Broken Springboards All the Way Down

lassitude

2009-08-22T20:51:14Z

...og jeg længes ud i alle mine dage

Today in history

2009-05-15T05:18:14Z

1931 - Ådalen Shootings

So, I need to find a copy of this book!

2009-05-15T04:37:28Z

Lapponia (book)

Lapponia is a book written by Johannes Schefferus (1621 - 1679) covering a very comprehensive history of Northern Scandinavia topology, environment and Sami living condition, dwelling-places, clothing, gender roles, hunting, child raising, shamanism and pagan religion. It was published in late 1673 and closely followed by English, German, French and Dutch translations. Adapted and abridged version were also followed where only original chapters on shamanism and religion was preserved but the others replaced with tales on magic, sorcery, drums and heathenism.

The book uses "Lap" mainly to notice that Samis are still pagan and it is concluded that Lap is a word introduced by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1150 - 1220) to distinguish Sami peoples living near the ocean (coast-fenni) and in the woodland (lapp-fenni).

It was aimed to meet rumors, or as the council Magnus De La Gardie saw as degrading propaganda, from (particular German) pamphlets claiming the Swedes had used "Sami magic" on the European battlefields.

The book was not until 1956 (after 300 years) fully translated to Swedish (as "Lappland", Acta Lapponica 8, Uppsala 1956). Its references is, however, based on "clergy correspondence" letters, i.e. reports made by priests.

A smaller part of the geographical region described in the book is today named Lappland (or Laponia.)

See also

*Sápmi (area)

Оригинал статьи Lapponia (book) на сайте Словари и энциклопедии на Академике

Herschel and Planck are up hurrah!

2009-05-15T00:33:44Z

Triple cheer!!! Woot!

New Scientist fucking up

2009-03-16T04:39:42Z

New Scientist is not a bad magazine. I read it regularly, despite the occasionally weirdly wanky physics story that looks as if it were published for sensational value only. But overall it is no bad, coming out strongly on the side of reason. However, I am very close to cancelling my subscription and encouraging others to do so.

Last week, the print issue carried an article by Amanda Geffer concerning creationist code-words and how to recognize them in pretend-science publications. It was an excellent, rational and thoroughly admirable article.

Apparently, someone complained to the editors about it and the article is currently removed from the online edition of NS, apparently “while they investigate”.

I encourage everyone to follow the link and leave a complaint in the comment section. If the editors do not restore the article in question immediately, or, at least, provide a reasonable explanation for their action (not that I think there can be one, besides intellectual cowardice), I will be cancelling my subscriptiion.

Since the article in question is no longer available at the NS site, I reproduce the complete text of it below:

How to Spot a Religious Agenda, Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:35 UTC

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else - something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism - where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial - is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid - “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) - to the silly - “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer’", his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

vatican proves its irrelevance

2009-03-08T21:55:52Z

OK, then, regarding my earlier excommunication post: vatican officially approves. What a bunch of fuckwits.

religious balderdash never ends

2009-03-07T20:57:00Z

An article in Catholic News tries to defuse the evolution “controversy” (itself a product of deranged creationist minds) by claiming that evolution is not to blame for the recent surge in atheistic books and the open spread of atheism. Rather, scientism is the evil beastie here (an old claim!). And they define scientism as “the use of science beyond its proper sphere of investigating physical nature”.

Of course the dolts do not realize that such a definition is certainly begging the question of whether there is anything at all “beyond physical nature”. Meh, they never cease to amuse me.

kepler launch today

2009-03-06T17:20:32Z

Kepler telescope, an instrument that will look for Earth-sized exoplanets, will be launched today. It may find thousands of them, another step in our search for life elsewhere in the Universe, and a boon for future navigators of sublight colony ships...;)

as if we need another reason

2009-03-06T16:24:39Z

...to know that religion and the Church are great forces for evil in our world: here.

Excommunication may be a weak concept, but they are excommunicating the wrong people! These scumbags are punishing the people who have saved the life of the 9-year old girl while refusing to pass a moral judgement on the actual perpetrator. And they feel persecuted? they fucking dare to complain (about trivialities: notice the prominent place given to The Golden Compass in this one)?

all the kings horsemen vs the bad eggs

2009-03-04T20:22:41Z

So the bankers are saying that they do not need the TARP money and that taking is was a mistake. So, why don’t they give it back now, instead of possibly within 2-3 years. I am sure that I am not the only one puzzled by the discrepancy: for fuck’s sake, if they really don’t need it they should cough it up now...

and then someone drew the curtains open

2009-03-02T10:02:13Z

and we stood there, blinking in confusion and only cognizant of the possible significance to our survival of the other bodies crowding into our space, complicated by sunlight.

Ah, now that is out of the way, don't you think that Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one come in) is possibly the best (and most emotionally beautiful) of all possible vampire movies?

religion, morality and fluffy many-tentacled monsters

2009-03-01T12:49:03Z

Everybody really should read this. Especially those of you that are religious fundamentalists and/or followers of some form of a diviine command ethical theory (which is probably very few, if any). So fucking bite me.

In fact, perhaps those of us that are sane should seriously consider making home in certain places in Northern Europe; or conversely, using them as an example towards which to strive in our work here in the USA.

The Top 15 Biblical Ways to Get a Wife

2009-02-22T19:20:10Z

(Don’t try this at home...)

1. Find an attractive prisoner of war, bring her home, shave her head, trim her nails, and give her new clothes. Then she’s yours. - (Deuteronomy 21:11-13)

2. Find a prostitute and marry her. - (Hosea 1:1-3)

3. Find a man with seven daughters, and impress him by watering his flock. - Moses (Ex 2:16-21)

4. Purchase a piece of property, and get a woman as part of the deal. - Boaz (Ruth 4:5-10)

5. Go to a party and hide. When the women come out to dance, grab one and carry her off to be your wife. - Benjaminites (Judges 21:19-25)

6. Have God create a wife for you while you sleep. Note: this will cost you. - Adam (Gen 2:19-24)

7. Agree to work seven years in exchange for a woman’s hand in marriage. Get tricked into marrying the wrong woman. Then work another seven years for the woman you wanted to marry in the first place. That’s right. Fourteen years of toil for a wife. - Jacob (Genesis 29:15-30)

8. Cut 200 foreskins off of your future father-in-law’s enemies and get his daughter for a wife - David (I Samuel 18:27)

9. Even if no one is out there, just wander around a bit and you’ll definitely find someone. (It’s all relative, of course.) - Cain (Genesis 4:16-17)

10. Become the emperor of a huge nation and hold a beauty contest. - Xerxes or Ahasuerus (Esther 2:3-4)

11. When you see someone you like, go home and tell your parents, “I have seen a ... woman; now get her for me.” If your parents question your decision, simply say, “Get her for me. She’s the one for me.” - Samson (Judges 14:1-3)

12. Kill any husband and take HIS wife (Prepare to lose four sons, though). - David (2 Samuel 11)

13. Wait for your brother to die. Take his widow. (It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.) - Onana and Boaz (Deuteronomy or Leviticus, example in Ruth)

14. Don’t be so picky. Make up for quality with quantity. - Solomon (1 Kings 11:1-3)

15. A wife?...NOT? - Paul (1 Corinthians 7:32-35)

flagellation and thought crime

2009-02-22T16:39:27Z

Every time my brain shows any kind of intelligence or independence, whether by dreaming, or a mathematical or coding renaissance, or even just growing gravid with simple snatches of song and poetry, I duly get a couple of liters of vodka and pummel it into submission. Bludgeoned into inactivity with several casual shots, it gives up on fancy creative ideas and—after a morning’s disoriented nausea—settles into sullen drudgery again, keeping me breathing, walking and functioning at work—and even smiling and happy, or at least providing a veneer of happiness to fool even itself. I do not require alcohol or any other kind of distraction for several days. Then it rebels again. Poor thing, it is obviously not that comfortable with its role as an automaton whose job consists in keeping this body coordinated enough to pay the rent and assure its continued survival and supply of further tranquilizers.

Do I really hate myself and everything I have to say that much? Occasionally I even get angry at myself; but then I get angry at my own anger, and that leads to another episode of imaginative attempt at independence, another uprising which my imagination loses with due repercussions. and so in the circle again. If I had a tail, I’d be chasing it quite properly and even with a pretense of joy. Brain vasectomy: efficient if only ever temporary.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

2009-02-14T06:24:55Z

OK, my lovely little morsels! Happy VD to all of you, and may whichever orgy you go to today turn out happy, friendly, full of reasonably clean, attractive and not too smelly people and orgasmilicious! Think of petals! And enjoy the fuck out of it!

(Special thanks to xkcd)

Discovery of the day

2009-02-13T15:40:27Z

OK, why didn’t I know about this until now? What a fucking brilliant idea!

How stupid is this?

2009-02-12T16:08:48Z

Or, more to the point, how stupid does he think the rest of the world is?:

“House Republicans had the wisdom to continue to talk to the Obama White House. This made them look gracious, even as the president edged toward a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.”

(Karl Rove)

I hope this buffoon keeps on babbling; with luck, he’ll bring the GOP approval ratings into single digits by 2010.

aleph-1

2009-02-12T15:56:01Z

OK, so last night was even more interesting. After the science-fiction tinged dreams of the last few days, it was quite a change into full-blown High Epic fantasy territory, and even Meta-fantasy at that.

I was on some strange and giant Ringworld, and I had a set of maps and on them was every Universe I had ever visited in my dreams; I just had to get to the right sector. The world extended in time as well as in space, so all the events that had ever happened in those major epic dreams of mine (and believe me, there are a-plenty, and many graphically violent, up to and including the destruction of whole civilizations and wholesale slaughter of millions) were accessible, concurrent, in some strange sense.

The problem, of course, was that there was no good transportation system. I could choose a destination, in space and in time, and have a very reasonable certainty that I would get to it, but the path was determined by the goal, and I still had to traverse many intermediate places and times. At least I seemed to be liberated from the most obvious constraints of linear time: not only did I appear to have all of it in the world, I was also not required to relive all the events leading to the event I was interested in getting to. I could inject myself into the given narrative at any moment I wished, but it came at a cost of having to travel through several other narratives on the way.

All in all, rather confusing, and hauling these maps around (there were, like, many cases of them) was a pain, what with having to fight off everything from Orc-like entities to hot punk-rock wenches to weather patterns, not to mention angry insane deities and faceless dreads each step of the way.

Quote of the day

2009-02-12T15:46:21Z

“This bill, which both chambers of Congress are expected to approve this week, marks a huge political victory for President Obama. He has only been in office a bit over 3 weeks and already made good on two of his biggest campaign promises: a middle class tax cut and a bill to stimulate the economy with the hope of creating 3.5 million jobs. The bill is popular in the country and any Republican who walks around in a T-shirt saying ”I voted no“ is not likely to pick up any new voters as a result.”

(from electoralvote.com)

Happy Darwin day

2009-02-12T09:33:20Z

Everybody dance, everybody sing, eveybody laugh at creotards!

dreamplot 23

2009-02-11T13:21:58Z

Law student Cath Anderson is plucked from her motorcycle in LA and finds herself at some time later, together with a group of other people, arriving to a very strange place: a planet in the system of Pollux (observed previously via the terrestrial planet finder), a subsurface forest world populated by giant snakes travelling along the pathways and tunnels, cleaning and reorganizing; a world of lost toys, sinister apparitions and forgotten and suppressed memories come to life; where there already is a sizable human population and some people act as spokesmen for the snakes, where both human pets brought to the planet with their owners and people are taken by the snakes for unknown purposes and giant pale mushrooms grow in the dark tunnels. The welcoming committee for the new arrivals explains some of the facts of living on the planet, but most of the activity the snakes and other denizens indulge in as well as the ecology of the planet is a mystery. What’s more, activity further in from Pollux towards the Norma galactic arm indicates that something much more involved and on a much larger scale goes on there, and some of the humans are selectively sent there (the disappeared ones?).

I have several inklings of the ecology of the planet, but they are vague as most dreams are. I will attempt to go back to sleep and try to get to that planet again. It seems to be quite a wondersome place as well as the first new location I have dreamt about for quite a while. While beautiful and feeling slightly safer than my usual city, there still is an undercurrent of menace in the air, and the massive galaxy-restructuring (?) activities further out certainly appear to be sinister in some way.

The snakes themselves are a bit frightening, but mostly because their sheer size and the nonchalance with which they snap up (but do not destroy?) objects in their way; they do not appear to be actively malevolent. If their human spokesmen are asked, they sometimes return whatever they have taken in perfectly good condition (as they did with three cats they picked up, apparently out of sheer curiosity, when I was there). Sometimes they don’t. I am not sure whether I was the woman protagonist, but I was certainly observing the action either directly through her eyes or just a bit to the side, so to speak.

The landscape was beyond weird: with deeply forested--and snowed under--patches right next to warm underground warrens, some quite organic, others apparently constructed from giant Lego blocks. Some of the passages between interior rooms appear to be non-euclidean in their geometry. Doors and other apertures open and close seemingly at random; other objects are brought with people from Earth (the motorcycle made it!).

And what about the human spokesmen for the inhabitants? Are they voluntary collaborators, or meat puppets? And what is the status of the snakes? Are they the masters of the world (and beyond) or simply worker drones?

OK, then, I am definitely going back there...see y'all in the morning!

bang for the buck

2009-02-08T19:07:18Z

Tax cuts? Oh, for fuck’s sake: here. Pay close attention to the graph.

stimulus schmimulus

2009-02-07T20:13:11Z

The most fascinating thing about the Republican opposition to the economic stimulus is the question of whether they really know so little about economics, and if so, why did anyone let them govern in the first place.. Of course the other alternative is that they are well-aware of basic macroeconomical principles at the heart of Obama’s plan, and pretend that they do not work only to win some political points. Interestingly, had Democrats done something like that in the ast 8 years, the Repugs would have quickly accused them of treason (and, in fact, they did: anyone expressing opposition to any of Bush’s foreign policy goals and methods was indeed attacked for alleged “anti-Americanism”).

I suppose the good thing about it is that the GOP is only further marginalizing itself and will join the American Communist party and the American National Socialists in irrelevance over the next few years, leaving Democrats as the standard party of the center-right and allowing some kind of a coherent left movement to emerge to challenge them. All in all, it’s about time USA found some political sanity and caught up with the rest of the Western society in this way.

quack quack

2009-02-07T17:26:46Z

I am proud to report that all of my blogs and social websites have registered 0 on the Quackometer test; that means I can still lay some claim to being on the side of raitonality and enlightenment! (Strangely, the only place that had generated any negative comments was my wordpress blog, long dormant; Quackometer reported that it was “dabbling in some postmodernist nonsense”, which I am at a loss to explain since part of my infamy was developed putting postmodernists down...)

Или куришь на тощак, или пьёшь с похмелия

2009-02-06T21:52:41Z

Google Mars, anyone? Ha!