Origin of the specious

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.

"Girls warned playing didgeridoo could cause infertility"

From AFP:

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.

On "Wisely Using Your Advantage"

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.

"Felon-presumptive Governor Palin"

Tom at The Inverse Square Blog rips into Palin. Money quote:

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.

"It's NOT The Economy, Stupid!"

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.”

Got that?
(From the Washington Post.)

Isn't it too soon for an October surprise?

The kind of headline I’d rather not see:

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.