Solar System Hierarchy By Size

I found this long image of objects in the solar system arranged by size, which I think is spiffy. Isn’t our solar system colorful?  And you can see what the current politically correct names are for each of the bodies. For instance, it has been decreed that we shall call Pluto a “dwarf planet”. I expect it will change again some day.

The Bugblatter Approach

I’m gonna have to revise my opinion about the UN. Those folks are brilliant. Geniuses, the whole lot of ‘em.

Consider this recent news about Arab leaders not cooperating on the Sudan crisis.

Secretary-General Ban’s attempt this week to marshal international help for Darfur victims suffered serious setbacks as an Arab League summit Riyadh, as well as at the U.N.’s own Human Rights Council, declined to exert any pressure on Khartoum.

Mr. Ban, who visited the Arab League summit in Riyadh yesterday, told Arab heads of state that he expected support for a U.N. plan to send 20,000 troops to Darfur, where according to America, genocide is taking place.

When I read the bolded phrase I had this epiphany.

To the simple American mind, the fact that genocide is going on in Darfur is something we (arrogantly) think we can straightforwardly state. I mean, all the accounts, all the reports, all the pictures are right there for all to behold.

But this only reveals our doltishness and inability to think outside the box compared to those UN highbrows who use a more advanced and clever method when confronted with sticky problems, which I’ll call the Bugblatter Approach.

Recall from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy what the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is and how one is advised to deal with it:

Daft as a hairbrush, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is arguably the most insanely idiotically dense creature in existence. It believes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Therefore, if you are faced by the horrid (yes, horrid, in spite of its intelligence, or lack of) Beast you should wrap your towel around your head (you do have one, don’t you?!)

The Bugblatter Approach then is to drape a towel over your head such that you cannot see the problem. In the case of Arab members of the UN, that would be a second towel over their heads (sorry, couldn’t resist it).

I’m sure you and I can think of many others who employ this clever and useful technique.

The Bugblatter Approach. Give it a try today!

Religious Indoctrination Linked To Violence

Those of you who are religiously inclined may get uncomfortable when you read this. Or you may just laugh it off, I won’t guess which.

Results of a study published in Psychological Science support the hypothesis that religious indoctrination increases violent tendencies. The study involved reading a violent scripture to students at Brigham Young University where 99% report a belief in God and the Bible, and to students at Vrije Universiteit where 50% report belief in God and 27% in the Bible. Some were told that the passage originated from the Bible. Others were told that it originated from an ancient scroll.

The students then participated in an exercise designed to measure aggressiveness in which they attacked each other…not with weapons but with noise (I guess the researchers didn’t feel like reproducing a Kill Bill scene in the lab that day). The study found that students who were told that the scripture they had heard came from the Bible, especially the students at Brigham Young, were more aggressive in their noise blasts. Follow the link for more details.

Pretty interesting, eh? Note that the study does not suggest that religious people are more violent than nonreligious people or anything of the sort. Rather, it indicates that when a scripture of a violent nature is read to a person who believes in a God who sanctions violence, that belief presumably overrides whatever part of the brain is supposed to serve as a check on these impulses.

It may sound like a condemnation of religion, but I would suggest that what causes a person to carry out violence without restraint has less to do with trust in God per se than with trust in authority of any kind, which is something we’ve known for a long time. In fact, you would expect stronger results in a case like this than in the Milgram experiment, as subjects in the latter were asked to act against their own conscience.

Iranian Kurds Speak

Excerpt from Michael J Totten’s interview with Iranian Kurds during his most recent trip to Iraq:

MJT: Which regime was more oppressive to you?

Mohtadi: The Iranians.

MJT: Worse than Saddam?

Mohtadi: Yes, of course. To Iranian Kurds, yes.

MJT: Tell us something about this. Very few Americans, including me, know very much about what the Iranian government has done to the Kurds in Iran.

Mohtadi: That’s exactly our problem. So many people in the West and in the world know that Kurds had problems in Iraq, they have problems in Turkey. But very few people know that Kurds are under oppression in Iran, as well.

Something to think about as we contemplate policy towards Iran.

Our relationship with the Kurds in Iraq is and has every reason to continue being a working one. For all our blunders and betrayals, we came through for them in the end. Point in fact is that the prosperity the Kurds now enjoy in Iraq demonstrates what can be achieved when the West sticks to its guns; it was enforcement of the no-fly zones over the years between the wars which enabled them to build the successful modern state (a sovereign state all but in name) that they have today while the Shia inhabitants of Saddam’s playhouse were in bloody shackles.

What, I wonder, will be our policy regarding the Kurds in Iran? Can they look forward to a day of liberation with (if need be) borrowed muscle from the free world or is the game of liberation a game that we’ve all grown tired of? This is an example of the kind of question I would like to see put to presidential candidates at home when election time rolls around.

Healthy Limits of Skepticism

I go with Hume a good ways.

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

Of Miracles, pp.115-116, David Hume

This is the stumbling block for all miraculous claims. When a reported phenomenon cannot be reproduced, when the evidence cannot be captured, all that we have to go on is the testimony of the one(s) who claim to have witnessed it. If what is reported in the testimony contradicts known laws of nature, we must choose between them. Hume concludes that it would be a greater miracle for the testimony of a man to be infallible, and therefore the rational mind must reject the testimony.

The approach serves as the basis upon which I consider all miraculous claims, from the mythical tales written of in the Bible to modern-day reports of the paranormal. But as others have argued, the so-called “Hume’s Razor” is not insurmountable.

Parapsychological evidence challenges firmly entrenched assumptions. Those who doubt these assumptions may welcome this evidence, and choose to ignore the power of Hume’s argument that all the experience that has caused us to make them weighs against the testimony on which the evidence rests. I think this is an irresponsible attitude. But those on the other side who are unwilling to entertain the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than our assumptions permit us to believe in, have to stare down the high quality of some of the testimony, and insist it must always be due to error or fraud. I think this looks like foolishness also.

In essence, what Terence Penelhum asserts is that the quality of the testimony, and I would add the quantity, can accumulate to the point where it would be the greater miracle for we fallible men to have gotten the laws of nature 100% right.

I would have to agree. But where does that point lie? Hard to say. I think application of Hume’s Razor can be used to eliminate the bulk of miraculous stories one might hear, while the better established claims deserve attention to the extent that the quality and quantity of accounts given are high. Even so, I would expect the true nature of a phenomenon which may in the future cause us to “rewrite” the laws of nature to seldom be exactly what its observer(s) thought it was.

That’s the approach in theory. Later, perhaps, when I write about ghosts and psychic phenomena I’ll explain the approach I favor in practice. (no, it isn’t the picture below)

How To Make a Comeback in the Pop Industry

Build a 50-foot tall robot of yourself. That’ll do the trick.

This Planet is Freaking Me Out!

And Saturn is too! Take a look at what NASA detects on Saturn’s north pole. And this on Saturn’s south pole. Creepy.

You can watch the hypnotic thing spin like the galactic mind control device it probably is.

(via Jeremy Gilby)

On Tetris

I love studies that demonstrate I am getting some benefit when I play a video game. In fact I go out of my way to look for them, and whenever I come across another it’s all the justification I need to go play the most violent, antisocial, expensive, time-consuming games I can get my hands on.

In this case that game is Tetris.

Tetris needs no introduction, but here’s the story of its birth retold by one of its creators who, due to living in a country where private business was prohibited and intellectual property nonexistent, and due to the weaseliness of Western entrepreneurs, did not receive in payment so much as a cornflake for his work in developing the classic. Proving that when you get right down to it, looking at capitalism and communism there is no good reason, really, to think one is any better than the other. (I hope you didn’t believe that last sentence)

And here’s Sayumi again, the J-idol I dedicated my first post on this blog to.

This time I kinda sorta have an excuse to display her picture. Sayu, it turns out, has mad Tetris skillz. When I learned where her scores usually range I said to myself, “Honey, there ain’t no way I’m letting a girl that cute be better than you (me) at a video game.”

So I went back into training. I’m pressing one hundred S-blocks a day.

By the way, did you know that mathematicians have proven that “Tetris is tough”? In case you were wondering what in the world do we have mathematicians for, there you go.

And now we arrive at the informative part of this post–There are places online where you can play Tetris for free!

Don’t worry, you can rest assured that no matter how many hours you spend, no Russian dead or living will get a cent out of you. Look on the high score list for “hydralisk”. It is even conceivable that you might top my high score, which would be okay as long as you are not a girl as cute as Sayu.

Why We Had to Win the Cold War

Secret Russian plans for the complete removal of the North American continent. Those knaves. They’d go THAT far.

(via Strange Maps)

How To Win In Iraq — And How To Lose

For those following the War in Iraq and for those interested in contemporary warfare and strategy generally, this is one article you simply can’t miss.

Arthur Herman examines the one historical conflict that must be examined if we hope to learn how to defeat an insurgency — the Algerian War of Independence.

…As he had learned from watching the British mount successful counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Greece, neither heavy casualties, nor the loss of weapons and bases, nor even the loss of leaders would stop the rebels. Ultimately, indeed, “military action [was] but a minor factor in the conflict.”

What then? Essentially, Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community…

….Galula’s approach boiled down to three stages, each with its own lesson for Iraq today…

Really, you want to read the entire thing. That’s not something I will say often. (Usually when I do, it’ll be in reference to a Jack Handey short)

Make no mistake about it. We the West–I use the word in the broadest sense; Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you’re with us too!–must master counterinsurgency and counterterrorism sooner better than later. How to fight bastards who with their IEDs hide among civilian populations is something we were going to need to learn eventually. Even if the present Iraq enterprise fails, even if there had never been an Iraq enterprise.

Related reading: TJ explains why more boots on the ground does not necessarily make your war effort go smoother. It’d be nice if I could believe a sudden burst of wisdom to the above was the reason Harry Reid and pals reversed their positions on sending more troops to Iraq so soon after the Bush administration had decided to do exactly this.

(via Austin Bay)