Michael Behe on Point of Inquiry
The Point of Inquiry podcast interviewed Michael Behe this week. Prof. Behe is a leading advocate of the 'intelligent design' movement, and Point of Inquiry really really isn't. It's great fun, and perfect for playing Spot the Logical Fallacy. Behe comes out with straw men, ad hominem attacks and false premises, as well as poisoning the well, saying things I believe to be demonstrably untrue and continually crying conspiracy. Interviewer D.J. Grothe doesn't pull any punches, although is of course polite throughout, and calls Behe on his evasions when necessary.
A particularly interesting moment comes when D.J. Grothe asks how ID-ers can criticise evolution for not providing a full and complete explanation, yet offer no mechanisms of their own. Behe's response is that everybody is trying to explain the appearance of design, so saying 'it looks designed' isn't something that needs to be backed up. This is slippery.
As I see it, the point of evolutionary theory isn't to explain why things look designed, it's to explain how they arose. That they appear designed is a side-effect, as it were, and related to the way our brains look at things (also interesting from an evolutionary standpoint). Books like 'The Blind Watchmaker' explain evolution from a basis of 'how come things look designed' as a) a response to creationists, who use this argument all the time, and b) it's a useful way of structuring an explanation. But evolution isn't there to explain the appearance of design any more than round-earth 'theory' is there to explain the appearance of a flat planet - that's just something that arises from the theory.
D.J. Grothe also asks him the obvious: isn't intelligent design just 'god of the gaps'? Behe denies this, saying ID uses what we know rather than what we don't know. But this misses the point: 'what we know' in this case is entirely based upon what they claim evolution can't explain - in other words, gaps. He doesn't address the question.
The final question is also particularly telling. Behe's latest book apparently claims malaria cannot have evolved and must have been designed. Why, he is asked, would a designer create something that kills so many innocent people? Unlike his scientific evasions, which sometimes took me a few minutes to unravel, the answer is obvious: god has a secret plan.
It's worth a listen, although it probably helps if you have a passing familiarity with intelligent design and its recent history - particularly the recent US court case in which ID had its ass handed to it by a conservative judge. Understanding the position of people you're arguing against is always a good idea, and it's cool that both sides agreed to the interview.
Free podcast of degree-level photography lectures
While looking for history of photography resources earlier today I found this site:
This podcast is recorded during class lectures for History of Photography, Photo 1105 at College of DuPage. The podcasts are intended as review for students in the class, but thousands of people around the world have found them useful to their education as photographers.
I was then mildly disappointed to discover that the podcast has a video component, which wouldn't be supported by my iPod even if it were working, and either way I wouldn't be able to listen to it while driving. About half a second later I vowed to brain myself with a saucepan at the next available opportunity: if I want audio-only explanations of topics, I should perhaps have chosen a degree less inherently visual. Doofus.
Moving on, the video podcast is actually rather impressive: you can skip through the slides using Quicktime's controls, rather than playing a guessing game with the slider, and it's synced up with the appropriate audio from the lecture. I confess I haven't watched it all yet, but it seems like a cool resource, and it's wonderful that the College of DuPage in Illinois is releasing it for free.
Astronomy Cast on Mercury
I recently started listening to the Astronomy Cast podcast1. It does a marvellous job of explaining the crazy universal physics I enjoy letting blow my mind. Dark matter, dark energy, relativity, spaghettification, black holes, the (endlessly fascinating) cosmic microwave background...it's all wonderful stuff.
But it's not all far-out frontiers of science. Sometimes it's a little more local. I recently learnt that geysers regularly explode out of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. The water is flung out into the vacuum, where it instantly crystallises and over time has formed a ring. Isn't that a beautiful image?
The title of the most recent episode was 'Mercury'. I was happy to listen while driving home from dancing, but didn't anticipate anything special. I figured I knew the most interesting Mercury facts: it's hard to see as it doesn't get far from the sun, it was a good test of general relativity versus Newtonian gravity, something about a magnetic field...Otherwise, reasonably uninteresting, as planets go.
Despite years of ingesting popular science, it apparently hasn't yet sunk in that a) I know nothing and b) everything is interesting. Mercury, unsurprisingly, is very cool:
- Ice. Radio telescopes suggest there *might* be (water-)ice in the pole craters, which lie permanently in shadow. Ice! Probably from comets.
- It's made of iron, and extremely dense. The most dense object in the solar system, in fact. This presents a problem - how did this happen? Probably it's the iron core of a once larger planet, in which case, what happened to the rest? Did something slam into it? Did a young sun blast its surface away?
- Venus is hotter than Mercury, due to the former's runaway greenhouse effect.
- At times when Mercury is visible, we always see the same face. For decades it was assumed that the planet is tidally locked - it rotates once per orbit, like the moon to the Earth, only ever showing the same face to the sun. Radio telescopes showed this isn't true: the back of the planet is incredibly hot, which shouldn't be the case. It turns out that because Mercury's orbit is particularly elliptical it's become locked into a pattern of 3 rotations per 2 orbits.
- It has a magnetic field. Weird. Magnetic fields are caused by molten cores. Mars used to have a molten core and magnetic field, but cooled. Theory suggests that, despite its proximity to the sun, Mercury should have cooled similarly. Why hasn't it? Current theories suggest that the aforementioned weird orbit pulls and pushes on the planet in such a way that its core remains molten.
- The far side of Mercury is mysterious. It's incredibly difficult to observe, but tentative low-resolution imagery has hints of a massive crater and mountain. Did Mercury get hit by something enormous enough to seriously deform its iron structure? NASA's Messenger spacecraft, en-route and scheduled for arrival in 2011, should provide answers.
There's plenty more in the show.
It's quickly become one of my must-listen podcasts, and is never less than fascinating. Large amounts of kudos and thanks to Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay for the hard work they put in - it must take some serious weekly research.
- sometimes only half of it, as my iPod is dying. Sob. [↩]
Neil Gaiman on I Should Be Writing
The wonderful Mur Lafferty managed to interview Neil Gaiman at this year's Balticon sci-fi and fantasy convention, and the resulting podcast is fascinating. She asks all the right questions regarding starting out with writing, and gets some interesting stories out of the Neverwhere / The Sandman / American Gods / Day The Saucers Came author. He also talks about how there's no such thing as writer's block, which isn't something you hear very often! It's definitely worth a listen if you're at all interested in the idea of writing, and what it means in practice.
I've listened to Mur's I Should Be Writing podcast for nearly a year, and it's always well thought-out and entertaining. However, I do think there's a possibility that she interviewed the wrong guy in this show, because there's no way Neil Gaiman sounds like that 
Surprise Call
For the last couple of months my favourite podcast has Penn Jillette's US radio show. He's the vocal half of Penn and Teller, and a raving atheist skeptic, so you can see the appeal
He's on a station that allows him to fully express his opinions - even if he can't say the name of his TV show - and he always takes advantage of this. I enjoy listening to his rants, and have had my mind changed on a few issues by listening to his normally well-constructed arguments (for some weird reason I was against 63-year-old mothers at first. I repented.)
The show I listened to today had a wonderful radio moment, which I've extracted. He's in the middle of a justified rant at the Guardian over this article, when there's a caller...I think it's better when you don't know what's coming. Here's the clip.
Ricky Gervais podcasts moving to a subscription model
Bit-Tech says that forthcoming Ricky Gervais podcasts will be released on a subscription basis, with four episodes per month costing ~£4.50. The Ricky Gervais website appears to back this up, as it's now displaying the Audible logo and offering a 'free preview'.
I admit I happily pay £0.79 for three-minute iTunes tracks. I occasionally rent DVDs at £3.85 for one night. Dancing costs me £4 / week. I very much enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast, but I can't see myself paying £4.50 a month for four half-hour shows. It may be hypocritical of me...but I just can't see it happening. It wouldn't need to be much lower, I don't think. I'd pay 79p a show without a problem. I'm not really making sense, am I. It just seems...too much.
Ricky Gervais is dangerous
The Ricky Gervais podcast should come with a health warning. Really. It's become a habit for me to listen to the latest show while driving back to the flat at night, but I don't think I can do it any more.
You see, the show is presented by Ricky and writing partner Steve Merchant, and much of it involves listening to the unique thoughts of their friend Karl. These thoughts are then justifiably ripped to shreds by the others. When I first heard the show I thought it was a little cruel, but then decided that Karl must know exactly what he's doing. Whether he actually believes what he's saying I don't know, although it doesn't sound like he's faking it. He's been on Ricky's stage show and used to produce their X-FM radio show, so I don't think there's any reason to feel bad.
The merciless attacks are very entertaining, especially when they involve topics dear to my heart like religion, evolution, pseudoscience and the paranormal. Ricky and Steve are atheists and very much men of science, and much like me they love to rip into the previous topics, but unlike me they can do it in very amusing ways. In one of the first couple of shows Ricky explained to Karl why a story involving "a cup that causes all who touch it to die" probably isn't true and would in fact require a re-writing of the laws of the universe to be true, and very entertaining it was.
Tonight, though, was show #4 of 12. Somebody wrote in and asked Karl which superpower he would have, given the choice. After some discussion, Karl decided that he wouldn't want a superpower, because superheroes were never happy. He used examples of The Hulk, Spiderman and Superman. Superman, he explained, always wanted to tell Lewis about his secret identity, but never could. At this point Ricky and Steve broke in, questioned the identity of 'Lewis', then decided he was clearly Superman's secret pen-pal, and they acted out a little scene.
I nearly died.
If something unexpected had happened on the road as I was in hysterics, I doubt I'd have been able to respond very quickly. Don't ask me why I found it so funny: I just did. I implore you to listen to the show, just not while driving.
A Christmas Carol Podcast
Penguin books are releasing A Christmas Carol as a free podcast download, read by Geoffrey Palmer who's best known to UK readers as the guy from As Time Goes By1. That's a really great idea. As mentioned by the BBC and Boing Boing, amongst others.
There are countless versions of A Christmas Carol - what's your favourite? Personally I adore A Muppet Christmas Carol - "this is my island in the sun!"
- two new episodes of which are being broadcast this christmas [↩]
Live 8: Podcasts
Lil and I recorded one very brief podcast before the show:
I recorded clips of two sets, when the crowd was singing:
Live 8 Podcast #2 - UB40
Live 8 Podcast #2 - Scissor Sisters
Finally, if you've ever wondered what it sounds like to be surrounded by 150,000 people singing 'Angels' as loud as they can, here's your answer. I recorded all of Robbie's set - I figure the Live 8 people won't mind me putting it here as it's in stunning 8-bit, 8khz sound. I'm afraid you can on occasion hear me singing (argh) but it's not me doing all the yelling
wongaCast #2
wongaCast #2 is up and available. If I actually do many more of these then I'll make a proper RSS feed with enclosures so you can have iPodder or similar download them automatically.
Show Notes:
Make Magazine Podcasts
Rocketboom.com
Tazer tagging
Adam Curry
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
