Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

Write like this.

So it seems a thread on SFN inspired me to create Alex’s Law of Internet argumentation. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that, and propose a new Law or two:

• Alex’s First Law
  As soon as an online discussion becomes an argument, the participants will never admit they are wrong, no matter how strong the evidence against them. Winning an argument fairly is impossible.
• Alex’s Second Law
  Upon reading something that flies in the face of accepted science or reason, the educated layman will immediately make an attack on the semantics of it, as he does not understand enough science or logic to make a more detailed response. Inevitably, the discussion will shift to the meaning of one or two key words rather than focusing on the science or logic.
• Alex’s Third Law
  It is far easier to attack an argument by quoting one of the Laws of Argumentation than it is to actually construct a logical response.

  First Corollary: Using a Law of Argumentation (this includes laws such as Danth’s and Godwin’s) as a substitute for logical argumentation is justification for using Alex’s First Law against you.

  Second Corollary: Using Alex’s First Law to win an argument immediately makes you a victim of the First and Third Laws.

A list of the other Laws of Argumentation

Evangelical minister Ray Comfort recently put out a “150th Anniversary Edition” of On the Origin of Species, with a Special Introduction attacking Darwin, the theory of evolution, and atheism.

Yeah, big deal. It’s been all over the Internet lately. Well, as an assignment for one of my university courses, I wrote a nice report on Comfort’s edition, comparing it to the original 1859 first edition, which we conveniently have a copy of in a library here on campus.

It was very revealing.

You can see the entire 11-page report here, though don’t be frightened by its length: it’s double-spaced and in a nice, large, easy-to-read font.

Enjoy, everyone! Feel free to spread this around the Interwebs as much as you’d like.

For the impatient, here are the highlights:

• Ray Comfort’s table of contents omits page numbers entirely, so you can’t skip to specific chapters. In fact, new chapters start in the middle of pages, and chapter headings are in tiny font, so you can’t even find chapters if you want to find a specific detail. It’s worthless as the edition for “universities and higher education” it claims to be on the back cover.
• The text of his Special Introduction is in a nice, large font, whereas Origin is in a tiny, unreadable font. It is painfully clear that Comfort does not even want you to read Origin, just his introduction.
• The nice, 12-page index is completely omitted.
• Darwin’s credentials, once present on the title page, are left out.
• The one figure included in the first edition, a nice tree of life diagram, is omitted, leaving four pages or so of Darwin blabbing about a figure illustrating his point with no actual figure to illustrate his point.
• Comfort’s claim that atheists wanted book-burnings and generally had a huge violent outcry is mostly unsubstantiated. Though one atheist on RichardDawkins.net calls Comfort out on his “ideological masturbation fantasy.” (Yeah, the paper’s worth reading just for that quote.)
• I did not, in fact, see much response at all from the religious online community, besides some criticisms of Comfort.

What does this lead me to believe? Well, here’s my conclusion:

Comfort’s edition of On the Origin of Species is not the product of a society that has rejected Darwinism. It is the product of a society that accepts Darwinism more than ever, whose acceptance has driven Ray Comfort to the conclusion that society is rejecting God. To a deeply religious minister, that is cause for action. Thus, a new Origin was produced, one designed to bring people back to God by emphasizing a religious message and discouraging anyone from even reading Darwin’s words. In his view, after all, Darwin is the man who drove them away from God in the first place.

This is no ordinary edition of Origins, with a nice introduction stating the “other side” of the story, as Comfort makes it out to be. It is an outright, but very subtle, attack. And it deserves to be treated that way.

I’ve been a moderator here at SFN for almost four years now, and an administrator for about three. (The promotion to administrator was rather ad-hoc and I’m not entirely sure when it happened in retrospect; one day blike needed help fixing something in vBulletin and he promoted me so I had access to the right bits of the admin control panel.)

Over this time I have collected various bits of wisdom about moderating and participating in discussions on Internet forums. As SFN moves ahead with new plans and new ideas for the future, I thought it best to write some of my thoughts down.

Read more »

First, read the poem What I Believe, by Michael Blumenthal. It’s crucial to understanding my poem.

What I Believe

I believe that unicorns exist,
but that dolphins and iguanas
are entirely imaginary.

I believe that a hamster’s bite
won’t kill a man,
but that his wife will.

I believe that the weirder you get,
the crazier you are,
but the more fun you have.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in a small bed,
you will fall off the side.

I believe that no one
is spared insanity,
but some people get too much of it.

I believe in determinism,
but that’s not my fault.

I believe that, when all
the clocks melt,
Dali goes on without them.

I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so violently.

so as to alarm everyone,
so as to make them shout
and inspire generations of filmmakers.

And I believe that there are living poets
that are quite good,
but that I have yet to find any.

[Note: There's basically no point to this post. But hey, it's the Internet. That's allowed here.]

Media I can use to communicate with people I know in person:

• Phone call. The highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency medium, unless you get voicemail. But somehow the least preferred.
• Text message. Annoyingly brief and usually vapid; useful for arranging meetings or telling someone you can’t go to their party when you’d rather not have to explain on the phone.
• Facebook message. Either wall post or private message. You can talk as much as you want, but in public you’d rather not and most private messages are just messages sent to groups to inform them that a party is coming up. (In my experience, anyway.)
• Instant messenger, like MSN or AIM. You will never have a group of friends that entirely uses one protocol or another; there’ll always be the one or two people using a different system. IMs are convenient and fast, you can keep logs for yourself, and it’s a lot easier to type on a keyboard than on a phone; still, IM clients aren’t as portable. (If you have one on your iPhone you have to type with the tiny keyboard.)
• Email. The original electronic communication method. It’s now basically the Snail Mail of the Internet, though emails only take two seconds to arrive most of the time. For some reason many people I know don’t use email for serious messaging at all, sticking to Facebook or text messaging.
• Smoke signal. This is arguably my favorite system, although it is difficult to find willing people to communicate with and the fire department tends to show up a lot.

I’m the sort of person that likes to keep things archived. I have all of my email since my current email accounts opened; I have all instant messages logged and I keep offline copies of the (very few, as it happens) Facebook private messages I actually deem important. Text messaging presents a problem because there’s no good way to archive it, and of course nobody likes having their phone calls recorded.

My obsessive-compulsive need to have a cohesive record of my past isn’t being fulfilled! Stupid technology.

To prevent phishing, all Internet scams and cons should be required by ICANN to use the TLD .con rather than .com.

That is all.

Deep in space, a fire burns.

It is not an ordinary fire. It is the heat of uncountable gazillions of tiny pairs of protons and electrons being squished together at incredible temperatures, releasing scads of energy. The energy is transmitted outward, through clouds of zillions of other pairs, until finally it reaches the surface of this giant ball of fusing protons. Off it goes, zipping through space at ludicrous speed, until some of it — a tiny portion of it — is stopped.

This particular portion happens to have collided with a collection of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms arranged in such a fashion that its energy contributes to a complex chemical reaction, helping to link twenty-four globs of proton, neutron and electron together into a giant chunk of atomic soup. This chunk is passed around in a veritable sea of watery goop, until finally it is broken apart again and used for fuel.

That atomic soup was partially composed of water, another oddity. This particular water was part of a huge collection of water much like it, interspersed with various salt molecules, which simply sits, unsure of what to do with its life, on a giant bed of sand and rock. For fun, it slow-dances to the rhythm of the coming and going of another chunk of rock a quarter of a million miles above it, shifting around on its bed slowly, like it’s about to pass out.

But back to that atomic soup. Eventually the structure housing it is ripped from its comfortable bed of ground-up rocks and organic matter, mashed into small bits, and then doused in a bath of acids which gradually separate some of those balls of protons and electrons. From there it moves on to a long fluid-filled tube where some of those chunks are absorbed through the walls, into a stream of watery, reddish fluid with iron in it.

That fluid, being pushed in its containing tube by a pump made of soft organic matter that pulses in a particular rhythm, gradually works its way up. Reaching its destination, our chunks are ingested by tiny wriggling balls of chemicals which use them as building materials and energy sources for further wriggling and squirming.

Let’s not forget where this is all happening: on a giant ball of rock, soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside, bathed in water and hurtling through space at a speed generally considered unsafe for travel. It’s circling around the aforementioned giant fireball, which circles around a chunk of stuff so huge other stuff can’t help but fall right in.

And this chunk of rock, this fireball, this other huge chunk, are all but one of billions and billions of their kind floating around the universe.

Whatever your religious affiliation, or lack thereof, I hope this post has made you think of just how fantastically insanely weird and complex our universe really is. Maybe God did it, maybe it’s a consequence of our complex rules of physics and the patterns that spring from them; regardless, this is one hell of a crazy place to live in. So stop acting so unsurprised at everything.

This is what happens when you tell a nerd to write poetry.

‘Twas a warm summer day in La-La Land,
Fields of grass swayed lazily in the breeze,
The cool wind made ripples in ponds quite grand,
Cattle grazed quietly in the tall trees.

Fields of wildflowers, cover’d in white snow,
Were drinking from the ice-cover’d river.
High up in the grasses was a white crow.
The moon resembled a small cheese sliver.

The townspeople, dressed in parkas, were out
To round up their herds of longhorn llamas;
The honey bees were beginning to sprout,
Searching for fresh floral-print pajamas.

Another normal day in La-La Land,
Said mister Dali to his melting hand.

Those who do not get the Salvador Dali reference should go check Wikipedia. And those who are Googling to see if I plagiarized this sonnet: 5th period. I was Hamlet.

• Kommandant of commas
• Sultan of spelling
• Advocate of adverbs
• Adjutant of adjectives
• Savant of style
• King of correctness
• Guru of grammar
• Partisan of participles
• Mogul of modifiers
• General of gerunds
• Pontiff of punctuation
• Archbishop of articles
• Kaiser of clauses
• Fountain of phonetics
• Syndicate of syntax
• Dystopia of dyslexia
• Conductor of conjunctions
• Purveyor of periods
• Secretary of semicolons
• Mullah of metaphor
• Imam of imagery
• Admiral of ampersands
• Priest of perspective
• Apostle of apostrophe
• Hyperion of hyperbole
• Deity of dependent clauses

And so on.