podpolia

Via my sister, we have an article in National Geographic describing the discovery of King Herod’s Tomb. Herod is one of my favorite historical figures from Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. He was really quite a character, and it’s interesting to see his tomb (if not his body) show up after all this time.

It seems that James Cameron has found Jesus’s magical tomb. In this particular tomb, rules of statistics, logic, and the facts of history don’t apply! The post here has prettymuch everything covered. Particularly, look at this comment, which is exactly the post that I wanted to write about the flawed statistics of this ‘discovery.’ If I lived in the magical Jesus tomb, I could probably claim that Jay the Evil Post Thief traveled to an alternate dimension in which I had not been too lazy to dig out my stats book and work out the numbers myself, stole the post that I wrote, and posted it as a comment. Unfortunately, I live in the real world, and don’t have a multi-millionaire backing my kooky theories.
I really wonder… how convincing will the public find this argument? The only statistics class I took was a 100-level “Intro to Stats for the Social Sciences” class in college, taught by an odd man with what appeared to be an entire goat glued to his chin. All the same, I could see immediately the flaws in the figuring, and was giggling over the press release. We shall see, I suppose.

It seems that James Cameron has found Jesus’s magical tomb. In this particular tomb, rules of statistics, logic, and the facts of history don’t apply! The post here has prettymuch everything covered. Particularly, look at this comment, which is exactly the post that I wanted to write about the flawed statistics of this ‘discovery.’ If I lived in the magical Jesus tomb, I could probably claim that Jay the Evil Post Thief traveled to an alternate dimension in which I had not been too lazy to dig out my stats book and work out the numbers myself, stole the post that I wrote, and posted it as a comment. Unfortunately, I live in the real world, and don’t have a multi-millionaire backing my kooky theories.
I really wonder… how convincing will the public find this argument? The only statistics class I took was a 100-level “Intro to Stats for the Social Sciences” class in college, taught by an odd man with what appeared to be an entire goat glued to his chin. All the same, I could see immediately the flaws in the figuring, and was giggling over the press release. We shall see, I suppose.

Babylon was an ancient city south of Baghdad in what is now Iraq. Tonight I stumbled across an interesting summation of the current status of the war in Iraq in the Bible:

Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken; Wail over her! Bring balm for her pain; Perhaps she may be healed.
We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; Forsake her and let us each go to his own country…”
Jeremiah 51:8-9a, NASB

Hm.

I think that the results shown by this poll are actually healthy. I think everyone has doubts at one time or another about things they believe in, and the constant re-evaluation of one’s beliefs — keeping them in mind and being willing to think critically about how they mesh with the world around you — is the mark of a thoughtful, intelligent person. This also gives the lie to those who accuse churches of being made up only of blind ideologues who insist on their beliefs without listening to others.
I am, however, very curious about what inspired Harris Poll to do the survey, particularly at a time when their services are in such demand for the election coming up. Was this privately commissioned, or was it just an idea somebody had for a neat poll? Either way, the results bear thinking about.

I always enjoy a good theological or philosophical discussion, and I enjoy politics, so here is the ultimate compromise: an analysis of the theology (and philosophy) of Andrew Sullivan, a fairly well known political writer. This starts out as a review of Sullivan’s latest book (The Conservative Soul), and ends up with a total shredding of Sullivan’s theological and philosophical framework as well as his intellectual honesty. I love a good intellectual beat-down, so this was a lot of fun.

This post could easily be put under the ‘Politics’ heading, but as I use the ‘Philosophy and Religion’ heading less, I thought I would use it for a change. I’m posting to draw attention to an excellent analysis of jihad in Islamic tradition by Mateen A. Elass of Christian History and Biography. The article examines the development of Muhammad’s rules on jihad, and not only compares some forms of it to Christian concepts, but refers to the expansion of both religions and shows how those two approaches to war have led to different behaviors of the two religions. Definitely worth a read — and make it quick, because I believe that the free copy of the article will change to subscription in a week or two.

I was flipping through the back of my Bible last night, looking for something in the concordance, and was slightly taken aback at the one phrase I saw. This particular concordance (which is copyrighted 1979 by The Lockman Foundation of La Habra, CA) is sorted by key words. “The key word is abbreviated in the text to its first letter, e.g., ‘abide’ is ‘a‘. Variants add suffixes, e.g., ‘abides’ appears as ‘a-s‘ and ‘abiding’ appears as ‘a-ing‘.” This seems perfectly innocuous, until one remembers that a particular colorful metaphor is abbreviated (even in common speech) with its first letter. All of this being explained, let’s get right to the amusing quotes (from the Bible, no less!)

“hide thy f from me”
Let’s hope.

“had the f of an eagle”
“like the f of an angel”
“perfecter of f”
“f-ed the multitude”
“thy people like a f”
Somebody’s popular…

“dissensions, f”
Paul seems unhappy with these dissensions.

“he will not f you”
“I reject your f-s”
“Love never f-s”
Rejection!

“devices let them f”
“f with their tongue”
“f-ing on his knees”
“f my inward parts”
Kiiiinky.

“I am f-ing calamity”
Somebody thinks highly of themselves…

“all may f … I will”
“and David f-ed”
“I f twice a week”
“Whom shall I f”
“righteous to f us”
Yes…

“Moses said … Do not f”
“Do not f, for I am”
“your f is lewdness”
“f … the wicked”
…or no?

“Solomon levied f”
Geez, didn’t he already have 900 wives?

“one f-inglight”
Isaiah seems to think it’s dark.

“was f-ing with smoke”
“the prophet was f-ed”
“plans are f-ed”
Statements on life…

“Wealth adds … f-s”
See? Girls go for rich guys.

So you see, the Bible has a lot of profound things to say, even if you cut it into bits, completely remove the context, and replace normal words with naughty ones. Now that’s impressive!

Brady and I were watching a “science behind Stargate SG-1″ type thingie this evening, and something struck me while the one guy was describing an electron moving from one place to another in quantum theory (it starts in one place, and takes an infinite number of routes to arrive at the other). He used the typical line that it only follows a specific route if it’s observed. That line has always bugged me, and tonight I realized why — how do humans (a massive collection of jiggley little molecules) count as a single observer for an event? Wouldn’t each of your molecules (all of them behaving at the quantum level in the same manner as the one you are observing) count as an observer? And wouldn’t they view them all differently, as they would be observing the Heisenberg uncertainty of the molecule as that molecule was doing the same with them?
My thought process went from that to, “Well, wouldn’t each person observe these things differently? Maybe the average of their molecules observed things differently than the average of my molecules viewed it.” That kicked me straight over to, “Aha! We have all of these irregularities at the quantum level, but we observe the world at Einstein’s relativistic level, and more specifically at the Newtonian level. Therefore, relativism is the statistical average of the behaviors of large numbers of particles at the quantum level.” It seems to me that the majority of the conflicts between quantum theory and relativity come when they start trying to poach on each other’s territory. Quantum theory has a terrible time with the macro scale, and relativity doesn’t seem to work properly when projected onto the micro scale. The way to unite the two theories would be to discover the quantum interactions that give rise to the statistical average of the relativistic behavior we see on our own scale.
I have no idea how accurate any of this is. It’s quite possible that I have some of my facts wrong, and it shot me off in the wrong direction. Besides that, it’s more of a philosophical argument than a scientific hypothesis (which is why I put this under the category of ‘Philosophy and Religion’ — it wasn’t just because I almost never post anything in those topics). If anybody out there has any more expertise in the field than I do, feel free to comment or email and let me know. I just thought it was an interesting thought and that I should write it down so I could confuse/bore all of you, and possibly make bizarre claims when I’m an old man and they figure out all this physics stuff that I actually had it right lo these many decades ago. I’m going to really enjoy being a crazy old guy.