This space for Rent

April and I went to catch the movie version of Rent on Saturday night.

Broadway musicals are a hard thing to translate from the stage to the screen. Something is always lost in the translation; it's not the director's fault, or any of the actors', but there's just something about that interaction between the audience and the performers that you just don't get with a movie; so it should be mentioned that Columbus had the deck stacked against him from the moment that he decided to put this musical on the big screen.

I don't mean to sound as if I didn't like the movie; because I did. The music was well-performed, the actors were comfortable in their roles, and if you like musicals, this was a good one. But having experienced the show when it came to Calgary, then seeing the movie, there's really no comparison.

This is another of the better films I've seen this year, and like the last one, this one will be a hard sell to audiences everywhere. Those who don't like musicals won't like this, and those who have seen it on stage will probably be overly critical of the movie version; whether it's deserved or not. I'm apparently one of those very rare guys (according to April) who a) likes The Sound of Music and b) isn't gay.

All that notwithstanding, if you go to it with an open mind, you'll enjoy it. It's a raucus, energetic film, and if you're at all musically inclined, your toes will be tapping by the time the first song has played its final chords.

Okay; shutting up now.

Compassionate Conservatives

Am I the only one who's starting to think that one of the identifying characteristics of people who identify themselves as "compassionate conservatives" is a complete and total lack of compassion?

Recently, the Family Research council has denounced the possibility of vaccinating teenagers against two different strains of Human Papilloma Virus; which, combined, could prevent approximately 70% of all cervical cancer. This vaccine has the potential of saving the lives of 3700 women in the United States alone every single year; and the FRC has gone on record claiming that they don't want it offered to teenagers with their standard set of immunizations.

Why? Because HPV is sexually-transmitted. The FRC and Focus on the Family have both released statements voicing concerns that vaccinating teenagers could be the equivalent of telling them that it's okay to have sex. Neither have openly denounced it just yet, but neither wants the vaccine given to adolescents around 13 years of age; which happens to be exactly when it's most needed.

In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Reginald Finger, a former medical analyst for Focus on the Family said: "There are people who sense that it could cause people to feel like sexual behaviors are safer if they are vaccinated and may lead to more sexual behavior because they feel safe."

Now, maybe I'm a little nuts, but isn't that like saying "we should only sell bicycle helmets to people who are planning on riding their bikes into a brick wall?"

Now, interestingly enough, both Focus on the Family and the FRC have been very vocal in the Pro-Life end of the spectrum. Again, I stay out of that particular debate simply because I don't believe that it can be boiled down to a black/white, pro-life/pro-choice debate, but suffice it to say that they seem to think that allowing abortion under any circumstances whatsoever is tantamount to murder.

So why is potentially allowing thousands of women to face the possibility of death or infertility suddenly okay?

If you want to reduce the number of abortions, the way to deal with it isn't to make abortion illegal, it's to educate the people who may potentially have them. Teach them about birth control; abstinence; teach them to be responsible for themselves sexually; and if they choose to have sex, make sure that they're safe about it.

But as far as they're concerned, that's no good, 'cause it still allows for the possibility that (gasp) people might actually have sex! So, they oppose just about anything that could make sex less risky: birth control pills; condoms; morning-after pills; HPV vaccines; I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if you looked for it, they probably opposed use of Hepatitis vaccines too. As far as they're concerned, abstinence is the only option; which means that they're either seriously delusional, or they have their kids under 24-hour surveillance. The point is that if this vaccine is sending the "wrong message" - that we expect that they'll have sex - what's the "right message?" That we care more about their maidenhead than their lives? Why are those who are so adamant that abstinence is the only way to go so convinced that fear is the only way to promote abstinence? If not gettin' it before marriage is such a wonderful thing, it seems to me that the last thing you'll have to do is terrorize teenagers into not doin' it.

See, I really didn't get the reason why the far right wing have this unhealthy obsession with sex. They don't seem to want anybody havin' it. They oppose homosexuality; not because being attracted to someone of the same sex is wrong, but because they might actually have sex with someone of the same sex. They preach abstinence, rather than promoting the teaching of responsible sexuality. The overwhelming message: SEX CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE! While flatly rejecting just about any medical advancement that goes even partway to ensuring that sex doesn't ruin their lives.

It wasn't until a friend of mine provided me with a rather brilliant hypothesis. It's so simple, so elegant, and rather beautiful in its simplicity.

They're not gettin' any; and what they're gettin', they're not enjoyin'.

I have to admit, I don't have any data to back this up. For all I know, they could spend their evenings banging the hell out of the local college football team; but you have to admit that there does seem to be a fair amout of sexual frustration inherent to the far-right. Seriously: what issue have they been more vocal about than sex? They're against homosexuality, but not against the idea that someone could be attracted to the opposite sex; they tend to focus on the act itself. They're not against people dating, they're just against the idea that the daters may be having sex in the process. They're not against sex after marriage; but they object to any kind of birth control being used. And they've gone to the point where they are so adamant that nobody have sex before marriage that they've endorsed so-called abstinence-only programs; tax-funded programs which promote abstinence, and only abstinence. How do they do it? You guessed it: fear mongering; even if that fear is completely unfounded. For example, contrary to research, these programs insist that "touching another person's genitals can lead to pregnancy," that "there's no such thing as 'safe' or safer' sex," and (this is my personal favorite) "loneliness, embarrassment, substance abuse, and personal disappointment can be eliminated by being abstinent until marriage." I hope I don't actually have to say this, but for the record, not one of these are supported in the least by any empirical data.

In short, the only reason why sex is really an issue is because the far right sees a need to make it one. Why, I'll never know. Guess there are a few things that even I don't get.

Pat Robertson to Dover Pennsylvania: "Don't turn to God if you Need Help"

You really couldn't make this kind of stuff up. Seriously. You don't need to really look to hard these days to find complete crackpots.

Pat Robertson; famous for calling for the assasination of president Hugo Chavez; for blaming 9/11 upon pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way;" for claiming to have directed the course of Hurricane Gloria which caused millions of dollars of destruction along the US' east coast in 1986; and made similar claims about Hurricane Felix in 1995; and my personal favorite: describing femanism as "a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians;" has again issued one of his PatWas.

No, I'm not making this stuff up.

"I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover," Robertson announced in a November 10th airing of The 700 club, "If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there."

There's compassionate conservativism for you. Apparently, feeling bad about his comments, Robertson later clarified: "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

Now, what's deliciously ironic about all this is that those who have been pushing the Intelligent Design Curriculum have been very careful to avoid any mention of the word "God" in any of their publications (although that sorta fell apart in the courts in Dover, when one of the witnesses on the stand admitted that he felt that the Intelligent Designer was the Christian God). The reason for this is pretty obvious: Intelligent Design, designed (no pun intended) to undermine the scientifically-sound theory of Evolution is basically just creationism made more politically correct. If you look at the Intelligent Design Network's Homepage, they offer the following:

We believe objectivity in the institutions of science, government and the media will lead not only to good origins science, but also to constitutional neutrality in this subjective, historical science that unavoidably impacts religion. We promote the scientific evidence of intelligent design because proper consideration of that evidence is necessary to achieve not only scientific objectivity but also constitutional neutrality.

On paper, that sounds pretty good. No mention of any of the standard biblical creation beliefs which would make Intelligent Design a violation of the establishment clause of the American Constitution.

Then Patty baby decides to go and blow all that hard work the ID proponents have been doing out of the water. According to them, Intelligent Design is merely the science of detecting evidence of design in nature; having nothing whatsoever to do with Pat Robertson's God. If we go by Robertson's reaction, it would seem that they were mistaken.

The logic (or rather the absence thereof) in Intelligent Design

Let's ask ourselves perhaps the most pertinent question in Intelligent Design theory; one that nobody seems to be able to answer: What is the scientific theory of Intelligent Design, and how may it be empirically tested?

Not one person yet has been able to answer this one simple question, and I openly challenge anyone who is within the sound of my electronic voice to provide an answer.

Evolution has been tested time and time again. It has been the prevaliling scientific theory to explain the diversity of life on earth for over 150 years; ever since Darwin was tromping around the Galapogos Islands. The fossil record supports it; modern genetics supports it... In fact, to date, not one study has been performed which contradicts evolution.

But let's suppose, hypothetically, that one had. One day a scientist stumbles upon irrefutable evidence that evolution simply cannot be the mechanism by which life on earth arose and diversified. Let's presume, just for the sake of argument, that tomorrow, we find out that the theory of evolution is wrong.

Guess what? The theory of Intelligent Design still wouldn't be a scientific theory.

See, according to the IDiots out there (although they don't explicitly say so, their strategy so far makes it quite clear) hacking holes (whether real or perceived) in the theory of evolution equates to proving Intelligent Design.

This is, of course, bullshit. No scientific theory is accepted until they at least have a solid falsifiable hypthesis and have either supported or disproven it. Frankly, where Intelligent design is concerned, it is very possibly impossible to falsify an act of God; and since She isn't coming forward to tell us how She dun it, Intelligent design will have to be viewed as it is by the scientific community: pseudo-intellectual crap.

Now, I know that the tone of this posting is a little harsher than I usually use, and I apologize, but the simple truth is that I see Intelligent Design as a slap in the face to everything I've decided to dedicate my professional life to. To take religion, specifically the book of Genesis, cloak it in pseudoscience, then try to force-feed it to high school students as if it were an accepted scientific theory; that is something I simply cannot accept. As a scientist, I simply cannot look upon Intelligent design with anything less than utmost contempt.

More On Wei Ch'i.

Granted it's been a while since I've played, and I'm fairly certain that I'm not as good as I once was, but I still pick up a chess board every so often just to keep myself sharp. I'm still pretty good. I've played at the national level, and did quite well; I finished in 143rd place out of over 3000 competitors.

So when I tell you that Go makes chess seem like the strategic equivalent of tiddlywinks by comparison, I want you to understand my full meaning.

Let's take your average chess game of, say, 120 moves (60 per player). On any one move, the largest possible number of available configurations is 121, broken down as follows; not counting the squares the pieces are sitting on at this moment:

pawns: 2 possible squares each (a total of 16 new possible configurations, at the absolute most).
King: 8 possible squares (eight new possible configurations)
Queen: 27
Bishops: 13 each (for a total of 26)
Rooks: 14 each (for a total of 28)
Knights: 8 each (for a total of 16)

Add 'em together and you should come up with 121. And the vast majority of the time, you will have far fewer than 121 available. For the first move, for example, there are only twenty possible moves, period. Not twenty-one, not nineteen. Twenty, exactly.

But since this is all very rough, that means that in a 120-move chess game, the configuration of the board is approximately 121^120; which gives you something on the order of 8.6x10^249.

On the first move playing Go on a 19x19 board, black has 361 possible moves; white, 360, and so on. Now, this is all approximate, but since I was generous enough to use the absolute best-case scenario for Chess, I'll do the same for Go. Your average Go game on a 19x19 board lasts about 300 moves. So the number of possible board configurations that are available looks something like this:

N=361!/61!; which gives you something on the order of 2.82x10^684 possible board configurations.

That's a really big number:

2820000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Give or take a zero or two

How many of these are actual legal board configurations is anyone's guess. I've seen estimates between 5 and 20%. Which, when you're talking about numbers this big, doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

So I'm beginning to understand why nobody's ever written a computer program that plays a decent game of Go. The numbers are just too big.

Here we Wei Ch'i

So I'm teaching myself to play Wei Ch'i. Well, that's the Chinese name. Around here, it's called Go. It's described as the most difficult game ever devised; a title it's held for somewhere between three and four thousand years, it's also a contender for the title of oldest game still played in its original form. The only possible exception to the latter is backgammon (although it's arguable that the romans played it in the same way that it's played today).

The game is played on a 7x7, 13x13 or 19x19 board, depending on how long you want the game to last and how good you are. Supposedly the masters can play games on a 19x19 board that can last for days before anyone wins.

I'm not that good.

The rules of the game are actually remarkably simple, the strategy is exceedingly complex. It makes Chess look like Tic-Tac-Toe. Legend has it that the Chinese emperors would make their generals learn to play to improve their strategies. I can see why.

But I gotta say, it's a lot of fun.

On Evolution, and God.

So I was chatting with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about evolution. It should be mentioned, critically, that my friend, while strongly Christian, does not ascribe to the dogma of the Intelligent Design proponents. He accepts evolution as having occurred; however, in his words, "that doesn't necessarily mean that God wasn't in there somewhere." He sees the book of Genesis as, and this is too good a quote for me not to use directly: "God simplifying natural history down to a level that a bunch of illiterate goatherds standing on a hill could understand and remember," which is basically what I've been saying since I found out about the whole Evolution/Intelligent Design debate; albeit somewhat more eloquently.

The thing, he said, that bothered him was the fact that Evolution required you to start with the assumption that God doesn't exist.

That was the epiphany moment for me. Ever since I learned about this so-called Intelligent Design theory, it confused the hell out of me why some people, many of whom are actually relatively intelligent, would deny the findings of just about every single branch of the natural sciences just to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old; and that all animals in existence were magically created in their current form. At that moment, I finally understood: here's a perception that Evolution somehow denies the existence of God; and God's a really tough chick to argue with.

Okay, first off, I don't want this to be an essay on the existence/non-existence of God. That's a question best left to philosophers, theologeans, and people who are a lot smarter than me.

What I do want to get into is whether or not evolution theory actually denies the existence of God.

The short answer is "no."

Evolution theory, in all the forms it has taken since Darwin, and its application as far as abiogenesis and the origins of life on earth says nothing whatsoever about whether or not God exists. It says notning about the existence or functioning of any god or gods. It's basically orthogonal to the question; roughtly as orthogonal to the question as how your microwave oven works.

Is it possible that radioactive decay rates spontaneously change as soon as we're not looking at them? Maybe; but until we have some observable data to support that premise, the scientific approach demands that we avoid speculation and work from solid data. Is it possible that God made the world to "look" old to every experiment we could possibly perform? Again, yes, it's possible, but following that logic through to its natural conclusion, it could be argued that we have no solid proof that all five of our senses are not illusory, so therefore, we know absolutely nothing about the world around us.

The point is that if no observations exist, and no observations can be expected to be made, speculation is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. Sure, speculation can be fun, and it can also draw you in new and interesting directions that you may not have previously considered; but as far as actually understanding a phenomenon, it often reflects far more upon the experimentor's personal baises than it does upon the actual nature of things.

The point is that science works upon what can be observed. Practically by definition, God is an unobservable entity; whether She exists or not. So science simply ignores the question. It's irrelevant to whether or not the theory of evolution is correct or not. We can speculate all we want as to whether God exists, and whether or not She was involved in the creation of life on earth, but all this would be beside the point. Evolution is possibly the single most-supported theory in the biological sciences. While I object to the term "unifying theory" on principle (largely because a lot of people think that it sounds too much like "God"), if the biological sciences have a unifying theory, then evolution would be it. From the gross anatomy of complex animals, to the smallest molecular pathway in our individual cells, there's a certain elegance about the system; and the only scientific explanation which simultaneously explains the magnificent diversity as well as the shocking similarities between the various organisms is Evolution.

Whether or not God was involved is a separate issue.

Knock, Knock; Who's there?

So, I've created a new blog to collect stories of people who have knocked on our doors, phoned us in the middle of dinner, or otherwise harrassed us to sell us something, convert us to some strange religion, or get us to donate to some cause that we've never heard of.

To find out more, please go to http://knockingatmydoor.blogspot.com.

This is a community project, and will only work by word of mouth, so if you have any friends, family or loved ones who have a story to tell, please send them my way.

Tell your friends. Have them tell their friends. Have them tell their friends' friends.