Let's play a quick game, even if nobody reads this in time

I'm calling this game "Lying, or Really F%$@# Stupid?". It's easy to play: just read a quote, in this case from Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, and...

"The plain meaning of sexual orientation is anything to which someone is sexually oriented. That could include exhibitionism. It can include necrophilia. It could include...voyeurism. You see somebody spying on you changing clothes and you hit them, they've committed a misdemeanor. You've committed a federal felony under this bill."

Well, I think it's pretty obvious what I want you to do.

An actual conversation

" 'That would be like saying that milk, cheese, and such, are called '''dairy products''' because farmers would dare each other to pull on the cows' udders.' "
"That's how I'm going to define it from now on."
"And the supporters of Proposition 8 think you should have that right. Or maybe they think you shouldn't, I'm not quite sure."

Yeah, it's a bad sign for a position if its proponents can't explain it well enough for people to make fun of it.

So, apparently, exams make me want to focus on these things again

There is a lot wrong with how I was doing this before. I was misunderstanding a lot of the things that have to be done with blogs, and not even in just the sense of "don't not post for months at a time". Once I finish up this semester's homework, I plan to go through most of my 'old' posts and fix them up.

Iowa

Huh. Have to say that I didn't expect that.

Bleh... 'content'... I'm going to be concentrating on a different blog under a different account, with no connection to this one, so this blog is now on official hiatus as opposed to unofficial hiatus.

EDIT: Also Maine and Vermont. I'd like to be all celebratory, but, then again, I'd also like to fly under my own power. I mean, like, with sufficient control and reflexes and such. Those would be a necessary part of the package. Though they'd also be nice on their own, though, of course, not as nice as the first thing. Not that I wouldn't be grateful!

See, that's why I need to edit a bunch of the entries.

I'm so often late to the party...

Peter LaBarbera. The Boy Scouts of America.

Sigh.

(Note: these have no real connection to each other. They're just stuff that's come up in the past month.)

"In a similar vein, what use is it to be an agnostic?"

That's a question I asked elsewhere, in a thread at Debunking Crap, an overall rather poor parody blog of some aspects of the skeptical movement.

I'd like to take some time to contemplate my navel at this question.

The context was a seminary student, evidently unaware of Occam's razor, asking why I would disbelieve in a god that, by definition, had no physical evidence of its existence whatsoever. His justification for choosing agnosticism under such circumstances, rather than atheism, was "Well, you don't know that he doesn't exist."

I wonder if I should have brought in Dawkins's, "Well, we're both atheists. It's just that I disbelieve in one more god than you do."

The logic! It burnnnnnsss...

So there I was, poking about the internet for information on genetic algorithms, and I found this.

For those who didn't click through, CreationWiki claims, among other things, that

Even when a fitness function is based on the real world, it is still just a mathematical model and it is therefore designed.

and

The point is that, because these evolution simulations are themselves designed, the claim that they show intelligent design to be unnecessary is false. It is absurd to look at a program that it took one or more intelligent programmers many hours to write and say that it proves that intelligent design of life is unnecessary.

So, to review: designing an environment to place things in is the same as designing the things themselves.

Unless anybody reads this and is all "MWchase, I dun' get it." I'm going to end this post on the note of that perfect little logic bomb.