Old Ex Cathedra

As happens so often, something Tim said yesterday prompted this post. If there are other bloggers out there wondering how to make their blogs interesting, I can tell you: all you need is some co-conspirators like Tim and the rest of our crew — who, except for Tim, haven’t been holding up their ends lately — consider yourselves scolded.

What follows is something I’ve almost said, or mentioned in passing, but haven’t given it a whole article to itself. But I think it’s high time, because it clarifies some things Tim and I were talking about.

One of the reasons you catch evangelicals engaging in hanky panky like the quote mining scam I talked about yesterday might be that they’re a bunch of sleazeballs. Or it might be that they’re really, really stupid.

But I think there’s a far likelier reason: while Tim and I (and I suspect a fair proportion of you) consider truth to be the ultimate criterion, evangelizing evangelicals don’t. Well, they do, but we need to distinguish between different kinds of truth.

But let’s hold off on that for a second. First, let me talk about a temptation that I think a fair number of the lesser lights in the evangelical world have round heels for: the idea that they should save people’s souls first, and then later they can get around to the fine details of whether the means they used were strictly ethical. If I can tell you a little white lie and get you to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, I’m not just justified in doing it, I’d be sinning if I didn’t do it.

Now like I said, it’s the lesser lights whose minds work that way. Let me speculate on what I think the best and the brightest believe: I think they say to themselves that there are lots of different kinds of truth. There’s the truth of logic, there’s the truth of our senses, there’s the truth you tease out of nature through experiment, and there’s God’s revealed truth.

Of all these truths, God’s truth is not only best (in the sense of telling you valuable things), it’s also the surest to be true. Scientific theories come and go, our senses deceive us, logic has its limits (viz, Gödel) and can lead us astray. But the word of God endures forever, and can be instantly verified as true by the Spirit in our hearts.

So if I run across a quotation from a secular scientist, asserting a scientific truth that seems to be at odds with God’s truth, taking that quote and twisting the context like the Recent Creationist quote miners are doing isn’t distorting the truth or hiding the truth, it’s revealing the truth of God that’s hiding in there.

I think that’s a justification that’s pretty nearly bulletproof. Of course I see some of you out there loading your guns even as I speak. But if that’s the case, then believers and skeptics really are looking at the same world but seeing two different things.

Now I probably don’t have to say this: to me the highest kind of truth is the truth that you can see, touch, verify, connect to observation, and try before your very eyes. That kind of truth tells me how balls move through space when I throw them and how biology turns a nice snack into my walking down the street toward the library.

Scientific truth (which is a stewpot into which I’m mixing several varieties of non-revealed truth) doesn’t tell me whether I should throw a ball toward that window over there or what kind of book I should take out of the library, or whether I’d be better off hiding the book under my coat or checking it out with my library card. But that’s OK. I don’t expect it to.

And I find this is a very good way to conduct my life: I don’t ask priests or sages how to distill alcohol and I don’t ask chemists whether I should have another drink. Two (at least) different kinds of truth: you measure this one with a yardstick and that one with your bathroom scales. Easy peasy. I don’t say it’s the only way. I almost don’t say it’s the best way — but in fact, I think it is. Horses for courses, as the Brits say. I think it’s an admirable way to run our lives, and I’m not shy about recommending that other people do it too.

Yes, I know that places me at odds with people for whom the supernatural is much more immanent, to be applied to many more situations, and who therefore strike a different balance, but I can live with that. I really, truly do think this is a better way to live. I accept absolutely that other folks believe that their way is better. It may even be better. But if they don’t give me enough basic respect, enough elbow room so I can go about living according to my own lights — well, then they and I are gonna have words.

And the beginning of that kind of respect starts with their (your?) admitting that my way may be better. Without that admission, the complement to the admission I just made that your way may be better, all you’re doing is standing out there like one of those street corner preachers, and I’m just gonna do what I do with them: smile and walk on by.

Or maybe, if I’m feeling ornery, have a little bit of fun with them.

Mele Kalikimaka!

One more quickie, almost superflous now.

Recent Creationists (who have been dressing up as Intelligent Design proponents) know they’re talking to a lay audience, not a scientific audience. So if they should go “quote mining” — taking quotations out of context in a way that deliberately misleads the reader about the intent of the quote — they’re probably going to get away with it. Some of the regular posters to talk.origins took on the job of re-mining those quotes to reveal the deception. The result: the Quote Mine Project, over 100 deceptive quotes by Recent Creationists.

That list is a bill of indictment against people who think it’s OK to lie to the suckers to get them into the tent. The suckers? That’s you and me.

From AP:

HARRISBURG, Pa. – In one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a federal judge barred a Pennsylvania public school district Tuesday from teaching “intelligent design” in biology class, saying the concept is creationism in disguise.

Sometimes we need to join hands and stand up together against intolerance, superstition, and lies. That’s why we institute governments, constitutions, and courts. One of America’s courts did its duty today and showed the world the spirit of a great people, a spirit that seems to have been in hiding for far too long.

Through this court decision, America has said a loud “No!” to a religion of death that that stifles learning and denies freedom and growth. It’s not time to declare victory, but in a season of celebration, this is truly something to celebrate.

Update: Jason Rosenhouse points out that one of the favorite debate lines of Recent Creationists is, “If the evidence for evolution is as strong as you say, then why are you so afraid to debate the other side?” Good point. And the answer is, “what happens when evolution and ID are debated in a forum where facts and evidence are paramount, as opposed to flash and rhetoric” is that you get decisions like this one.

Update: Here’s the ruling [pdf].

Update: One of these paragraphs is a parody of Pat Robertson (by Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). The other is actually Pat Robertson (courtesy of PZ Myers at Pharyngula). Can you tell which is which?

Example A:

You know, what we have got to recognize just there in this case is that the evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that’s their religion. And evolution becomes their religion. It is a matter of religion. So this is an establishment of religion contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution…. [A] lot of scientists are. More and more are. They are saying there are just too many things that can’t be explained by evolution. But, I mean, these fanatics, I mean, it is a religion, it is a cult. It is cultish religion, and whenever you start talking about the origins of life, you now get into religious matter, and theirs is just as much religion. The only difference is that even questioning, questioning that — the ACLU says even if you question our religion, you are guilty of violating the First Amendment. I mean, give me a break.

Example B:

I’d like to say to Judge Jones, the activist liberal judge in this case, that if there is a disaster in your life, don’t turn to God because you just threw him out of schools. In fact, I’ve just spoken to the Lord and he tells me that he has a voodoo doll that is an exact replica of the likeness of Judge Jones. Over the next few days, he will begin to feel pains throughout his body as Jesus pokes and bends and crushes this voodoo doll in order to move the judge with a spirit of repentence. I also predict that Judge Jones’ hometown will be overrun with homosexuals, which will bring the inevitable hurricanes, meteorites and terrorist bombings. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Doo dee doo doo, doo dee doooooo, doo dee doo dah DIT da da da da da….

You’ve seen the stories in the corporate media about how Wikipedia articles may be unreliable. And while it’s certainly in the interest of dead-tree media to cast doubt on an online rival, that doesn’t mean the stories aren’t true anyway.

Nature decided to find out. In an article “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head” they compare Wikipedia to the Encyclopaedia Britannica by sending articles from the two encyclopedias to peer reviewers.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

That puts the two encyclopedias in the same ballpark. The Britannica scored higher on readability, though, which reflects both the multiplicity of authors for each Wikipedia article, each with his or her own writing style, and the fact that the Wikipedia is perpetually a work in progress, which discourages authors from putting a stylistic polish on the whole article.

I’m not surprised that both encyclopedias have errors. You’ll remember from the graduate level courses you took in college that most topics have “hair” on them: things that don’t fit within a simple, polished statement. Encyclopedists are required to be brief and to write for a general audience, and as a result, they shave off a good bit of the “hair”, and that’s bound to result in errors. To avoid those errors, you have to go to the original research papers, and there Pope’s maxim applies: “A little learning is a dangerous thing / Drink deep or else taste not that Pierian Spring.”

As long as you keep in mind what an encyclopedia article is for, I don’t think you’ll have too many problems with either the Wikipedia or the Britannica.

Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus, appeared on Fresh Air the other day. His book is designed to help intelligent laypeople understand the basics of scriptural textual criticism.

Even though hermeneutics is a favorite topic around the rectory, Professor Ehrman has a couple of stories I hadn’t heard before. For instance, the Pericope Adulteræ, the woman taken in adultery, a story everybody knows.

8:3 The experts in the law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught committing adultery. They made her stand in front of them 8:4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. 8:5 In the law Moses commanded us to stone to death such women. What then do you say?” 8:6 (Now they were asking this in an attempt to trap him, so that they could bring charges against him.) Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger. 8:7 When they persisted in asking him, he stood up straight and replied, “Whoever among you is guiltless may be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8:8 Then he bent over again and wrote on the ground.

8:9 Now when they heard this, they began to drift away one at a time, starting with the older ones, until Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 8:10 Jesus stood up straight and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 8:11 She replied, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you either. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
– John 8: 3-11

Scholarly consensus is that this passage was almost certainly a 12th century addition. Ehrman suggests the story entered the gospel through a marginal notation by a monk who had heard the story and wrote it in the margin, and a later monk moved the passage from the margin to the text.

Then there’s the Comma Johanneum:

5:7 …For there are three that testify, 5:8 the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are in agreement.
– 1 John 5: 7-8

That’s the version accepted by scholars. Here’s the same passage as it appears in the King James Version:

5:7 …For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 5:8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

The new material is not found in any manuscript earlier than the 16th century! None of the early texts include it, none of the early commentaries include it, and none of the early church fathers mentioned it even when they were debating the doctrine of the trinity. What makes the addition significant is that there is no other passage in the bible that refers to the trinity so unambiguously.

Why did it show up in the 16th century? That was when, for the first time in 1,000 years, scholars and theologians were talking about the doctrine of the trinity again, most notably Michael Servetus (Unitarians claim him as their patron saint). It was certainly in the interest of the Church, who controlled the scriptures and could declare what was canonical and what wasn’t, to add this passage.

If you’re wondering whether it actually happened that way, or whether the passage crept in in a less deliberate fashion, you should probably know that, when Erasmus produced a critical translation of the New Testament that didn’t have this passage (he said the passage isn’t found in any Greek manuscript), scholars working for the Church forged a New Testament in Greek that had the passage in it, and Erasmus, true to his word, added it to his later edition.

These are just two of the most dramatic examples, but the Bible is full of cases where gospels have been harmonized (Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, has had material added to it from Matthew), where difficult passages have been simplified (in the story in Mark 1:40-45, older versions have Jesus “moved with anger” which is difficult to understand, newer ones have him “moved with compassion”) — and even then the Christian canon is at variance with itself (for instance, it’s far from clear from the story of the crucifiction in Luke that Jesus suffered as a man would suffer; Mark’s version leaves no such doubt).

Ehrman grew up as a born again Evangelical, and attended Moody Bible Institute. He went on to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Semenary, where he found he could no longer accept the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy he’d been taught. Whether this was a significant part of his spiritual voyage, where he currently calls himself an agnostic, I don’t know.

But there’s little doubt in my mind that people brought up in fundamentalism might very well be shocked when they poke their heads up from their little cloisters and learn a few of the things scholars have discovered over the centuries. And I don’t doubt that the shock from reading Ehrman’s book or others like it might cause some people’s faith to crack, as brittle things often do.

I think that’s a shame, and it’s one more reason why fundamentalism is bad religion: it equates any doubt with all doubt: it offers no middle ground to stand on between militant know-nothingism and denial of God. Those of us brought up in a more flexible, more scholarly tradition know there’s a good deal of middle ground. Losing your fundamentalism need not lead to losing your religion.

Someone smarter than I am has tackled some of my earlier questions about Sudoku.

Barry Cipra, a mathematician and writer in Northfield, Minnesota, describes a hierarchy of rules of increasing complexity. The rules mentioned above constitute level 1: They restrict a cell to a single value or restrict a value to a single cell. At level 2 are rules that apply to pairs of cells within a row, column or block; when two such cells have only two possible values, those values are excluded elsewhere in the neighborhood. Level-3 rules work with triples of cells and values in the same way. In principle, the tower of rules might rise all the way to level 9.

Bryan Hayes describes Cipra’s work in his article in American Scientist, and goes on to ponder other puzzle peculiarities. Worth a read if you’ve been bitten by the bug.

…and all his friends.

Just in case you find Google is busy, you might want to try this Google mirror.

W. Robert Connor is wondering about the Big Questions on campus.

He approached his compatriots from the academy:

Some months ago I started asking friends, colleagues from my teaching days, researchers in higher education, faculty members of various ages and ranks, deans, provosts and presidents, and focus groups of students: “What’s the status of the Big Questions on your campus?”

And he concluded that the Big Questions are “in eclipse.”

He offers some possible reasons:

1. Faculty members are scared away by … accusations of liberal bias and “brainwashing” ….

2. A second possible reason is that faculty are put off by the feeling they are not “experts” in these matters….

3. Or is it that engaging with these “Big Questions” or anything resembling them is the third rail of a professional career.

4. Or, “It tends to be that … those who talk about morality and the big questions come from such an entrenched far right position … that the rest of us … run for cover.”

Connor is part of a project that is trying to put the Big Questions back into curricula.

But I think he’s missed the mark pretty broadly.

In particular, I’m going to take the position that the Big Questions don’t belong in the curricula – at least, not explicitly.

At a school I once attended, there was a freshman only seminar class which was essentially a Big Questions class. The problem with these kinds of classes is that they are the kind of thing you should be able to do for yourself *after* completing a liberal arts education.

Oh, sure, the Big Questions should hang in the air – but I think it is unlikely you will find a decent liberal arts college where they do not (regardless of their status in the curricula).

The point is that freshman don’t know enough to answer the Big Questions. But by the time they are through, they might have taken enough science, history, philosophy, literature, psychology, anthropology, and math to begin to be able to work out informed thoughts about the Big Questions.

To sit the freshmen down and ask them to tackle the Big Questions without being educated first, and without promising them the time and depth required to start to understand the issues is to do them a grave disservice.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to argue that these classes must, by their very nature, approach Indoctrination much more closely than they approach Education. The students are entirely at the mercy of the professor in their exposure to the debate, and they don’t have enough facts or techniques yet at their disposal to be independent of the professor’s reasoning. The fact is, these are Big Questions not because they have Big Answers, but because they don’t have answers – and because the search for the answers require considerable intellectual effort; require more than a student fresh from America’s public high schools can be expected to bring to bear. At the very best, in the case where these classes don’t amount to indoctrination, all they can hope to do is replace the time a student could have spent learning history with the sense that yeah, the question is Big, it is hard! Not much compensation when what you have traded away is some of the knowledge that could have helped you wrestle with the question.

This is disgusting. I didn’t even know there were plain, uh, thingies. As you can tell from my reticence, it’s NSFW unless you work in a really interesting place.

OK, you deserve something to make up for that. Here’s a sigquote:

Market research shows that Americans tell lies an average of 4 times per day. Actually, I just made that up. One down, three to go! — Elizabeth Goldberg

Here’s another:

I wouldn’t say I’m lazy — I’m just, well, I really don’t feel like explaining it. — J. Hutter

And another couple. I’m feeling really bad about that Cthozy. These are all from the Top Five list and the Ruminations list.

These are a few of my favorite things: baby lambs, long walks in the rain, grilling and eating neighborhood children on my patio and, of course, rainbows. God forbid I forget the damned rainbows. — Chris MacEachen

There’s no sense beating a dead horse — but if you’ve reached the point where you even seriously consider that abusing a dead animal might improve your lot in life, I say go ahead and give it a shot. — Anthony Myers

Sometimes there’s a fine line between participating in an extreme sport and just playing a conventional sport very, very badly. — Andy Ihnatko

Caution: Care Bears do not actually care very much. — Unknown

For best results, consume hard liquor prior to assembly. — Unknown

A woman uses thousands of facial tissues a year. A careful man, however, can use one handkerchief for almost eight months before it’s full. — Michael Cunningham

If I was one of those priests who molest children, I think my sermon the next Sunday would be all about forgiving people for their human frailties. That, and not listening to the crazy stories kids dream up. — Larry Hollister

As I sat handcuffed in the back seat of the patrol car, I reflected that it may not have been wise to comment to the officer writing me a speeding ticket, “Can you speed it up? I’m kind of in a hurry.” — Ian Dauphinee

Every year for Halloween, I give out my famous “mouse heads.” It’s not what you think: I coat them in chocolate first. — Michael Cunningham

I’m abusing the privileges of fair use to “exhaustively excerpt” Michael Canfield’s “A Very Short Essay on Doubt (composed of very famous quotes)” in the latest edition of eSkeptic. The two connecting words are Canfield’s.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. — Bertrand Russell

To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. — Descartes

But,

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. — Bertrand Russell

The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– Yeats

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire

Therefore,

Doubt ‘til thou canst doubt no more … doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought. — Albert Guerard

eSkeptic? Bet you didn’t know about it. Cool, huh?

I bumped across a review (in the New Yorker) of Louis Menand’s study of expert predictions. And I can confidently predict that this will amaze, and perhaps enrage, you.

Here’s the money quote, but the whole article is well worth your time:

…[experts] were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And [Tetlock] measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Consider these specific examples:

In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate.

There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.

These two examples seem to me the most troubling.

I would predict, for example, that a civil engineer’s predictions about the stability of a particular bridge span would be more accurate than the prediction of, for example, a high school counselor or a psychologist’s secretary. In a sense, that’s a subtly different question about predictions, perhaps because I’d like to believe that a prediction about the failure of the structure is a different kind of prediction than a prediction about the failure of a student in college. It may require a different sort of knowledge.

But on the other hand, one would imagine that if future college performance (or brain damage) is something that can be understood, then some kind of informed predictions can be made about those things – just as the engineer has something important to say about the stability of the bridge.

Much as it is nice to see the pundits brought down, I imagine that some of us on reading this *are* experts in one thing or another, however narrow, and would like to preserve the idea that this gives us *some* edge over the monkeys with darts.

So: what do you think? Is there a value in expertise? Is it that one kind of expertise is more reliable than another? That certain kinds of fields or certain kinds of knowledge are some how qualitatively different? Is it only certain kinds of predictions that cause the problem? How can we distinguish those from legitimate expert judgement?

Consumer alert: this is a recycled article I wrote for Tourbus back in November of 2002. Since I’ve looked up that article a half dozen times, and since I can’t find the search feature in the Tourbus archives any more, I figured I’d drag it out into the light and post it here so I can find it the next time I need it.

Apart from fixing one bad link, which evidently was bad in the original article , replacing one link that had moved, and removing one paragraph where I asserted that Mac owners have a whole raft of free and cheap video tools (they don’t), I’ve left it alone, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, all the programs are still there and I know for sure they still work just like they did when I wrote the article. Here it is.

While Patrick has been very kind about introducing me and telling you a few interesting things, he’s neglected to mention the one truly spectacular event in my life. No, it wasn’t the time when Mike Vax, who played lead trumpet in the Stan Kenton band, was visiting in our apartment, and he took his trumpet out of his case, played a double high C, and put his trumpet back in his case — though that was pretty spectacular.

No, what Patrick has neglected to tell you was that when I was a mere sprout, the Video Ranger saved my life! It’s absolutely true. I was a stone fan of Captain Video, and during a personal appearance at the Allegheny County Fair I had joined the mob of kids to get an autograph, and as I was returning to my seat in the stands, I didn’t notice a small truck puttering along the path I was about to cross. The Video Ranger did, though, and he pulled me back in the nick of time.

Now it was a small truck, and it was moving very slowly, but it’s my claim to fame.

If you’re one of those young whippersnappers who’s never heard of Captain Video, Commissioner Carey, or I TOBOR, I pity you, but I can set you on the path of wisdom by pointing you to Professor Rory Coker’s space heroes page, where you’ll find more about Captain Video, Tom Corbett, and Buzz Corry, Commander in Chief of the Spaaaaaaaaaaace Patroooooool!.

If you have a VRML plugin and you’d like to see a 1950’s sci-fi style space ship I modeled a few years ago, click the link.

As usual, I digress. What I’m really here to tell you about isn’t my childhood hero, but a website that’s so amazing that, once you’ve visited it, your friends and neighbors will be calling you Captain Video.

If you’ve played around with video on your PC, then one of two things has happened: (a) you’ve played around with Windows Movie Maker, got frustrated because it’s pretty much a toy, and gave up; or (b) you’ve found about vdchelp.com. [It's now videohelp.com, and I think it may have changed its name into dvdrhelp.com in between, but the same stuff is still there.]

Nothing I could say here can possibly do justice to the wonderful step by step instructions you’ll find on vcdhelp.com. In fact, in my Opera bookmarks folder for video, there is one entry: vcdhelp.com. So all I’ll do here is throw out a couple of pointers to things I’ve found especially useful: the cream of the crop.

The cream at the very top of the cream: Virtual Dub. This is the video editor, especially at the price (free, open source). It will let you capture, edit, clean up, and do virtually anything to video files.

Here’s one thing they don’t talk about as a feature. If you’ve ever downloaded AVI files, you know that the morons who designed that file format put some critical information at the *end* of the file. That means if you’ve got a partial AVI file, you can’t play it. But Virtual Dub will do its best to accept partial AVI files, and in most cases will make them playable up to the point where they’re cut off. I’ve heard of other tools that will play partial AVI’s, but Virtual Dub has done the job so well, I’ve never bothered to download them.

Since Virtual Dub’s native output format is uncompressed AVI, and since those files are humongous, the next thing you need to do is put them on a serious diet. So let’s run them through AVI2MPG2 — note the “2″ at the end of that program name. There’s another program out there called AVI2MPG which isn’t nearly as nice. [I didn't explain this at the time: the one you want comes in a package with BBMPEG.]

You can let Virtual Dub save the slices you want to keep in separate files and join them all together with AVI2MPG2.

That program will save your files in MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) format, which means that, unlike AVI files which can only be played on Windows machines, you can play them anywhere.

Or you can use yet another tool, TMPGEnc, which converts your AVI Files to VCD (Video CD) or Super VCD format.

If your CD burner is Nero you can burn your video CD directly from there (select “other CD format” in the wizard that comes up when you start, and check “video CD”). If you have Easy CD Creator or the CD burner that comes with Windows XP, then you may have to upgrade to a higher version or use some of the tools they recommend on vcdhelp.com to burn it onto a CD.

But take heart: you absolutely can take a movie, edit it, tweak it With special effects, burn it on a CD-ROM, and pop it in your DVD player and play it. Apart from the cost of your CD burning software, you won’t have to spend a nickel.

Here’s some more odds and ends.

1. There’s a licensing issue with the MPEG 2 codec which means you have to pay to get a version of TMPGEnc that will create SVCD (Super VCD) files after the trial period has expired. You can still create Regular VCD files. They explain it on their website.
2. You may find it helpful to compress your AVI files or recode them, say, in DIVX format. Try AVIUTIL. The page is in Japanese, as are some of the program’s menus, but don’t worry: it’s really simple.
3. Do you hate Real Video files? You’re not alone. TINRA (That Is Not Real Anymore) will convert them to uncompressed AVI’s. Make sure you run them through AVIUTIL or one of the other programs I’ve mentioned above to reduce their size. Note that in fine type at the start of that page they show a Windows GUI for TINRA. If you hate to type command line parameters as much as I do, make sure you get it. Just install everything in the same directory and it should work fine.
4. Have you discovered that Windows Movie Maker is like a roach motel? Video clips check in in all kinds of formats, but Windows Movie Maker only saves WMV files, and you can’t turn them into an MPEG or AVI or anything useful? Not so, little grasshopper. Simply rename it from foo.wmv to foo.asf, and TMPGEnc will turn it into an MPEG.
5. Are you sick and tired of having to endure the millions of ads and the lousy bandwidth that some sites use to send you video streams? Would you like to save the video on your own computer and view it at your leisure? Help is at hand: ASFRECORDER.
6. When you downloaded that video through ASFRECORDER, you may have discovered it won’t play. The media weasels have taken advantage of a “feature” in Windows Media Player: when WMP finds an error in a file, it complains and refuses to play it, but when it finds an error in a stream, it does the best it can to play it anyway. So the weasels slip in a couple of deliberate errors. Solution: ASFTOOLS. Let ASFTOOLS repair the stream you downloaded and the file should be playable.
7. If the menus and all the choices on TMPGEnc are too much, there’s a simpler program called AVI2VCD. You may find it’s just what you need.
8. You remember how your parents would have guests over and after dinner they’d set up their slide projector, and the guests would groan? Well, you can do the same thing on your TV! Slide Show Movie Maker takes images (Windows Bitmaps or JPEGs), ties them together with some neato effects like fades and wipes, and lets you add text and audio voice-overs. It generates uncompressed AVI files, but by now you know enough to take it from there and turn it into a video CD.
9. TMPGEnc has some very useful filters on page 3 of their wizard. Push the “Other settings” button and look on the Advanced tab. Yes, some of the settings will be in geek-speak and totally mysterious to everybody but a video maven, but “Simple Color Correction” is really easy. Gamma correction is easy to work with and it’s the tool you’ll probably use most often on your problem video clips once you get used to it.

Now, I know, something named “gamma” is scary, and when you find out it’s an intensity transfer function and see the equation, your eyes glaze over. But trust me: it’s pretty much just a combination brightness and contrast control, and — here’s the cool part — if you don’t like the result, it’s completely reversible! You may have seen a gamma slider in your 2D graphics programs (IrfanView, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop) next to the brightness and contrast controls, and your hand may have jumped away if your mouse accidentally strayed near it. Same thing there. Once you use it and get used to it, you’ll never touch brightness and contrast again, and you’ll be mad that there isn’t a gamma control on your TV.

In fact, any Mac and Linux users who are still with us, that last paragraph may be the most useful thing in this whole article. Gamma is the reason pictures that look good on a PC look bad on a Mac and vice-versa, and it’s the one-step control that can fix them.

One warning, though. Some graphics programs have buried way down deep in the menus a “Set monitor gamma” control. You do not want to touch this control unless you’re a professional graphics artist, and even then, the color space controls will probably be more useful. I was the chairman of the Web3D Consortium’s Color and Lighting Working Group, which sounds a lot more impressive than it is, and my monitor gamma is set to 1.0 and my color space to good old sRGB. So don’t mess with monitor gamma. [Now that I think back on it, I think Maureen Stone and Eric Haines were the chairs, and all I did was get that WG organized. ]

But the regular gamma, the one next to the brightness and contrast controls, will become your friend for life. Trust me.

In fact, you can apply the same lesson to the other gobbledegook you see on the menus of these video programs — play with stuff. You don’t need to know a pedestal from an aspect ratio. All you need to know is, if I do this, it does that. And if some of the wonderful articles on vcdhelp.com explain why it does that, it’s just gravy.

Ages ago, I worked for for GMI, a flight simulator company in Tulsa that was terrific at building sims but awful at staying in business. After I’d been there a couple of years, we’d grown to the point where there were too many of us for the existing managers, and some of our old hands were elevated to the position of first level managers. One of them thought being a manager meant he had to be Super Theory X Man, so much so that he arranged the room so that he sat at a desk behind us and we all had our backs to him so he could look over our shoulders.

One of the things us peons would do, therefore, is call “Jiggers!” whenever our new boss was on his way into the building so we’d all look like we were working. Eventually our new manager loosened up, and we didn’t use “Jiggers!” any more except when the VPs were coming. A little while later the company’s money troubles started getting more serious, and, inventive as always, we developed a system of signals in case the balloon went up when we were out of the country or our paychecks started bouncing. As one precaution, we always flew, even on indefinite assignments, with an open return ticket.

Well, in case the balloon goes up in America and we hear the stomp of jackboots on our front stoop, it pays to be prepared. So I’ve got my copy of the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents about how to keep the vital work of Ex Cathedra going when we’re forced underground. Maybe you ought to get your copy too before they start making a list of who’s got copies.

There’s also an alleged CIA sabotage manual from the 1980s. Golly, isn’t the internets wonderful? I’m actually scared to look at it. So much for my future as a saboteur. Besides, nobody’s ever found a better way of sabotaging a system than installing… nope. Way too obvious.

OK, I looked at the first page, and it seems to be a manual the CIA distributed in Nicaragua translated into English and adapted to bringing down the U.S. infrastructure.

Yeah, like saboteurs could do any more harm than the Bush administration — whose latest escapade is firing the chairman of Amtrak and spinning off the profitable Northeast corridor.

The Republican administration who appointed all four board members who fired David Gunn is trying to convince people that he was ineffective. The truth is closer to this: he was too effective, and he looked like he might save Amtrak. That doesn’t fit in with conservative ideologues’ plans to bankrupt the railroad and sell off the pieces to their buddies.

Conservatives: conserving our nation’s resources.

Well, not for us. But for somebody. That’s better than they usually do.

Oh. Wait a minute. That assumes they’re competent and they won’t just turn our railroad into a pile of worthless scrap. These guys? Competent? Never mind. Forget what I said about conserving.

Long copyright terms. Looooooooooooong copyright terms. The copyright cartel (see, it wasn’t hard at all to figure out what my point of view is on that issue ) makes a big point about how hugely extended copyright periods really benefit the artists. After all, Mark Twain wrote wittily and persuasively that while the Carnegies and Mellons of the world had accumulated huge fortunes by devoting all their time to business, he and his fellow writers had devoted all their time to their art. They’d earned a wage from their royalties, but they hadn’t accumulated wealth the way the great robber barons had. The only legacies they could leave behind were their works, and unfortunately the value of the legacies evaporated within a fairly short time after their death.

They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.

I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit. I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the possession of the product of a man’s labor. There is no limit to real estate.

Doctor Hale has suggested that a man might just as well, after discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the Government step in and take it away.

Now wait a damn minute! The government doesn’t take it at all. They don’t even stop anybody from continuing to mine the coal. All that happens is that your heirs’ heirs eventually lose the right to stop other people from mining it.

But let’s allow the hyperbole, because the point is valid when the owner of the copyright is a real, live person. And Clemons had particular reason to worry about what might happen to his family, because he managed to invest his earnings from his books in one doomed scheme and confidence game after another.

The copyright cartel claims that not only do long copyright terms mean that an artist’s widow and orphans will be taken care of, they give publishers an incentive to keep books in print and preserve old works, even to release them in digital form, and isn’t this a wonderful world?

Well, no. No, it isn’t. As the Library of Congress discovered, 84% of the recordings “of interest to scholars and collectors” between 1890 and 1964 are protected by copyright, and of those recordings, only 14% are out on compact disc. The vast majority of recordings remain, dead and buried by the media corporations that own them, not worth the cost or trouble to reissue (they think), but absolutely worth the cost of lawyers to haul you into court if you should make an illegal copy.

That’s fully 60% of recordings — and we’re not talking the recording someone made of my mother singing “America the Beautiful” in our church (I can say, who’ve heard a lot of vile music, that this is quite possibly the worst recording and worst performance ever) or the ephemeral recordings of bands that never left town — but rather, recordings of things people want to hear.

Some artists (I know Stan Kenton is one), have an active enough fan base that any reissue will probably make up the cost of its conversion and pressing, and so there are only a handful of Stan Kenton records that haven’t been released, some by EMI on the Blue Note label, others though licensing arrangements with Mosaic and Collector’s choice. Other artists (I know Don Ellis is one) lack this fan base, and their recordings are only slowly starting to appear.

Here’s a good example: arranger and bandleader Gerald Wilson produced interesting, exciting music from the moment he started arranging for Jimmie Lunceford in 1939. He led a big band pretty steadily from 1949 to today, and he made recordings at a pretty fair rate. Apart from a brilliant Mosaic set of his Pacific Jazz records I grabbed the moment it came out and a handful of “best of” compilations, here’s (courtesy of allmusic.com) the Gerald Wilson recordings that mad it to CD.

We know this already. A serious proportion of the recordings in our collections are mainstream enough that the artist had a major label contract, however briefly. And yet those of us with any number of vinyl recordings at all know some of our treasures will probably never see CD reissue.

The media corporations simply don’t believe in the long tail. Or perhaps they find it irrelevant in an age where selling your buildings and land improves your net ROI. Just as they’ve ruthlessly trimmed all but the highest profit artists from their rosters, so they’ve kept low and medium profit releases off the market. Besides, years of scarcity, however artificially created, may end up increasing the value of these recordings — provided the ancient analog media they’re stored on doesn’t disintegrate.

While the recording industry wants you to believe they’re providing a cornucopia for the benefit of the poor widows and orphans of great artists, in fact the truth, here and now and for the forseeable future, is that they’re letting these orphaned recordings rot, sometimes quite literally.

Tip of the old mitre to Pharyngula.

We’re planning a real Cthulhu Christmas around the rectory. I won’t link to the plush Cthulhu dolls, because you can’t find anybody who’s actually selling them. I actually saw one once, but its owner never let his vigilance lapse long enough for me to slip it into my backpack. Damn coffee!

But even if we can’t get the dolls, there’s still a Cthulhu spirit in the air. For instance, just like How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the real one, with Boris Karloff) is the definitive proof that Christmas season has arrived, so this ad for Cthulhu legos (QuickTime .mov file) marks the start of kids’ dreams of Cthulhuplums.

Cthulhu carols? Sure. No problem: A Scary Little Solstice.

And what better way to promote Cthulhu Awareness than with these wristbands.

So from all of us at the rectory, merry Cthulhu Christmas, and may Cthulhu grant you a quick and painless death in this season of ice.

There is an article in the Nov-Dec 2005 Birding magazine (the glossy forum of the American Birding Association) on kleptoparasitism in birds. Kleptoparasitism is stealing food – for example, an eagle robbing an osprey of a fish.

At any rate, the investigators have discovered this behavior in terns (small ocean birds). But the form that this kleptoparastism can take is revealing. (The original research is reported in Shealer, Spendelow, Hatfield, and Nisbet, Behavioral Ecology 16 (2005) 371.)

Here’s the text from Birding:

Thieves chose from among four methods. Most often, a tern patrolled over the island until it spotted a bird returning to the colony with a fish in its bill, and then swooped down to snatch the fish. Sometimes a pirate scanned from an elevated perch and made a brief flying lunge to grab fish from a returning bird that passed too closely. Sometimes the robber stood between chicks and a parent that had landed with a fish; when the parent attempted to feed the chicks, the thief lunged to grab the food. The fourth tactic was strikingly sly. A female would repeatedly beg and adopt a submissive posture toward a male (not her mate) that was bringing in a fish for his young. Such female behavior typically invites courtship feeding and copulation. Using the tactic for theft instead, the female would allow the stranger to mount her, and then suddenly she would reach up, grab the fish from the startled male, and fly off to feed her chicks.

Draw your own moral from this story.

Polly Toynbee reviews the new movie of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the Grauniad:

Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young – apart from those in faith schools – that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.

Sigh. If only.

If only our Great Awakenings had been Great Enlightenments. If only Southern churches hadn’t broken off from (or been expelled from) their denominations so they could continue to justify first, slavery, then segregation. That great rift in the Protestant churches ensured that most of the humane and progressive religious voices of the 19th and 20th centuries would remain unheard in the South and Midwest.

If only we’d had a little less land so that we had villages instead of suburbs. Then ultraconservatives and libertarians disparaging the idea of cities and community in favor of a phony self-reliance would receive the stern disapproval they deserve from their fellow citizens who are willing to pull their own weight. And then we wouldn’t have the mass of our citizenry out of contact with the source of new ideas and progress, the city.

If only. Then our children would be as ignorant of those allegorical references as they are about how many pecks are in a hogshead. Which is to say, some ignorance is good.

But we have to live in the America we’ve got, and in this America, Aslan and the rest of the allegories will be obvious. In this America, Lewis’s books and the movies Disney is making from them will be effective propaganda for a viper’s nest of anti-Christian heresies that have already gained entirely too much of a foothold here.

Toynbee’s headline itself is a bracing chill after the suffocating hot breath of the reviews by the saved and those fearful of the saved: “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.” And the review does pretty well to live up to the promise of that headline.

I’ll stop here. Go read it to see why I chose “Rampaging Lamb?” for the title of this article and why we might want to think about protecting our children from the invidious messages in the books and the movie.

If only we still burned some kinds of heretics at the stake.

Over in Dover, the argument rages about whether or not ID properly qualifies as science. [Let me state here, for reasons that will be apparent at the very end of this post, ID is not science.] And one Steve Fuller, very fuller of himself, has pontificated before the court on ID as science. Is Fuller a scientist? Oh no! No, he is much too knowledgeable about science to be a mere scientist. Fuller, you see, is a professor of Sociology.

And Fuller is apparently convinced that being a sociologist means one understands science – science, that is, not the sociology of scientists – better than the scientists. Of course, the fact that he is under oath arguing for ID as science is evidence enough to all reasonable people that this can’t be true.

Wait, let me let you hear it in his own words. (If you can bear it, you can find all his self-serving testimony here and here.)

A. …Nowadays, to be professionally trained to be a scientist, is, in effect, to be a technical specialist in a very small area, a small branch even of your own science…. Now if what we’re doing here in this case is making judgments about what is science and not science, we’re making very general global kinds of judgments, right, the kinds of information and knowledge and forms of reasoning that one needs to have would not normally be part of an ordinary scientific education, but would, in fact, require this additional kind of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that one gets from studying the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.
Q. So is it true then that the training you have actually makes you better equipped to answer that issue than a scientist that’s practicing?
A. Yes.

(And he said this not only with a straight face, but under oath!)

It is painfully evident that Fuller is, well, lets say that at best he is an opportunist. But I’m not really writing to dissect Fuller. Fuller’s defense of ID is much like ID itself: an invented controversy intended to give the illusion of credibility. I’m writing about the larger issue – of why people like Fuller persist. And I was unexpectedly provided with the answer from a different context.

(If you are interested in the context, you can find the full article here. It contains no ID.)

The author wonders, and then answers:

As to why people adopt theories that conflict with the most minimal honest reflection, I will quote T. S. Eliot, who, while not always right, was right about this:

“Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t want to do harm, but the harm does not interest them . . . or they do not see it . . . because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

Eliot might have added: the endless struggle to look well in the eyes of their fellow intellectuals and the fear of losing caste. But as a result of their efforts, as Orwell also famously said, “We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

I wondered about the reliability of Wikipedia some time ago in this forum, in a place and context that I have entirely forgotten. But the fog in my head was stirred slightly when I bumped into this article in the NYTimes. (You may have to register for it, I don’t know.)

Here are a few fair-use excerpts.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages….

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed [linked to the Kennedy assassination], found that his “biographer” was anonymous….

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode…. “We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites,” he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles….

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.