As I do semi-frequently, I was perusing The Huffington Post, and something caught my eye. The video above was deeply disturbing. I knew that sexism still exists in America, I just didn’t know that some people felt strongly enough about it to cause a public disturbance. I hope that this was simply a stunt done by a couple of attention-starved kids (I couldn’t guess their ages from the grainy video). If not, such embracing of one’s own ignorance if frightening and sexism is a more problematic than I suspected.

I saw this the day after I renewed Bunnies4Buddha’s membership to the National Organization for Women (NOW). In response to this video, I just gave an additional contribution to the NOW and am encouraging my American readers to contribute as well. I’m also adding a link to NOW’s website on my sidebar. Let’s turn these fools’ antics into inspiration to effect change.

And here I thought it was just my humor that was stuck in Junior High.

Thanks to Scott for this little piece of humility.

A few months ago, I read my first Christian Apologetics book, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and hated it. When I discussed it with my friend Scott, he lent me Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I must admit, this Christian Apologetics book was much better, even insightful. It was logically written, with clear definitions and little appeal to emotion. Lewis’s approach to defending his religion is the polar opposite of Chesterton’s. It was a joy to read. Well at least the first half for reasons I will discuss later.

This short book is so dense with interesting thoughts and claims that I plan on limiting my discussion to what I consider the three most interesting topics. In the interest of brevity, I will also spread those topics over three separate posts. The three topics are the existence of God, The Case for Christ, and ethical insights. Here is the first:

Lewis starts the book by using a simplified version of the normative moral argument for the existence of god. That is, moral laws are ‘outside of’ ourselves. In other words, moral obligations are independent of one’s goals and universal.

1. It appears to human beings that moral normativity exists.
2. The best explanation of moral normativity is that it is grounded in God.
3. Therefore God exists.

The key word is in premise 1: “appears”. Morality only has the appearance of normativity but is in fact, not normative at all. Furthermore, this appearance has an explanation best grounded in nature. Consider the possibility that morality is an evolved, social instinct. This would then create instinctual moral obligations in almost all (not all, due to genetic variation and/or mental deficiencies) members of the species. i.e. our moral instincts would have the appearance of being universal. Secondly, such an instinct is social and acts on the group level. Thus the moral instinct would sometimes conflict with our one’s own goals. Thus the instinct would have all the appearance of normativity.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a new year and we have a new TITMT from The Art of Getting By. It’s a standard New Years style question:

What are your resolutions for the year 2008? If you don’t have personal resolutions, what are the things you wish would happen in the world? Be as silly or as serious as you want to on this one. Have fun!

Since the day our calendar designates as the first day of the year is arbitrary, I’ve never really been all that interested in New Year’s Day. Don’t get me wrong, I like the excuse to stay up late and drink and appreciate the day off work, but the day itself could have been any day. Thus I’ve always found making resolutions at the appointed time arbitrary as well. I like resolutions, and make them myself but I generally don’t tie them to this holiday. Every day of the year is a great one to try to improve one’s life.

That being said, I happened to make a resolution last month and started it December 29th. That’s close enough to January 1st to call it a New Year’s resolution. Mine is this: I will take a full month break from video/computer games in between games. As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to play one game compulsively and it ends up eating up way to many hours. I’ve tried various measures to limit playing time and all have failed. This new approach allows me to obsess but spaces the obsessions out so that I have time to devote to other things. What are those other things? Well, after video games, I spend my time on three things: music, reading, and exercise. I expect those activities to fill the gaps.

In a recent post, I wrote about my excitement over a major engineering advance in nuclear power generation. In the ensuing discussion, chopdeli berated me for giving short-shrift to the downsides of nuclear power. Fair enough. As a long-time nuclear power enthusiasts, I’m not surprised I tend to overlook the problems. I will partly address them in this post.

As I see it, there have been three major downsides to nuclear power plants. First, the cost, especially for coal-rich America. This barrier has been overcome, at least with new small scale plants. The other problems are safety and, of course, waste issues. I’ll cover safety in this post, since I know a bit more about it. Nuclear waste is a serious problem and concerns about it are certainly valid. As I hope to show, they are certainly more valid than concerns about nuclear plant safety.

The fears over nuclear power plant safety are significantly overblown, in my opinion. So overblown, in fact, that I characterized the fears as ‘irrational’ in one of my comments, much to chopdeli’s ire. Really, I think lack of information, not irrationality is to blame.

Let’s look at some numbers.The bottom half of the graph at the beginning of this post gives the number of active nuclear power plants world wide per annum. The data underlying this graph is from the International Atomic Energy Agency. From this graph, I’ve estimated the total number of active plant-years to be about 14,000 world wide. In that entire history there has been one partial meltdown, Three Mile Island, and one complete meltdown, Chernobyl. That puts the odds of meltdown per plant per year worldwide to be 1 in 7000. Since there were exactly zero deaths and zero injuries resulting from the Three Mile Island incident, the odds of being injured in such a meltdown are 1 in 14,000.

Read the rest of this entry »