The best news of the day

21% of American atheists believe in God.

In other news, fourteen percent of illiterates can read and write fluently, thirty-one percent of libertarians favour high taxes and extensive government regulation, and nine percent of Vancouver Canucks fans don't feel the need to whip out their cell phones and call their friends whenever they're at a game and the Canucks score.

Creepiness! Unusually, the kind where I'm the object instead of the subject.

As I haven't yet mentioned in this space, I'm currently a candidate for the community representative spot Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. The election continues until tomorrow at midnight, and it's a fairly safe bet that I won't win (there are a few reasons for this, but I won't go into them because it's not the point of this post).

In what might come as a surprise to people who have experienced my past involvement in different things, I've kept a fairly low profile on Wikipedia. I certainly never posted a picture of myself (though I immediately disclosed my identity, so anybody who had cared could probably have tracked one down). It's traditional for Board election candidates to do so, though, so I uploaded this one, because I thought it was fairly flattering and because I thought it exhibited a representative level of self-satisfaction:

Anyway, some time ago one of my opponents - Greg Kohs, who has a terribly interesting story of his own that I won't go into because that's not the point of this post - suggested that I looked like a young Richard Gere. That led to this homoerotic exchange.

I feel pretty...

Now for something 50% more different...

...a ranking of the tracks on Paul Simon's Graceland, which has been the subject of a surprising amount of debate in my life recently. My sentiment on this fluctuates based on my mood (for example, I am directly contradicting several of the points I made on Sunday when discussing this), but this is pretty much right:

1. Graceland: Simon calls it probably the best song he ever wrote. I wouldn't go that far (although don't ask me which song deserves the title), but it's the best on the album - a rare case, for Simon, of naming the album after the best song.
2. The Boy in the Bubble: Simon has said that he isn't a political songwriter, but that's sometimes not true. Still, his best political writing comes when he personalizes it, as he does here.
3. You Can Call Me Al: I often feel obligated to rank this one lower because it's so damned catchy, and catchiness seems like the mark of a non-brilliant song to me. But the image of a guy, battered by life, who wants a partner primarily to guard him against reality is a great one.
4. Gumboots: Repetitive and almost irritating musically, but the lyrics are top notch, especially the portions that deal with the least romantic marriage proposal in history ("you don't feel you could love me, but I feel you could", "why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute?").
5. I Know What I Know: Wait a minute - don't I know you from the cinematographer's party?
6. All Around the World: Signs of the times - the talk show host as prophet, the abandoned army post, and the belief in the differentness of our fingerprints.
7. Crazy Love Volume II: What the hell is meant by the image of an archangel named "Fat Charlie" filing for divorce? I don't know, and I don't care - it's brilliant, and I won't hear a word spoken against it.
8. That Was Your Mother: An unexpected Zydeco treat on an album of South African-inspired music.
9. Homeless: Probably the most "African" feeling song on the album, this doesn't benefit as much from the fusion of American and African as the earlier songs do.
10. Under African Skies: I have nothing in particular to say about this song.
11. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes: Long and boring.

A rousing and eloquent call for change from the Democratic nominee

Just not the nominee you're thinking of.

Was Gore speaking like this in 2000? Because that's not how I remember it. For my money, this is much better than Obama's DNC speech - outstanding rhetoric, important instances of substance, and (a personal bugbear of mine) respectful towards opponents.

Gore's probably overselling his candidate, but it's pretty tough to argue after hearing this that there aren't important differences between Obama and the status quo, and that Obama wasn't on the right side of those differences.

Science and politics

I've gotten pretty involved in Wikipedia over the last few months, which has led me to all manner of conclusions about it. I won't bother sharing most of these here, at least not right now. But as anybody who's spent much time there (and by "there", I mean places other than in the articles themselves, which often give the impression of a stable competence) knows that it's a hotbed of conflict. Much of this conflict can be described on one of several axes: the inclusionist-deletionist axis (should we have articles on individual Pokemon/municipal councillors/small corporations, etc.?), eventualist-immediatist axis (if somebody makes a questionable addition to the article, should we immediately revert it in the interests of the current quality of the article, or leave it there in the hopes that people will tinker with it until it's good, in the interests of the future quality of the article?), the protection of living persons-completeness of information axis (should the focus be on thorough reporting of notable living people, in the interests of completeness, or on the conservative reporting of notable living people, in the interests of decency?). There are dozens of these, and I'd strongly recommend that anybody whose life is short of drama and warfare go right down, register an account, and line up on one side or another.

One of the axes, though, is on tolerance of pseudoscience (should we portray natural selection as an open controversy within the scientific community, or as a scientific consensus that is under assault only by fringe scientific elements and non-scientists?), and this axis has recently got me thinking about science and politics. Normally, I associate anti-scientific viewpoints with the right-wing - young earth creationists, global warming deniers, etc.

(Disclaimer: I don't consider myself competent to have strong views on existence of anthropogenic global warming, but from what I've seen the portion of the scientific community that strongly believes in its existence appears to be both i. larger by orders of magnitude than portion of the scientific community that is skeptical, and ii. generally more persuasive. Regardless, I do consider myself competent to have strong views on whether action should be taken to combat the possibility of anthropogenic global warming, on the grounds that the reasonable possibility that carbon dioxide emissions are imperiling our way of life is quite enough justification to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.)

But one of the places I've spent some time at Wikipedia is on the homeopathy article. When I first showed up there, I was broadly unaware of what homeopathy was, besides that it was something that a lot of people seemed to consider an alternative to "conventional" medicine. Since I've learned more about it, I've concluded that it's batshit insane. In brief, its tenets are that substances that cause a given set of symptoms are useful for curing afflictions that cause the same symptoms, and that the more diluted these substances are the more potent they are as cures. Some homeopaths go so far as to suggest that these cures are at their most potent when they're so diluted that not a single molecule of the alleged cure remains (one explanation given is that water has a memory, so even if a substance is no longer present in the water, the water can "remember" when it was and behaves accordingly). It is the sort of thing that I cannot imagine any reasonable person believing for any reason other than religious ones, and I'm not aware of any religion that considers homeopathy a key tenet.

(Apparently in the late 1700s, homeopathy enjoyed a much greater success rate than conventional medicine, which sounds like a point in homeopathy's favour until you realize that the day's conventional medicine included things like bloodletting.)

And yet, by and large the people who believe in homeopathy, at least in the developed world, aren't young earth creationists and other conservative quacks, but hippies who, by and large, believe in evolutionary science and are adamant about fighting global warming.

So, um, yeah: what's up with that?

Random things one learns while researching Wikipedia articles...

The Calgary Sun did snapshot profiles of all the Calgary candidates in the last provincial election. They can be found here. I find the responses to "political heroes" interesting. First of all, it seems like pretty well every P.C. candidate named Churchill, which isn't all that surprising I guess. A little more surprising is that four candidates in Calgary were willing to come out and name Pierre Trudeau as their political hero. These bold four came from three different parties, none of which were the Liberals: they were two New Democrats, a Green, and a Wildrose Alliance candidate (who also cited Ralph Klein and Peter Lougheed as among his heroes).

Question to Liberals wanting to avoid an election...

"Some top Liberals have urged Dion to cut the incessant sabre rattling and frankly admit the party is in no position to fight an election this spring." - CTV.ca

So the reason that the Liberals are allegedly in no position to fight an election - and I do not, by the way, necessarily disagree with this allegation - is that Stéphane Dion is not a leader. How is this problem going to be solved or even mitigated by an admission by Dion that the official opposition is in no position to fight an election and is therefore prepared to allow the minority government to do whatever it wants?

Stephen Harper these resembles no Prime Minister so much as Joe Clark in that he's a minority Prime Minister who's decided to govern as if he had a majority. Like Clark, he faces a Liberal opposition that gives no appearance of being ready for an election In 1980, though, the Liberals adopted slightly different tactics.