Last night (Sat.) I caught part of an Al Franken routine in which he read Trump's latest tweets about a new drug that he has heard about. Franken quoted directly from the tweets, but I have to paraphrase them. And, yes, I know that those tweets are not real, though as always with Trump that can be difficult to tell.
Trump tweets about a new surefire cure for corona virus that he has just learned about. This is a drug that has been around for many decades and has been in more clinical trials than any other drug. And in those tries it has proven to cure all diseases. Whatever ails you, this cures it.
Its name is placebo. And it is very effective. It is so effective that they even have a name for how very effective it is: placebo effect.
Fauci approves of it. Birx approves of it. Fauci gave Trump a placebo tablet. The tablet tasted a bit sweet. Fauci told Trump that now he is immune to corona virus and to demonstrate the effectiveness of placebo Trump should go to a major hospital and personally visit all the COVID-19 patients and shake their hands. Trump thinks that is a very good idea and is making arrangements for that visit. Pence also thinks that it is a very good idea and wants to help make the arrangements.
Edited by dwise1, : a name that describes how effective it is
I wanted to remark about something Tangle said in Message 136 of Covid-19 and religion., but then thought better of making an off-topic remark -- that despite mike the wiz apparently having already pulled it off-topic.
Tangle says:
Tangle writes:
But hey-ho; just for starters, atheists do not have any version of god.
My quibble is that when atheists do discuss characteristics of this god-thingee, we must refer to one of the many versions that theists present us.
A classic and humorous example is from the book, Catch-22 (link is to the SparkNotes that I'll be using here). While a cadet at the Santa Ana Army Air Base (local history for me, though I had never heard of that base before reading the book), Yossarian has an affair with the wife of Lt. Scheisskopf (who is true to his name), Mrs. Scheisskopf. At one point, they get into a heated argument: although they are both atheists, they don't believe in different versions of God -- Joseph Heller did a lot of word play, which is part of the joy of reading the book, and which you just now saw and will see below.
quote:In one of the novel’s manifold contradictions, two atheists, Yossarian and Mrs. Scheisskopf, argue over what kind of God they do not believe in and address the nature of God in a debate. The God in whom Mrs. Scheisskopf does not believe is good and all-knowing, whereas Yossarian’s deity is bumbling and confused. Yossarian’s argument is typical: that a truly compassionate God would not have allowed all the unpleasantness and pain in the world. But the details that Yossarian uses to argue his point are unusual: he asks why God would create phlegm, tooth decay, or incontinence. Yossarian is not just angry with the God that he does not believe in, but he also ridicules him. Mrs. Scheisskopf, on the other hand, prefers not to believe in a good and righteous God, arguing that if one is not going to believe in God, one might as well not believe in a good God. In this way, the idea of God can be useful, even if it is not accurate. The contrast between the chaplain and his assistant, the atheist Corporal Whitcomb, further develops this paradox. The chaplain, who does believe in God, has a very quiet, nonintrusive manner as he ministers to the men in the squadron, which does not turn many men toward religion. Corporal Whitcomb, on the other hand, wants to enter into a full-scale religious campaign, which would include revivals and form letters sent from the chaplain to the families of men killed in combat. Like Mrs. Scheisskopf, Whitcomb’s lack of belief in God allows him to see religion as a useful tool.
Not having much time to track down the full text, here is an excerpt that I found from that argument:
quote:What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.
But no, atheists don't have versions of gods they don't believe in. Tho' I suppose if there was a god I wanted to believe in it would be GDR's and not Faith's.
True. My point is that we do have to address specific versions when we discuss theists' gods with them. One advantage we have is that we can see the wide variety of god-versions that exists whereas most believers can only see their own version.
Different personalities seem to be drawn to different versions.
There was a book co-written by a rabbi, Stupid Ways, Smart Ways to Think About God (1993) -- I saw a flyer about it at my UU church. Basically, most believers have childish ideas about God because that what they had learned as children and, since they never gave it any thought since then, as they matured their ideas about God did not. That's one of the reasons why I keep trying to get believers to start to think, which they will anything they can to avoid doing -- candle2 being the latest example here.
There's also a question of how one had become an atheist. If we did it by examining god-belief and realizing that it doesn't make any sense, thus growing out of belief, then we wouldn't be tied to any particular god-version. But some atheists deconverted in response to trauma induced by the religion of a particular god-version, so they would be more likely to have a specific god-version to not believe in.
But in this scene in Catch-22, instead of theists arguing in disagreement over which god-version to believe in, he has atheists arguing in disagreement over which god-version to not believe in.
At the risk of continuing this off-topic tangent, that UU church flyer was a reprint of an Associated Press review of the book taken from the Los Angeles Times.
quote:Among the "stupid" views of God listed in their 117-page book:
God as your personal "cosmic bellhop," ratifying "your every desire," always "ready to serve you" to control others, making in essence "yourself god."
God as "little Mary Sunshine," so don't worry, "little Mary Sunshine will take care of everything for you."
The "proverbial God of wrath, ready to show how much he cares by punishing you, the Marquis de God," despising sinners so much he exterminates them. Adherents of this view blame God's vindictiveness, rather than "our own moral lapses."
"God the general," a "nationalistic god" whose "holy mission is to serve his country. Protect its honor." He's not just defender, but a "self-righteous and meddlesome god. . . . He is the commander of crusades. The leader of jihads."
"God the master of ceremonies," who leads weddings, bar mitzvahs, confirmations, funerals, to be hired by anyone.
This ties into my view of religion, which is that a useful constructive religion is not one that gives you answers, but rather one that gets you to ask the questions. Asking questions makes you think about these things, getting you involved in seeking your answers, and promoting your spiritual growth. When you are only spoon-fed answers, you stop thinking and you stop growing. To question is the answer.
And as too many theists do, the authors offered their own explanation for what turns people into atheists (why doesn't anybody ask us or listen to us when we explain it to them?):
quote:"We still have stupid ways of thinking about God," they say. "The ideas we were spoon-fed as children we now gag on as adults," undermining and destroying belief in many cases.
. . .
To a large extent, atheists seldom reject a credible God but usually "reject some stupid way of thinking about God," the authors say, calling some ideas about God "so ridiculous they are not worth believing."
I would add, though, that it's not so much a matter of children having been spoon-fed these childish ideas, but rather that those are the childish interpretations that children tend to form when being taught something that they don't quite understand.
For example, I remember in a Released Time Christian Education lesson being taught about Abraham gathering stones on a hillside with which to build an altar, so in my mind Abraham was dressed in a black suit with that top hat because Lincoln was the only other Abraham I had ever heard of.
Art Linkletter had a feature, Kids Say The Darndest Things, in which he would ask a question to children around the age of 3 to 8. The only one I remember was one young girl didn't want to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because she was afraid of the witches. Which witches? The four witches: "One nation, four witches stand, ... "
I always warn believers to not leave a kid alone with a Bible. That's just asking for trouble.
Edited by dwise1, : added "to question is the answer" paragraph
I am posting this link in response to Tanypteryx having brought up the CRISPR gene editing toolkit in Message 415 of NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology? . When I joined OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes) at Cal-State Fullerton upon my retirement, the popular "Science 4 U" class was about half-way through its course on genetics based on lecture videos by Eric Lander, Professor of Biology at MIT. In the part of the course that I attended, Dr. Lander was working through how we would decipher the genome, which turned out to be by using naturally occurring enzymes for cutting proteins and joining them together. Then we got to the CRISPR complex of enzymes.
It's a retired husband-wife team who run the class, so one day she gave us an ear-wig. Which I now pass on to you from acapellascience:
Neither side has noticed that It's the same god - the symbols are identical, it's a matter of personal perception which you see, a rabbit or a duck.
It goes far beyond that. Rather than nobody noticing that they're the same, their doctrines and dogmata forbid them from noticing. If you were to start to notice, you would be committing blasphemy, which in the societies depicted would undoubtedly be punishable by death. The moment you start to slip, you would force yourself back on the straight and narrow.
Our city would sponsor a "Concert in the Park" once a week in the summer. One night, the band singer announced that they were going to sing all the great songs from the 80's. From the picnic blanket next to us I heard the comment, "Well, this shouldn't take long."
Actually, in my case disco had come and was on its way out the door before I first encountered it (that was "A Fifth of Beethoven" which Mexican TV used in its coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics).
I grew up on the music of the second half of the 60's (basically starting with Rubber Soul). My older sisters were always playing 50's music which I did not like (though after learning to dance a couple decades ago I've been able to appreciate it more, though not as much as big band).
Then early in the 70's the musical, Grease, sparks a big 50's revival in popular music. I didn't like it the first time around and I didn't like it rehashed either. My impression was that rock must be starting to die since it clearly was running out of ideas.
At that time, a friend played his Switched On Bach, which introduced me to baroque music from which I branched out to classical, etc. That was about the only music that I listened to for the next 28 years, so most popular music and artists just went unnoticed (eg, disco). I've heard some names, but have no idea what they've done nor how they sound. For example I do remember Michael Jackson, but I only know the bubble-gum stuff he did in the 60's.
Talking about Grace Slick, I saw Jefferson Airplane (that Starship stuff was also after my time) at the Newport Pop Festival (03-04 Aug 1968 -- they were the closing act on the last day). When the audience start calling out for "White Rabbit", she said, "No! I hate that song!"
Ever since then the human cultural activity we used to call popular music has gone to the depths of formula with no imagination, no evolution, no poetry and no soul.
I am reminded ...
In the early 70's, there was a German Kino (cinema) at Alpine Village in Torrance which played German movies on the weekends (later converted to a dining area for their beer hall). I was learning German at the time so I would go there to practice my ear (no Netflix in those days).
One of the movies was a Ruth Leuwerik tear-jerker in which she played a teacher mentoring troubled students were so heavily into jazz that they had their own jazz band and would play all night (this was after all not only the 50's, but also Germany in the 50's, so troubled youth would become jazz-heads). One of the student dies (of an illness, since that would be worth half a packet of Kleenex (you would rate a tear-jerker by how many packets of tissues were used)) and his friends want to play at his funeral and the funeral director adamantly refuses with a classic line I still remember half a century later: "Bei mir gibt es nach Brahms keine Musik mehr!" ("In my opinion, after Brahms there's been no more music (written)!"). BTW, they did finally play at their friend's funeral.
On a slightly different tangent, in a radio segment on "Your Hit Parade" (1934-1959), the historian being interviewed said that there didn't use to be a generational dichotomy of musical taste -- everybody of all ages listened to the same music. It was 50's rock-n-roll with such performers as Elvis who changed that -- they actually had rock-n-roll back in the late 30's (or at least around that time Ella Fitzgerald was singing about it).
Elvis also helped usher in the demise of "Your Hit Parade", which would perform the top selling songs of the week using the studio orchestra and singers, which they could do because the songs were more important than who performed them. But then with the rise of rock and roll as a separate genre, the performance became more important than the song itself. As that link above notes:
quote:The show faded with the rise of rock and roll when the performance became more important than the song. It is said that big band singer Snooky Lanson's weekly attempts to perform Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" hit in 1956 hastened the end of the series.
He asks her to sings and she sings, all the while moving her hands in a wax-on wax-off motion.
He stops her and asks what the hand signals are about. She replies that somebody told her to move her hands while she sings.
He says yes, but the hand motions should have something to do with what you're singing.
Jazz hands. And I learned what they are used for. When we were learning Al and Leon's version of the Shim Sham, our teacher showed us a video of Al and Leon performing it (many Lindy routines are reconstructed from such videos). At one point, one of them starts doing jazz hands. Our teacher pointed that out and told us he was using them to direct the audience's attention away from his feet to hide the fact that he was messing up his footwork.
Which reminds me....
In junior high, one of my teachers complained to the class that rock music just repeats the same words over and over again, so I brought up "Norwegian Wood" as a counter-example. He hadn't heard of it.
And as for Beyonc., et alia, they're all way after my time so I have no idea what they're like nor wish to know. And when you're required to crank out song after song, I have no doubt that originality and creativity has to give way to following a formula. Something that we keep seeing on TV as they strain to fill air time with something (and it's always the same thing, just with a different name and paint job).
For example, one night I came home from duty and my wife had been watching syndicated shows in TV where the station's program manager had decided to make a point. "Charlie's Angels" and "Mod Squad" had played back-to-back and it was the exact same script with the superficial renaming of the characters, etc. So a writer -- eg, Rick Husky in this case -- writes a script and sells it once in 1971 and then he sells modifies it slightly and sells it again in 1976. BTW, the episode list for "Mod Squad" notes that remake as does the imdb page for the Charlie's Angels episode.
As for dancers making the same moves, there's also the little matter of there being a finite number of steps. And they all have names (eg, jazz steps like Boogie Forward, Boogie Back, Fall off the Log, Tackie Annie, Shorty George, Fan Tails, Rusty Dusty, Jump Charleston, 'Round the World Charleston, Gaze Afar, Suzie Q). Those names are how a dancer can come into an audition and not know the audition choreography until the director rattles of some names immediately followed by the count (think back to any such scene, such as in the beginning of "Chorus Line"). There's even a Lindy routine, the Big Apple, which is based on a ring dance where a dance step is called out and everybody does it. So creating a choreography is largely a matter of stringing existing steps together.
Why, do they use jazz hands? I would assume that they're not playing music for the Shim Sham.
I had heard mention of Genesis, but my main access to rock circa 1970 was from an AM station in LA, KRLA (oh do I miss her!) -- the local station, KWIZ, only played 50's stuff. I could only get FM at home, which was not often. So if Genesis didn't make it to KRLA, I never heard them.
BTW, my Lindy teacher is probably now in his late 30's. He grew up on ska. I'm sure that Genesis is old-school "before his time" stuff.
quote:Virgin-birth, whose scientific term is Parthenogenesis, is real and has been observed in nature occurring mainly in some invertebrates, though it also occurs in some fish, amphibians, and reptiles, and very rarely in birds. But not in mammals, though. BTW, the genetics of gender in reptiles, for example, is quite different than in mammals (ie, X and Y chromosomes).
Depending on the actual parthenogenetic mechanism involved, if meiosis is not used then the offspring will be full clones of the mother. Since all the parthenogenetic offspring would be full clones of their mother, that would mean that they would also all be females. All of them.
Armed with that knowledge (and applying ample quantities of humor), we can clearly see a major problem that the Virgin Birth presents for basic Christian doctrine and tradition. Jesus could not have been a man, but rather had to have been a woman. Jessica Christ? National Lampoon magazine did tell her story in the December 1971 issue. Which means that Christian doctrine is a massive cover-up trying to hide that fact from us that the Christ was a woman.
Actually, researching back that story of Jessica Christ portrayed her as Jesus' pesky sister who had similar powers as his. I haven't found a reprint of that article, though there is a reprint of Son-o'-God comics, which also appeared with the "7th Seal of Approval" a number of times in National Lampoon.
BTW, on my page I examine Christograms, Christian religious symbols constructed out of the letters from the name, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (or "(Ιησους Χριστος" in mixed case) -- though sometimes the letters get Latinized with "J" replacing "Ι" and "S" or "C" replacing "Σ". I started my research in this after seeing deliberately placed Christograms, "JHC", painted on the walls in an old chapel in Spain (in Spain!).
My conclusion is that the most likely origin of the "H" middle initial was from a misinterpretation of the use in Christograms of the eta ("Η", "η"), the "long e" sound (think of Spanish, French (ie, the "é"), or German vowels, not English vowels which are just plain weird). In developing this idea on my page, I present several examples of such Christograms, including one that you saw on the back of the Archbishop's vestments in the Coronation scene in The Crown (ie, with the miniscule eta ("η") with an extended stem that's topped with a cross bar forming a cross -- it's on my page).
I also note that objections to "Xmas" are both ridiculous and ignorant. That "X" is actually a chi ("Χ", pronounced like the German soft "ch" or the Spanish hard "j") which is the first letter of "Χριστος" from which we derive the English word, "Christ". And it has been used for nearly half a millennium as an acceptable abbreviation for "Christmas".
On that same note, I've seen someone make the observation that the ridiculous FOX News fake "War on Christmas" has ended in the UK with a victory. Sorry about that.
Edited by dwise1, : Slight formatting correction in the quote and minor coding corrections
Match (used to be match.com?) has a commercial out that I had seen but didn't listen to until the other night.
Satan checks his smartphone and the Match app informs him of a match. They meet on a walkway under a bridge (Central Park?). He asks "Two Zero Two Zero?" and she replies, "Just call me Twenty-twenty." Then we see them doing things together, like going into public restroom and stealing all the toilet paper. Taking a selfie in front of a dumpster fire. Etc.
It's on YouTube (where I just now noticed that her avatar is a locust).
Truth! In his 1985 series, The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke pointed out that in dictionaries published before the 1940's, computers were defined as people who performed calculations. Though, of course, that should come as no surprise to anyone who had watched Hidden Figures -- at the end of that movie something happened that almost never happens anymore: the audience broke out in applause.
When we covered iterative array operations to solve either linear or differential equations (it's been four decades, so cut me some slack), our instructor described how it used to be done by human computers. An array of small desks would be set up and "manned" by girls (calculations of the cost of running such operations were measured in "girl-hours" instead of man-hours, since you paid the girls less). The initial coefficients were given to the back row, who would perform their iterative step on those values and then pass their intermediate result to the next row, etc.
My initial response to this photo was to joke about how they wanted to implement shift-register operations but those mechanical were so noisy that you couldn't hear the music from the Vitrola (no electronic amplification) to play the requisite musical chairs.
While WWII marks the genesis of modern electronic computer industry, IBM data processing predates that by decades. Somewhere I saw a 1920's photograph of a major bank's bullpen filled with large oak desks (4' × 8' approx), each completely to a depth of about two feet by stacks of IBM punch cards. In the 1920's!
International Business Machines was formed by the 1924 renaming of the Computing Tabulating Recording Company through the 1911 merger of a few companies, including Hermann Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company. Hollerith had formed his company specializing in punched card data processing equipment in the 1880's in order to process the 1890 Census -- the 1880 Census had taken seven years to tabulate, so with the large influx of immigrants in the 1880's the 1890 Census would have taken more than a decade to tabulate, but Hollerith's punch-card technology completed the task within a few years. BTW, the encoding of characters into holes on a punch card has been named "Hollerith code" -- I found a strong correlation between Hollerith code and IBM's Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Code (EBCDIC), which I had thoroughly memorized in school (we worked with an IBM S/370 mainframe) and could read on sight from a hex dump, but I never could do with ASCII despite working with it for decades.
Earlier there was the work of Charles Babbage, starting in the 1820's to automate the calculation of tables (James Burke attributed his motivation to a desire to remove human error from navigational tables which resulted in shipwrecks). While he did not profit from his designs, Swede Per Georg Scheutz picked up his work and sold a differential engine machine to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, which nearly got that director fired.
Babbage's analytic engine was mainly theoretical and was very close to a general programmable computer. Interestingly, its memory storage was based on the same technology as Hollerith's later punch cards: the programming "punch" boards of the programmable Jacquard loom. BTW, on a BBC TV technology segment on Google's research into wearable tech which is woven into the garment, the name for that project was given as "Jacquard". So Google has a sense of history.
The title of the world's first computer programmer is given to Ada Augusta, Lady Lovelace, born in 1815. She was a correspondent of Babbage and she and her husband were supporters of his research -- basically from what I had heard, they wanted to use his tech to help them play the ponies. In their correspondence they discussed his design ideas and she wrote some programs for it to run, hence her unofficial title. In the late 70's and early 80's, the Department of Defense wanted to have one universal programming super-language that could to everything (we could spend hours discussing the reasons for that). They ended up naming it Ada after Ada Augusta. The specification for the Ada language is given the military standard designation of MIL-STD-1815, after her birth year. Other bit of trivia. In the competition for whose basic design would go into Ada, the four competitors were designated by color. The Green Language, based on Pascal, won. As a result, the government printing of MIL-STD-1815 was bound in green.
Also, when I left the military and started working in aerospace software engineering, the hot topic was transitioning to Ada. Frankly, in my first job I was not only the only one with a degree in computer science (eg, we had a marine biologist whose programming experience was from his work on his thesis), but also the only programmer with any experience with Pascal. Everybody was switching to working in Pascal since they saw that as a stepping stone to Ada -- one of the big problems with going Ada was that you were forbidden from working with a compiler that didn't implement all its features, including multi-processing. Furthermore, you were mandated to only use a validated Ada compiler, such that every Ada compiler had to be re-validated every six months. No such compiler existed yet in the early 80's. So they had all their programmers working in Pascal as a stepping stone. Indeed, most of the Ada training materials were divided into two sections: 1) how incredibly like Pascal Ada is, and 2) how completely unlike Pascal Ada is.
BTW, less than a decade later the hot idea in military procurement had become COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf). As I understand, Ada is still used, but primarily in specialized highly-critical projects, whereas most military applications can be satisfied with COTS.
One last which harkens back to your photo. If you have Amazon Prime Video, do a search on a PBS special, Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII. Wade through the personal memories. Women schooled in mathematics whose only possible employment was to teach were recruited into wartime technology roles. Some worked at wiring disks in very arbitrary ways not knowing that those were rotors to go into our bombes to automate the breaking of Enigma. Others worked as low-level technicians programming computing systems such as ENIAC. As it turned out, they were the ones who figured out how to get those systems to actually work.
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