Yes, she is.

Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia, is an atheist. For a while there, I wasn't sure, but she came out this morning in a radio interview.

Do you believe in God?

No, I don't, John. I'm not a religious person.

I'll write some more on this later, but I just wanted to light a celebratory sparkler. Isn't it great that Australia is a country where a politician doesn't have to pretend to believe in supernatural beings, and can still get elected as a head of government...

Erm. Maybe I should hold off on the celebration until after the elections.

North Am dialects reprezzent!

Did you learn to speak English in North America? Your input is required for the North American English Dialect Survey.

It's easy -- you just use your computer's microphone to record yourself saying various words. They also ask where you went to high school, and where you live now.

They're going to love me. I still sound like a dang 'Merkun, but living in Australia for so long has changed my accent in one respect: I have broken free of the cot/caught merger. I say 'cot' like I'm British, but my 'caught' sounds like Noo Yawk. It might puzzle them for a bit, but they'll probably understand once they see my current postcode.

Mobile phones and cancer

A study shows that mobile phone towers do not cause cancer. Good to know.

British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman's baby developing cancer.

In a study looking at almost 7,000 children and patterns of early childhood cancers across Britain, the researchers found that those who developed cancer before the age of five were no more likely to have been born close to a mast than their peers.

And in this article, Bernard Leikind explains why mobile phones themselves cannot cause cancer.

One watt (the amount of energy emitted from mobile phones) is much smaller than many other natural energy flows that no one suspects might cause cancer. In my Skeptic paper, I show that the average energy production in my body as I go about my life is about 100 Watts. I also show that while I jog on my local gym’s treadmill for half an hour, I produce 1100 or 1200 Watts. This energy, produced in my leg muscles, travels throughout my body including my brain, and I sweat a lot. My body’s temperature does not change much. No one believes that my frequent treadmill sessions cause cancer. If the cell phone’s less than 1 Watt causes cancers, then why doesn’t my exercise session’s more than 1000 Watts cause cancer?

Perhaps if people hear this enough times, they will start to believe it. We live in hope.

Apparently, it did.

Great moments in blokeness:

Aussie men shoot each other in buttocks 'to see if it hurts'

Two Australian men needed surgery after shooting each other in the buttocks during a drinking session to see if it would hurt, police said on Wednesday.

The men, both aged 34, used an air rifle to fire at each other on Sunday. By Tuesday, both were in hospital to have pellets removed from their buttocks and legs.

Criticise them if you wish for mixing guns and alcohol, but you have to admire their commitment to empiricism.

And there's something else we can learn from this. You notice how one guy shot his friend (doubtless hurting him), but then it was his turn to get shot? This just shows that an experiment isn't really valid unless it's replicable.

Ask an atheist: What is god like?

I sometimes contribute to 'Ask the Atheists'. Here's a recent question.

What is your concept of God in His most crucial essence?

Rather an odd question to pose to atheists, don't you think? Someone posed the same question to Richard Dawkins once, and he said he found it absurd.

Here's how I answered it.
= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - =
I’d like to describe the crucial attributes of God, and I’m not going to let a little thing like not believing in him stop me.

First, I’d say that God is intelligent. (Joseph Smith said that, and went on to found one of the dumbest religions of all time.) Because God is so intelligent, he’d be far too smart to invent a dumb thing like creationism, intelligent design, or intelligent design creationism. He’d surely see through the ridiculous charlatanry known as faith healing. He’d also be too smart to need numbskull apologists to defend him using poor reasoning, logical fallacies, and doomed arguments. Maybe they should cut it out.

Apparently, he controls everything, listens to billions of prayers, and (I have heard) is responsible for all the physical processes in the universe. That means he’s a busy guy. So he’d be far too busy to care what people are doing with their naughty bits. He also wouldn’t care about gay people getting married, how low women’s hemlines or necklines are, what kind of underwear people are wearing, or any of a thousand details about food and drink, meat preparation, hair length, language use, or social customs that religious systems concern themselves with for the supposed well-being of their members.

He created the world, and everything that in it is. That includes fossils and rocks that are millions of years old. That would suggest that he wants people to believe that the earth is much older than the 6,000 – 10,000 years that Christian fundamentalists believe it is. Why do they ignore the evidence that comes from the world that their god created? And why don’t they believe the fact of evolution? If he’s the god of truth, shouldn’t they quit trying to ignore facts? Doesn’t that sound like they’re not being respectful to him?

God created a lot of women. I happen to think they’re quite nice-looking, and since I’m created in God’s image, I bet he likes the way they look too. He’d probably be offended if someone tried to cover them in yards of fabric. Or if anyone tried to mutilate their genitals. Or burn them, cut off their noses, or honour-kill them for not being sufficiently obedient.

In other words, from what I can tell of God’s crucial attributes, I think he’d be as disgusted with the attempts of humans to worship him as I am. If he existed, that is.

Call for compulsory teaching of evolution in the UK

Should the teaching of evolution be compulsory, even in primary schools? OH HELLS YES.

Richard Dawkins among academics calling for compulsory evolution teaching at primary school

Evolution should be taught to all primary school pupils, according to leading scientists and academics.

Experts including three Nobel laureates and Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, are calling on the new Government to make teaching of the theory a compulsory part of the curriculum.

They say it is necessary because of the increasing number of schools that do not have to follow the curriculum, and because of the “threat” posed by the religious concept of creationism.

They wrote: “Evolution is the most important idea underlying biological science. It is a key concept that children should be introduced to at an early stage.

“Whatever curriculum reforms are made, we urge that there is teaching of evolution for all school-age children, and especially in the primary curriculum.”

Evolution is the foundation of biology, and it's as well-supported as a theory gets. Everyone should know this stuff to be considered an educated person. It should be regarded as just as essential and mandatory as maths or writing.

We need this kind of move just to move things back in the right direction. Creationists have been engaged in a protracted struggle to get their ignorance illegally enshrined in school curricula for decades, so this is a nice bit of pushback.

Would the know-nothing religious right scream that the government is forcing evolution down everyone's throat, and outlawing the teaching of alternative Bible-based points of view?

Of course they would. But that's what they've already been saying for years, so who would notice?

The Bank Holidays -- 'Ship Becomes a Kite' album launch

Last night was the album launch for the new Bank Holidays album, "Sail Becomes a Kite".

For this sophomore album, the Hols have turned down the temperature, washing their trademark sunny harmonies in a golden melancholic glow. You'd think this would make for a difficult concert, playing downbeat songs that the audience doesn't know. In fact, the concert worked amazingly well, for three reasons:

1. They interspersed their old favourites like 'The Greatest Game' and 'She's Not Into Love'.
2. They played a kick-ass version of the Kinks' (or the Jam's) song 'David Watts'. Hope they recorded it -- that would be a great b-side.
3. The new material is really strong, and they can do it live. The three-part harmonies were incredibly listenable -- the audience seemed to be hanging on to the notes, or maybe it was just me.

I haven't gotten through the whole album yet -- I'm savouring it. The Bank Holidays partake in the unpretentious optimism of many other twee bands, but twee isn't usually welded to songwriting as confident as this. A great show, and so far, a great album.

Wait 'til they go with a fellatio joke.

Frauds, linguistic and otherwise

It's a week for Obama-bashing. Nothing new there, but now a pseudo-linguist is trying to linguify the sport. Paul Payack is the guy in charge of the Global Language Monitor, a group which serves mostly to promote bogus claims about language. This time, Payack is carping about Obama's Oval Office address. He says it's far too professorial at an impenetrable 9.8 grade level. Also, it's 'aloof' and 'out of touch'.

Mark Liberman comments:

I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster. Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!

Payack's critique appeared in this CNN article.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence "added some difficulty for his target audience," Payack said.

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: "That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge -- a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy."

Did that sentence stump you? If it did, it's not your fault -- blame Obama.

In fact, why not blame Obama for everything? That's the strategy employed here by Sarah Palin, whose sentences could never be described as 'professorial', though one could say 'aphasic'.



I get through about 13 seconds of this before I get a strong desire to cram her down an oil pipe (along with her three-legged stool), which may just be worth trying. I'm amazed at her ability to criticise someone who's actually working on the problem. Remember how she used to say "Drill, baby, drill" not too long ago? For some reason, not so much anymore.



I can only imagine what the extent of the disaster would have been if the GOP clowns had won the election. More drilling, plus even less regulatory oversight.

John Cole takes up the theme:

All I know is that if Obama doesn’t stop the oil leak with his massive Kenyan penis and then give a rousing FDR/Trumanesque speech delivered using a grade 7.5 language level that gives Chris Matthews a blue-vein hard-on and then personally scrubs every drop of oil from the gulf without hurting BP’s profits and making sure every oil worker has a job, I’m out. I mean, come on. That isn’t asking too much, is it? And why don’t we have gay marriage and a cure for cancer? What a loser!

Yeah, because saving the economy and passing health care is so last year.

Spelling bee protesters

I would have liked to compete in the National Spelling Bee as a young scholar. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a sponsor. Nowadays, though, the event is attended not just by logophiles but by protesters. That's right.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held.

Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.

The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."

Spelling reformers are a quixotic bunch. Their devotion to spelling reform is somehow touching, as though they're unaware that people have pushed for this -- going on two hundred years -- to almost no effect.

I will admit that English has some arcane orthography, and there are various reasons for that. For one thing, English spelling got more or less locked down just before the Great English Vowel Shift. Scribes represented words according to their dialect, and sometimes they had some funny preferences.

But English spelling isn't all that bad. A major problem is vowels. There aren't enough letters to represent all the vowels we use. But double letters allow us to distinguish between vowel sounds: 'striping' v. 'stripping'. The much-maligned silent 'e' does its work, too: 'wan' and 'wane'. The letter 'c' has two sounds, true. 'Athletic' ends with a /k/ sound, and 'athleticism' has a /s/ sound in it, but the 'c' preserves the relationship between these words that share the same root.

Spelling everything like it 'sounds' becomes more complicated when you realise that words sound different in different dialects. Would speakers of Scottish English be hosed in this new future? Whose dialect would get represented? And how does one distinguish homophones like 'bow' and 'bough' when they also become homographs?

If you want to see how different sound and spelling can become, have a look at French. Despite some reforms, there's still quite a difference. Final consonants are often elided. 'En haut' is pronounced something like 'ãõ' -- try saying 'ah oh' using only your nose.

I suppose one day the divide between English sound and English spelling will become so serious that we'll have to sit down and make some tough choices. But it's going to take a while.

La Maison en Petits Cubes

Had to share. A very appropriate film for a rainy Tuesday.

La Maison en Petits Cubes from Rhena_Sama on Vimeo.

Amcal experts?

Here's the new ad for Amcal, a pharmacy chain. I caught this ad last night in a rare spate of TV watching.



So I popped down to my local Amcal chemist. Along with perfumes, diapers, and magazines, here's what I found.

Lots and lots of homeopathy. The message is starting to get out that homeopathy doesn't work, but it seems the chemists are either clueless, or they can't resist all the tasty tasty money that it brings.

Bach flower essences are also popular, but just as dodgy. "Traditionally used to relieve feelings of stress", it says.

This is a bottle of some patent medicine. If you look closely, it says, "With creosote." That's not a warning; I think it's meant to be a selling point.

This is supposed to be for migraines. It's mostly just lavender oil.

And lots of ear candles. Everybody knows these are bogus, right? A brochure says that in addition to sucking the wax out of your ears, they can restore your harmonic energy balance. I asked, if they don't restore my harmonic energy balance, do I get my money back? They said no.

And check it out -- colloidal silver, ffs.

I don't think my local chemist is atypical. Chemists around here have real medicine that works, but they don't mind selling a bit of the fake stuff on the side. So if you walk into a chemist expecting expert advice, you might get it, or you might shell out good money for a lot of crap.

People look to pharmacies as places where they can get accurate information about health and drugs. Maybe pharmacists don't ask for this reputation, and it's an expectation that the public has created. Which would let the pharmacists off the hook.

But now that Amcal is embracing its image that their people are 'experts' (and trading off of this image), then they have a responsibility to provide expert advice and educate the public, and not supply fake cures just because the unwary will pay for it.

Homeopathy kills again

Lately it's been out-of-stater Meryl Dorey grabbing the attention with AltMed woo-woo in Perth, but let's not forget that we've got a lot of woo-sters of our own.

Peter Dingle is not a medical doctor, but he gives medical advice on his blog. He's come out against cholesterol-treating drugs. He finds the time to spread uncertainty about vaccines. The stuff he writes isn't always wrong, but it's a worry that he tends to cherry-pick scientific reports that confirm his views about natural health, all presented in an authoritative-sounding package. People think he knows something.

Sadly, his wife Penelope Dingle died of rectal cancer, which is treatable if caught early enough. What did the Dingles use to treat it? Homeopathy.

The State Coroner is investigating the death of a Perth woman who died of cancer after refusing traditional medical treatment in favour of alternative therapies.

Penelope Dingle died of bowel cancer in 2005.

In 2007, her family approached the coroner's court to investigate her death.

The inquest has been told Mrs Dingle was being treated by a homeopath when she developed symptoms from bowel cancer.

Counsel assisting the coroner told the court her condition was not diagnosed until two years later at which point her homeopath told Mrs Dingle her cancer could be cured with alternative therapies.

Mrs Dingle then refused treatment from doctors who told her she had a reasonable chance of recovery if she underwent chemotherapy and an operation.

And Peter Dingle's role in this? He wanted to write a book.

Ms Brown told the inquest that Jennifer Kornberger, a friend of Penelope's, told her that Ms Scrayen, Penelope and Peter had made "a pact" that if treatment with homeopathy together with his regimen of anti-oxidants, vitamins and protein drinks was successful, he would write a book.

If I'd been through what Peter Dingle has been through, there's no way in hell I'd be blithely offering up medical advice, especially with no medical qualifications. Why does he think he has any credibility?

There's a bright side to this sad story. This time, they didn't kill a child like usual. Penelope Dingle's death was terrible, but at least she was an adult who made her own choices. She could have had access to good information if she had wanted it, especially with a supposedly scientifically-minded husband.

The other good thing: One less book about alternative medicine.

Sunday blasphemy: Get your patriarchal blessing online!

If you never got your patriarchal blessing -- maybe you're ex-Mormon now and it's too late -- well, now you can get it online.

Please note that the validity of the inspired pronouncements in your blessing depend for their self-fulfilment on numerous complex and interacting variables including:
• Your tribal ancestry/heritage;
• Free agency;
• Your adherence to the solemn admonitions within your blessing;
• The changing mind of God;
• Supervening circumstances;
• Your astrological birth/star sign;
• Ongoing evolutionary changes in church doctrine;
Etc.

For the uninitiated, Mormons have a belief that when a certain old man lays his clammy hands on your head and goes into a kind of trance, a supernatural being gives him information about the rest of your life. He says a bunch of vague stock phrases which get typed up and presented to you. It's called a patriarchal blessing, and you're meant to consider it as your own personal scripture.

But really, the patriarchal blessing is the Mormon equivalent of a psychic reading. All sincere, I'm sure, but like other psychics, the 'patriarch' gleans info about you, and then outputs something that sounds spiritual. People accept the hits, and reinterpret the misses.

The problem comes when people believe this nonsense, and try to guide their lives by bogus oracles. One friend of mine was convinced that she was going to die young because of some vague pronouncement in her PB. (I'm pleased to say she's still alive and healthy.) The actual phrase in question was rather innocuous, but when you convince someone that random drivel from a stranger is divine revelation, you can't blame them for being bad interpreters.

I think the site gives an excellent imitation of the writing style that Mormon patriarchs always seem to come up with. About the only thing missing is the bit where they tell you that you're from the tribe of Ephraim. Well, if you're Caucasian.

Career guidance counselor

Sarcasm detector

Certain pragmatic jobs in language seem so human that we feel like computers could never begin to approach them. Recognising sarcasm is one of these. How could you get a computer to recognise that a speaker is intending the opposite of what their words are saying, particularly if it's very subtle?

Well, a paper presented at AAAI last week gives details of a project in sarcasm detection. And they didn't even use tone of voice as a feature -- they just used the text from reviews at Amazon.com.

Of course, words aren't enough when you're recognising sarcasm. We also need real-world knowledge, and an idea of what words to expect in a situation. Let's say the dentist tells Fred he needs a root canal, and Fred says, "Great." We know it's sarcasm because we know that root canals aren't very fun, and Fred isn't likely to look forward to it.

We can't tell that to computers (although some have tried), but we can use other information. For this project, they used the number of stars in the Amazon review. If it was a poor review (one to three stars), the appearance of words like 'great' are likely to be used sarcastically, especially if the word "can't" appears first.

This is what I love about Computational Linguistics. We can get a start on even the hardest problems with a well-crafted experiment. The meaning is already there in the words we use. All we need is that little bit of extra information to tell the system that something extra is happening.

Action item: Counter the Anti-Vaxers

Via Pharyngula and Podblack:

The State Library is hosting an anti-vaccination event tonight, 1 June 2010 with Meryl Dorey of the so-called 'Australian Vaccination Network'. They'll be promoting their noxious brand of pseudoscience. Alt-Med is always a problem, but in this case, the stakes are higher. They tell worried parents that they'll be harming their children by vaccinating them, when in fact the risk of death and disability from disease is much higher without vaccination than with. So more WA kids are going to die as herd immunity diminishes.

Your orders: meet Kylie (along with me and the Perth Skeptics) at the coffee shop at the State Library at 6:00 tonight. Let's spread some good information.

A good source for info is the Immunise Australia Program.