No word from either of the two companies from which I am trying to obtain music licenses. I guess they just don't want my money. But then again, what would you expect from a company that sues people for parodying songs that are in the public domain.
Happily, I have discovered that copyright law makes granting certain kinds of licenses mandatory. So I can't use the original recording, but I can hire a band to record a cover version for me. Cool! That will almost certainly cost less, and might even sound better. (I've always wanted to tweak one of the lyrics in "Comfortably Numb". It should be "When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse/Out of the corner of my MIND.")
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
The stupidest leaflet ever
A picture is worth a thousand words. Or in this case, five. This leaflet was actually included in a box of medicine. Go figure.
Music licensing adventures continue
I wonder if the people at the music companies have been reading my blog. Here's the response I got from one of them today:
Dear Mr. Garret,
Further to your request for the use of BRAIN DAMAGE in the production entitled “Control,” please note that the song is not available for this use.
Thank you for the request.
Best Regards,
Brooke
I'm bummed.
There are two interesting things about this. First, I asked for a quote on a performance license, which I know they do give out because the Lounge Lizards did a cover of Brain Damage. (It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. You can find it on iTunes.) Second, why didn't they just tell me this up front instead of asking me for all the term and territory information?
I've sent the following response:
Hi Brooke,
Thanks for getting back to me.
Do you mean that it is not available for use in movies in general, or just not in this particular movie?
Is there anything else in your library with a similar feel that is available that you might suggest as an alternative?
How much is a performance license? (I know those are available because at least one band has done a cover version.)
rg
Dear Mr. Garret,
Further to your request for the use of BRAIN DAMAGE in the production entitled “Control,” please note that the song is not available for this use.
Thank you for the request.
Best Regards,
Brooke
I'm bummed.
There are two interesting things about this. First, I asked for a quote on a performance license, which I know they do give out because the Lounge Lizards did a cover of Brain Damage. (It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. You can find it on iTunes.) Second, why didn't they just tell me this up front instead of asking me for all the term and territory information?
I've sent the following response:
Hi Brooke,
Thanks for getting back to me.
Do you mean that it is not available for use in movies in general, or just not in this particular movie?
Is there anything else in your library with a similar feel that is available that you might suggest as an alternative?
How much is a performance license? (I know those are available because at least one band has done a cover version.)
rg
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Music license quote quest part 3
The quest to wrestle a price quote from the music industry for a license to two Pink Floyd songs continues. I got an email today from one of the two companies involved. I was actually somewhat surprised that they got back to me at all. They said they needed more information, including the time period and the territory, which I don't know because the film I want to use the songs in isn't even in production, let alone in distribution.
I sent back a response asking for quotes for various permuations of periods and territories. Haven't heard back.
Still waiting to hear anything from the first company.
If anyone in the music industry is reading this and wondering why your business is in the toilet, it's very simple: your problem isn't pirating, your problem is that you treat your customers like shit. What could you possibly be doing that makes it take days or even weeks to generate a price quote to use a song in a movie? It's not like I'm the first one to do this. And even if there really is a reason for it to take this long, how hard would it be to shoot me an email saying, "Sorry this is taking so long, we have to do X and Y and Z, expect to hear from us in N days."
I can't help but wonder what it is the industry is hoping to accomplish by making it this hard to do business with them.
I sent back a response asking for quotes for various permuations of periods and territories. Haven't heard back.
Still waiting to hear anything from the first company.
If anyone in the music industry is reading this and wondering why your business is in the toilet, it's very simple: your problem isn't pirating, your problem is that you treat your customers like shit. What could you possibly be doing that makes it take days or even weeks to generate a price quote to use a song in a movie? It's not like I'm the first one to do this. And even if there really is a reason for it to take this long, how hard would it be to shoot me an email saying, "Sorry this is taking so long, we have to do X and Y and Z, expect to hear from us in N days."
I can't help but wonder what it is the industry is hoping to accomplish by making it this hard to do business with them.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Music licencing adventures, chapter 2
It turns out that the situation for licensing music is not quite as bad as I had thought once you know the system, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. There are two companies, BMI and ASCAP, that are the main gateways to the music industry's licensing machinery. Thay have searchable on-line databases that will give you the name and contact information for the publisher of most popular songs, including the ones I'm looking for.
From there the procedures vary by company. In my case I'm dealing with two different publishers, both of which require you to send in a written request for a quote by fax. Why they don't have a web page set up for this in this day and age is beyond me (but is pretty much in keeping with the music industry's general attitude of being too important for their customers). Maybe there's a business opportunity here.
One of the things I've been told is that the quotes for licensing music for movies vary by term (which is to say time period) and territory. Since my film isn't in production I have no idea what the term or the territory might be. We'll see how much of an obstacle that presents to getting them to name me a price.
Stay tuned.
From there the procedures vary by company. In my case I'm dealing with two different publishers, both of which require you to send in a written request for a quote by fax. Why they don't have a web page set up for this in this day and age is beyond me (but is pretty much in keeping with the music industry's general attitude of being too important for their customers). Maybe there's a business opportunity here.
One of the things I've been told is that the quotes for licensing music for movies vary by term (which is to say time period) and territory. Since my film isn't in production I have no idea what the term or the territory might be. We'll see how much of an obstacle that presents to getting them to name me a price.
Stay tuned.
Friday, June 16, 2006
It shouldn't be this hard to get someone to take my money
One of the things I've been doing on the side is writing a screenplay. It's a mystery thriller about a killer virus, and I've written two copyrighted songs into the script. I've bene toying with the idea of producing the movie myself, and so as an experiment I decided to try to find out how much it would cost to license these two songs for my film.
You'd think that the music companies would make this easy. After all, I want to buy something from them. Not only that, but the music industry is on somewhat of a crusade against piracy. Surely they would have things set up so that if someone actually wants to pay them for a song instead of pirating it that it would be easy to find out how much it costs and where to send the money.
Not so. In fact, it turns out to be nearly impossible.
The two songs I'm interested in are Pink FLoyd's "Comfortably Numb" from The Wall, and "Brain Damage" from Dark Side of the Moon. The Wall is copyright 1979 by "Pink Floyd Limited", and it was produced by Columbia Records. Neither company has any contact information on their web site. Dark Side of the Moon was produced by Capitol Records (now EMI), which actually does have contact information on its web site. I was even able to call the company and get the switchboard operator to put me in touch with someone in the licensing department, but of course this person didn't actually answer their phone and they haven't returned my call.
This is no way to treat your customers.
Not that any of this came as a great surprise to me. The music industry has a rather ignominious history of treating their customers like shit. For all the effort they spend on rootkits and legal action, I wonder if any of them ever once considered that they might make more money if they only made it easier for people to figure out where to send the check and how much to make it out for?
Stay tuned for future installments on this saga.
[Update: I finally found this page on the RIAA web site. It was well hidden.
You'd think that the music companies would make this easy. After all, I want to buy something from them. Not only that, but the music industry is on somewhat of a crusade against piracy. Surely they would have things set up so that if someone actually wants to pay them for a song instead of pirating it that it would be easy to find out how much it costs and where to send the money.
Not so. In fact, it turns out to be nearly impossible.
The two songs I'm interested in are Pink FLoyd's "Comfortably Numb" from The Wall, and "Brain Damage" from Dark Side of the Moon. The Wall is copyright 1979 by "Pink Floyd Limited", and it was produced by Columbia Records. Neither company has any contact information on their web site. Dark Side of the Moon was produced by Capitol Records (now EMI), which actually does have contact information on its web site. I was even able to call the company and get the switchboard operator to put me in touch with someone in the licensing department, but of course this person didn't actually answer their phone and they haven't returned my call.
This is no way to treat your customers.
Not that any of this came as a great surprise to me. The music industry has a rather ignominious history of treating their customers like shit. For all the effort they spend on rootkits and legal action, I wonder if any of them ever once considered that they might make more money if they only made it easier for people to figure out where to send the check and how much to make it out for?
Stay tuned for future installments on this saga.
[Update: I finally found this page on the RIAA web site. It was well hidden.
Has America gone completely insane?
I'm so depressed I can hardly bring myself to write about this.
The state of Washington is prosecuting a man for writing a blog about on-line gambling.
And the Supreme Court has ruled that the police don't need to knock before breaking your door down.
Congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants the Ten Commandments displayed in public buildings, but he doesn't even know what they are. (For those of you who share his confusion, the First Commandment is: I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." How anyone can say with a straight face that serves a secular purpose is beyond my comprehension.)
And last but not least, an old but still worthwhile read if the preceding wasn't enough to convince you that it's time to jump of a bridge.
The state of Washington is prosecuting a man for writing a blog about on-line gambling.
And the Supreme Court has ruled that the police don't need to knock before breaking your door down.
Congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants the Ten Commandments displayed in public buildings, but he doesn't even know what they are. (For those of you who share his confusion, the First Commandment is: I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." How anyone can say with a straight face that serves a secular purpose is beyond my comprehension.)
And last but not least, an old but still worthwhile read if the preceding wasn't enough to convince you that it's time to jump of a bridge.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Does this prove God doesn't exist?
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Missing the point again (and again and again and again and again)
I've been reading Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus. A worthwhile read and quite the eye-opener, which got me to thinking about Isaiah 7:14 (Behold, a virgin (or young woman depending on your scholarhsip) shall conceive etc.) It is transparently obvious from a logical point of view that this verse has nothing to do with Jesus, and that the Christian apologist arguments to the contrary are vacuous.
Consider the following prophecy:
"Behold, a race horse shall win the Triple Crown and his name shall be called Sussmahir."
Now, suppose I claimed that Seattle Slew fulfilled that prophecy. You might counter that while they may share a few letters in common, "Seattle Slew" and "Sussmahir" are quite transparently not the same name. At which point I, playing the role of the religious apologist (and those of you who speak Hebrew are no doubt way ahead of me here) would point out that "Sussmahir" means "fast horse" and there can be no denying that Seattle Slew has been called a fast horse. Q.E.D.
The problem, of course, is that on the apologists' view both prophecies are vacuous. Of course any triple crown winner will be called a fast horse, and of course the (any?) Messiah will be called (some variant of) God With Us by someone (though, I note in passing, Jesus is actually never referred to that way in the New Testament).
Of course, none of this will convince a believer, and so I get quite depressed when people put forth extraordinary efforts to produce even more extensive debunkings. And, of course, all of it completely misses the point, which is that people do not believe in God because it makes sense. People believe in God because it helps them deal with their pain.
You'd think that after reams and reams of futile debunking all these atheists and agnostics (who are by and large fairly bright people, even though many of them are complete morons when it comes to marketing) would take a step back and try to figure out why it isn't working. But they don't. They just keep spouting logic, completely oblivious to the fact that in many cases that is actually making matters worse. There's a reason most people don't gravitate towards math and science.
It is at once amazing and tragic how so many smart people can miss such a simple and obvious truth.
Consider the following prophecy:
"Behold, a race horse shall win the Triple Crown and his name shall be called Sussmahir."
Now, suppose I claimed that Seattle Slew fulfilled that prophecy. You might counter that while they may share a few letters in common, "Seattle Slew" and "Sussmahir" are quite transparently not the same name. At which point I, playing the role of the religious apologist (and those of you who speak Hebrew are no doubt way ahead of me here) would point out that "Sussmahir" means "fast horse" and there can be no denying that Seattle Slew has been called a fast horse. Q.E.D.
The problem, of course, is that on the apologists' view both prophecies are vacuous. Of course any triple crown winner will be called a fast horse, and of course the (any?) Messiah will be called (some variant of) God With Us by someone (though, I note in passing, Jesus is actually never referred to that way in the New Testament).
Of course, none of this will convince a believer, and so I get quite depressed when people put forth extraordinary efforts to produce even more extensive debunkings. And, of course, all of it completely misses the point, which is that people do not believe in God because it makes sense. People believe in God because it helps them deal with their pain.
You'd think that after reams and reams of futile debunking all these atheists and agnostics (who are by and large fairly bright people, even though many of them are complete morons when it comes to marketing) would take a step back and try to figure out why it isn't working. But they don't. They just keep spouting logic, completely oblivious to the fact that in many cases that is actually making matters worse. There's a reason most people don't gravitate towards math and science.
It is at once amazing and tragic how so many smart people can miss such a simple and obvious truth.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Toe the line or lose your job
At least if you're a government employee. The Supreme Court ruled today that the First Amendment does not protect "every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job."
Hm, I must have missed that part of the First Amendment where it spells out all the exceptions to freedom of speech. Let's see.
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nope, still don't see it.
[At this point an NSA agent breaks into my house and hits me upside the head with a baseball bat.]
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, except in such cases where it would embarrass or inconvenience powerful government officials.
Oh. Right. There it is. Can't imagine how I managed to miss that.
What's that sound I hear? It must be the founding fathers rolling over in their graves as they behold government of the people, by the people, and for the people slowly perish from the earth.
Hm, I must have missed that part of the First Amendment where it spells out all the exceptions to freedom of speech. Let's see.
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nope, still don't see it.
[At this point an NSA agent breaks into my house and hits me upside the head with a baseball bat.]
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, except in such cases where it would embarrass or inconvenience powerful government officials.
Oh. Right. There it is. Can't imagine how I managed to miss that.
What's that sound I hear? It must be the founding fathers rolling over in their graves as they behold government of the people, by the people, and for the people slowly perish from the earth.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Friday, May 26, 2006
Don't they have anything better to do?
The Michigan department of education is trying to ban the words "America" and "American" from their public schools. It's good to know that all the more pressing concerns of the Michigan schools have been solved so that they can finally focus on this issue.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Scared of lung cancer? Toke, don't smoke.
Scientists have found that there appears to be no link between smoking marijuana and increased risk of lung cancer.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Nibbling away at the Constitution
Today's chomp is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales floating a trial balloon for the idea that journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information on the grounds that:
"'... it can't be the case that that right [the First Amendment Right to freedom of the press] trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity,' he said. 'And so those two principles have to be accommodated.'"
Well, no. Actually, the Constitution specifically says what rights we have in that regard. The Fourth Amendment reads:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." (emphasis added) And, of course, this means unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, not by burglars.
This "right" that the "people" have to "see ... the government go after criminal activity" was invented by Gonzales out of whole cloth, and it completely eviscerates the First Amendment. If this theory holds, all the government has to do to censor information is to classify it.
Once again the Bush Administration is trying to take a bite out of the Constitution. Not that this should come as a suprise to anyone at this point.
"'... it can't be the case that that right [the First Amendment Right to freedom of the press] trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity,' he said. 'And so those two principles have to be accommodated.'"
Well, no. Actually, the Constitution specifically says what rights we have in that regard. The Fourth Amendment reads:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." (emphasis added) And, of course, this means unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, not by burglars.
This "right" that the "people" have to "see ... the government go after criminal activity" was invented by Gonzales out of whole cloth, and it completely eviscerates the First Amendment. If this theory holds, all the government has to do to censor information is to classify it.
Once again the Bush Administration is trying to take a bite out of the Constitution. Not that this should come as a suprise to anyone at this point.
Someone really needs to get a life
Don't ask me how I stumbled on to it, but this is the weirdest e-commerce site I have ever seen. It even has an extensive Wikipedia entry.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Iranians not Nazis (yet)
Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, writes that yesterday's story about Iran considering a law requiring Jews and Christians to wear distinguishing insignia is (and I quote) "a steaming crock."
The Iranian legislature did pass "a law regulating women's fashion." Well. I suppose that's harder to get worked up considering the long and venerable history of this kind of discrimination.
The Iranian legislature did pass "a law regulating women's fashion." Well. I suppose that's harder to get worked up considering the long and venerable history of this kind of discrimination.
It can't happen here redux
Michelle Goldberg has an excellent analysis of how the American Taliban (a.k.a. the Christian Nationalist movement) will take over the country.
People go in, but they never come out
The Army Reserve has started denying officers' resignations even after their term of service is over.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Think it can't happen here?
Wow, today is just turning out to be chock full of nasty surprises.
BALTIMORE -- Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions.
WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions.
How is it even possible to trespass on a public street?
I hope those officers are drawn and quartered.
BALTIMORE -- Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions.
WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions.
How is it even possible to trespass on a public street?
I hope those officers are drawn and quartered.
Never again? Think again.
Iran is contemplating a new law that would require Jews (and Christians this time around) to wear special insignia.
I'm not sure what is more shocking, that they would do this, or that there are still Jews in Iran.
[Update: there are indications that the cited story is not true. Nonetheless, the fact that it is plausible enough to cause such a kerfuffle is disturbing in and of itself.]
I'm not sure what is more shocking, that they would do this, or that there are still Jews in Iran.
[Update: there are indications that the cited story is not true. Nonetheless, the fact that it is plausible enough to cause such a kerfuffle is disturbing in and of itself.]
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Protest the government - go to prison
One of the problems with the President having unilateral power to throw people in prison without trial is there is no way to stop him from doing just that to political opponents. Think it can't happen? Think again.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
How convenient
The Justice Department probe of the NSA's domestic wiretapping activity has been called off because the NSA would not give the Justice Department lawyers the security clearances they need to investigate the matter.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Required reading
Four years old but still timely, Andrew Sullivan analyzes Islamic fundamentalism and the war on terror. Should be required reading for everyone IMO.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
George Bush is no Christian
I was going to write a post entitled "The Gospel According to Dubya." It was going to go something like this:
"Blessed are the warmakers, for they shall ensure the security of the people. Thou shalt kill and torture and bear false witness as long as you do it in the name of national security. And if a man smite thee on on one cheek, well, you should have launched a pre-emptive strike to disarm him."
But as I was reading through the Sermon on the Mount I was really struck by something. What few supporters Dubya has left among generally say they stick with him because they think he's a good Christian and his actions are guided by God. Well, maybe he's guided by some god, but he certainly isn't guided by Jesus. Here are a few quotes from Matthew:
"But I say unto you that ye resist no evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." (I wonder if Dubya has ever said a prayer for Osama bin Laden.)
"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets that they may be seen of men... But thou when thou prayest, enter into thy closet.. [and] pray to thy Father... in secret."
"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink." (Oh, but Jesus didn't say anything about what ye shall put in your fuel tank!)
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Dubya's version: "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.")
"Blessed are the peacemakers..." (Maybe Dubya thinks that Jesus was referring to the LGM-118 missile.)
If Dubya is guided by God, it must be the god of the Old Testament (e.g. "And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no convenant with them, nor show mercy unto them." (Deut. 7:2)
Still, one has to wonder...
"And if thy say in thine heart, how shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously..." (Deut. 18:21-22)
WMD's are a slam-dunk. We will be greeted as liberators. Mission accomplished. The war will last weeks, not months.
Are these the words that the Lord hath spoken?
"Blessed are the warmakers, for they shall ensure the security of the people. Thou shalt kill and torture and bear false witness as long as you do it in the name of national security. And if a man smite thee on on one cheek, well, you should have launched a pre-emptive strike to disarm him."
But as I was reading through the Sermon on the Mount I was really struck by something. What few supporters Dubya has left among generally say they stick with him because they think he's a good Christian and his actions are guided by God. Well, maybe he's guided by some god, but he certainly isn't guided by Jesus. Here are a few quotes from Matthew:
"But I say unto you that ye resist no evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." (I wonder if Dubya has ever said a prayer for Osama bin Laden.)
"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets that they may be seen of men... But thou when thou prayest, enter into thy closet.. [and] pray to thy Father... in secret."
"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink." (Oh, but Jesus didn't say anything about what ye shall put in your fuel tank!)
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Dubya's version: "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.")
"Blessed are the peacemakers..." (Maybe Dubya thinks that Jesus was referring to the LGM-118 missile.)
If Dubya is guided by God, it must be the god of the Old Testament (e.g. "And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no convenant with them, nor show mercy unto them." (Deut. 7:2)
Still, one has to wonder...
"And if thy say in thine heart, how shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously..." (Deut. 18:21-22)
WMD's are a slam-dunk. We will be greeted as liberators. Mission accomplished. The war will last weeks, not months.
Are these the words that the Lord hath spoken?
The FDA squanders its credibility
Since the FDA, in a patently absurd and obviously politically motivated move, declared that marijuana has no medical benefits, the news is chock full of stories reviewing all the scientific studies (to say nothing of the anecdotal evidence) that show unequivocally that it does. I'll just note this one since it's very well written and comes from The Economist, which is hardly a bastion of left-wing propaganda.
You know, if one's goal were to get the truth about marijuana's benefits out there for people to see, one could hardly imagine a more effective strategy than to get the FDA to make such a manifestly false claim. Someone in the administration is either very stupid or very clever.
My money is on stupid.
You know, if one's goal were to get the truth about marijuana's benefits out there for people to see, one could hardly imagine a more effective strategy than to get the FDA to make such a manifestly false claim. Someone in the administration is either very stupid or very clever.
My money is on stupid.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
The right way for religion to critique science (and vice versa)
Science and religion waste of a lot of energy talking past each other by arguing about the wrong things, like whether or not God exists. Relgionists go to extreme, sometimes comical lengths to "scientifically" prove the existence of God. Scientists also go to equally extreme and ultimately equally futile lengths to prove his non-existence. It is at once amazing and sad to see all these smart people wasting so much effort on such manifestly useless endeavors.
What is most amazing about it is that it is transparently obvious even by their own standards that both sides are wrong. How can that be? It seems a logical tautology that either God exists or He does not. But it isn't so. P or not P is tautologically true only if the truth value of P is well defined. "Either God exists or He does not" is no more of a tautology than "Either Les Demoiselles D'Avignonis a beautiful painting or it is not."
The futility of the debate ultimately stems from the fact that the two sides are actually arguing about something different than what they think they are arguing about. They think they are arguing about the existence of God, but in fact they are arguing about His nature. What the religionists really are setting out to prove is not that the Universe was Designed, but that the Designer is still around, and He has a plan, and you have a place in it. What (most) scientists/humanists/atheists really want to say is not that the universe is devoid of transcendant meaning, but that we need to seek it in places other than holy scripture.
Even on a question as basic as whether or not we were created in God's image the two sides could find common ground if only they would be honest with themselves about what they really believe. The Bible teaches that we are created in God's image, but what does that mean? It can't mean that we are exact duplicates of God, if for no other reason than that there are six billion of us and only one of Him (to say nothing of the fact that He is almighty and omniscient and we clearly aren't and never were). The only reasonable interpretation is that there is something in our essential nature that mirrors the essential nature of the Creator. But for a scientist, the Creator is simply the Laws of Physics (LP). Framed that way, it becomes self evident that we are created in the image of the Creator/LP. We can even agree on what certain aspects of that essential nature is. For example, we have the capacity to do Good. The story that would be told to explain this is different on both sides, but the fact itself is beyond dispute, as is the fact that it arose from and is a reflection of whatever created us.
This is not to say that we would achieve perfect harmony; we would not. There are legitimate disagreements between science and religion, and productive debates to be had, but we're not having them because neither side is capable of seeing beyond its own prejudices.
One of the most counterproductive prejudices that is shared by both sides is that science is not a religion, that it is the antithesis of religion. That is hogwash. Science is not necessarily a religion, but it certainly can be (and I think it should be). It is clearly Richard Dawkins's religion (and the fact that he would take great umbrage at that suggestion is evidence that it is in fact true). And if Dawkins won't have it, then I'll claim it as my own. I am a scientist. That is my religion. I believe that the Laws of Physics, once they are properly understood, provide an adequate guide to how to live a good, moral, and even transcendant life. But coming to that understanding has not been easy, either for me personally or for mankind as a whole, and I can certainly understand how someone could believe otherwise.
I think a proper understanding of science as a religion would help the debate become more productive all around. We would not achieve perfect agreement, of course, because no two religions can ever be perfectly reconciled. (That's one of the things that makes them religions.) But I do think that reframing the debate as one between two religions rather than between relgion and non-religion would go a long way towards breaking some of the present logjams.
Consider for example the question of the reliability of the Biible on how we should live our lives. The extreme positions are "It is absolutely reliable" (the fundamentalist Christian position) and "it is absolutely unreliable" (the fundamentalist scientist position). Both are, of course, wrong. (Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong.) Even the most extreme fundamentalist would concede that, if nothing else, the meaning of certain passages in the Bible is far from self-evident, and the debate within the religious community about how to address that problem has been raging for thousands of years. And even the most extreme scientist would concede that some parts of the Bible, like "Love thy neighbor as thyself", are probably not bad ideas. And we can go even further: the scientific viewpoint on morality is that it evolved as an evolutionarily stable strategy, so it would make sense that at some point as the human brain evolved that certain aspects of that strategy should be codified in writing. So the Bible can be viewed as a sort of an early draft of a theory of evolutionarily stable (which is to say moral) behavior, just as Beowulf can be viewed as an early draft of a theory of drama.
So how should religion critique science? Well, how about something like this:
There is no dispute that science serves as a reliable guide to a great many things, like how to build cars and computers, and how to make medicine. But science has its limits. Our scientific understanding of the human mind is rudimentary at best, and progress is slow. Those who pursue this work are driven by a faith that the extreme challenges presented by this undertaking will some day be overcome. That faith is laudable, but it is, in fact, faith.
In the meantime, the world is filled will six billion humans who have to figure out what to make of their lives here and now. Many of these people do not have the luxury of being able to invest the very high time and effort that it takes to reach a scientific understanding of one's place in the Universe. Most people's time is consumed with the day-to-day business of survival, of getting crops planted and harvested, of finding clean water, of caring for the livestock (if they are lucky enough to have livestock), of struggling with the passion and pain, the joys and sorrows and the pain that are part and parcel of being human. Some day, perhaps, science will understand all this well enough that we can cure every disease, ease every heartache, and provide everyone with a sense of purpose and transcendant meaning based on science. In the meantime, if someone is in pain, what purpose is served by depriving them of the comfort they might obtain by believing that God loves them and has a Plan?
And how should science critique religion? Well, how about this.
What is most amazing about it is that it is transparently obvious even by their own standards that both sides are wrong. How can that be? It seems a logical tautology that either God exists or He does not. But it isn't so. P or not P is tautologically true only if the truth value of P is well defined. "Either God exists or He does not" is no more of a tautology than "Either Les Demoiselles D'Avignonis a beautiful painting or it is not."
The futility of the debate ultimately stems from the fact that the two sides are actually arguing about something different than what they think they are arguing about. They think they are arguing about the existence of God, but in fact they are arguing about His nature. What the religionists really are setting out to prove is not that the Universe was Designed, but that the Designer is still around, and He has a plan, and you have a place in it. What (most) scientists/humanists/atheists really want to say is not that the universe is devoid of transcendant meaning, but that we need to seek it in places other than holy scripture.
Even on a question as basic as whether or not we were created in God's image the two sides could find common ground if only they would be honest with themselves about what they really believe. The Bible teaches that we are created in God's image, but what does that mean? It can't mean that we are exact duplicates of God, if for no other reason than that there are six billion of us and only one of Him (to say nothing of the fact that He is almighty and omniscient and we clearly aren't and never were). The only reasonable interpretation is that there is something in our essential nature that mirrors the essential nature of the Creator. But for a scientist, the Creator is simply the Laws of Physics (LP). Framed that way, it becomes self evident that we are created in the image of the Creator/LP. We can even agree on what certain aspects of that essential nature is. For example, we have the capacity to do Good. The story that would be told to explain this is different on both sides, but the fact itself is beyond dispute, as is the fact that it arose from and is a reflection of whatever created us.
This is not to say that we would achieve perfect harmony; we would not. There are legitimate disagreements between science and religion, and productive debates to be had, but we're not having them because neither side is capable of seeing beyond its own prejudices.
One of the most counterproductive prejudices that is shared by both sides is that science is not a religion, that it is the antithesis of religion. That is hogwash. Science is not necessarily a religion, but it certainly can be (and I think it should be). It is clearly Richard Dawkins's religion (and the fact that he would take great umbrage at that suggestion is evidence that it is in fact true). And if Dawkins won't have it, then I'll claim it as my own. I am a scientist. That is my religion. I believe that the Laws of Physics, once they are properly understood, provide an adequate guide to how to live a good, moral, and even transcendant life. But coming to that understanding has not been easy, either for me personally or for mankind as a whole, and I can certainly understand how someone could believe otherwise.
I think a proper understanding of science as a religion would help the debate become more productive all around. We would not achieve perfect agreement, of course, because no two religions can ever be perfectly reconciled. (That's one of the things that makes them religions.) But I do think that reframing the debate as one between two religions rather than between relgion and non-religion would go a long way towards breaking some of the present logjams.
Consider for example the question of the reliability of the Biible on how we should live our lives. The extreme positions are "It is absolutely reliable" (the fundamentalist Christian position) and "it is absolutely unreliable" (the fundamentalist scientist position). Both are, of course, wrong. (Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong.) Even the most extreme fundamentalist would concede that, if nothing else, the meaning of certain passages in the Bible is far from self-evident, and the debate within the religious community about how to address that problem has been raging for thousands of years. And even the most extreme scientist would concede that some parts of the Bible, like "Love thy neighbor as thyself", are probably not bad ideas. And we can go even further: the scientific viewpoint on morality is that it evolved as an evolutionarily stable strategy, so it would make sense that at some point as the human brain evolved that certain aspects of that strategy should be codified in writing. So the Bible can be viewed as a sort of an early draft of a theory of evolutionarily stable (which is to say moral) behavior, just as Beowulf can be viewed as an early draft of a theory of drama.
So how should religion critique science? Well, how about something like this:
There is no dispute that science serves as a reliable guide to a great many things, like how to build cars and computers, and how to make medicine. But science has its limits. Our scientific understanding of the human mind is rudimentary at best, and progress is slow. Those who pursue this work are driven by a faith that the extreme challenges presented by this undertaking will some day be overcome. That faith is laudable, but it is, in fact, faith.
In the meantime, the world is filled will six billion humans who have to figure out what to make of their lives here and now. Many of these people do not have the luxury of being able to invest the very high time and effort that it takes to reach a scientific understanding of one's place in the Universe. Most people's time is consumed with the day-to-day business of survival, of getting crops planted and harvested, of finding clean water, of caring for the livestock (if they are lucky enough to have livestock), of struggling with the passion and pain, the joys and sorrows and the pain that are part and parcel of being human. Some day, perhaps, science will understand all this well enough that we can cure every disease, ease every heartache, and provide everyone with a sense of purpose and transcendant meaning based on science. In the meantime, if someone is in pain, what purpose is served by depriving them of the comfort they might obtain by believing that God loves them and has a Plan?
And how should science critique religion? Well, how about this.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I couldn't have said it better myself
If I am ever able to write even one tenth as well as Douglas Adams I will be a very happy man. Here is a transcript of a speech he gave which starts out shredding religion and then goes on to say why it is indispensable. It's much the same point I've been trying to make, but he does it much better than I could ever hope to. It's very long but well worth the time.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Whaddya know? I'm not a lone nutcase!
It seems I'm not the only one who thinks that George Bush wants to nuke Iran while he still can.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
A sober view of global warming
Tom Evslin offers up a sober view of global warming, and a conclusion with which I agree:
What we can't afford to do is make policy based on hysterical observations that the glaciers are continuing their fifteen-thousand year retreat OR a complacent assumption that things will stay the way humans have always seen them.
Here again we would be well served with a little more humility on all sides.
What we can't afford to do is make policy based on hysterical observations that the glaciers are continuing their fifteen-thousand year retreat OR a complacent assumption that things will stay the way humans have always seen them.
Here again we would be well served with a little more humility on all sides.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Why vs How - a false conflict
The Atheist Spy sent me an email asking me to comment on his blog, and this post in particular. My knee-jerk reaction was that he is taking an awfully long time to say a fairly simple thing, but I think his point (once you get to it) is basically valid: people become religious or not depending on whether they care more about "why" than "how", or vice-versa. And there's no way to justify a concern for one over the other from first principles. Every world view, even atheism (even solipsism or nihlism), requires a leap of faith. (I actually made this point in my very first post here.)
But all that got me to thinking: why (it's a loaded word now!) must these two questions put people at loggerheads? Why can't we care about both? How (!) can we reconcile the conflict that seems to arise between the Whyers and the Howers?
The answer, I think, is very simple. The problem is that the methods that are effective for answering "how?" are not very effective for answering "why?". So if you care about one or the other then you naturally conclude that the methods that are effective for answering the question that you care about are "good" (because they produce the answers that you care about).
Can these positions be reconciled? Of course they can. All it takes is to recognize that there are two questions being asked, that people can be legitimately concerned (or not) with both of them, and that the effective methods for answering them are different.
Of course, this requires a bit of humility and a willingness to admit that what is important to you might legitimately be different from what is important to someone else, and perhaps even a willingness to admit that you might be wrong about some things. Such humility is in short supply at both extremes of the debate. Both religious fundamentalists, who insist that X must be true because it is what they think their holy text says (they are very rarely actually correct about this -- more on that later), and science fundamentalists (like Dawkins), who insist on pretending that anything that does not succumb to reductionism is nothing more than a human foible, will never be convinced. For the rest of us, middle ground is not hard to find.
The problems with fundamentalist religion have been extensively cataloged. Fundamentalists have attempted to make similar catalogs of the failings of "fundamentalists science" (e.g. creationist/ID critiques of Evolution) but these fail because they attempt to critique science using logic, and that can never work because science by definition *is* logic. It is rather like trying to critique faith by saying, "Jesus can't be the Son of God because I don't believe it." It doesn't work.
An effective religious critique of science must be based on the methods of religion, not science. The problem with science is not that it has trouble explaining how we got here, it's that it is utterly uncapable of explaining why we got here. The scientific answer to this is to simply dismiss the question as unimportant, but that's cheating. It's just as much of a cheat as saying, "It's true becuase the Bible says so." If I want to ask "why?" it is not for you to say whether my concern is worthy of consideration. The mere fact that I am a human and I choose to ask makes it worthy of my fellow human's concern. (Likewise for those who choose to ask "how".)
It is a happy circumstance that those who choose to ask "how" have stumbled recently (like in the last few hundred years) upon a method on which they (we) could all mostly agree and which seems to be effective. Those who choose to ask "why" have not yet been so fortunate. But that in and of itself is not license to dismiss the question. It was not that long ago in the grand and glorious scheme of things that the how-askers were trying to convert lead into gold. The arrogance of fundamentalist science is no more well founded than the arrogance of fundamentalist religion. Just because we scientists have found some common ground does not give us license to dismiss as unimportant the concerns of our fellow humans who have not been so fortunate.
I think we would all be well served with a little more humility and compassion all around.
But all that got me to thinking: why (it's a loaded word now!) must these two questions put people at loggerheads? Why can't we care about both? How (!) can we reconcile the conflict that seems to arise between the Whyers and the Howers?
The answer, I think, is very simple. The problem is that the methods that are effective for answering "how?" are not very effective for answering "why?". So if you care about one or the other then you naturally conclude that the methods that are effective for answering the question that you care about are "good" (because they produce the answers that you care about).
Can these positions be reconciled? Of course they can. All it takes is to recognize that there are two questions being asked, that people can be legitimately concerned (or not) with both of them, and that the effective methods for answering them are different.
Of course, this requires a bit of humility and a willingness to admit that what is important to you might legitimately be different from what is important to someone else, and perhaps even a willingness to admit that you might be wrong about some things. Such humility is in short supply at both extremes of the debate. Both religious fundamentalists, who insist that X must be true because it is what they think their holy text says (they are very rarely actually correct about this -- more on that later), and science fundamentalists (like Dawkins), who insist on pretending that anything that does not succumb to reductionism is nothing more than a human foible, will never be convinced. For the rest of us, middle ground is not hard to find.
The problems with fundamentalist religion have been extensively cataloged. Fundamentalists have attempted to make similar catalogs of the failings of "fundamentalists science" (e.g. creationist/ID critiques of Evolution) but these fail because they attempt to critique science using logic, and that can never work because science by definition *is* logic. It is rather like trying to critique faith by saying, "Jesus can't be the Son of God because I don't believe it." It doesn't work.
An effective religious critique of science must be based on the methods of religion, not science. The problem with science is not that it has trouble explaining how we got here, it's that it is utterly uncapable of explaining why we got here. The scientific answer to this is to simply dismiss the question as unimportant, but that's cheating. It's just as much of a cheat as saying, "It's true becuase the Bible says so." If I want to ask "why?" it is not for you to say whether my concern is worthy of consideration. The mere fact that I am a human and I choose to ask makes it worthy of my fellow human's concern. (Likewise for those who choose to ask "how".)
It is a happy circumstance that those who choose to ask "how" have stumbled recently (like in the last few hundred years) upon a method on which they (we) could all mostly agree and which seems to be effective. Those who choose to ask "why" have not yet been so fortunate. But that in and of itself is not license to dismiss the question. It was not that long ago in the grand and glorious scheme of things that the how-askers were trying to convert lead into gold. The arrogance of fundamentalist science is no more well founded than the arrogance of fundamentalist religion. Just because we scientists have found some common ground does not give us license to dismiss as unimportant the concerns of our fellow humans who have not been so fortunate.
I think we would all be well served with a little more humility and compassion all around.
If abortion is murder redux
Ohio is poised to make it a felony to leave the state to have an abortion.
It makes perfect sense. If the fetus is a person then abortion is murder, no different from infanticide, no different from shooting someone in the head. Abortion is cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Driving someone out of state for an abortion is no different from kidnapping a baby to be executed. Of course it should be a felony.
If abortion is murder. If the fetus is a person.
And what about all those frozen embryos? If life begins at conception then embryos are people too, and so letting an embryo thaw out without being implanted in a woman's uterus is murder. Cold-blooded premeditated murder. Why should not a woman who undergoes in-vitro fertilization not be required by law to carry all of the resulting babies to term? If life begins at conception, isn't the embryo a person? Isn't refusal to implant an embryo tantamount to abortion, tantamount to murder?
Am I the only one feeling a little queasy here?
The answer is that embryos are not people. Fetuses are not people. It takes more than a full complement of human DNA to make a person, more than a beating heart. It takes a functioning brain. That is why we recognize the concept of "brain death" (most of us anyway).
Life may begin at conception, but personhood doesn't start until much later. If we do not recognize that, we are headed towards a very unpleasant future.
It makes perfect sense. If the fetus is a person then abortion is murder, no different from infanticide, no different from shooting someone in the head. Abortion is cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Driving someone out of state for an abortion is no different from kidnapping a baby to be executed. Of course it should be a felony.
If abortion is murder. If the fetus is a person.
And what about all those frozen embryos? If life begins at conception then embryos are people too, and so letting an embryo thaw out without being implanted in a woman's uterus is murder. Cold-blooded premeditated murder. Why should not a woman who undergoes in-vitro fertilization not be required by law to carry all of the resulting babies to term? If life begins at conception, isn't the embryo a person? Isn't refusal to implant an embryo tantamount to abortion, tantamount to murder?
Am I the only one feeling a little queasy here?
The answer is that embryos are not people. Fetuses are not people. It takes more than a full complement of human DNA to make a person, more than a beating heart. It takes a functioning brain. That is why we recognize the concept of "brain death" (most of us anyway).
Life may begin at conception, but personhood doesn't start until much later. If we do not recognize that, we are headed towards a very unpleasant future.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The fear-mongering begins
Here is the first of what will no doubt be a long series of lies designed to bolster the case for going to war with Iran:
"April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Iran, which is defying United Nations Security Council demands to cease its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days if it goes ahead with plans to install thousands of centrifuges at its Natanz plant, a U.S. State Department official said."
That claim is absurd on its face. Iran probably couldn't build a car in sixteen days, let alone a nuclear bomb. Iran's current capacity for enriching uranium is tiny. It will take them months if not years to produce even the raw materials for a nuclear bomb, let alone the bomb itself.
Now, one must wonder: since it has become clear that the invasion of Iraq was based on, at best, willful ignorance, why he is once again resorting to transparent falsehoods to bolster the case for yet another invasion? My theory is this: George Bush is a man of deep convictions. He believes in Right and Wrong, and he would never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of smiting the evil doers. Nor would he let a little thing like democracy stand in the way either.
My guess is that Dubya has his doubts that God will arrange to keep control of the House in Republican hands after November. That means he has to get the war with Iran started in the next six months while he still has a Congress full of lap dogs. After the election he can use the "now that we're there we have to stay" argument to bring the Democrats to heel.
A crazy theory? God, I hope so. But we would all do well to keep a very close eye on Adminstration rhetoric in the next few weeks. The possibility that George Bush actually wants to start World War 3 (perhaps to hasten the return of Jesus) is not entirely out of the question.
"April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Iran, which is defying United Nations Security Council demands to cease its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days if it goes ahead with plans to install thousands of centrifuges at its Natanz plant, a U.S. State Department official said."
That claim is absurd on its face. Iran probably couldn't build a car in sixteen days, let alone a nuclear bomb. Iran's current capacity for enriching uranium is tiny. It will take them months if not years to produce even the raw materials for a nuclear bomb, let alone the bomb itself.
Now, one must wonder: since it has become clear that the invasion of Iraq was based on, at best, willful ignorance, why he is once again resorting to transparent falsehoods to bolster the case for yet another invasion? My theory is this: George Bush is a man of deep convictions. He believes in Right and Wrong, and he would never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of smiting the evil doers. Nor would he let a little thing like democracy stand in the way either.
My guess is that Dubya has his doubts that God will arrange to keep control of the House in Republican hands after November. That means he has to get the war with Iran started in the next six months while he still has a Congress full of lap dogs. After the election he can use the "now that we're there we have to stay" argument to bring the Democrats to heel.
A crazy theory? God, I hope so. But we would all do well to keep a very close eye on Adminstration rhetoric in the next few weeks. The possibility that George Bush actually wants to start World War 3 (perhaps to hasten the return of Jesus) is not entirely out of the question.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Global warming is a myth -- NOT!
Professor Bob Carter claims There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998:
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Is he right? Well, take a look at the chart and see for yourself.
His raw claim is (more or less) true. The average temperature for the years 1998-2005 were more or less contant. Is this a reason to believe that global warming has stopped? Absolutely not. To see why, ignore the black line and look just at the raw data (the blue and red bars). As you can see, there is a lot of random noise on top of the signal. Some years the temperature goes up and in other years it goes down. (On two occasions in the last 20 years global temperatures went down two years in a row!) But the general trend is pretty clearly up. Can we actually quantify this so that it's not just a gestalt assessment? Yes, we can.
The tool that science uses to pull a signal out of noisy data like global temperatures is called statistics. The math can get pretty hairy, but the fundamental idea is very simple. The method works like this:
1. Pick some assumptions. (These are called the null hypothesis conditions.)
2. Figure out the probability distribution of some property of the data if those assumptions are true.
3. Compute the probability of the data that you actually observed. If the probability is low then there are only two possibilities: either a very unlikely event happened, or your assumptions are false.
Let's see how we can apply this to the global temperature data.
1. Let us assume that the earth is not warming up.
2. If that is true, then the probability distribution of temperatures should be a normal distribution around the average. In particular, we should see more or less the same number of above average temperatures as below-average temperatures. (We should also see more or less the same number of increases and decreases. There are many different properties of the data we could choose.)
3. When we look at the data we see that over the last 25 years the data are not evenly distributed between above and below average. In fact, every one of the last 25 years has been above average. The probability that this would happen merely by chance (on the assumption that there is no global warming) is 1 in 2 to the 25th power, or about one in 33 million.
So there are only two possibilities: either our assumption is wrong, or we've just happened to hit upon an extremely unlikely set of events.
In fact, the evidence is even more compelling than that. If you take as your baseline temperature the average before 1900, then every year since 1940 has been above average. The odds of that happening in the absence of real underlying global warming is about one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (more or less).
You can do a similar analysis using an assumption that there is global warming and figuring out the probability of hitting an eight-year long spell of more or less constant temperatures. The probability depends on exactly what your assumptions are (mainly the rate of the underlying warming and the magnitude of the noise) and I don't have time to actually do the math at the moment, but it almost certainly will turn out to be a fairly common event. There are actually several multi-year periods in the recent past with no apparent temperature change (e.g. 1975-85, 1988-92).
So Carter's basic observation is correct, but his conclusion is absolutely wrong. In fact, it is so wrong that I wonder how he ever managed to get his Ph.D., let alone a faculty position. His mistake is so fundamental that it is hard to put it in any kind of favorable light. Carter is either disingenuous, or he is ignorant of basic scientific principles. I can't think of any other possibility.
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Is he right? Well, take a look at the chart and see for yourself.
His raw claim is (more or less) true. The average temperature for the years 1998-2005 were more or less contant. Is this a reason to believe that global warming has stopped? Absolutely not. To see why, ignore the black line and look just at the raw data (the blue and red bars). As you can see, there is a lot of random noise on top of the signal. Some years the temperature goes up and in other years it goes down. (On two occasions in the last 20 years global temperatures went down two years in a row!) But the general trend is pretty clearly up. Can we actually quantify this so that it's not just a gestalt assessment? Yes, we can.
The tool that science uses to pull a signal out of noisy data like global temperatures is called statistics. The math can get pretty hairy, but the fundamental idea is very simple. The method works like this:
1. Pick some assumptions. (These are called the null hypothesis conditions.)
2. Figure out the probability distribution of some property of the data if those assumptions are true.
3. Compute the probability of the data that you actually observed. If the probability is low then there are only two possibilities: either a very unlikely event happened, or your assumptions are false.
Let's see how we can apply this to the global temperature data.
1. Let us assume that the earth is not warming up.
2. If that is true, then the probability distribution of temperatures should be a normal distribution around the average. In particular, we should see more or less the same number of above average temperatures as below-average temperatures. (We should also see more or less the same number of increases and decreases. There are many different properties of the data we could choose.)
3. When we look at the data we see that over the last 25 years the data are not evenly distributed between above and below average. In fact, every one of the last 25 years has been above average. The probability that this would happen merely by chance (on the assumption that there is no global warming) is 1 in 2 to the 25th power, or about one in 33 million.
So there are only two possibilities: either our assumption is wrong, or we've just happened to hit upon an extremely unlikely set of events.
In fact, the evidence is even more compelling than that. If you take as your baseline temperature the average before 1900, then every year since 1940 has been above average. The odds of that happening in the absence of real underlying global warming is about one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (more or less).
You can do a similar analysis using an assumption that there is global warming and figuring out the probability of hitting an eight-year long spell of more or less constant temperatures. The probability depends on exactly what your assumptions are (mainly the rate of the underlying warming and the magnitude of the noise) and I don't have time to actually do the math at the moment, but it almost certainly will turn out to be a fairly common event. There are actually several multi-year periods in the recent past with no apparent temperature change (e.g. 1975-85, 1988-92).
So Carter's basic observation is correct, but his conclusion is absolutely wrong. In fact, it is so wrong that I wonder how he ever managed to get his Ph.D., let alone a faculty position. His mistake is so fundamental that it is hard to put it in any kind of favorable light. Carter is either disingenuous, or he is ignorant of basic scientific principles. I can't think of any other possibility.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
You've got to fight for your right to be a bigot
The LA Times reports:
Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.
The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."
...
"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay-rights group Lambda Legal.
Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay-rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
I guess Ruth Malhotra hasn't read Timothy 2:11-12. Or if she has, she seems to be pretty choosy about which bits of her Christian faith are worth fighting for.
Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.
The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."
...
"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay-rights group Lambda Legal.
Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay-rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
I guess Ruth Malhotra hasn't read Timothy 2:11-12. Or if she has, she seems to be pretty choosy about which bits of her Christian faith are worth fighting for.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Better late than never
If in 2000 Al Gore had mustered the courage to give the speech he gave the other night at the Los Angeles HRC dinner he might be president today. Instead of the wishy-washy yes-on-civil-unions-but-no-to-gay-marriage position he took during the campaign, he finally came down squarely on the side of human rights. Better late than never I suppose.
Unfortunately, Al hasn't learned a thing about delivery. He was as wooden and meandering behind the mike as ever. The AV team did an admirable job of keeping the audio level adjusted as he wandered this way and that behind the podium. These are style-over-substance issues that matter a whole lot more than they ought to. I can't help but think that poor Al has been a couple of acting lessons away from the White House for the last ten years.
Still, having the truth on your side goes a long way towards making up for a lack of charisma. It has always been blatantly obvious to me that those who would deny human rights to gays are on the wrong side of history, and Al Gore finally seems to have come to this realization. (I don't know, maybe he always knew this, and his position in 2000 was just a political calculation rather than a reflection of what was in his heart of hearts. Either way, it's a hard position to respect, and I think it cost him the presidency.)
Imagine a charismatic Al Gore championing gay rights not because he's a liberal but because he's a Christian, pointing out that laws forbidding interracial marriage were on the books in a number of states until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1967, that this is today a national embarrassment. Imagine a fired-up Al Gore saying that fifty years from now people will look back with similar shame at the day when we as a society denied certain people the right to legally commit their lives to their country and the people they loved. Imagine Al Gore extemporizing [gasp!] "Good grief, all you're asking for is monogamy and military service! Is that too much to ask?" That Al Gore was at the Century Plaza last Saturday.
I just wish this Al Gore had surfaced six years ago. The world would be a better place.
Unfortunately, Al hasn't learned a thing about delivery. He was as wooden and meandering behind the mike as ever. The AV team did an admirable job of keeping the audio level adjusted as he wandered this way and that behind the podium. These are style-over-substance issues that matter a whole lot more than they ought to. I can't help but think that poor Al has been a couple of acting lessons away from the White House for the last ten years.
Still, having the truth on your side goes a long way towards making up for a lack of charisma. It has always been blatantly obvious to me that those who would deny human rights to gays are on the wrong side of history, and Al Gore finally seems to have come to this realization. (I don't know, maybe he always knew this, and his position in 2000 was just a political calculation rather than a reflection of what was in his heart of hearts. Either way, it's a hard position to respect, and I think it cost him the presidency.)
Imagine a charismatic Al Gore championing gay rights not because he's a liberal but because he's a Christian, pointing out that laws forbidding interracial marriage were on the books in a number of states until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1967, that this is today a national embarrassment. Imagine a fired-up Al Gore saying that fifty years from now people will look back with similar shame at the day when we as a society denied certain people the right to legally commit their lives to their country and the people they loved. Imagine Al Gore extemporizing [gasp!] "Good grief, all you're asking for is monogamy and military service! Is that too much to ask?" That Al Gore was at the Century Plaza last Saturday.
I just wish this Al Gore had surfaced six years ago. The world would be a better place.
Self-confidence indicates incompetence
Dick Cheney seems pretty cocksure about the Rupublican's ability to conduct the war in Iraq, and the Democrats' lack of same, saying of the Dems, "If they are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol."
Better start warming up those vocal chords. This paper from the APA shows that self-confidence has a very strong negative correlation with actual ability:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Better start warming up those vocal chords. This paper from the APA shows that self-confidence has a very strong negative correlation with actual ability:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
It's official: George Bush is a dictator
He says so himself. Glen Greenwald has a lucid analysis.
Didn't we already have this debate back in 1972?
Didn't we already have this debate back in 1972?
Friday, March 24, 2006
Haven't we learned anything redux
You gotta hand it to George Bush, he certainly has balls. Despite the furor over the unauthorized wiretapping of U.S. citizens he still has no compunctions about brazenly declaring that he intends to violate the law. And of course, those spineless Republican lap dogs in Congress will let him get away with it. (To be fair, the Democrats have been pretty spineless too, but they aren't the ones in power.)
It's 1932 all over again.
It's 1932 all over again.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Shooting the messenger
What do you do when someone singlehandedly saves our democracy? Why, you throw them in prison of course.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Is killing cancer cells murder?
I just learned about the remarkable case of Henrietta Lacks, who came down with cervical cancer in 1951. Cells from her tumor are still alive.
I wonder, would pro-lifers consider killing these cells to be murder? After all, this is human life.
The obvious answer is, "No, killing tumor cells is not murder because, despite the fact that they have a full set of human DNA, they are not capable of becoming a fully-fledged human being the way, say, a frozen embryo is."
To which I will respond: but isn't that just a limitation of our technology? After all, bringing a frozen embryo to fruition as a human being is not an easy matter, and would not have been possible fifty years ago. Why is one ball of cells with human DNA better than another just because we happen to have the technology at the moment to bring one to fruition and not the other? Surely moral principles ought to trancend our (transient) technological limitations?
I wonder, would pro-lifers consider killing these cells to be murder? After all, this is human life.
The obvious answer is, "No, killing tumor cells is not murder because, despite the fact that they have a full set of human DNA, they are not capable of becoming a fully-fledged human being the way, say, a frozen embryo is."
To which I will respond: but isn't that just a limitation of our technology? After all, bringing a frozen embryo to fruition as a human being is not an easy matter, and would not have been possible fifty years ago. Why is one ball of cells with human DNA better than another just because we happen to have the technology at the moment to bring one to fruition and not the other? Surely moral principles ought to trancend our (transient) technological limitations?
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
A modest proposal
Here's a question for all you supply-siders out there who never met a tax cut they didn't like:
If lowering taxes is always a good thing and budget deficits don't matter, why not just eliminate taxes entirely and fund the entire U.S. government on debt? While we're at it, why don't we just go ahead and write every U.S. citizen check for, oh, say, $10 million or so and put it on our tab? That would solve just about every problem we have: poverty, education (everyone could afford private school), health care (everyone could afford insurance), you name it. We could double the size of the military, which we'll probably need to do before we can attack Iran. Hell, why not triple it and take on North Korea while we're at it? After all, the debt doesn't matter, so the sky's the limit, no?
Hm, I think I may be on to something here.
If lowering taxes is always a good thing and budget deficits don't matter, why not just eliminate taxes entirely and fund the entire U.S. government on debt? While we're at it, why don't we just go ahead and write every U.S. citizen check for, oh, say, $10 million or so and put it on our tab? That would solve just about every problem we have: poverty, education (everyone could afford private school), health care (everyone could afford insurance), you name it. We could double the size of the military, which we'll probably need to do before we can attack Iran. Hell, why not triple it and take on North Korea while we're at it? After all, the debt doesn't matter, so the sky's the limit, no?
Hm, I think I may be on to something here.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
And now, a baby alpaca
We ran into this little guy at an alpaca farm outside of Cuzco:
Isn't he the cutest thing you've ever seen?
Isn't he the cutest thing you've ever seen?
Escape from Peru
Last month my wife Nancy and I took a cruise around South America, starting in Buenos Aires and ending up in Lima. I posted a tiny snippet of our adventures over on Xooglers but then decided that a travelogue really wasn't appropriate over there. So here is the rest of the story, just in case anyone was wondering.
I'm going to post the rest of the Peru story first even though that happened at the end of the trip.
I have to tell you a couple of things to set the stage for this story. First, I've been to a lot of places. My parents were (and still are) big-time travellers. They were born in what was at the time Palestine, and I was born in Germany, so we took a lot of trips to Europe and the Middle East when I was a kid. One of my earliest memories is being allowed inside the cockpit of an El Al 747 at 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic. I hung out there for half an hour or so gazing in wonder at the cloud deck far below. I am deeply saddened that no child will ever again have that experience, at least not for a very, very long time. We also toured all over the United States. I don't specifically remember it, but my parents are fond of recounting how one of the few times they were able to get me to sit still was driving across the Arizona desert in an unairconditioned Volkswagen squareback. It was just too hot to move.
So I've been to a lot of places. I've been to beautiful places, and I've been to ugly places, rich places and poor places, cities and wilderness. But the most beautiful place I have ever seen is Peru.
It is also the ugliest. But first things first.
Machu Pichu is just beyond words. You have to experience it to appreciate it. I'd read about it and seen lots of photos, but no third-hand fascimile can even begin to do the place justice, so I won't even try. I will tell you a few things that you'll need to know to appreciate the experience though.
The only way to get to Machu Pichu is by train from Cuzco, which is a fascinating place in and of itself. If you ever go (and you really should) plan to spend at least one full day in Cuzco, one full day at Machu Pichu, and one full day at Aguas Callientes, which is the little town at the base of Machu Pichu where the train drops you off.
(Aguas Callientes, as one might imagine, is so-called because there is a hot-spring where you can go swimming. The road to the hot spring is lined with little stores that rent towels and bathing suits. Unfortunately, the packaged tour we were on didn't allow for a full day in A.C. so the ticket booth at the end of the row of shops is as far as I got.)
From A.C. a shuttle bus takes you up a onee-lane dirt road which traces out a gut-wrenching series of switchbacks to the Sanctuary Lodge, which is the only structure on top of Machu Pichu besides the Inca ruins themselves. From there you have to walk a few hundred yards to enter the ruins.
Go to Machu Pichu while you can still walk. It is literally impossible to see it any other way. One of the members of our tour had had a bad recorvery from knee surgery and couldn't walk the few hundred yards it takes to get to the ruins. He went all the way to Machu Pichu but was never actually able to lay eyes on the place. It was heartbreaking.
Like I said, Machu Pichu itself (the name actually refers to the mountain where the Inca ruins lie, not the ruins themselves) is the most beautiful place I have ever been to. Zermat is like Gatlinburg next to Machu Pichu. And it's not just the surroundings, it's the Inca ruins themselves. Nothing prepared me for the scale of the place. It's simply enormous, and the Inca trail, still in very good repair after hundreds of years of neglect, stretches all the way back to Cuzco and beyond. The Incas give new meaning to the term rock-solid. I walked many miles through the ruins and along the trail and not once did I encounter so much as a loose stone.
On the shuttle ride up the mountain your bus will very likely stop to pick up a Peruvian kid dressed in traditional costume. The point of this will become apparent on your way down: these kids are called "goodbye boys" and what they do is put on a little bit of street theatre (or dirt-road thatre) by racing the bus down the mountain and magically appearing at every other switchback to bid the tourists goodbye. The wave and call out "Aaaadiiioooosss goooooood byyyyyyeeee" and something in the traditional Inca language that I can't recall. At the bottom they board the bus to pose for photos and collect tips. It's hard work. Some of those kids have to have some wicked shin splints.
Back in A.C. we had an hour before our train left and I wandered around town a bit. It's a very safe place in part because the place is crawling with a special security force designed specifically to protect tourists. They are very discreet, but once you notice them you realize that they are absolutely everywhere. This could be the reason that, although street hustlers and vendors giving you the hard sell (sometimes a very hard sell) are ubiquitous in Peru, we saw very few actual beggars, despite some pretty crushing poverty (about which more later). Everyone has at least an ostensible trade, even if it is nothing more than standing around hustling for tips to have your photo taken with a llama.
(This is not to say that there are no heartbreaking scenes. One little girl of about seven years old dressed in traditional costume had a perpetual smile on her face as she walked around asking, "Photo? Photo?" But as I watched her from the bus I saw the smile crack a bit when she thought no one was looking. Her parents were nowhere to be seen.)
Anyway, we got on the train, got back to Cuzco, back to our hotel (the Monestario, which is interesting because it is the only hotel in the world that pipes oxygen into the rooms to help guests suffering from altitude sickness), and crashed in preparation for a 5 AM wakeup call the next day. Our plane was supposed to leave at 7:30, but as you already know, it was solid overcast and heavy rain and the airport was closed. We hung out waiting for a break in the weather, watching as one flight after another was cancelled, the crowds at the airport grew, and places to sit became harder and harder to find.
I found a wireless internet connection, but it didn't seem to work (no DHCP) so I went up to the counter to ask how to use it and was told that it wasn't working. I thought for a moment that I might be able to help them fix it, that maybe all it needed was to have their router's DHCP server turned on, but I decided that the language barrier (they spoke no English and my Spanish is rudimentary at best) was too great to overcome on a matter like this. But having nothing better to do I decided to try to see if I could hack it. Without going into too many boring details, I succeeded after only about five minutes. Not only did I have wireless Internet at the airport, but it was free! Except for being stuck in the middle of nowhere in a third-world country, I was in hog heaven. The first thing I did was check the weather in Cuzco, and it did not look good. They were predicting two days of solid rain, which seemed plausible given the situation on the ground: no wind. Apparently a stationary front had parked itself over Cuzco and wasn't going anywhere any time soon.
Finally at about one (six hours and three cycles through the check in line after we had arrived at the airport) our guide decided it was time to give up and wait until the next day. This was really bad news for us because it would mean that we would miss our flight back to the U.S., which left at 7 AM the following day.
Then, just as we were assembling to get on our shuttle bus back to the hotel, the rain stopped, and the clouds began to lift. The airport was still closed and bursting at the seams with people trying to get the hell out of dodge, but it was starting to look like we just might be able to make it. Two options eventually presented themselves. Our tour company had booked us on a flight scheduled to depart at 5 PM, four hours later, and our friend Tom had called his travel agent back in Santa Barbara who had somehow managed to snarf the last four seats on a 2:30 departure to Lima with (we thought at the time) two stops. The 5:00 flight was direct and we'd be able to stay with the group, but I've had too much experience with mountain weather turning on a dime and the stakes were too high not to go with the bird in the hand.
Until the day I die I will sing the praises of Lima Tours. If you ever go to Peru, hire them. They were just absolutely terrific. Somehow, a second guide magically appeared just to sheperd the four of us (me, Tom, and our two spouses) through the check-in process for our 2:30 flight, and it was a really good thing too. We almost missed the flight. It took literally an hour to get us checked in because we had to upgrade our tickets and pay a surcharge to take the earlier flight. This turned out to be a major production because we didn't have enough cash in our pockets to cover the cost and had to pay with a credit card. The infrastructure for taking credit cards is not as well established in Peru as it is in the U.S. and Europe, and it often involves a lot of manual processing, phone calls, and filling out of forms. (One of our fellow tourists told us about one poor shopkeeper who had to use a pay phone to try to call the credit card company to verify that the card wasn't stolen. After half an hour or so she finally just gave up and helplessly conceded that she would just have to trust them.)
I'll spare you all the gory details. Suffice it to say we made it to Lima.
A more shocking contrast I have never experienced. Not twenty-four hours earlier we had been in Machu Pichu, surely the most beautiful place I have ever seen. And Lima is just as surely the ugliest. It hit us as soon as the plane touched the ground and they start piping in non-recycled air from the outside. There was a stench that I can only describe as a mix of rotten eggs and raw sewage. Like the rest of the coastal desert on which Lima is built, it never rains here. And I don't mean that it never rains like it never rains in LA. It really honest to god never rains in Lima. Ever. (Well, that's not quite true. It rained for an hour or so about thirty years ago. The locals still talk about it.)
Lima is perpetually enveloped in a fetid haze ranging from a tropical humidity in the summer (it's only 12 degrees south of the equator) to a drizzly mist in the winter. Throw in eight million people and their non-emission-controlled diesel-powered vehicles, their untreated sewage, their unburied trash, and an admixture of God only knows what, and you have Lima. Or at least you have the air in Lima. The city itself is a whole nuther thing entirely.
Because it never rains, roofs are a luxury, not a necessity, and very few Limaians can aford them. Driving out of the airport there is nothing but mile after mile after mile of raw cinder block buildings with no roofs, and there is no doubt that these are not abandoned buildings because every one of them has a clothes line full of laundry. And all this is bathed in a murky soup of diesel exhaust, humidity, and whatnot.
Even when you get to the beach there is no letup. Physically it looks a lot like the California coast, with beaches backed up by cliffs that look as if they'd come down in a good rain, except that California's cliffs are regularly subjected to such tests whereas Lima's never are. There are people on the beaches, but they are not sunbathers because the beaches are used as landfills. The people are either dumping trash, or picking through it. After the trash dumps there is actually a section of beach that is used by surfers, but even there the water roils under a thick layer of brown foam.
It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It is heart-wrenchingly ugly.
I will never understand how Limaians keep themselves from sinking into a morass of despair (I surely would if I had to live there) but they don't. Without exception everyone we met was cheerful and friendly and, as far as I could tell, working hard to make their city a better place. (I am also sure that there are nice parts of Lima that we didn't get to see because we spent all day just trying to get there. I am equally certain that none of those nice places are near the airport.)
Of course, we rich Americans were whisked through all the blight to Miraflores, the Riviera of Peru. Our tour company put us up in a five-star hotel, world-class in every respect, from the sweeping curved staircase in the marble-floored lobby, to the the granite slab countertops in the bathrooms, to the huge pool table in the cherry-clad walls of the lounge. The contrast with the world we had driven through to get there was jarring.
We had a restful if short night, and I am writing this on our flight to Miami. Ironically, the Peruvian plane we took from Cuzco to Lima was much nicer than the American plane we are now on to Miami. The LAN plane was a sparkling new Airbus A320. This AA plane is a leaky old Boeing 757. (I mean that literally. Among other problems, there is something dripping from one of the overhead bins.)
I have never been so glad to leave a place (twice). As we took off, Nancy and I jokingly called out "Aaaaaadiiiooooos Lima, goooodbyyyyeeee Peru..."
But we both left a little piece of our hearts on Machu Picchu.
I'm going to post the rest of the Peru story first even though that happened at the end of the trip.
I have to tell you a couple of things to set the stage for this story. First, I've been to a lot of places. My parents were (and still are) big-time travellers. They were born in what was at the time Palestine, and I was born in Germany, so we took a lot of trips to Europe and the Middle East when I was a kid. One of my earliest memories is being allowed inside the cockpit of an El Al 747 at 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic. I hung out there for half an hour or so gazing in wonder at the cloud deck far below. I am deeply saddened that no child will ever again have that experience, at least not for a very, very long time. We also toured all over the United States. I don't specifically remember it, but my parents are fond of recounting how one of the few times they were able to get me to sit still was driving across the Arizona desert in an unairconditioned Volkswagen squareback. It was just too hot to move.
So I've been to a lot of places. I've been to beautiful places, and I've been to ugly places, rich places and poor places, cities and wilderness. But the most beautiful place I have ever seen is Peru.
It is also the ugliest. But first things first.
Machu Pichu is just beyond words. You have to experience it to appreciate it. I'd read about it and seen lots of photos, but no third-hand fascimile can even begin to do the place justice, so I won't even try. I will tell you a few things that you'll need to know to appreciate the experience though.
The only way to get to Machu Pichu is by train from Cuzco, which is a fascinating place in and of itself. If you ever go (and you really should) plan to spend at least one full day in Cuzco, one full day at Machu Pichu, and one full day at Aguas Callientes, which is the little town at the base of Machu Pichu where the train drops you off.
(Aguas Callientes, as one might imagine, is so-called because there is a hot-spring where you can go swimming. The road to the hot spring is lined with little stores that rent towels and bathing suits. Unfortunately, the packaged tour we were on didn't allow for a full day in A.C. so the ticket booth at the end of the row of shops is as far as I got.)
From A.C. a shuttle bus takes you up a onee-lane dirt road which traces out a gut-wrenching series of switchbacks to the Sanctuary Lodge, which is the only structure on top of Machu Pichu besides the Inca ruins themselves. From there you have to walk a few hundred yards to enter the ruins.
Go to Machu Pichu while you can still walk. It is literally impossible to see it any other way. One of the members of our tour had had a bad recorvery from knee surgery and couldn't walk the few hundred yards it takes to get to the ruins. He went all the way to Machu Pichu but was never actually able to lay eyes on the place. It was heartbreaking.
Like I said, Machu Pichu itself (the name actually refers to the mountain where the Inca ruins lie, not the ruins themselves) is the most beautiful place I have ever been to. Zermat is like Gatlinburg next to Machu Pichu. And it's not just the surroundings, it's the Inca ruins themselves. Nothing prepared me for the scale of the place. It's simply enormous, and the Inca trail, still in very good repair after hundreds of years of neglect, stretches all the way back to Cuzco and beyond. The Incas give new meaning to the term rock-solid. I walked many miles through the ruins and along the trail and not once did I encounter so much as a loose stone.
On the shuttle ride up the mountain your bus will very likely stop to pick up a Peruvian kid dressed in traditional costume. The point of this will become apparent on your way down: these kids are called "goodbye boys" and what they do is put on a little bit of street theatre (or dirt-road thatre) by racing the bus down the mountain and magically appearing at every other switchback to bid the tourists goodbye. The wave and call out "Aaaadiiioooosss goooooood byyyyyyeeee" and something in the traditional Inca language that I can't recall. At the bottom they board the bus to pose for photos and collect tips. It's hard work. Some of those kids have to have some wicked shin splints.
Back in A.C. we had an hour before our train left and I wandered around town a bit. It's a very safe place in part because the place is crawling with a special security force designed specifically to protect tourists. They are very discreet, but once you notice them you realize that they are absolutely everywhere. This could be the reason that, although street hustlers and vendors giving you the hard sell (sometimes a very hard sell) are ubiquitous in Peru, we saw very few actual beggars, despite some pretty crushing poverty (about which more later). Everyone has at least an ostensible trade, even if it is nothing more than standing around hustling for tips to have your photo taken with a llama.
(This is not to say that there are no heartbreaking scenes. One little girl of about seven years old dressed in traditional costume had a perpetual smile on her face as she walked around asking, "Photo? Photo?" But as I watched her from the bus I saw the smile crack a bit when she thought no one was looking. Her parents were nowhere to be seen.)
Anyway, we got on the train, got back to Cuzco, back to our hotel (the Monestario, which is interesting because it is the only hotel in the world that pipes oxygen into the rooms to help guests suffering from altitude sickness), and crashed in preparation for a 5 AM wakeup call the next day. Our plane was supposed to leave at 7:30, but as you already know, it was solid overcast and heavy rain and the airport was closed. We hung out waiting for a break in the weather, watching as one flight after another was cancelled, the crowds at the airport grew, and places to sit became harder and harder to find.
I found a wireless internet connection, but it didn't seem to work (no DHCP) so I went up to the counter to ask how to use it and was told that it wasn't working. I thought for a moment that I might be able to help them fix it, that maybe all it needed was to have their router's DHCP server turned on, but I decided that the language barrier (they spoke no English and my Spanish is rudimentary at best) was too great to overcome on a matter like this. But having nothing better to do I decided to try to see if I could hack it. Without going into too many boring details, I succeeded after only about five minutes. Not only did I have wireless Internet at the airport, but it was free! Except for being stuck in the middle of nowhere in a third-world country, I was in hog heaven. The first thing I did was check the weather in Cuzco, and it did not look good. They were predicting two days of solid rain, which seemed plausible given the situation on the ground: no wind. Apparently a stationary front had parked itself over Cuzco and wasn't going anywhere any time soon.
Finally at about one (six hours and three cycles through the check in line after we had arrived at the airport) our guide decided it was time to give up and wait until the next day. This was really bad news for us because it would mean that we would miss our flight back to the U.S., which left at 7 AM the following day.
Then, just as we were assembling to get on our shuttle bus back to the hotel, the rain stopped, and the clouds began to lift. The airport was still closed and bursting at the seams with people trying to get the hell out of dodge, but it was starting to look like we just might be able to make it. Two options eventually presented themselves. Our tour company had booked us on a flight scheduled to depart at 5 PM, four hours later, and our friend Tom had called his travel agent back in Santa Barbara who had somehow managed to snarf the last four seats on a 2:30 departure to Lima with (we thought at the time) two stops. The 5:00 flight was direct and we'd be able to stay with the group, but I've had too much experience with mountain weather turning on a dime and the stakes were too high not to go with the bird in the hand.
Until the day I die I will sing the praises of Lima Tours. If you ever go to Peru, hire them. They were just absolutely terrific. Somehow, a second guide magically appeared just to sheperd the four of us (me, Tom, and our two spouses) through the check-in process for our 2:30 flight, and it was a really good thing too. We almost missed the flight. It took literally an hour to get us checked in because we had to upgrade our tickets and pay a surcharge to take the earlier flight. This turned out to be a major production because we didn't have enough cash in our pockets to cover the cost and had to pay with a credit card. The infrastructure for taking credit cards is not as well established in Peru as it is in the U.S. and Europe, and it often involves a lot of manual processing, phone calls, and filling out of forms. (One of our fellow tourists told us about one poor shopkeeper who had to use a pay phone to try to call the credit card company to verify that the card wasn't stolen. After half an hour or so she finally just gave up and helplessly conceded that she would just have to trust them.)
I'll spare you all the gory details. Suffice it to say we made it to Lima.
A more shocking contrast I have never experienced. Not twenty-four hours earlier we had been in Machu Pichu, surely the most beautiful place I have ever seen. And Lima is just as surely the ugliest. It hit us as soon as the plane touched the ground and they start piping in non-recycled air from the outside. There was a stench that I can only describe as a mix of rotten eggs and raw sewage. Like the rest of the coastal desert on which Lima is built, it never rains here. And I don't mean that it never rains like it never rains in LA. It really honest to god never rains in Lima. Ever. (Well, that's not quite true. It rained for an hour or so about thirty years ago. The locals still talk about it.)
Lima is perpetually enveloped in a fetid haze ranging from a tropical humidity in the summer (it's only 12 degrees south of the equator) to a drizzly mist in the winter. Throw in eight million people and their non-emission-controlled diesel-powered vehicles, their untreated sewage, their unburied trash, and an admixture of God only knows what, and you have Lima. Or at least you have the air in Lima. The city itself is a whole nuther thing entirely.
Because it never rains, roofs are a luxury, not a necessity, and very few Limaians can aford them. Driving out of the airport there is nothing but mile after mile after mile of raw cinder block buildings with no roofs, and there is no doubt that these are not abandoned buildings because every one of them has a clothes line full of laundry. And all this is bathed in a murky soup of diesel exhaust, humidity, and whatnot.
Even when you get to the beach there is no letup. Physically it looks a lot like the California coast, with beaches backed up by cliffs that look as if they'd come down in a good rain, except that California's cliffs are regularly subjected to such tests whereas Lima's never are. There are people on the beaches, but they are not sunbathers because the beaches are used as landfills. The people are either dumping trash, or picking through it. After the trash dumps there is actually a section of beach that is used by surfers, but even there the water roils under a thick layer of brown foam.
It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It is heart-wrenchingly ugly.
I will never understand how Limaians keep themselves from sinking into a morass of despair (I surely would if I had to live there) but they don't. Without exception everyone we met was cheerful and friendly and, as far as I could tell, working hard to make their city a better place. (I am also sure that there are nice parts of Lima that we didn't get to see because we spent all day just trying to get there. I am equally certain that none of those nice places are near the airport.)
Of course, we rich Americans were whisked through all the blight to Miraflores, the Riviera of Peru. Our tour company put us up in a five-star hotel, world-class in every respect, from the sweeping curved staircase in the marble-floored lobby, to the the granite slab countertops in the bathrooms, to the huge pool table in the cherry-clad walls of the lounge. The contrast with the world we had driven through to get there was jarring.
We had a restful if short night, and I am writing this on our flight to Miami. Ironically, the Peruvian plane we took from Cuzco to Lima was much nicer than the American plane we are now on to Miami. The LAN plane was a sparkling new Airbus A320. This AA plane is a leaky old Boeing 757. (I mean that literally. Among other problems, there is something dripping from one of the overhead bins.)
I have never been so glad to leave a place (twice). As we took off, Nancy and I jokingly called out "Aaaaaadiiiooooos Lima, goooodbyyyyeeee Peru..."
But we both left a little piece of our hearts on Machu Picchu.
"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion"
Turns out that there are many, many cases of anti-choice women having abortions. Imagine my surprise.
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