Books/Religion

Reading the Bible

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 5 Comments

This summer I thought it would be an interesting project to sit down and read the Bible cover to cover. (Perhaps later I can tackle the Qur’an.) At the time of writing I’m on Numbers 20 (page 170 out of 1217) and generally learning a lot. (The Old Testament God is scary.)

But reading the Bible probably isn’t going to help me understand Christians any more than I do already. A few days ago I posted a thread on TheologyOnline asking them which chapters of the Bible they believe would be the best for an atheist (like me) to read.

Then I get this response from “OMEGA”:

You can buy a 2 CD set in the USA for about $15.00

that will have the bible read to you so, you can Listen to it at your convenience.

and a short while later:

I hope that my suggestion helps because I am not sure that you atheists have evolved far enough to be able to READ.

Okay, so I might not have gotten into the New Testament preachings about kindness and love yet. But isn’t this hatred a little, well, un-Christian?
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Life

The Relationship Uncertainty Principle

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 2 Comments

A long long time ago, a friend and I wrote a document on the science of relationships. It was mostly silly, but it did have one section that wasn’t just made up. That section was on the Relationship Uncertainty Principle.

The RUP works in a fashion similar to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. The idea is simple: at any given time in a two-person relationship, you cannot simultaneously know each party’s feelings for the other and how those feelings are changing.

Perhaps an example would help explain it.Continue reading →

Life/Science

Any Psychologists in the House?

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 3 Comments

Can anyone explain to me why people love talking about things like they’re experts when they really don’t know anything about the subject?

Like this guy:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt1Yo610lG0]

I’m often asked questions about things that are out of my area of expertise. Rather than make stuff up, like Mr. LHC Guy, I at least admit that I’m not sure. (My refusal to be absolutely certain has gotten me in trouble in the past, because when you’re trying to sell things it pays to be confident in yourself. Oh well.)

(To be fair, I act like an expert on things I’m probably not an expert on, but I’ve never yet caught myself being a complete and utter moron.)

Is there a psychologist around that can explain why people don’t recognize when they’re utterly out of their depth and shut up? I think that needs to be a mandatory skill.

(Video shamelessly noticed at Splendid Elles.)

Education

Going Gradeless

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 6 Comments

I’ve talked to quite a few people who agree that high school students focus too much on grades and too little on the actual learning — that students aim to improve their numbers, not their understanding. A good example would be the high school students who take vast numbers of college-level classes not because they care about the material, but because the classes may help their GPA or just look impressive. As an even better example, in the state of Texas, the top 10% of each graduating class (usually ranked by GPA) gets automatic admission into state universities, no questions asked. Students vying for top places add and drop classes to gain extra points and move up in rankings. Surely education shouldn’t be a competition where the person with the most points wins. School is about education and learning, not strategy — right?

Ideally. I generally agree with the anti-grade crowd. I’m more pro-learning. But what can be done?

I was talking with a friend about this on Saturday, and she suggested a rather creative solution.

Ditch grades altogether.
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Education

Literary Analysis: Metaphysics?

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 5 Comments

Science is limited by what scientists are capable of measuring. Our understanding of reality can only reach as far as our best experiments. If you were to ask any physicist, they’d tell you that physics stops at what we can measure: beyond that, we reach metaphysics, the land of unfounded speculation about why physics works. It is literally impossible to ever test a hypothesis in metaphysics because, by definition, no experiment can enter the world of metaphysics.

Someone go tell that to an English professor.
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Education

P2P Learning

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 2 Comments

I think education needs to take a hint from the Internet. Peer-to-peer communication, using protocols like BitTorrent, forms a significant share of all of the traffic on the Internet. No longer is the Internet a simple client-server model — content can be shared from user to user.

How does that relate to education? Well, teaching has been client-server for a long time, with the “client” being your average student and the “server” being your average teacher. It’s a server-push system: the server pushes content to the client and hopes that it accepts and understands it correctly.

That’s kind of dumb.
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Life

Your Attention Please

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 2 Comments

If you expect me to solve your computer problem, you will have to tell me more than “I tried to go to the website and it didn’t work.”

I’d rather like to know what exactly happened when you tried to go to the website and what error message, if any, you got. Error messages, after all, do have a point: they tell you what went wrong. That can be helpful.

Education/Science

Why People Believe Weird Things, Redux

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 4 Comments

Michael Shermer wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, which I own and have read several times. I always find it fascinating, but recently I’ve been thinking about Shermer’s main point: why, in fact, people do believe weird things.

Shermer’s point can be summed up with a few quotes:

More than any other reason, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting.

Immediate gratification. Many weird things offer immediate gratification.

And finally, Shermer lists the last reasons as: simplicity, morality and meaning, and “hope springs eternal.”

I disagree.
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SFN

Statistics and Stuff

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 14 Comments

Over on SFN, we’ve been interested in figuring out how to stimulate growth and post volume to allow SFN to expand. It’s an interesting challenge — we have four large competitors (that I know of), and there is no simple “how to get more posts” procedure that we can follow. It’s a seat-of-the-pants venture.

To get a better handle on what we’re dealing with, I’ve compiled a graph and some handy statistics.
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Books/Science

Review: The Mind of the Market

Posted on by capnrefsmmat / 0 Comment

I recently bought Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.

The book starts off highly interesting: it brings up points about free trade few people have likely considered before, and in general makes interesting observations. Readers of Shermer’s other works, however, will notice a common theme between books — Shermer brings in evolution and intelligent design for yet another battle, and some of his examples from Why People Believe Weird Things are used over again in the new book.

While it is interesting, The Mind of the Market seems to suffer from a catastrophic failure to make a point. Shermer brings in studies and stories and numerous interesting facts, but yet never draws these studies together and offers his own hypothesis or uses them to make a broad point about economics. One can’t help but think that the book is more a compilation of interesting evolutionary economics rather than Shermer’s attempt to advance his theory. There just doesn’t seem to be a common thread between the stories.

So while the book is interesting (like all of Shermer’s work), it seems like it needed some more work and perhaps a strong-willed editor. If you’re looking for an interesting read, get the book — you’ll learn things you’ve never heard before. If you’re looking for a persuasive discourse on evolutionary economics, look elsewhere.