Ex Cathedra

Washington University in St. Louis, better known to most people as “I remember them, I almost applied to grad school there,” is planning give an honorary doctrorate to Phyllis Schlaffly, professional antifeminist, better known as “James Dobson with a wig, big shoes, and a rubber nose. ” There’s a Facebook group being organized to protest this act of stupidity and collaboation with hate by this formerly moderately-well-respected university. H/t to Feministting. The protest is centered on cutting them off at the purse strings, an expensive but unstylish fake-pearl covered little purse that blends in nicely with her plastic hairdo.

Sorry, life here in the pollen capital of the universe has put me down temporarily, but I’ll be back posting soon.

Perhaps somebody will   post about  the National Day of Prayer. I looked at the application to be a coordinator, but while I was delighted to see that convicted felons could be coordinators, Jews couldn’t. Nerither  could Roman Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and pretty much everybody else.

Perhaps some of our other contributors will leap into the breach and inform us abou this lovely event that was coordinated by the Dobsons, president Bush, and of course the felons.

In the meantime, perhaps a  pretty picture: Or another, wih a sweet sentiment

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, perhaps best known as the DC Madam was Found Dead, Apparently in a Suicide

There’s a community tribte to her at Bound, not Gagged.

h/t to Blog for Democracy and Amber Rhea

And thanks to fegg on b3taboard for this:

Hey, authors! Picture uploading works again. Maybe. Wait. It works, it’s my brain that doesn’t. I originally posted this as a page, not a post. Also, posting and editing work way better in Opera.

OK, I’m going over my quota of words, but did anybody catch on that Miley Cyrus is 15 years old?   Did anybody catch on that the young girls in that fundamentalist Mormon compound  never”had sex with their husbands,” They were raped by old men?  This happened in the context of a religion that sanctions pedophilia. There are child beauty pageants, padded bras for 7 and 8 year olds, and  ”little diva makeover parties .That’s enough.   The sexualization of children has got to stop. Right now!

How? : Except for the religious perverts, somebody is selling this shit. Not only should we never give these child panderers  a nickel for any of their products, we should do the best we can within the limits of nonviolence to make their lives miserable starting now.

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. - Emo Phillips

I went looking for a quote for a reply to Ted Goas, who was kind enough to visit and leave a nice comment (his blog is on the blogroll now, sorry I missed it). Anyhow, I came across a site that has a bunch of atheist quotes. This was among them. Guaranteed to warm your heart. Or something.

Coming up on Thursday.

Why not observe the National Day of Prayer? I know what that gets you: Madeline Kara Neumann

I’ve upgraded to the current version of Wordpress (2.5.1) which fixes an obscure security problem and fixes some other bugs, among them, the bug that gave authors problems uploading images

An interesting article in the NYTimes that’s related to early posts about narrative and science and math.

In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.

Then the students were tested on a different situation — what they were told was a children’s game — that used the same math. “We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game,” Dr. Kaminski said.

The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.

The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.

“They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night,” Dr. Kaminski said. “It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information.”

You know those tourists who have somebody take a picture of them standing next to the Statue of Liberty? NASA is exactly like that. The Greenbelt: Nova: So proud of us — more pictures there, including the picture of us.

Apropos nothing, I offer the following - shamelessly stolen from another blog.

Here is where I found it. Attributed to one Leslie Stephen a name that, I’m afraid, means nothing to me.

He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof - if it be a proof - has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.

It’s one way to argue, I suppose. Maybe this is nothing more than “appeal to narrative.” A kind of if you are inclined to believe this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will believe. So if it fits the narrative you’ve constructed for your world, it is truth. If it fails to fit, it is fiction.

If everything is narrative, maybe this is the best we can hope for.

But I’m inclined to believe that it isn’t all narrative; that there is argument which can do more than appeal to your own prejudices - that can have a truth value other than “this is the kind of thing I am predisposed to believe.”