me telling you the truth
Edwin (Lahash) says:
what truth?
Nerdfighters [rawr] says:
that your critical thinking skills are astronomically nonexistant and your logic is honestly severely flawed
and that sometimes, like now, you’re a moron
Edwin (Lahash) says:
no, they’re there
if you haven’t realized by now, I’m highly misanthropic
I try not to be though
but it usually doesn’t work
Nerdfighters [rawr] says:
what does hating the human race have to do with logic
what the fuck

I took over from there.

[23:10] Elles: K. Well if the Bible’s the word of God it’s true, and the Bible says that it’s the word of God so we know that it’s true.
[23:10] Edwin (Lahash): no its not
[23:10] Elles: Why not?
[23:11] Edwin (Lahash): something cannot prove its credibility by referencing itslf
[23:11] Elles: In my logic it can.
[23:11] Edwin (Lahash): well you’re logic is flawed then
[23:12] Elles: How do you know? It’s logical to me. What’s logical to me may not be logical to you but it’s logical to me.
[23:12] Edwin (Lahash): but it’s illogical in general
[23:13] Elles: What do you mean, “in general”? Do you mean to suggest that the same rules of logic applies to all people in all places?
[23:13] Edwin (Lahash): I don’t know
[23:13] Edwin (Lahash): well, I do, I just don’t know how to explain it
[23:13] Elles: Now you know how Chris and I feel.

So ends lesson one in critical thinking.

"The word 'lolita' has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active."

Well, at least it hasn’t started burning books yet…

Recently this article appeared in the Guardian which appears to be accusing Hitchens, Dawkins, etctera of wanting to take away the liberty of freedom of religion and, therefore, not being liberals.

Russell Blackford has a great response here but as it is something that people could potentially accuse the Atheist movement in general of, I thought I’d sum up Terry Eagleton’s error in one sentence:

In all his fancy wording about the “liberal state” he makes it clear that his flawed assumption is that Atheists want to make our beliefs about the harmfulness of religion public policy.

Well, he’s right insofar as we want a secular state in which religious beliefs which require “faith” don’t form public policy. This is for a good reason. We shape our morality around our perception of reality. If your morality is shaped around something that can’t be empirically demonstrated to people  who don’t share that faith (i.e. God told me that gay marriage is wrong), then you can’t expect them to form morality around your perception of reality.

Yeah, I’d like there to be more Atheists in the world (at least fewer fundamentalists), but I don’t plan on doing that by taking public office and banning religion (although I may tax churches). I plan on doing that by the less effective, but “liberally” permissible means of free speech through debating Christians, writing blog posts, while others add to Atheist literature.

That’s it. All we want. Tell me about how us Atheists are just-as-bad-as-fundies again? “Militant” rationalists? Western supremacists? kthx

In case you haven’t seen already…

Two things…

She did not actually answer the question. The question was: should states follow suit in allowing gay marriage? She said that we can choose between “same sex marriage” and “opposite” marriage, and then says that she believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s not clear whether she wants to impose her personal (bigotted) beliefs about it on other people through the government. It’s just vague.

My favourite bit, though, is where she says “that’s how I was raised and that’s how I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

I’m cynical about beauty queens, yes, but Americans do seem to care more about what a person says because they’re pretty than because they have fancy degrees and years of experience. Miss USA is also used as a spokesmodel for certain causes, although rarely political. Still, it’s slightly unsettling to see somebody essentially say “I don’t have any independent thinking skills, I just do what my parents told me, and I want to represent your country!”

I leave you with a quote from her interview with the most unbiased media source in all the world, Fox News.

This happened for a reason. By having to answer that question in front of a national audience, God was testing my character and faith. I’m glad I stayed true to myself.