It's not that the TSA did anything uniquely annoying during this trip. It's just that every time I have to go through the security checkpoints and jump through hoops that do practically nothing to actually increase security, I get just a little more pissed off. This trip, I was so busy unpacking the laptop, loading up all our bags onto the belt (we had more carry-ons this time now that the airlines are charging for checked luggage), and taking off my shoes, that I forget to empty out my pockets and take off my belt. That's probably enough metal that it would have set off the metal detector even back in the good old days, but when you're already irritated with an organization, it makes you that much more irritated. Plus, thanks to actually doing good on my diet the past few weeks, taking off my belt meant holding my pants up the whole time. I started grumbling once I got through the checkpoint and was getting dressed again, when my wife told me to just be quiet so that we could enjoy our vacation.

I recall hearing a joke one time, and I can't remember where I first heard it now, but this blog has a similar joke in the comments.

First the terrorsits tried to sneak bomb onto a plane using their shoes, so they made us take off our shoes.

Then the terrorists tried to use liquid explosives, so they made us give up our drinks and toothpaste.

The day they realize that a terrorist could try to smuggle a bomb up his ass is the day I quit flying.

But when you stop to think, how much indignity are we willing to take in the name of safety (assuming, of course, that the TSA is increasing safety, which I'll get to in a minute)? We already have to go barefoot through the metal detectors, and take off our belts and hold up our pants. If you take a carry on, you see the inspectors rifling through all your personal belongings. A few years ago when my wife, my daughter and I flew up north to visit the rest of my family for Christmas, presents already wrapped, the TSA didn't just take them out of the wrapping paper - they unpacked everything completely, down to removing the toys from the plastic and twist ties that held them in place (I guess I could be thanking them, since everyone knows what a pain it can be to get toys out of their packaging sometimes).

To point out just one more pet peeve - why can't people that aren't flying wait with you at the gate anymore, or come meet you at the gate when you arrive? I know the current policy does nothing to keep out anybody determined enough to sneak in. The fact that all it takes is a computer printout of your itinerary or tickets to get it, means that anybody with a computer and any type of ingenuity can print out counterfeit tickets or itineraries. They probably wouldn't work to get them on the plane, but they'd certainly get the people into the gate area. Perhaps the point is to reduce the number of people in the gate area, to make observation and surveillance easier. I still don't like it.

Okay, you get it - I think the TSA's annoying. But have they actually done anything to increase security? In anticipation of anybody that's going to say that we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11, therefore the TSA must be working, I have a tiger repelling rock I'd like to sell you. I've had this rock for years, and haven't seen a tiger the entire time, so it must work, right?. (Realizing that Simpsons episode was from way back in 1996, it's eerie how well it predicted the country's reaction to 9/11 - do anything, even if there's no evidence it works, just so it seems like we're doing something.)

I've got a little experience "smuggling" things past the TSA myself. As I mentioned in the essay I linked to up top, I've forgotten about one of my pocket knives a few times. It's a small little knife that looks like a key, and goes on my key ring. The blade's only about 2", but that's exactly the type of thing the TSA was supposed to be keeping off planes. And I managed to get by security with it once during the highest threat level. (The knife actually has some sentimental value to me, so I've since taken it off my key ring, just to make sure I don't ever forget about it when flying and find that one TSA agent who notices it.)

What about more serious threats, besides pocket knives that probably aren't going to be worth much of anything, anymore? Well, there's this case where, "Investigators with bomb-making components in their luggage and on their person were able to pass through security checkpoints at 19 U.S. airports without detection." And what about the student who smuggled bleach, matches, box cutters, and clay that resembled plasic explosives, onto multiple airplanes, told the TSA about it, and some of the items still weren't found for over a month.

Or, just read these articles, from the column, Ask the Pilot on Salon.com. It's written by an airline pilot, Patrick Smith, who doesn't like the TSA all that much, either. He describes all types of silly regulations the TSA follows, including not letting him get through security because he was carrying the exact same knife that the airline gives out to passengers aboard the plane, not to mention that most airport personnel who aren't seen by passengers have very lax security regulations. He also has a good article on the N.Y. Times site.

I understand that we probably do need security. I just don't like seeing an organization that does very little good. At best, it's a minor convenience. At worst, it's a false sense of security, and a waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere.

Anyway, I'm back now. For the next couple days, I'll be pretty busy catching up, but some time this week I'll be back to writing blog entries.

P.S. I should have a new page on my main website for the Florida trip once I have a chance to go through the pictures.

P.P.S. Doing a Google image search for "intermission" yields some pretty surprising results (NSFW).

The card was printed by the same organization, Living Waters Ministries, headed by the same person, Ray Comfort, as the cards I found in Lyra's Oxford and the other books I mentioned in that entry (man, that took some restraint on my part not to use a different noun to describe Comfort). Given Dawkins' subject material, I wasn't nearly as surprised this time as when I found the inserts in the children's books, and this insert isn't nearly as disengenious. Still, it seems we have a misguided busybody at our local bookstore. Plus, it's always a bit unpleasant to be reminded of the inventor of the argumentum ad bananum.

First, for a bit of trivia, for anyone familiar with the concept of endianness in computing (byte order), this is where the term comes from. A long standing rivalry between the Lilliputians and Blefuscudians existed over which was the proper way to open an egg, whether from the big end or the little end. Hence, there were Big Endians and Little Endians. And here I always thought it was some technical term.

To be honest, this wasn't one of my favorite books. Perhaps that was partly to do with the fact that it was a political satire, and I didn't get the jokes. I suppose it's a bit like when my daughter watches The Daily Show. She understands the sillier bits of humor, but just doesn't get the parts that require an understanding of our political climate, or the personalities involved. The edition of the book that I read did have footnotes to explain some of the references, but as everyone knows, a joke's not funny once you have to explain it.

The book also satirizes an area that I personally find very intersting - science. This occurs when Gulliver is in Laputa and Balnibarbi. Basically, the people are all intellectuals, who go to the extreme of relying entirely on theory instead of practical knowledge. I'm sure Swift wrote this in response to the Enlightenment, and to the then not so old Royal Society. However, this attitude of questioning the reason for doing science when there's no clear practical application irritates me. Knowledge for its own sake is good enough. In the same way that some people may find beauty in a painting, others can find beauty in a deeper understanding of the mysteries of our universe. I've written about this previously so I won't go on about it anymore here.

The section on Glubbdubdrib was on another subject that irritates me. The king of Glubbdubdrib had the power to bring people back from the dead (but only a day at a time, and no more than once every three months). It was basically one long section on how things were so much better back in the good old days, when the kings were nobler, the generals braver, the philosophers smarter. I've written about the good old days before, too, and they weren't always so good.

Finally, the book was just so negative. It didn't start off too bad, but became increasingly pessimistic as time wore on. In reading other people's reviews online, I've seen many of them characterize it as misanthropic, and I have to agree. You definitely don't put down the book and walk away with a skip in your step.

I guess that there's probably a reason that a book's still in print almost 300 years after it was first published. To quote the Wikipedia entry on Swift:

Gulliver's Travels is an anatomy of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticized for its apparent misanthropy. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has not adequately characterized human nature and society. Each of the four books--recounting four voyages to mostly-fictional exotic lands--has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the failings of Enlightenment modernism.

Perhaps my main problem is that I just happen to like Enlightenment values.

According to the news release put out by the Texas Education Agency,

A less repetitive, more grade-level specific set of English Language Arts and Reading curriculum standards will go into use in Texas classrooms in the fall of 2009 after having been approved by the State Board of Education May 23 on a 9-6 vote.

The process of revising the 1997 standards began in 2005. Hundreds of teachers, numerous experts, national facilitators, and State Board of Education members worked on many drafts of the document over that time.

The standards ultimately approved by the board represent a blending of a document crafted by teacher work groups, with the help of facilitators from StandardsWork, and a version drafted by a coalition of English teachers. Many of the same teachers worked on both documents.

Other board expressed strong concerns about being asked to approve a draft document that emerged on the final day of deliberations. Consequently, the board agreed to go through the document page by page, spending several hours looking at the latest revisions.

After working two and a half years on curriculum standards, I can imagine that board members would have "strong concerns" over a document that they'd had less than a day to review. There's an article in the Dallas Morning News that lists more details of how that document was released:

"I find it's really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight," said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.

The article also discusses how the "seveal hours" were spent reviewing the new document.

After first saying he would not give board members time to go over the new document during the meeting, Chairman Don McLeroy, a Republican from College Station, eventually relented, allowing a quick run through of the new document with an explanation of the changes.

But the squabbling did not end there.

"Mr. Chair you're going so fast ... you're moving so fast we can't find it in the other document," Berlanga said, shortly after the page-by-page explanation began.

After more complaints, McLeroy declared that he would continue at the fast pace.

"The ruling is you're being dilatory in dragging this out," McLeroy said.

The Houston Chronicle also has an article on what happened, with an opening paragraph that sums up the situation quite nicely.

A three-year effort to rewrite English language arts and reading standards for the state's public schools came down to a last minute cut-and-paste job Friday.

The way the Board of Education handled this was completely improper. Don McLeroy, the head of the Board of Education (who also happens to be a creationist, and a dentist, with virtually no qualifications for heading that board) should resign, and if he doesn't do so voluntarily, should be removed by the governor.

And don't forget that the science standards are the next in line to be reviewed. If the board can be so underhanded on a topic as uncontroversial as English, I fear just what stunts they're going to pull when it comes to subjects like biology and geology.

The best write up I've seen of this in the blogosphere comes from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog

Long ago when the Builders constructed the City of Ember, they had an important secret that the people were supposed to learn in 220 years. They enclosed the secret in a box with a mechanism that would open at the appropriate time, and entrusted the box to the mayor, who was supposed to hand it down to the next mayor, who was supposed to hand it down to the next mayor, etc., until the box opened and the citizens of Ember learned the secret. Unfortunately, one of the mayors broke the chain, and the box with the secret was lost.

Now, the two main characters, Lina and Doon, must figure out a way to solve the city's problems.

I really enjoyed reading this book. To give an idea of how engaging the story is, I read the book in two days, my wife read it in three, and our eight year old daughter read it in two. It's written in a style that sucks you in, so that you really want to just keep reading to see how it's going to end. Granted, it may not be perfect. It's a little predictable, and I definitely have a few unanswered questions (which may be resolved in the sequel or prequel, which I haven't read, yet), but those slight shortcomings are more than made up for by the story telling. I'd recommend this book to anyone, young and old alike.

Well, I've done a little more research into these things since I wrote that. Unsurprisingly, I've discovered that other people have already thought along these lines (that's one of the humbling things I've learned from the Internet - no matter how deep or profound of an idea I think I've come up with, it's almost inevitably been written about by someone else before me, sometimes thousands of years ago). What I was calling "experience" is more formally known as "qualia," and there's a whole Philosophy of Mind dealing with this issue.

One of my original assumptions was that experience couldn't be a property of plain matter. One could arm chair philosophize about this all they wanted, but that gets you nowhere. The best thing to do is to look for evidence that may or may not support this. Unfortunately, given the subjective nature of experience, it's a very difficult topic to find data on. However, since this is a discussion on souls, and the classical understanding of souls is that they are our true identity, and would influence our personalities, we could instead look for evidence dealing with what controls our personality. A very informative website, Ebon Musings, has an essay titled Ghost in the Machine dealing with this very issue. It lists a good deal of evidence explaining how our actions and emotions are controlled by our brains, and how physical changes to the brain can affect us. One of the examples he discusses, and probably the most famous in these types of discussions, is a man by the name of Phineas Gage. Gage was a foreman in charge of blasting for the railroad. In 1848, he was involved in an accident, where an explosion sent a tamping iron through his head, destroying a part of his brain in the process. He survived the incident, but had a completely different personality afterwards.

The fact that it is our physical brains that control our personality is not definitive proof against a soul. It's still possible that to experience qualia, we need an immaterial soul. However, with that line of reasoning, the function of the soul is greatly reduced. It's basically just an observer, along for the ride. And if that were true, what exactly would existence be like after death? Would a soul retain memories? Would it even have a personality?

I don't want to admit it, because the emotional side of me still really wants to reunite with dead loved ones, and to be able to still watch over my daughter after I die, but it really does seem most likely that we don't have souls, that our physical brains really are the true centers of what we would consider "self."

This raises some interesting questions. Where exactly does this awareness come from? Is there any way to know what else has this awareness? Barring solipsism, we can be pretty sure that other humans experience qualia, because we can easily communicate with them. Other animals, too, seem to share this trait. If this awareness is an emergent property of matter, and we know that it occurs in our brains, it seems only natural to assume that it would occur in the brains of other animals. But, are brains the only complex structures that can produce this property? The less we can interact with something, the less we can tell what it might be experiencing. Do plants experience emotions, but we have no way of telling because they can't talk to us? What about the sun? It appears to have some pretty complex reactions going on inside it. Could those reactions be generating some type of experience? Does it even take complexity? Could a rock have a very limited sense of awareness, but with no sensory organs, and no way to communicate with us, we just wouldn't have a way to tell?

And with as specialized as regions of our brains seem to be, how does our consciousness get manifested in a coherent way, incorporating all the thoughts and inputs from different brain regions? Is our consciousness really that coherent, or could it even possibly be that the region of the brain that incorporates input from all other parts is the true center of our "self," and that the other regions of our brain might even have their own sense of awareness? Or, not trying to sound too pantheistic, could this awareness not require actual physical contact (because in reality, no two atoms are ever truly touching, anyway), and be some type of heirarchical phenomenon? Could ant colonies be "super consciousnesses," or could there even be a super consciousness for the entire universe? That last concept seems a bit too outlandish and I really do doubt it, and even common sense would seem to indicate that it's absurd, but knowing how bad of a guide common sense is to the mysteries of the universe (such as quantum mechanics), this still remains an intriguing remote possibility.

In the end, even if we don't have souls, this universe of ours truly is a wondrous place. I'm glad, however it comes about, that I get to experience it.

We live in a country where half the population doesn't accept evolution. That's a lot of people, and I don't think you can say that that many people are complete idiots (unless you're on the highway with them, but that's for a different entry). I think a huge part of why so many people don't accept evolution is religion - they hear their respected church leaders and other members of their congregations tell them that evolution is false, and since they trust those people in other areas, they trust them about creationism, too. Couple that with the fact that our science education is so bad that half the population doesn't know that it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun, and you can see why so many people are creationists. As Richard Dawkins has said, "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." For most people, it's simply ignorance - they haven't studied evolution, it hasn't been presented to them in school, so they go along with others in doubting it. And to be honest, unless you're like me, evolution's not a topic that comes up in normal dinner conversation, so it's not like those people often get exposed to a differing viewpoint. It's hard to get good and pissed off at someone who believes something and hasn't ever been shown a good reason not to believe it.

Now, consider your groups like Answers in Genesis, The Institute for Creation Research, The Discovery Institute, or Ray Comfort (okay - Ray Comfort's not exactly a group unto himself, but he does head Living Waters Ministries). These groups aren't like your run of the mill creationists. Their organizations are very well known, very prominent, and subsequently get exposed quite a bit to people of differing viewpoints. It must be a nearly daily basis that they get correspondence from people trying to show them the evidence, or to have a reasonable conversation on the topic. These people cannot simply claim ignorance like most Americans. Like Dawkins, I'd rather not assume that they're wicked, but the only options that leaves are stupidity or being delusional.

What's worse, these organizations aren't content to simply keep to themselves, they put up the websites I linked to above, build $27 million monuments to their stupidity, publish books, make movies that insult the memories of holocaust victims. They're trying to push their ignorance on the rest of the population, and they're succeding to a large part. They're dumbing down our society.

Now, I know that some people may say that when you start insulting people, you're not going to do a good job convincing them - more flies with honey and all that. And in entries like this one, where I call AiG a "reposity of stupidity," some creationists might feel like I'm insulting them personally. I'm not. I'm insulting the big name creationists, because quite frankly, they piss me off. There's only so much willful ignorance a person can take before they crack, and sometimes I do.

So to summarize - run of the mill creationists are only creationists out of ignorance, and usually haven't been shown good reason to accept evolution, so they get a pass. But big name creationists, who have had plenty of opportunity to be educated but refuse to do so, and continue to push their stupidity on the rest of the country, deserve the ire and ridicule that they receive.

I know my blog isn't hugely popular, but if you just happen to be a creationist reading this entry, and you feel like leaving me some feedback on why evolution is wrong (or, if you're a rational person, and want a resource to use to counter creationist arguments), go check out the Index to creationist Claims on Talk Origins. Chances are, the argument's been rebutted many times over already.