We’re at the White River Amphitheatre for the Santana concert. We did the “green” thing by parking in Auburn and taking the (9 mile) shuttle bus. It’s now 6:25, the concert is scheduled to start at 7, and we’re at the end of a long line that is only just starting to move. This is easily the most incompetently disorganized concert facility I’ve ever been to. I hope the show is better than the venue.
Update: seated and ready to go by 7:15. Opening act was Salvador Santana Band. 6 members: drums, bass, keyboards, sax/vocals, guitar, and a total loser who fancied himself as a rapper and keyboards player. He had no sense of rhythm in either role. If they’d dumped him, the remaining five guys would have made a great act - tight rhythm, good vocals, inventive solos. Oh well….
And now for Santana!
[...]
Brilliant. A simply wonderful show.
In the New Humanist, A. C. Grayling carves up “Dissent over Descent”, the new book on Intelligent Design by the ludicrous Steve Fuller. Money quote:
Fuller has written about Popper; he seems to forget Popper’s killer point, namely, a theory that explains everything explains nothing. ID is such a theory; everything is consistent with it, nothing disproves it. The idea that there is such a thing as a deity behaves logically as a contradiction does unsurprisingly, because the idea is indeed contradictory: anything whatever follows from it. But presumably this is okay for Fuller because he was educated by Jesuits.
The Victorian Aboriginal Education Association said instructing girls on how to play the [didgeridoo] was an extreme cultural indiscretion and has called for the book to be pulped.
OK, I can believe that it might be a “cultural indiscretion”, whatever that means. No reason not to do it, of course - and no reason to pulp the book. I bump into cultural indiscretions all the time, most recently from the RNC in MSP.
But then it gets really silly. According to the association’s general manager Mark Rose:
“We know very clearly that there’s a range of consequences for a female touching a didgeridoo — infertility would be the start of it, ranging to other consequences,” he said, adding: “I won’t even let my daughter touch one.”
WTF?
Someone should ask Mr. Rose to explain exactly what he means. Infertility is pretty well understood: which parts of a female’s reproductive functioning would be affected by touching a didgeridoo, and how? What would the causal mechanism be? How would the “consequences” be manifested - would they show up on an X-ray or ultrasound, for instance, or would it be necessary to test hormone levels?
Rose describes it as “cultural ignorance”. It seems that the real ignorance shown here is his own superstitious ignorance of science and medicine. And I refuse to play the patronizing multicultural game of assuming that Aboriginals are incapable of living in a scientifically informed culture, and that their mythologies are so fragile that we must all pretend that they correspond to reality.
Enough politics: let’s talk about probability. The Quantum Pontiff has a delightful piece up about “Gambler’s ruin”:
Gambler’s ruin is one of my favorite basic probability exercises… Suppose you have access to a game in which you have a slight advantage in winning… [W]hat is your probability of ruin, given a starting bankroll of D dollars, an advantage of p, and a target of T dollars?
The math isn’t too hard, but the results are surprising. Check it out.
I said that Miss Palin is being used. The passive voice is a deceiver. Sarah Palin is using her daughter as cynically as I have ever witnessed anyone turn their children to their own ends. John McCain is taking advantage as best he can of a pregnant teenager to advance his ambition. The McCain campaign and the leaders of the Republican Party are asking — demanding, as far as anyone can tell — that Bristol Palin suspend whatever hope for privacy she may have in order to provide her mother with the cover she needs.
I do not have words to describe how I feel about women and men that would so put themselves and their ambitions, their lust for power before that of a young woman — a girl — who had done nothing, not one thing, to place herself in the way of such a train wreck.
Here’s James Fallows’ assessment of this aspect of the Palin speech:
Nothing off limits. Barack Obama has used his family as a prop from time to time — most recently, bringing the charming girls onto the stage at the end of his convention speech. That’s life in politics; everybody does it to some degree.Very few politicians do it as all-out as Sarah Palin just did, from citing the disabilities of her youngest child as part of her resume to including the shotgun groom of her elder daughter. I can’t recall any spectacle comparable to Baby Trig being passed from Cindy McCain, to Trig’s 7-year-old sister, to Palin herself when she ended the speech. Her husband looks charming, I have to say. From this point on it will be hard for her to declare anything about her personal or famiy life out-of-bounds.
For those of you who labour under the delusion that the US Presidential election might be about national security, or “The Economy, stupid”, or budget deficits, or Social Security, or stuff like that, let John McCain’s main man put you straight.
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
“This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
Alaskan Independence party (AIP) before becoming an elected Republican official, and recorded a video message for the AIP convention this year. The party’s chief goal is securing Alaska a vote on seceding from the US, a goal that AIP leaders believe the state was denied before it became part of the US almost 50 years ago.
Dutch withdraw spy from Iran because of “impending US attack”
The Dutch intelligence service has pulled an agent out of an "ultra-secret operation" spying on Iran's military industry because spymasters in Netherlands believe a United States air attack was imminent.
I’m irresistibly reminded of Sir Humphrey in “Yes, Prime Minister”: “‘controversial’ will lose you votes; ‘courageous’ will lose you the election”. McCain’s choice was quintessentially courageous….
Appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in July, John McCain was reminded that [he] often tells his audiences the vice president has only two duties: Breaking tie votes in the Senate and inquiring daily about the health of the president.
“That job will be very, very important in my case,” replied McCain, who turned 72 today.
And this was the most qualified candidate he could come up with…?
I’m off to Boston first thing Tuesday, flying SEA-DEN-BOS and returning BOS-SFO-SEA on Sunday. From those routings, you can tell it’s United, can’t you? I’ve applied to upgrade both trips; in each case I’m confirmed on one leg, waitlisted on the other. 15K miles for each upgrade; I’m drawing down my MP balance as fast as I can…
UPDATE (onboard at SEA): the upgrade went through, so it’s 1st class for both SEA-DEN and DEN-BOS. This is good, because this flight is 100% full.
This beautiful piece appeared today in 3quarksdaily, and I just had to quote from it:
Dermatology & Galileo
A creationist student of mine with a wart the size of a gumball on the end of his nose recently told me science is overrated and is anathema to God. In the same breath he said he was seeing a dermatologist about the wart.
I asked, “Have you prayed about this?”
He said, “All the time.”
I asked, “Has it helped with the wart?”
He said, “I don’t pray about the wart. I pray for forgiveness for consulting a dermatologist.”
As his guru, I told him it would be smart to meditate not only on the wart, but upon his inclination to view God as an idiot. He looked at me as if I’d told him the earth revolves around the sun and excused himself to call his dermatologist on his iphone.
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