I was asked by a friend to take a look at this paper which he was surprised to see in a science journal. Its a weird and unconvincing paper, a Case report of instantaneous resolution of juvenile macular degeneration blindness after proximal intercessory prayer. Its actually a case of rummaging around in old medical files in order to report a miracle in 1972.

Heres the story: an 18 year old girl lost her vision in 1959 over the course of a few months, with no identified cause. She was diagnosed with 7/200 vision, attended a school for the blind, and lived as a blind person for 12 years. Then, even more suddenly, her vision recovered fully after her husband prayed for her.

When the couple went to bed later than normal (after midnight), her husband performed a hurried spiritual devotional practice (reading two Bible verses) and got on his knees to pray. She describes that they both began to cry as he began to pray, with a hand on her shoulder while she laid on the bed, and with great feeling and boldness he prayed: Oh, God! You can restore [] eyesight tonight, Lord. I know You can do it! And I pray You will do it tonight. At the close of the prayer, his wife opened her eyes and saw her husband kneeling in front of her, which was her first clear visual perception after almost 13 years of blindness.

An examination in 2001 revealed that she had 20/40 vision, and that her retinas looked normal.

I cant debunk this account, if thats what youre looking for. I could speculate about possible ways the story is misleading us, but we know nothing about the causes of the blindness or its cure, we dont even know that there was a physical basis for the blindness, and Im not going to diagnose an old medical condition thats what the authors of the paper are doing. All weve got are old records, and modern evidence that she can see, and no way to trace the actual history of her vision. Its an anecdote. Maybe she was actually cured by a miracle! Unfortunately, theres no way to analyze what actually happened.

Im skeptical that prayer is actually effective, though. This woman was devout, came from a very religious family and community, and youre telling me that the onset of blindness did not trigger a flurry of intense prayers from the woman, her family, and her church? Was that the first time her husband begged his god to restore her sight? Its awfully hard to believe that something th...

I decided to try a slightly different process than normal for the update on the movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest, so that post will be up tomorrow, and today you get something like a stream of consciousness.

Work on The Inner Tower is going well, for the most part. I think I will never understand why my brain just refuses to cooperate sometimes, for no discernible reason. Even so, Im following the map I laid out, and discovering an interesting landscape. There are a few geographic locations in that world that were established before I began the exploration that is writing a first draft. Beyond that, its been mostly blank, and the landscape has been filling in as I go.

When the plot of this thing started falling into my brain like Tetris blocks last year, I decided that I was going to be deliberately formulaic with my writing, and see what sort of interesting story I could create within more conventional limits. I say more conventional, because my first novel, Exits and Entrances, was very much experimental. The biggest difference youll probably notice, should you decide to read it, is that every other chapter is a short story thats peripheral to the main plot. I dont recall why I thought that was a good idea, but I think it turned out decently for a first novel. I dont think I was a particularly good writer at that point in time, but I try to remember that there are books out there that are much worse by every metric I can think of, save popularity.

I will have to return to that particular laboratory, because there are two books still to write for that trilogy, but for my current project, Ive chosen to constraints and rules from bits of writing advice Ive encountered over the years.

I guess you could say that this series just a different kind of experiment, but I think itll be a more familiar reading experience for regular young adult fantasy readers, at least for the first couple volumes. After that, things will get a little stranger, because I just cant help myself.

Part of the reason youre getting this particular blog post, is that I was getting tired of video posts, and I doubt Im alone in that. The other part is that, after a cold snap in which we actually got snow, its the first classic Beautiful Spring Day since the sun went away. That means that Im sitting at a folding table out in the middle of our little walled village, while His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat explores.

While there are cats and foxes that...

West Virginia had a bill in the works to explicitly allow the teaching of intelligent design creationism.

Teachers in public schools, including public charter schools, that include any one or more of grades kindergarten through 12, may teach intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.

Never fear, Americans United is on the case. It didnt pass, not yet at least.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser issued the following statement in response to the West Virginia Legislature adjourning without passing Senate Bill 619, a bill that would have authorized public school teachers to teach intelligent design creationism:

We at Americans United are thankful that West Virginia public school students wont be forced to sit through lessons on intelligent design creationism an inherently religious doctrine that has no place in public schools. Public schools are not Sunday schools; their purpose is to teach students sound science, not preach religious beliefs.

While the intelligent design bill failed this session, its alarming that the bill got as much traction as it did. The bills supporters blatantly ignored the Constitutions promise to separate church and state the protector of religious freedom and would have flouted decades of court precedent that bars the teaching of religious doctrine in public schools, including an Americans United case that successfully proved intelligent design was simply creationism rebranded.

If legislators insist on resurrecting this bill, Americans United is ready to defend the Constitution and protect public education and the religious freedom of West Virginia families. Using our public schools to impose religious doctrines like intelligent design on a captive audience of schoolchildren is part of the Christian Nationalist agenda to force all of us to live by their narrow beliefs. We need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state. Our public schools and our democracy depend on it.

The creationists are persistent little buggers, thats for sure.

My daughter might appreciate this. Shes writing up papers, getting ready for her Ph.D. thesis defense, and trying to raise a four year old, and all I have to contribute isit could be worse.

I dont think she has any mad Australian guardians living next door, unfortunately.

Also, where is Ray Comfort getting the money?

Thats a box full of crap you can get for free from LivingWaters/london. Just fill out the form at that link, giving Ray Comfort your address, and he will ship up to ten boxes of his book and Bible tracts about the coronation.

You could have a thousand copies of Rays book and six thousand cheesy tracts delivered to your doorstep, totally free. Unless youre in the UK, EU, Australia, or New Zealand, in which case you dont get the books, just 10,000 cheesy tracts. Or if youre outside those countries, you get nothing, and will have to pick up your free tracts in person in London.

From this I have determined that Canada is truly blessed.

I thought about ordering a box, just to bleed a few drops from the bloated vampiric corpse of Ray Comforts unaccountably rich organization, but decided not to. My reasons: a) its not enough to exsanguinate the parasite, b) it would just encourage him, c) its incredibly wasteful and would just have to be recycled, and d) I dont want to read his stupid book (Ive read enough Comfort to know it will be awful), I dont want his tracts, and I dont need a box of waste paper in my house. The man is giving away free garbage, and that does not appeal.

I still have to wonder, though: does ol Ray have some multi-millionaire sugar daddy? Or does he get so much in donations from a horde of deluded Christians that he can afford these ridiculous give-aways? Does he pay taxes on all of his revenues that he then spends on evangelical nonsense?

By the way, Ray Comfort is very, very excited about the coronationbut hes not going to bother to go himself. He wants his minions to do the humiliating work of distributing his crap to all the people who dont want it in London.

Im working on an actual post catching up on events in Atlanta, but for tonight, I encourage you to check out this interview. Matthew Johnson does a great job breaking down whats going on with Cop City, the dubious history of Atlanta PD, the very dubious police account behind their killing of a peaceful activist, and how things got to this point in the first place. The whole situation is a nightmare, and really underscores just how little say people have in the government that supposedly serves them.

I got a request for a ghetto shiv and, naturally, it had to happen.

The original design request was for a sort of switchblade icepick something youd push a button on, and an icepick blade would pop out. Theres a big problem with that, which is that front-opening lock knives (OTF) are finicky and not particularly strong. The lock depends on a few small pieces of steel that hold in place with a spring I own a few OTF knives and they are great letter-openers and utility knives but I would not trust them with the impact of a proper stabbing.

Another problem is that something like that is going to attract attention from the wrong sort of people, by which I mean: the police. In many states there are laws on the books that the district attorneys can use to bulk up the charges on a case, to make the offense more severe i.e.: if you get in a fight with someone, youre in trouble, but if you are carrying a concealed dagger (even if you dont use it) theres a felony charge they can drop on top of everything else, to make the defendant more likely to accept a plea bargain. Im going to year-old to carry a loaded AR-15, but criminalize carrying a dagger. After all, daggers dont stab people in the kidneys, people do.

Carrying any kind of nasty knife comes with other problems. Often, I see some of the knives people carry and the sheathes for the knives, or the carrying system in general, scare me. Ive fallen down, before, see, and you dont want to land on 4 of razor blade, especially if its carried anyplace useful under an arm, near the waist, on a thigh because those are not the places you want a loose razor blade scurrying around in. So the solution I like is: hardwood. A good solid block of oak is something that would break if you hammered on it repeatedly, but its going to protect a blade and, more importantly, keep it out of your own arteries, in the event of a normal accident.

That style of sheath is one I developed randomly for a letter opener I did for Richard B., (Yes, I still owe you another one) and its a fun build. Basically, you make a wooden welt that is cut on the bandsaw to hold a blade with a fair chunk of wood left over at the top. The pieces are epoxied together, then drilled from the top down with a forstner bit to make a hole the size of the blades handle. Since we already know that the cut-line is the center where the hole should...

This 1979 film about notorious Roman emperor Caligula had a script written by Gore Vidal, a well-known director Tinto Brass, and featured a cast of A-list actors like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter OToole, and John Gielgud. I saw the film a long time ago and despite the sterling credentials of the people involved, it was a mess. But that was not the fault of any of the above luminaries, but of the producer Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine who financed the film.

Guccione took charge of the final cut and seemed to think that it was a good idea to waste all this star power by inserting, after filming had been completed by Brass, large amounts of gratuitous sex scenes to make what some considered a pornographic film. He probably thought that all those sex scenes would draw audiences who would seize on the chance to see a mainstream film that was soaked in sex and violence, since in those pre-internet days, video of explicit sex was not available to the general public except in selected theaters that showed low-budget, crudely made films. He may well have been right since the film made $23.4 million at the box office, exceeding its cost of $17.5 million.

The films Wikipedia page describes all the turmoil and controversy that surrounded the film right from the beginning.

Gore Vidal originated the idea for a film about the controversial Roman emperor and produced a draft screenplay under the working title Gore Vidals Caligula. The director, Tinto Brass, extensively altered Vidals original screenplay, however, leading Vidal to disavow the film. The final screenplay focuses on the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The producers did not allow Brass to edit the film, and changed its tone and style significantly, adding graphic unsimulated sex scenes featuring Penthouse Pets as extras filmed in post-production by Guccione and Giancarlo Lui. Brass had refused to film those sequences, as both he and Vidal disagreed with their 1979 and in American cinemas the following year, disregarded Brasss intentions to present the film as a political satire, prompting him to disavow the film as well.

Caligulas release was met with legal issues and controversies over its violent and sexual content; multiple cut versions were released worldwide, while its uncut form remains banned in several countries. Despite the generally negative reception, with some critics also citing it among the worst movies ever made, the film is considered to be a cult classic with significant merit for its political content and historical portrayal.

Thomas Negovan has obtained all the original negatives of the film and is remaking it in the spirit in whic...

What an interesting dilemma: if I were seated next to this smug asshole, would I take the money? How about you?

On the one hand, that would be a nice sum for my retirement, and the odds of getting COVID from one exposure are lowand the odds of dying from the disease are even lower. On the other hand, gambling my health and life against what this guy considers chump change is a fools game.

The deciding factor for me is that Mr Kirsch is an obnoxious jerk whod use my acceptance as propaganda to do greater harm to other people. His seatmate turned him down, as did several other people he offered $10,000 to. So yeah, Id tell him no, and probably tell him to fuck off.

As it turns out, Steve Kirsch is a notable liar and quack with a lot of money.

Kirsch is a serial entrepreneur who has spent decades pitching the next big thing, whether optical mice (Mouse Systems), document processing (FrameMaker), search engines (Infoseek), digital security (OneID), or e-commerce (Propel Software). His latest startup, M10, is a spin-off of a spin-off that sells a blockchain for banks. He has made millions from these projects, even if they have not turned him into a household name.

You see this with people who have a lot of money, who think that reflects their intelligence, Richman told me. He considers himself an expert in something that he doesnt have training or experience in, and hes not following scientific methods to assess data.

Man, we sure have a lot of examples of that phenomenon.

His current obsession is with promoting crank COVID cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Hes funding clinical trials, which is good, but then he tends to ignore or even contradict the results when they dont go in the direction he wants, which is antithetical to doing good science.

His peers and the beneficiaries of his wealth are beginning to realize that.

Peter Meinke, another former board member, spent nearly three decades in drug discovery at Merck.

Its really, really common for a small effect, something that looks exciting, to be a statistical fluke when you look at a larger population. Its sad, but its true, he told me. With covid, 80% of your patient population does just peachy with no treatment at all, just a little bed rest and fluid. Its actually much harder to parse out a signal than if youre treating diabetes or cancer.

In addition to the issues with fluvoxamine, advisors grew increasingly un...

Just a short post today. This videos from a new channel that I might dip into again in the future. Im not a huge fan of the clickbait-y content style, but I cannot deny that this video contains some cool facts about lions, and it also has a certain something that I cant quite put my finger on. Watch to the end, and let me know what you think.

Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.

(Non Sequitur)

However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.

I was forwarded this photograph that purported to show snow in Sri Lanka.

As soon as I saw it I was skeptical. The catch is that Sri Lanka is a tropical island that is just a few degrees north of the equator, somewhat like Hawaii in climate, so snow would be very unusual even given the erratic weather patterns caused by climate change. Furthermore, I lived for many years in the area shown in the photograph and I cannot recall even needing a sweater at any time. It is at an elevation of less than 2,000 ft above sea level.

My initial reaction was that this is one of the many doctored images that float around the internet, especially since there was no sign of snow on the trees or on top of the cars and buildings.

But a friend in Sri Lanka says that while it is not snow, it is not a hoax either, that the material used to resurface the roads results in a soap-like foam emerging after it rains. This apparently happens all over the globe but I have never encountered it myself.

Has anyone observed this?

Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. Its a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the communitys feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

• Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. Its also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate were trying to cultivate.
• Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isnt necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food. There is some polite agreement with the statement (Im not saying anything, because Id only provide loud impolite agreement) a...

Minnesota is doing the right thing.

Minnesotas Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order Wednesday directing state agencies to take action to protect and support access to gender-affirming health care across the state.

All state agencies must, to the fullest extent of their lawful authority, pursue opportunities and coordinate with each other to protect people or entities providing, assisting, seeking or obtaining gender affirming health care services in Minnesota, the order says.

Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender the one the person was designated at birth to their affirmed gender the gender by which one wants to be known.

Walzs order comes as Republican-led states around the country push restrictions on such care, with at least four states this year having passed measures to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors. As part of the order, the governor is prohibiting the state from cooperating with investigations by states that aim to penalize such care, saying their actions pose a grave threat to the health of members of the LGBTQ community.

Yeah. Basically, Republican-led states have turned evil and want to actively harm their own citizens, but Minnesota will stand strong as a refuge. Join us!

Although I dont always plug it here, I run a monthly ace journal club on my other blog.  This months article was about asexual experiences coming out.  It might be worth a read if you want an overview of asexual coming out experiences and how they sometimes differ from gay coming out experiences.

Chat GPT is a blurry jpeg of the web | New Yorker A relatively pessimistic article about Chat GPT that describes it as a copy of the internet, saved with lossy compression.  The author asks, how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?  I think this a great starting point to understanding the state of the art chatbots.  The chatbots have strictly less knowledge than what you can find on the internetalbeit in more a form that may be easier to process.  Perhaps the megacorps are right, and the best application is search engines.

The Problem With Masterworks | The Plain Bagel (video, 19 min) If youve ever seen sponsored ads on youtube for Masterworks, an art-based investment scheme, you might have thought it sounded scummy.  Sounds scummy, is scummy, this video gives the scoop on that.  Apparently they skirt through regulation loopholes, which gives them a lot of leeway to report returns in a misleading way.  I actually unsubbed to a channel because they accepted a sponsorship from Masterworks.

Dear Esther | The Almighty Backlog Via Critical Distance, I found this review of one of the original walking simulator games. I admit, although I like walking simulators, I dont think very highly of Dear Esther.  I dont like the story, and as this reviewer says, there isnt anything else for the game to fall back on.  But its interesting to look back upon the roots of the genre.  One of the unique aspects of the game is that parts of it are randomized on each playthrough.  Its clever, but who would notice?

Whos Pranking Sam Harris & Eric Weinstein? | Rebecca Watson Rebecca highlights how Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein (best known for creating the intellectual dark web) seem to have been taken in by claims that there would be an imminent announcement that UFOs really are aliens.  This is obviously great schadenfreude against two terrible people.  Although my initial joy is tempered by my principled stand against mocking victims of hoaxes.  I think that fear of embarrassment is part of wha...

Ill be streaming in less than an hour, if all goes well. See you then!

I am, in general, pretty cynical about the U.S. electoral system. Its designed to empower conservatism, and has been shaped to make change that benefits the working class nearly impossible. Yes, there are victories, but every single one has come as a result of decades of grueling and dangerous work by the people who most need that change. The Republicans want the U.S. to be a fascist, white supremacist state, in which the power of capitalists the aristocracy is unchallengeable, as long as they support the fascist agenda. The Democrats, or at least their leadership, still seem to want the world to be held in stasis in the mid 1990s, but will go along with social change when someone else does the work.

Thats not exactly a difficult choice to make, but neither is it a pleasant one. When it comes to foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, though the Dems are, on rare occasions, a bit less hawkish. Biden wont try to hunt down and murder trans people, but hell continue working to undermine any alternatives to capitalism, and to prevent things like universal healthcare.

In a lot of ways, at least to someone who pays attention, workers have become alienated from politics in a manner similar to how theyve been alienated from their labor. Its something that affects our lives on a daily basis, but we have very little say in how it goes. In both cases, getting change that helps us, and not just the capitalist class, requires us to work together outside of a system that very much does not want us to do that.

Its frustrating, and for those working to make things better, its often exhausting. I can easily understand why so many people often try to avoid thinking about it. We can have massive demonstrations to change policing, and after paying a bit of lip service, the Democrats go ahead with giving cops more money, while the GOP accuses them of defunding something they have neither the courage, nor the desire to do and howls for more violence from police

Thats why I advocate for systemic change, outside of electoral politics. Our system does change, but it does so slowly, and at great cost. The decades it took to ban leaded gasoline, or to end segregation, or to get gay rights, or to get trans rights people died during those delays, because of those delays. P...

Yesterday Joe Biden released his budget proposals for the next fiscal year. In the ritualistic role-playing that is the annual budget process in the US, a presidents proposals are taken seriously as likely to be implemented only if the presidents party controls both houses of Congress. Otherwise, the opposition party that is the majority will dismiss the proposals outright. Those are the usual opening moves in this dance and it is being followed this time with Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy and others in his partys leadership dismissing the budget.

In a joint statement, House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans accused Biden of shrugging and ignoring the national debt, which they called one of the greatest threats to America.

President Bidens budget is a reckless proposal doubling down on the same far-left spending policies that have led to record inflation and our current debt crisis, the statement said.

McCarthys statement looked like it might have been written well in advance since he accuses the Biden budget of ignoring the national debt when in fact Biden argues that his budget will lower it by $2.9 trillion over the next ten years. The precise numbers are always subject to debate but it is incorrect that Biden is ignoring it when it is the top line item.

That does not mean that this is a wasted exercise. The presidents proposals should be viewed as more like a campaign platform, especially so since next year will be a presidential election year. Progressives have reserved their criticisms mostly to the absurdly high military allocation while generally praising the budget,

Biden advocates for $59 billion in funding and tax incentives to increase the affordable housing supply; $10 billion to remove barriers to affordable housing developments; and $10 billion to address racial and ethnic homeownership and wealth gaps. The president proposes providing $4.1 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Programand allowing states to use some of that money to provide water bill assistance to poor households, since a related program expires at the end of 2023.

Along with fighting for billions of dollars to ease hunger, the administration aims to pour money into high-poverty school districts as well as improve the affordability of higher education by increasing the discretionary maximum Pell Grant by $500, expanding free community college, and subsidizing tuition for students from families earning less than $125,000 enrolled historically Black, tribally controlled, or minority-serving...