Always trust Google maps!

Google Maps result for driving directions from Seattle, WA to Honolulu, HI:

2,804 mi – about 14 days 6 hours

Seattle, WA‎
1. Head northeast on Broad St toward Taylor Ave N
About 1 min - 0.5 mi
2. Turn left at Westlake Ave N
About 4 mins - 1.6 mi
3. Turn right at 4th Ave N
go 489 ft
4. Continue on Fremont Bridge
go 0.2 mi
5. Turn right at N 34th St
About 1 min - 0.3 mi
6. Turn right at Stone Way N
go 128 ft
7. Turn left at N Northlake Way
About 1 min - 0.2 mi
8. Kayak across the Pacific Ocean
Entering Hawaii
About 14 days 5 hours - 2,756 mi
9. Slight right at Turtle Bay Hilton
go 0.1 mi
10. Turn left at Kuilima Dr
About 2 mins - 0.5 mi
11. Turn right at HI-83
About 19 mins - 10.5 mi
12. Continue on Joseph P Leong Hwy
About 3 mins - 1.9 mi
13. Slight right at HI-99/N Kamehameha Hwy
Continue to follow N Kamehameha Hwy
About 14 mins - 8.6 mi
14. Merge onto I-H2 S via the ramp to Honolulu
About 9 mins - 8.2 mi
15. Merge onto I-H1 E
About 5 mins - 4.5 mi
16. Take exit 13B to merge onto I-H201 E
About 6 mins - 4.7 mi
17. Continue on I-H1 E
About 6 mins - 5.2 mi
18. Take exit 25A for King St
go 0.2 mi
19. Turn right at Waialae Ave
go 98 ft
20. Continue on S King St
About 1 min - 0.2 mi
21. Continue on S Beretania St
go 20 ft

Honolulu, HI‎

HT: The Agitator

An Open Letter to Michael Phelps

Radley Balko's suggestion on how Phelps ought to respond to the ridiculous media kerfuffle over an old photo of him showing him allegedly smoking pot. Beautiful!

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

Read the rest at The Agitator.

Bailout humor

No further comment needed...

HT: My[confined]Space

Inauguration Invocation

There was a great deal of hubbub in the media regarding Obama's selection of the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, to deliver the opening invocation at his inauguration yesterday. Most of the outcry came from members of the GLBT community who perceived the selection of Warren, whose anti-gay stance is well known, as a slight against them; particularly as Obama has made a point of playing himself up as being "gay-friendly". There was also some concern from non-theists that the choice of an evangelical might lead to an overtly, even offensively, sectarian prayer. While I don't think religious prayer should play any legitimate part in the pomp and circumstance of secular government rituals, the invocation is a long-standing tradition (although not as old as Christian Nationalists would have you think! Prayers weren't a part of the inauguration until 1937.) and I don't think it's going away any time soon. The least we can hope for is that the minister chosen will attempt to be as non-sectarian and inclusive as possible. Many evangelicals however, care little for the societal benefits of such occasions and refuse to take a more inclusive or ecumenical approach. Would Warren's address follow this divisive path?

Well, the inauguration has now come and gone and for the most part, Warren did a pretty good job. The prayer was directed to "God our father", rather than "Jesus Christ", and while that's undeniably theistic, it does at least have the benefit of comporting with so-called "ceremonial Deism" and thus not being overly sectarian. And while Warren did include a personal reference to Jesus toward the end and concluded his prayer with the Christian "Lord's Prayer" (and Protestant Christian at that), he did NOT pray "in the name of Jesus" or conclude his prayer "in Jesus name", or anything overtly Christian like that. In addition, he obviously made what seemed to me a more or less good-faith attempt to be inclusive of at least the other Abrahamic faiths: the opening of his prayer included the following: "The Scripture tells us, ‘Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ and you are the compassionate and merciful one and you are loving to everyone you have made." This statement incorporates both the Hebrew Shema and the opening sentence of the Islamic Quran.

All in all, not a bad attempt at inclusion at what must necessarily be a divisive, pointless, and ultimately irrelevant exercise at an allegedly secular governmental function. The only negative that struck me, and it's a pretty big one, is when Warren said the following:

Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans. United not by race or religion or by blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all. When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you, forgive us.

Huh? Freedom and justice for all? You mean like gay Californians recently stripped of their civil rights by you and your fellow travelers? Of course, for Warren and people like him, "for all" doesn't really mean ALL, it just means "all of those with whose choices I agree". No freedom and justice for gays. No freedom and justice for religious skeptics. No freedom and justice for women.

The immense irony in this statement, to which Warren is no doubt oblivious, is that evangelical Christianity, as a movement, is fundamentally in opposition to freedom. Freedom requires autonomy, both metaphysical and concrete. Moral agents possess, by definition, the right of self-determination and to deny that right is to deny both freedom and any real possibility of justice (or, indeed, of any moral value whatsoever...but that's another post). But evangelical Christians reject autonomy and declare that the right of self-determination does not exist; that the goal of Man's life has been decided for him and the rejection of this imposed purpose is not only sinful, but should be prevented by force of law.

The slavish devotion to imposed purpose is harmful enough, but at least it only harms those who believe in it. But when they attempt to impose this alleged "purpose" on the rest of us by legal fiat, they strike at the heart of freedom itself. Those who would use the power of the state to strip citizens of rights and privileges they enjoy by virtue of their humanity have no love for freedom or justice; they are in fact haters of them.

Americans, at least insofar as an "American" is defined as a citizen of the United States of America, should hold the values enshrined in the Constitution as common principles of both citizenship and social action. Former president Bush once infamously (and stupidly) said of the Constitution, "it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" There is a sense of course in which this is true (in that it is written on paper), but there is a greater sense in which it is absolutely false. The Constitution is the United States of America in a way nothing else can be. Freedom is paramount in its design and the protection of liberty its primary goal. Evangelical Christianity, in its denial of moral autonomy (freedom), stands in opposition to this most basic of American values.

And therefore, I found it somewhat ironic that Warren should wax poetic about American's "commitment to freedom and justice for all". He no doubt considers himself an American, but he and others like him most certainly do not share such a commitment.

There's no "*choke*...ggch...*gasp*...ack...*thud*" in T E A M

HT: Crave

All I Want For Xmas Is My Two Front Tenori-On

I wish I had seen these in time for Xmas. As the title implies, I think the "Tenori-On" sounds pretty cool...

Your name is FANTASTIC!

A little old news, but still pretty funny. From the BBC:

A teenager has changed his birth name by deed poll to incorporate several comic book superheroes.

George Garratt from Glastonbury has become Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine The Hulk And The Flash Combined.

The 19-year-old music student made the change "for a bit of a laugh", through a legally-recognised website.

He said: "I decided on a superheroes theme and whenever my friends offered up suggestions to me, I added them."

He added: "My family have begun to expect these sorts of things from me, and although my friends thought it was ridiculous most people do call me Captain and it's been a great conversation starter."

A spokesman from The Legal Deed Poll Service, said: "We get so many outrageous name changes that these days it barely fazes us, but when this one was brought to my attention I knew there was something special about it."

What a great idea! I'm thinking of changing my name to Super Spider Killer Monkey Doo-Wap-Diddy Purple People Eater Flying Wallenda Peter Griffin Armchair Mangrove Throat Warbler Spelt Luxury Yacht Jones.

But you can call me "Ted"...

Intelligent Design vs. Invisible Hand?

Over at Reason magazine's blog Hit and Run, I noticed a post by Ronald Bailey in which he touches on something I've noted here in the past: the apparent cognitive dissonance present in conservative Christians who accept almost as a matter of faith the idea of emergent order in financial markets (Adam Smith's "invisible hand") yet reject the exact same idea in the realm of biological science (Charles Darwin's "natural selection"). So called "intelligent design" proponents argue that biological complexity simply must be the product of an "intelligent designer" yet they and many others who would agree with them have no difficulty eschewing said designer in the case of market equilibria. But there's really no difference between the two in terms of the salient result: emergent order.

Bailey quips, "Intelligent design is to evolutionary biology what socialism is to free-market economics." (although I think he meant "command economics", rather than "socialism" which is rather broad), which echoes what I wrote previously:

Of course, this is not to say that ID theorists ARE Marxists, merely that they seem to be, at the very least, intellectual fellow-travelers. Their rejection of emergent order seems to me to necessitate it. Therefore, it seems to me that ID theorists who desire to remain intellectually consistent must abandon all support for capitalism and support instead a theory of planned economy. For if order is not emergent, then capitalism cannot hope for success.

Bailey also includes a link to Matt Ridley's Spectator essay that prompted his post as well as a couple of other interesting links at his post (linked in the title). Enjoy.

What type is this blog?

Interesting...an algorithm that "analyzes" blog content and "categorizes" blog type. Here's what it came up with for this site:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

That is so me!! It's just like my horoscope!

HT: Andrew Sullivan

The tears of unfathomable sadness...

...yummy and sweet.



HT: Radley Balko

The consequences of death-worship

P.Z. Myers links to a post on a "homeschooling" blog wherein the blog's owner, one Raani Starnes, writes:

A friend recently sent me this article about a "gay-friendly" high school. If we were living in a biblical society, homosexuality would be punishable by death so such a school would be unnecessary. Although I'm against the special accommodations, perhaps this new trend of segregation will protect straight kids from these predators. With any luck, some radical will blow up the gay school. No, I'm not condoning vigilantism--I'm merely saying that it would be poetic justice.

Charming...and this woman has four children. Pity them.

I feel some further comment is needed. As the title of this post indicates, I see this as the consequence of death-worship. This woman, and many others like her, worship anti-life, anti-humanity; in short: death. They have come to believe, through indoctrination, moral failure, or mental illness, that human beings are degraded, valueless creatures who require some sort of external salvation from their humanity. Accordingly, they reject human values, indeed, they reject their own humanity and the humanity of others. They seek to purge life of all that is human and replace it with their own, necessarily crippled values. Theirs is the morality of the slave, of the degenerate, the looter, and the corpse.

In reality, our humanity is what makes moral value possible. Only our nature as free moral agents can adequately ground value and thus a true moral system. No external agent can grant to us as an arbitrary whim any kind of real value or impose upon us any kind of moral rule. That is the morality of the slave. No real moral system can require the rejection of our human nature as a "ground rule" for existence. That is the morality of the degenerate. No free moral agent can accept as the base of its moral system that which comes from outside its own nature. That is the morality of the looter. No true moral system can reject the value of human life (and by that I don't mean a clump of cells). That is the morality of the corpse. And yet all of this is what these death-cultists would have us believe is the source of moral value. This is nothing less than moral insanity.

Theirs is a corrupt and dying belief, but in its death throes it threatens all of human society with the noxious curse of its memes. Too often those who oppose such evil have hesitated to speak out strongly against it. We call for "tolerance" and "respect", ask people to reject "bigotry" and "prejudice" but never seem to press our opponents on the base immorality of their beliefs.

I say: The time for accommodation has passed.

It is time for human beings to speak up in favor of humanity and against the purveyors of evil who would foist upon us a degenerate moral system based on slavery & death. By all rights, this rotting corpse deserves a burial. We should no longer hesitate to speak the truth as we know it: these beliefs are insane and deserving of no more respect than we would offer to the random gibberish spewed by the average resident of Bedlam. Beyond that, however, they are actually evil. We should not mince words; our opponents do not. We must counter them with reason and logic; show the confused and contradictory ground on which their beliefs stand, expose the degeneracy of their moral system, and expound the objective foundation human nature provides for a real human moral system.

To Mrs. Starnes (should she deign to read this), I want to make clear: I do not hate you. I do not hate your family. I do not wish any harm to come to you, your husband, or your children. I would guess that the link from PZ's blog has probably multiplied the traffic to your blog at least tenfold and I can only imagine the feedback you're receiving. Some hateful (and for that I offer what apologies I may), some constructive (and I hope you read those with as open a mind as may be possible), and others antagonistic (as I intended mine to be). I do not seek to engage you so much as to stand in clear opposition to you, albeit without personal rancour. I find your beliefs odious and corrupt (and I imagine you would say the same to me), but I have no feelings toward you as a person.

Update: I've noticed some of the comments on PZ's blog are suggesting that Mrs. Starnes' blog post be reported to blogger as in apparent violation of Blogger's TOS. Although I would agree that Mrs. Starnes has an absolute right to her opinion, so does Blogger, as a corporate entity, have the right to restrict the material it allows to be hosted on its servers. If Mrs. Starnes wishes to air her moral degeneracy, she's certainly welcome to do so on her own server, but if her post does in fact violate Blogger's TOS, they have every right to remove it. As of this point, the post is still up, but the coming days may prove different.

Update 10.23: As at least one reader has noticed, the original post appears to have been taken down. But in it's place (and using the same URL as the original post) is a new piece of insanity: a veritable stew of ignorance, faulty reasoning, and, coming from someone who calls himself a "pastor" and who apparently "shepherds" what can only be imagined as an unfortunate group of sheep, painfully poor biblical exegesis and understanding. If there were any such thing as "sin", this poisonous vitriol would certainly qualify.

Update 11.18: I noticed today that the entire blog has been deleted. I'm guessing that was due in whole or part to the consequences of having such disgraceful and vile opinions brought to the attention to a plethora of more or less decent people.

Do Not Eat!!

During my final year of undergraduate studies I worked as an assistant in UNCG's Financial Aid Office. At some point during that year, the office received a couple of new computers and I was placed in charge of unpacking and setting them up. As I opened one of the packages, a tiny white envelope fell to the ground. As I picked it up, I noticed bold lettering on the side: DO NOT EAT.

Of course this is probably good advice given that those little envelopes, ubiquitous to electronics packaging, contain some sort of dessicant and are likely not the sort of things humans should consume. Still, it made me wonder what kind of person is going to look at this envelope, packed in with a computer keyboard, and think, "Hey, that looks like a tasty snack!" I was so amused at the notion that I used up an entire pad of Post-It notes, writing "DO NOT EAT" on every one and sticking them to various objects in the office (desks, chairs, filing cabinets, clocks, etc). After all, if people were going around munching on strange paper containers found in electronics packaging, then they might very well start snacking on office equipment next! These people needed to be warned!

The other evening while watching television, I saw an advertisement for Guitar Hero in which an animated band plays a rock-and-roll anthem while standing on the roof and hood of a wildly speeding automobile. I'm not sure I understood the connection between the game and the image, but at any rate at the bottom of the television screen was displayed the disclaimer, "Do Not Attempt".

WTF? No, seriously...WTF?? Are there really individuals out there too stupid to realize what might happen to them if they attempt to stand on the hood of a car careening madly down the street? And if so, should we really care what might become of them? Isn't this the sort of defect that natural selection is so good at weeding out of the population and aren't we doing ourselves some sort of disservice by stepping in and preventing nature from doing its part to preserve the overall fitness of the species?

Deep breath....okay, I realize that companies that put these disclaimers on their products/advertisements are doing so out of an understandable desire to protect themselves and their shareholders from lawsuits. But therein lies the problem: what sort of jury awards damages to idiots who injured themselves while performing some stunt they saw in a cartoon or who ate an unidentifiable substance that came in an envelope that fell out of a box? I suppose the answer is: a jury comprised of the same sort of idiots.

One of the baseline assumptions of a modern democratic society is or should be that citizens are rational adults; free moral agents who are responsible for their own actions. Obviously where an individual or a group of individuals are coerced or deceived into acting against their own best interests, those responsible for the coercion or deception should be held accountable, but it seems to me that among rational, free moral agents there should be an assumption of a commonly-held grip on reality. In other words, that we all have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the world works: ice is slippery, hot liquids can burn, not everything can be eaten safely, what goes up must come down, falling can be dangerous, etc, etc. For indeed, how could a society function without such a common reality?

But what of individuals who apparently lack this level of understanding?

In the days before advanced medical technology and unscrupulous ambulance-chasing attorneys these unfortunate persons would have served as examples to the rest of us and a chance for humanity to raise its collective I.Q. Today however, they reap millions of dollars from lawsuits because they burned themselves with hot coffee while the rest of us pay higher taxes and inflated prices on goods and services to compensate them for their stupidity.

Wait a minute...um...who is the stupid one again? I think I'll go and try to shave with the paper shredder...after all, there's no sign on it that says I can't!

Image credit: Saint Gasoline

Talk about your must-see TV!

Keith Olbermann tears into Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, and, finally, McCain for the disgusting turn the losing Republican campaign has taken into a divisive "us vs. them" approach. As always, well worth the time to watch.



Let's not kid ourselves, though. This isn't really anything new for these people, it's merely the latest outrage. If John McCain had a shred of decency left in him, he would disavow this absurd, deeply offensive, and, indeed, anti-American tactic. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that happening is nil. Palin, Limbaugh, Bachman and their ilk may be risible fools, but they, not John McCain, are what drives the Republican party now.

This is what has become of the party of Abraham Lincoln?

HT: Pharyngula

Banksta Rap

Damn, I love Sinfest...

Debate Reactions

Andrew Sullivan collects some great reactions to last night's McCain-Obama debate. My favorite? Wil Wilkinson:

Gut read. Obama owned it. This election’s over unless he murders and eats the flesh of a child on live television.

I'm not sure that it would take all that, but one thing I believe for sure: this election has been and still is Obama's to lose. Of course, I thought that was true of Gore as well...

Take that, non-believers!

Funny O' The Day

Although I know it's already been on a couple of blogs, I just can't resist:

Does Philosophy need bumper stickers?

From Victor Reppert's blog. My contribution:

My other car is a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona.

cf., what Edmund Gettier would be likely to have on his car.

Turnabout is certainly fair play...

In reference to John McCain's ludicrous ad attacking Obama as supposedly "just another celebrity" like Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton, Ms. Hilton has now appeared in a parody ad that rightly skewers McCain's conceit:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

HT: Andrew Sullivan

Happy Birthday, Evolution!

On July 1st, 1858, an essay by Alfred Russell Wallace and two unpublished excerpts from a book by Charles Darwin were presented to a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. These writings, which were to be published in the Society's journal a month later as "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; And On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection", was the first public presentation of what has come to be known as the theory of evolution by natural selection, a foundational cornerstone of modern biology.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Darwin and Wallace's idea on science or on history in general. Even today it remains at the forefront of not only scientific exploration, but also in our culture; as a cause of tension between reason and faith (or rationality and irrationality, if you will).

Obviously, the theory as it was then limned and presented has not survived unaltered these one hundred and fifty years, but the spark of that genius shines brightly even now. Happy Birthday, Evolution!