BluRay At A Store Near You

The first BluRay drives, one of the two technologies trying to take over for DVD, are starting to hit the market. There will be, I believe, somewhere in the neighborhood of three movies released on the first day and the first drive will cost $850. That's right, $850 to play discs that cost $30 and offer a bit of increase in picture quality, but only if you're HDTV is extremely new, like within the last six months.

What this also means is that whatever it takes to play BluRay discs is not cheap technology and that the PS3, which plays BluRay movies as well as playing next generation video games, has got to be extremely expensive. Either that or they are using substandard parts in the machine in order to keep its retail price in line with the norm for game machines. One final possibility is that the PS3 will be the normal price for game machines, somewhere between $200-$400 at launch, but that Sony will take extreme losses on each machine sold.

  

Poll question

Is it immoral to look someone up on Google without getting their explicit permission first?

So, mangoes prove a hostile designer exists?

Some of you may be aware that Kirk Cameron grew up to be a fundamentalist wacko. In this ID video, he and his trusty sidekick disprove atheism. Using a banana. And quotes taken out of context from famous scientists. It's half an hour, but be sure to watch from 3:30 to 4:36 if nothing else.

What's especially funny is that the banana is actually a fantastic illustration of natural selection in action. Before their domestication, bananas were tiny, bitter and virtually inedible (if you ever ate a really green banana or a raw plantation, then you know how bad they tasted). But the environment changed in a way that favoured those plants that produced larger, sweeter, and softer fruits when ripe -- in particular, humans came along -- and those plants flourished. Then, there was a freak mutation, which resulted in a strain of bananas that were still more successful than their cousins -- given the environment (humans cultivating the kind of bananas they preferred), those without seeds were able to reproduce much more prolifically than those with seeds.

Arguably, this new strain of bananas was a speciation event -- the new kind of bananas reproduce in a completely different way from the old kind, and hence are a related, but distinct, species. This is important, because creationists like to claim that we've never observed 'macroevolution', where one species transitions into a new one. But they're wrong: bananas have undergone macroevolution! Even if you don't buy this, the history of bananas still debunks the myth that 'all mutations are harmful' -- while the seedless strain of bananas would have failed miserably in other environments, it flourished in the one in which it happened to arise, and hence was a beneficial mutation. And it was really just one little mutation -- at the genetic level, nothing all that dramatic or unusual.

A creationist might still object, claiming that cultivation isn't natural selection. But 'selection pressures' just means the way an organism with (or without) a given trait is more or less successful at reproducing in a given environment. It doesn't matter what links that trait with success, whether it's a change in the local climate or humans cultivating strains with traits they find desirable.

Finally, it's also important to keep in mind that banana farmers weren't, for the most part, breeding bananas to encourage particular traits (like sweetness and seedlessness): as banana plants with more desirable traits cropped up at random, they were cultivated more, and bananas with less desirable traits were cultivated less. Farmers certainly couldn't have foreseen that a seedless strain would develop!

The history of the banana, then, is a human-scale illustration of natural selection. Random and genetically minor but compounded mutations were disproportionately favoured by the environment, with the result that a new species formed and was better able to reproduce than the old. And all within a few thousand years (meaning this supports Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium, too).

Via Jesus' General

Blog against heternormativity

I have too much work to do, so I'm blogging vicarious, ie, just giving you a link. Okay, I'll also drop in a quote that explains heternormativity.

in brief, heteronormativity is a term that can be used to describe institutions, policies and beliefs that reinforce the rigid categories of male and female. these categories, supposedly, determine our sex, sexuality, sexual desire, gender identity, and gender roles. therefore, there are expected behaviors for males (such as the patriarch of the nuclear family for example), as are there expected behaviors for females (the submissive wife to the patriarch, among other things). but we all know---THAT'S BULLSHIT!

Wait, words and formalities aren't enough for it to count as a democracy?

Via Twisty Faster, a fantastic filmstrip from 1946. Mmmmm irony.

  

Friday Random Ten - On Time!

What up, you hep cats and kittens? It's that time again, and I know Kryssa's excited for it! Let's skip the directions this week and get right down to the tunes. If you don't know what we're doing...make your best guess and play along! Actually, I'm going to try something different this week. My list will be random, but at the end of each line I'll include a number representing where the song would be if I reordered the list by favorites, with my favorite song of the bunch at #1 and decending from there. Feel free to do the same.

(Song - Artist)
1. Don'T Let The D'Evil In - The Flower Kings (8)
2. Broken Wave - Enchant (9)
3. The Break Down - People Under The Stairs (7)
4. Casper, The Friendly Ghost - Theme (10)
5. Octavarium - Dream Theater (1)
6. Psycho Monkey - Joe Satriani (4)
7. La Villa Strangiato - Steve Morse (2)
8. Everyday People - Sly and the Family Stone (3)
9. Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96 - DJ Shadow (5)
10. Still, You Turn Me On - Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (6)

Now, I spent just a couple minutes ordering those, so if I thought about it more or later there might be some shifting, but I was trying to keep it easy and go right off the top of my head. I wouldn't recommend agonizing over it if you're going to play along.

Big Friday Blog Dump

First, the important news: There's a new Star Trek film in the works and it's going to be directed by JJ Abrams of Lost/Alias fame! I don't know about his directing abilities, but I like that he's involved. I'm less excited about the fact that it's supposedly focused on the youth of original cast, but I guess it could be interesting. You *know* that they're going to show Kirk cheat his way through the Kobayashi Maru, right? Oh, snap! Fanboy gushing!

I know it's plenty hip to hate on the Country music, but while I'm not exactly a fan, I can listen to it without rolling my eyes and have even found a few tunes that kind of grew on me. Twang or no, a catchy tune is a catchy tune, and before their fall from grace a while back I heard quite a bit of the Dixie Chicks through my sister and they certainly fit that category. Modern Country may not really be "Country" by some standards, but The Dixie Chicks seemed even less so. Anyway, I'm nowhere near qualified on Country music generally or The Dixie Chicks specifically to say much without exposing my ignorance, but they've got a new album out and you can listen to the first single for free here. Even if you're not into Country it's worth a listen.

I've got a couple Crooks and Liars links for ya next: here and here. The first shows a Fox News Poll with Bush's approval at 33%. Criticize polling all you want, that's a damn impressive number. The second link is an awesome clip from The Daily Show about Donald Rumsfeld. Sometimes it's like these people set the jokes up themselves.

I think Big Media Matt's War-Avoidance Plan with Iran was best articulated by Agent J in the venerable foreign policy documentary Men In Black: "What I don't understand is, why you gotta come down here and bring all this ruckus? My opinion is, 'Don't start none, won't *be* none'."

Read this editorial on how it was so awesome when people could beat up gay people for sport. This got published, in print. No, seriously.

Bitch, Ph.D isn't a site that I read with great regularity, but evidently she gave a keynote address recently and it's an interesting, if a bit long, read. Now, Noumena can probably correct me if this is wrong, but it seems to me like a good place to start if you're interested in reading the site or just thinking about femenism generally.

Joel Dykstra of South Dakota thinks "rape" and "incest" are undefinable buzzwords. In other news, does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Also be sure to check out Bill Napoli's rape exception. I think he's a crazy person.

Danniel Henniger is worried that the web is making everyone into disinhibited, foul mouthed crazy people. Of course, I don't think it was blogs that led to Cheney's famous phrase from the Senate floor, nor do I think the lack of blogs made the Old West any more "civilized". Pieces like this remind me of the Krikkit Wars from Life, The Universe and Everything. A solar system surrounded by a vast cloud of space dust which obscured any view of the stars led to the inhabitants on one of the system's worlds to believe that their little solar system was all that existed in the universe. When a space ship crash landed on the planet, the shock and trauma of learning that their entire conception of the universe had been wrong from the start led the people of Krikkit to the only reasonable conclusion: The rest of the universe needed to be destroyed. I don't know Henniger's political beliefs, but I think this is true for most Movement Conservatives. Oh, and I'm not going to scan back to make sure, but I'm pretty sure I got through writing this big ol' blog without uttering a single swear. Of course, if someone points out that I did, I'll just edit it. Ha ha, the beauties of the internet!

Fetishizing profit

Marx argued (somewhere in Capital, I'm too lazy to dig out a quotation right now) that one of the major fallacies committed by economists of his day was commodity fetishism, the reification of communal values and beliefs -- for example, treating money as a physical, material object and the profit motive as an inevitable law of nature.

In the intervening century and a half, things haven't improved. Let's examine a list of reasons why the cost of gasoline to the consumer has jumped up so high in the past year:

-- The showdown over Iran's nuclear program has pushed crude-oil prices to new heights, with a barrel costing $71.95 Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

What does the possibility of a war have to do with the current relationship between supply and demand in the crude oil market? Well, nothing, of course. Except for speculators buying as much oil as they can now, anticipating scarcity when (if) a war starts, and thereby creating scarcity now. So, technically, it's speculation and opportunism among investors over the showdown in Iran that's driving up crude oil prices.

-- Several states have started blending ethanol into their gasoline, driving up costs for the additive.

Driving up the costs for refinery and gas station owners. They could, of course, choose to absorb the cost of adding ethanol.

-- Some refineries knocked out by last year's hurricanes remain closed, while others untouched by the storms have throttled back for long-overdue maintenance. That's driven down gasoline production 457,000 barrels per day compared with the same time last year, while demand is up slightly, according to the Department of Energy

This is the only explanation that seems genuinely beyond the choices any individuals have made. However, one might still ask why the former refineries are still closed, and simultaneously, production has slowed at the latter.

-- Refinery profits have soared, adding to the price at the pump.

This is essentially the same explanation as the ethanol one: the owners of refineries have chosen to maintain, or even increase, their profits, at the expense of working- and middle-class folks (who do not generally get reimbursed by their employers as completely, if at all, for their transportation and travel expenses as the upper-middle class and wealthy).

All four explanations, then, are misleading: it is not that impersonal economic forces have accidentally aligned in such a way that pump prices have inevitably floated up, but that speculators, refinery owners, and gas station owners have all made opportunistic choices to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

Waking the fire

 
 

Behind the fold, Eric wakes the fire Saturday night with some enthusiastic drumming. 

Women gamers outnumber men

Counterintuitive? There's a catch:

Women were found to be slightly less likely than men in the 25-34 bracket to play traditional console games on systems like the PlayStation 2 or Xbox, while they gravitated more heavily towards simple [sic!] types of games like Tetris or other puzzle games and card games like solitaire. These casual titles are typically found on web portals like Yahoo!, AOL Games, PopCap Games, EA's Pogo.com and elsewhere.

As someone pointed out in the comments on that thread (which you should also read), puzzle games aren't usually what gamers are talking about. We're thinking first-person and third-person shooters and adventure games, sports franchises, and real-time and turn-based strategy games -- Penny Arcade and Gamespot probably aren't going to breathlessly review the latest additions to Yahoo! Games.

And, as I've suggested before, both the culture and content of 'real' games is, generally speaking, rather sexist, and this is why women are less likely to play them. As I put it in my comment on that thread, women are less likely to be impressed when you skimp on decent writers and invest in animators that can make a pair of DD boobs bounce as obviously as possible.

This might seem to be a self-reinforcing problem -- the teenagers playing sexist games learn sexist values, and grow up to become the game designers churning out even worse titles. But I think there's good reason to be optimistic, as feminist values gradually infuse the entire culture and teenage women who enjoy 'real' games despite the sexism grow up to be designers of better, more popular, and hence more lucrative games.

Public intellectuals

I'm too tired to write a comment. But go and read, and keep in mind that this doesn't just apply to scientists. All intellectuals ought to be public intellectuals; they don't (or shouldn't) just pay us to think deep thoughts with each other.

This therefore leads, once more, to the idea that perhaps the layman not only is not ill-equipped to fully understand science, but that more important than the lack of education, is a lack of caring. But, if that's the case, than how do we reach out to the community and encourage improved general scientific understanding of our surroundings? If the pursuit of scientific understanding is part of bettering all of humanity, but we cannot seem to communicate our findings to an improved general understanding of the world, what then is our true purpose? Is it all just a quest for pure truth?

And For The Nerds Of A Different Sort

Ezra Klein, formerly of Pandagon fame and now at The American Prospect Online, did a spot on C-SPAN on Easter, which is pretty interesting. Interesting, and depressing; the kid's younger than I and is not only getting all kinds of success and recognition, he deserves it.

If you just want to see Ezra's segment, make sure you click the top link, as the other one is much longer.

Edit: Rather than post another short post just to get a link in, and since this pertains to nerds as well, here's an amusing article about Wikipedia courtesy of Dan Brottman.

Edit #2: New issue of The Escapist is out, and there are several very interesting articles there for your perusal. I can't understate how impressed I've been with The Escapist. Were it not an online publication, I would probably subscribe to the print copy. Games are treated as a serious medium worthy of serious discussion, which unfortunately is all too rare in the media.

The Internet Is Awesome Part Eleventy-Billion And Two

You know, it's easy to get jaded on the Internet. It's easy to say, "Oh, I've seen "Brokeback to the Future", and "The Internet is for Porn", and "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny". I've seen all the nerd humor there is to see!" Then somebody makes a new funny video and it's awesome. I give you, "The Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society". Discuss.

Women watch themselves being looked at

Take the time to read this photoessay on the male gaze. Like Bitch Ph.D, I perceived the first two pictures of men as just as cute and charming as those they're based on. I find this interesting: what does it say about the way we construct cuteness in general?

Oh, How I Love Law School Ruckus

I'll admit it, I hate having drama in my own life but I *LOVE* having drama in other people's lives that I get to watch from afar. Obviously, I hate to see personal friends in traumatic situations, but I do love a good ruckus. Oh, and there's a good one going on now.

Professor Livingston, a tax and international law professor at Rutgers Law - Camden, started a blog in the last several months and recently wrote a post where he expressed his dislike of affirmative action, particularly in the hiring of new law professors. I'm not sure what the chronology of events was, but his post got picked up by the Volokh Conspiracy and a few other mainstream conservative sites. At some point this post found its way back to Rutgers Camden and spread through the faculty, including Imani Perry, a black professor and recent addition to the Rutgers faculty. She evidently wrote an email response to Professor Livingston expressing her offense at the perception that he intended recent "diversity hires" as the target of criticism. This, in turn, got picked up by Blackprof.com, and at some point was emailed to the student body by "Justice Forall" of the Equality Forum 2006. I'm not sure, but I think that *might* be a pseudonym. Since this started there has been extreme outrage by some at the school, with at least a few calls for his dismissal and a few more references to his "obvious" bigotry. At some point after this Prof. Livingston wrote a followup to his original post after this kerfluffel started.

Well, that's some fine drama!

So, read the posts, decide for yourselves, and post your thoughts in the comments. I'll hold off on giving my opinion until we've got something like a conversation going...Man, I love ruckus!

So, Is Gay Porn Ok If The Actors Are Married?

The new Bush Administration policy on abstinence-only education programs, and the federal grants that go to them, now includes the definition of "abstinence": Voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage." It also defines marriage as the legal pairing of two members of the opposite sex, so as Think Progress points out, gays are to be taught to be celibate for their entire lives. This is assuming, of course, that marriage as they're defining it only authorizes you to have sex with your spouse and not participate in, say, some sort of wild key party.

Cranky atheist Easter post (belated)

Easter is creepy and annoying. You have an entire religion nominally based on the teachings of a guy they call The Prince of Peace, and the holiest of holy days revolves around his brutal torture and execution. I guess celebrating something more positive and constructive, like, say, the Sermon on the Mount, with all its radical notions about caring for the poor and shunning superficiality, would just be crazy. Incidentally, I'm not sure that Passover is actually better in this respect -- it celebrates the wholesale slaughter of innocent Egyptian children, after all. But at least Jewish people don't go around wishing everyone a happy Passover. And neither do Neo-Pagan and Wiccan fertility fetishists shove May poles down our throats.

I would find ways to say cranky and dismissive things about other religions, too, but sadly I don't know enough about spring celebrations in Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Other than that colour festival thing they showed a clip of on the Daily Show a couple weeks ago, and that actually looked neat.

There's basically one grocery store chain in the SB, and yesterday it was closed. I needed sugar for my lemon meringue pie, and had to drive five miles to find a place that would sell it to me.

Now, go read about bad reporting on New Testament studies. My mom actually bought me one of the Strobel books mentioned there a couple years ago; I'm pretty sure I managed to decline the gift without calling him a hack and crappy apologist (which I did do to someone who tried to get me to read some CS Lewis back in college). He is a hack and a crappy apologist of course (as is Lewis), but I managed to keep things politic.

So, hopefully everyone had a nice Zombie Jesus day. I'm going to get some Indian food.

Coming attractions

 
 
 

I went to a bonfire last night. Expect to see more as I have time to put them up this week.