Month: January 2010

Another entry for the ‘I thought I was beyond being shocked’ category – a very expensive ‘bomb detector’ that has nothing in it but ‘the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.’ Iraq has been paying $40,000 apiece for them – and using them to detect bombs – and they can’t detect bombs because all they have is ‘the cheapest bit of electronics that you can get that look vaguely electronic and are sufficiently flat to fit inside a card.’

Well that’s a nice way to make money!

The Iraqi government has spent $85m on the ADE-651 and there are concerns that they have failed to stop bomb attacks that have killed hundreds of people…The device is sold by Jim McCormick, based at offices in rural Somerset, UK. The ADE-651 detector has never been shown to work in a scientific test. There are no batteries and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. Critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod. Mr McCormick told the BBC in a previous interview that “the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar”.

Oh is it! So what was it doing on the market then?

He says that the key to it is the black box connected to the aerial into which you put “programmed substance detection cards”, each “designed to tune into” the frequency of a particular explosive or other substance named on the card. Newsnight obtained a set of cards for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT. It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores. Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT. There is nothing to program in these cards. There is no memory. There is no microcontroller. There is no way any form of information can be stored,” he added. The tags which are supposed to be the heart of such an expensive system cost around two to three pence. “These are the cheapest bit of electronics that you can get that look vaguely electronic and are sufficiently flat to fit inside a card,” Dr Kuhn told Newsnight.

Dear god. How do people live with themselves?!

Chad Orzel said a strange thing the other day.

OK, fine, as a formal philosophical matter, I agree that it’s basically impossible to reconcile the religious worldview with the scientific worldview. Of course, as a formal philosophical matter, it’s kind of difficult to show that motion is possible. We don’t live in a formal philosophical world, though, and the vast majority of humans are not philosophers (and that’s a good thing, because if we did, it would take forever to get to work in the morning). Humans in the real world happily accept all sorts of logical contradictions that would drive philosophers batty. And that includes accepting both science and religion at the same time.

That’s very blithe – hey ho, we believe all sorts of things that are completely incoherent and that’s just fine, in fact if we didn’t we would be unable to move. That’s not really right, actually – sorting out things that are incoherent is generally useful, and it’s a good deal too glib to just shrug them off as purely formal and of interest to no one but philosophers.

Sean Carroll is much better.

In the real world, scientists have different stances toward religion. Some of us think that science and religion are (for conventional definitions of science and religion) incompatible. Others find them perfectly consistent with each other. (It’s worth pointing out that “X is true” and “People exist who believe X is true” are not actually the same statement, despite what Chad and Chris and others would have you believe. I’ve tried to emphasize that distinction over and over, to little avail.)

Yes so have I; I tried so over and over on Chris’s posts that I got banned from commenting there (and also from commenting at Talking Philosophy); also to little avail. Chris does seem to have grasped the point now, but he hasn’t said ‘Oh right, oops, my mistake, sorry for all that name-calling’; instead he just pretends we disagree with him that there are scientists who are also religious. We don’t. It would be to little avail to try to get Chris to acknowledge that though.

And there are some scientists — quite a few of us, actually — who straightforwardly believe that science and religion are incompatible. There are absolutely those who disagree, no doubt about that. But establishing the truth is a prior question to performing honest and effective advocacy, not one we can simply brush under the rug when it’s inconvenient or doesn’t make for the best sales pitch. Which is why it’s worth going over these tiresome science/religion debates over and over, even in the face of repeated blatant misrepresentation of one’s views. If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

Quite.

An impoverished religious mind at work:

Recently, atheists seem intent on proving they can be good without God. I always get a kick out of evangelizing atheists and how they’re so desperate to prove that they’re as good (and usually better) than us religious types.

No, we’re not desperate, but we do like to counter the slanders of many theists to the effect that we can’t be good without God. If Matt Archbold were making a good faith argument (so to speak), he would acknowledge that many theists claim that atheists are necessarily immoral, and that we naturally disagree with that. But he’s not, so he didn’t.

But let’s give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt because us religious types like to do that.

No you don’t. That is one thing you emphatically do not ‘like to do,’ not when it comes to atheists at least. You ‘like to’ give us the very opposite of the benefit of the doubt (as this whole piece abundantly illustrates).

I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God?

What an ugly mind is here revealed.

The rest of what he says is ignorant and unreflective, but that question is downright ugly.