Teabagger takeover

Moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava has suspended her campaign in the special election to New York’s 23rd Congressional District, (h/t to AmericaBlog). Although I cannot predict who will win the election in this GOP-leaning district and what the winner will act like, rest assured that if some appeals to, and is pandering to, teabaggers, it is pretty likely that they will act like and have the same positions as a teabagger. I think this is bad news because when the teabaggers take over, compromise is crushed.

Extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are bad because it is difficult to get them to compromise. Compromise is good because it prevents the foolish excesses of both the left and right. I know, it’s frustrating to not always get what you want, but while ideologies create the ideas and initiatives, it is moderates who actually put them into practice, regardless of which side they are from. Extremists are unable to do that. Consider the case of California, where due to gerrymandering, incumbents on both sides have a 99% reelection rate. If elections are not competitive, there is no need for candidates to hold moderate positions and attract the votes of centrists, and hence nearly everyone in the California Legislature is an extremist. What does that bring? Budget crises because no one is willing to cooperate instead of compete.

Scozzafava would probably have been a reasonable conservative. She was pro-choice and supported marriage equality. She would have been a necessary “Let’s go slow” counterweight to left-wingers. But her withdrawal, that will not happen. Instead, the wingnuts and teabaggers will likely be energized and will try to take down the remaining GOP moderates.

And that is another step on a dangerous downward spiral.

Update: Look at all the wingnuts who supported Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party’s candidate: Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Concerned Women of America, James Dobson, Michele Bachman, the Eagle Forum; a who’s who of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Yikes!

Bald men don’t exist

Let’s do an experiment. You will need a photograph of a man who is not bald. The average human head has 100,000 hairs, and for the sake of this experiment assume that this man has exactly 100,000 hairs on his head. Imagine that you pluck one out. He now has 99,999 hairs on his head. Is he still not bald? Of course. There is no significant difference between having 100,000 hairs and having 99,999 hairs. Imagine that you pluck out another hair, so that the man now has 99,998 hairs on his head. Again, this is not a significant change, and the man in the picture is still not bald. Repeat this enough, and eventually you will imagine plucking out the last hair on the man’s head, leaving him with no hairs. If, when starting with a man who is not bald, plucking out one hair at a time never changed a man from being not–bald to bald, wouldn’t this mean that a man with no hairs on his head is not bald?

Houston, we have a problem.

Clearly, our conclusion is unacceptable. We cannot say that no man is bald because our experiment resulted in a man with no hairs on his head, who would be bald by definition. We cannot deny that not–bald men exist, as our experiment started with someone who we agreed was not bald. This implies that somewhere along the line the man went from being not–bald to being bald. When did the man change and where was the boundary between being bald and not bald; equivalently, how many hairs does a man need to have on his head so that, should one be plucked out, he will go from being not–bald to bald?

We cannot pick any random number, say 10,000, because this brings up issues of arbitrariness; why not 10,002 or 9998? We cannot defend our choice of 10,000 being the boundary because it is a round number, because 10,000 is a round number because of the numeral base we are using (base 10 in this case). The Ndom language of Kolopom Island counts using base six. In base six, 10,000 is 114,144, not at all a round number. Hence, defending 10,000 as the boundary between being bald and not–bald because it is a round number implies that a man’s state of being bald or not–bald is dependent on the language we are discussing him in. That idea is, of course, ridiculous. Finally, we cannot claim that there are three categories— not–bald, unsure, and bald— because this necessitates asking where the boundaries between not–bald and unsure, and between unsure and bald, are. This therefore reduces to the same problem with selecting a boundary as before.

The resolution to this problem is realizing that even though there is no clear boundary between being bald and being not–bald, there still is a difference between them. The lack of a clear boundary between the category bald men and the category not–bald men in no way means that those categories are not distinct. The key point is that a large number of successive differences in degree (plucking out one hair at a time) eventually amounted to a difference in kind (not–bald versus bald). And that is exactly what the difference between micro and macroevolution is. A large number of successive changes (microevolution) eventually accumulate, causing evolution into a new species (macroevolution).

So now, whenever you debate cdesign proponentists, you can explain this to them and ask them, if they still accept microevolution but deny macroevolution, why they deny the existence of bald men.

Pox parties are dangerous

Trigger warning due to graphic picture.

Anti-vaxxers who take their kids to “pox parties” are misguided and putting their children at risk. They have this bizarre belief that acquiring immunity to the varicella zoster virus is somehow safer or more effective than the vaccine. This is incorrect. The vaccine is effective at preventing chicken pox and is safer than the actual infection.

It’s not jus the fact that pox parties expose your kids to something that might kill them that makes them dangerous. You are also threatening them decades down the line. This is because of the way the VZV works.

The VZV is a kind of herpesvirus, and infections with herpesviruses can literally be described as lasting forever. When your body beats chicken pox and you recover, the virus is not eliminated. Rather, it goes latent and “hides” inside nerve cells. It can stay there for an indefinite time. Then, years or decades later, it reactivates, migrates down the ganglia, infects skin cells near the ganglia, and causes shingles (herpes zoster).

Need I mention that shingles is really painful and even disfiguring? Even when the outbreak is over, the pain can last for months or years due to nerve damage (this is known as postherpetic neuralgia). Also, what do you think happens if shingles occurs in a facial nerve?

If shingles breaks out near the geniculate ganglion, is causes what is known as Ramsay Hunt Syndrome type II. Besides the rash from shingles, it also has horrible ear pain, and potentially permanent unilateral hearing loss and facial paralysis.

And then there is herpes zoster ophthalmicus. That can cause permanent vision loss and debilitating pain. A picture of what this looks like is after the jump (graphic).

Please tell me this isn’t starting again

Another foot was found. It’s the seventh one since August 2007. I’m sure there’s nothing sinister going on, and I’m sure there’s a mundane explanation, but it’s really kind of a morbid mystery.

Not at all successful

In the wake of the assassination of American President Lincoln, a rather crude joke was told: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” This joke is committing the fallacy known as the overwhelming exception, where definitely relevant factors (in this example, her husband’s assassination) are ignored.

This sort of thing happened recently (via Feministing):

On Saturday, October 24, at a school dance in California, a fifteen-year old student was brutally beaten, robbed, and gang raped for two and a half hours. At least twenty people were involved, and some were joined in and encouraged it to continue. A few filmed the event with their cell phones. All this happened about half an hour after the security guards were released.

A spokesman for the school district, world-class asshole Marin Trujillo, said afterwards (emphasis added): “[The d]ance was successful event and safe for the students that were there. This dance itself was a successful event.”

Marin Trujillo, FUCK YOU.

Also, I think that the bystanders had a moral obligation to intervene. Doing nothing shows the negative character traits of cowardice (because they could have put themselves in  to help someone but didn’t), maleficence (because they were allowing something bad to happen), and others. Had some bystander called for help they would have shown beneficence (because they were taking steps to end an evil act) and had they intervened personally they would also have shown valour (since they were putting themselves at risk to help someone else). Since it is unquestionably better to be brave and beneficent than cowardly and maleficent, by not intervening the bystanders did an immoral act.

Speechless

From the Huffington Post (emphasis added in all cases):

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

[...]

Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions…

[...]

A 38-year-old woman in Ithaca, N.Y., said she was raped last year and then penalized by insurers because in giving her medical history she mentioned an assault she suffered in college 17 years earlier. The woman, Kimberly Fallon, told a nurse about the previous attack and months later, her doctor’s office sent her a bill for treatment. She said she was informed by a nurse and, later, the hospital’s billing department that her health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, not only had declined payment for the rape exam, but also would not pay for therapy or medication for trauma because she “had been raped before.”

[....]

Might nothing be “real”?

A brain in a vat

While bumping my way around the internet, a found an online excerpt from a book by a philosopher named Hilary Putnam. It attempts to show that the brain in a vat thought experiment is self–refuting, and implicitly disproves the real world. I am posting about it, not because I agree with it, but because I think it is interesting.

The argument starts by considering what a brain in a vat is. We can all imagine it, an evil mad scientist kidnaps us, cuts open our heads, puts our brains in a tub of fluid, and hooks them up to a supercomputer. The supercomputer feeds our brains with impulses, and it creates a complete illusion of reality. In principle, this means that nothing is “real” as there is no way for the brain to tell where it is.

Now, consider the case of a brain “born” in a vat. In such a case it would never experience anything of the “real” world, but rather only the supercomputer’s virtual world.

Suppose that the brain in a vat has a certain object in its world. Having a term for that certain object is a reasonable assumption, as it fulfills a need to talk about and think about that certain object. Let’s say that that certain object is called a flig. When the BIV refers to a flig, it is clearly referring to a virtual object, even if by coincidence a flig looks exactly like a brain in the real world.

Based on the previous, a BIV can only think about and talk about virtual things that have been fed to it by the supercomputer. This stays the same even if the word ‘flig’ is changed to ‘brain.’ Hence, if a brain in a vat in the real word says, “I am a brain in a vat,” what it is really saying is “I am a virtual brain in a virtual vat,” even though it clearly isn’t. Since the BIV is always stating a falsehood, the thought experiment is self-refuting. Basically, if all you know are virtual things and virtual facts, you cannot know anything about real things and real facts.

Recall that we are brains born in bodies. The role of our bodies and senses are hence directly analogous to the vat and the supercomputer respectively. We are therefore only thinking about things sent to us by our senses and not “real” things. Hence, if you say “I am a brain in a body,” what you are really saying is that “I am a virtual brain in a virtual body.” In this sense, nothing you see, think about, or experience, is real; the “real world” is all in your head.

Image via the Wikimedia Commons.