If Richard Dawkins Died and Met His Maker...

Religious apologists have a long history of using the idea of death-bed conversions by skeptics as proof that God is real. Apparently, if you're afraid of one thing, that proves the existence of some other thing. One of the most often cited such conversions was Darwin's. That such conversion never actually took place matters little to charlatans who will lie and deceive in honor of their god, not realizing what an insult that is to the very god they worship... but that's how it goes, I guess.

When it comes to philosophers, it was David Hume's intellectual integrity and courage that shocked the world, and especially the renowned biographer James Boswell, who could not understand for the life of him why his literary mentor didn't think it was at all rational or prudential to bet on Pascal's wager as he was nearing death...

When Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it one step further, pre-emptively arguing (starting at 7:52 in the video below) that any such possible conversion on his part, were it to happen, would most likely be an indication of his illness, medicine administered by doctors, or some sort of dementia.

Finally, and although he has not kicked the bucket yet, it seems that if Richard Dawkins were to die and find out he was wrong after all, and that there is a god, god who would be the one to end up getting bitch-slapped :)

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What Do You Get When You Mix Russian Drivers and Dashboard Cameras?

A few days ago news spread all over the world about a 15-meter (roughly 49 feet), 10,000-ton meteor that hurled towards Earth over central Russia and exploded in mid-air, sending sonic shockwaves that damaged hundreds of buildings. Although over a thousand people were injured, apparently there were no casualties.

The interesting thing about this news, though, is that the footage of this amazing celestial event was captured by dashboard cameras installed in many vehicles. Apparently, this is sort of a necessary fad there because a lot of Russians simply cannot be trusted to be peaceful, honest, law-abiding citizens. So what do you get when you mix Russian drivers and dashboard cameras? Apparently, Benny Hill-styled footage. Jon Stewart reports.

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Cartography and Social Justice to Blow Your Mind!

There are some things that we take for granted as settled truth. I've always assumed that a map of the world is a fairly accurate representation of our planet, but apparently and under certain conditions, the kind of map we're most familiar with isn't even in the ballpark.

This all started last night, when I was looking at a map of the world like the one on the side, and it struck me that Greenland is slightly bigger than Africa. 'Wow,' I thought, 'I didn't know that.' Out of curiosity, I started to look at pictures of the globe instead of a map and I saw something that floored me: the sizes of these two land masses are nowhere close to each other. In fact, as it turns out, Africa is actually 14 times larger than Greenland! That's right, 14 times!

So why do they look so similar in size? Well, we live on a spherical, three-dimensional planet, and maps only come in two dimensions, so any attempt to represent a sphere as a plane, even with the most advanced of mathematics, is going to produce distortions, which is apparently why cartographers refer to world maps as projections.

Since distortions are inevitable, trying to produce an accurate representation of one variable will produce distortions in another. And the Mercator projection we're all so familiar with (like the picture on top), was invented in 1569 as a navigational map, which is fine if you want to go sailing, but not so good if you're thinking about how many soldiers you are going to need when you decide to attack your neighbors two doors down. With the Mercator projection, the closer you get to the poles, the larger that countries start to look, to the point that Greenland looks larger than a place that's actually 14 times larger than it!

Gall-Peters Projection

So, different projections help you visualize different things that you might be interested in. If you're looking for an area-accurate projection, there are a few that can do this, but the one that struck me the most is the Gall-Peters projection to the side. Doesn't it look weird and all stretched out? It may 'look wrong,' but it's actually closer to reality than what we're used to thanks to the ubiquity and popularity of the Mercator projection. We're just not used to it.

But it's not just a question of mathematical accuracy. Countless lives depend on this! For various psychological reasons, especially cognitive biases, we seem to be wired to believe that bigger is more important, that top matters more than bottom, etc. (I know, total sexual innuendo there), and so when we are thinking of the world's problems, our attention automatically tends to focus on the northern hemisphere first, which, in the Mercator projection looks substantially bigger than it actually is: Boom! Double whammy! And so countries in the southern hemisphere, which are usually the ones in greatest need of help, look smaller than they really are, and are the ones that end up getting neglected.

And apparently there are movements out there whose goal it is to raise awareness and standardize a more socially conscious world map that will help reverse this social injustice. Since the question of absolute accuracy is ruled out mathematically, we get to determine what other criteria it might make sense to use. One suggestion is using the Gall-Peters projection above, to produce a more realistic representation of the size of countries relative to others; others have proposed turning the map upside down to reverse the top-bottom bias; etc.

I'm not an expert on the subject, just having become aware of it last night, so I won't presume to have any particular recommendation, but I do tend to think that this is a conversation worth having. So, if this is news to you, share this insane finding with your friends.

And if you're curious about this topic, check out the Wikipedia entry on map projections or the Cartography and Geographic Information Society.

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Fear and Trembling - The Story of Abraham and Isaac

I'm currently re-reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, one of my favorite books of all time: a gripping philosophical and theological analysis of one of the most macabre stories in the Bible: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the son that had been promised him by God, and who was destined to start the nation that was to trace its lineage back to Abraham.

As I also re-read the biblical story, I noticed that while it tells us what Abraham did, it doesn't say a word about what went through his mind when he first heard the injunction, nor what he thought/felt when he drew the knife that was to kill his son. This silence allows Kierkegaard to explore the paradox that Abraham, as the knight and father of faith, represents.

And through a lyrical exposition (for this is not the kind of thing that can be argued for), Kiergegaard shows that Abraham's silence also implies that we can't use the universal categories of language and the ethical to understand him, since his move transcends the universal, the intelligible, the communicable. This is why Kierkegaard explores the question of whether there can be a teleological suspension of the ethical, and why, while he simultaneously admires, praises and shudders at Abraham and his conviction, he cannot understand him.

And this inability to understand, this absolute necessity for silence and absence of language, communication and rational intelligibility, is further reinforced by the fact that Kierkegaard wrote this philosophical work under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio: even if Abraham did what was most appropriate in the particular situation he found himself in, there is nothing we can extrapolate from his choice; he cannot be understood, and his greatness, if it isn't just madness, cannot be communicated.

For Kierkegaard, faith isn't the lazy cop-out answer that's given by most believers nowadays when they simply fail to explain something they don't understand: it is something that has to be experienced permanently, in fear and trembling, because it represents a conviction that stands at the edge of the most dangerous abyss, and that is affirmed existentially in virtue of its absurdity.

Anyway, while Kierkegaards's philosophical investigation is as serious as it gets, since it deals with the nature of human existence and choice, the story of Abraham reminded me of this hilarious clip I saw a few years ago:

For those of you who are not religious, I still highly recommend this book because beneath the religious surface, Kierkegaard explores the paradoxical nature of profound existential topics that we can't help but confront, despite our secular inclinations. Agree or disagree with him, he will stimulate your mind, and you'll get to read a master of writing. Here's just a small sample:

No! No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone was great wholly in proportion to the magnitude of that with which he struggled. For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but he who struggled with God became the greatest of all. Thus did they struggle in the world, man against man, one against thousands, but he who struggled with God was the greatest of all. Thus did they struggle on earth: there was one who conquered everything by his power, and there was one who conquered God by his powerlessness. There was one who relied upon himself and gained everything; there was one who in the security of his own strength sacrificed everything; but the one who believed God was the greatest of all. There was one who was great by virtue of his power, and one who was great by virtue of his hope, and one who was great by virtue of his love, but Abraham was the greatest of all, great by that power whose strength is powerlessness, great by that wisdom which is foolishness, great by that hope whose form is madness, great by the love that is hatred to oneself.

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Penn Jillette's Bullshit Detector

Belief is our default setting. We are wired to believe, and we'd rather believe a completely nonsensical answer than to have to face to the possibility that we don't know. Belief is easy. Questioning and investigating require work, and we are lazy.

But since belief comes so easily and automatically to us, there are many who try to exploit that cognitive quirk for their own ends, and they get us to believe in the most insane and asinine ideas one could imagine. Don't believe me? Just look around!

There are some tools we can use to protect ourselves from this kind of mental exploitation. Learning how to spot common logical fallacies is one, and in today's video, magician Penn Jillette offers some other tips, starting with the fact that the things we should question the most are the things that we desperately want to believe, and moving to the basic but important insight that it is all-too-easy for us to make category mistakes, and to equate things that should not be equated, like the kinds of things that should be thought about and the kinds of things that should be felt.

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President Obama's 2013 Inaugural Speech

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60 Seconds Adventures in Economics - The Paradox of Thrift

If you're a long-time follower of our blog, you've probably heard the Hayek vs Keynes rap rap before, and learned all about the boom and bust cycle, but if you haven't, or if you want a different introduction to the short vs long-term, and individual vs collective conflict in economic theory, here's a little introduction to Keynes' paradox of thrift, all part of the Open University's 60 Second Adventures in Thought.

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