Bad porn science

I hate bad science. What I really hate is someone using a thin patina of scienceyness to push some sort of political agenda. That's when people either cherry-pick data to support their position, or produce some ideological-driven "study." John Bambenek did that a few months ago, when he tried (and failed) to produce studies that showed sex caused depression in girls. Two of the studies directly contradicted in their text the very conclusion he was drawing, and the third wasn't even a credible study. I suspect Bambenek has not changed his position on this matter, showing it is ideologically driven and not rational.

Recently, a study is being flogged around by the press about internet porn addiction. Porn addiction is apparently about to destroy society. The study was run by Christianet.com, which claims to be the "most-visited Christian website in the world." The addiction results have been reported by mainstream news sites (here, here, and here) and Christian news sites (e.g. here, here, and here). Gay bloggers have also picked it up; both Pam's House Blend and Wayne Besen have commented on it.

Here's what the study says:

The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to pornography," said Clay Jones, founder and President of Second Glance Ministries whose ministry objectives include providing people with information which will enable them to fully understand the impact of today's societal issues. 60% of the women who answered the survey admitted to having significant struggles with lust; 40% admitted to being involved in sexual sin in the past year; and 20% of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

Fifty percent of men are addicted to porn? Not just that they look at it, but they're actually addicted to it? That's an absolutely ridiculous statistic. If I told you that half of all men were addicted to heroin, you'd look at me with a "What you talking about, Willis?" look on your face. It's absurd on the face of it. What pisses me off is that this statistic is being reported without even a shred of skepticism.

So I thought that maybe the press was picking this up and making more of it than it really was or just flat-out misunderstanding it, as reporters often do with anything having to do with science. So I went looking for this study. What did I find? Crickets chirping. Nothing.

First, I went to Christianet.com. This place hardly qualifies as a website at all. It's an Internet portal. How very 1998. It's mostly a collection of links to things like "Christian Home Loans" and "Meet Christian Singles." Their Blogs section is a hoot, too. Each blog entry consists of roughly two lines of text, plus a link to some other section of their site and an offer to send an e-card.

It turns out that this thing everyone is citing is an internet poll, not any sort of study. There's no information about what questions were asked, how people responded, or even what qualifies as internet port "addiction." I have the suspicion that the people running this poll would consider Michelangelo's David to be Renaissance porn.

I tried to find more information about the poll on their website. Not only isn't there any mention of it on the Christianet website that I can find, there's no contact information for anyone at Christianet. Absolutely zero. No email address, no "Contact us" page. I wrote the admin in the WHOIS entry, but no response.

What's almost worse than this thing getting this level of attention is that it's being looked at with complete credulity. Even though it concluded that half of all men have this addiction, no one even batted an eye. In fact, people mostly just seemed to find it amusing that Christian evangelicals were caught in a bit of hypocrisy. The Stuff article called them "porn-again Christians." (OK, I admit I got a laugh out of that.)

This is how things get caught up in our collective consciousness. Someone reads about this poll in a news article on some website, but no one ever looks up the details. It gets generally accepted as true, even though it's just propaganda from one small group with an axe to grind.

Things that make you go, "Who cares?"

I've been working a bit on a Big Important Blog Post in my head for the past couple of days. Tonight I decided to make Indian food, so you get this, instead.

Over On Matt's Planet, a commenter mentioned that he hadn't heard of Paris Hilton for a couple of months. Other commenters asked how recently he arrived on Earth.

So here's my question: is the constant media fixation on Hilton driven by the fact that people watch the news when she is on it, or is it that people watch the news when she is on it because the media is fixated on her? Discuss.

On a related note, the photographer that took the iconic picture of Paris weeping in the car as she was driven off to jail also took another famous picture exactly 35 years ago. You gotta feel for that poor photographer.

A couple of gaming notes

I'm not trying to move in on Billy's turf, but there are a couple of gaming related notes I thought I would share.

First, Blizzard has announced Starcraft II. If you haven't played the original Starcraft and it's expansion Brood War yet, you really are missing out. Starcraft really is one of the juggernauts of gaming history. Not only does it have really great RTS gameplay, but it has an entertaining plot and characters. The multiplayer action is supposed to be real good as well, but I've never used that.

As part of the announcement, Blizzard has released several movies for Starcraft II. There is a cinematic movie and a gameplay movie. The cinematic is just visually very impressive; there were times when I honestly was unable to tell if it was animation or live-action. It doesn't have a lot of content, though. The gameplay movie shows off the new game engine, and some of the units that will be in the game. Again, it just looks stunning (get the 500 MB high-res movie) and they seem to be putting a lot of effort into balancing the units very well.

All the movies are distributed through BitTorrent through a small BT client dedicated to downloading just that file. Blizzard also distributes it's World of Warcraft patches the same way. This, combined with their the Easter eggs they like to include and their new in-game anti-spam feature, has led me to believe that Blizzard Gets It^TM. If there is a better way of distributing multi-hundred-megabyte files to thousands of people across the Internet, I don't know it.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, Blizzard also released patch 2.1.0. They actually made a cinematic movie to advertise a game patch, which I find stunning. (To be fair, the patch included quite a bit of new content along with the usual fixes.) Making these things can't be cheap, and that they will go to that extent shows, I think, just how big a deal WOW is.

Oh, for those that care, Starcraft II and WOW are available for both the PC and the Mac.

Our what media?

Driving across the country, I've learned that listening to the radio is, not surprisingly, a good way to make the time pass. Music is OK, but what really makes the miles go by is listening to news and talk radio. There also seem to be roughly two kinds of radio stations.

It seems that non-music radio can be divided into two types. Listening to the first type of radio station, I learned:

• about the first post-Taliban beauty school in Afghanistan and how it was teaching women a skill they can use to support their families
• how a musician is using his music to teach the current generation about their unique ethnic group, descended from shipwrecked African slaves and local Indians
• about an Army chaplain, how he is working to help re-integrate soldiers and veterans into civilian society, and how combat can damage a soldier's spirit and soul (on Speaking of Faith)

On the other type of radio, I learned:

• how FOX News is mainstream; CNN is "liberal"
• CNN and Law and Order are pro-homosexual; these three guys had a real thing for L&O, mentioning it at least three times in the space of fifteen minutes
• that, when Rosie O'Donnell says the silly things she does, it's because she "hates America" (Bill O'Reilly)
• that the New York Times editors want completely unchecked immigration in order to destroy the white, male, Christian power structure (again, Bill O'Reilly)
• how Catholics are not "real Christians"
• how the ACLJ is running a petition to get Congress not to pass a stem cell bill that would allow the "killing of babies"
• that adult stem cells are far more useful than embryonic stem cells (no mention of the fact that research on adult SCs has been going on for more than three times longer than embryonic SCs).
• that the ACLU plans plan to eliminate and outlaw Christianity in this country

We are constantly told that one of these types of media outlets is "biased." Determining which of these is biased is an activity I will leave up to the reader.

(By the way, I self-censored and didn't even put the real kooks into the second group. These were the mainstream stations. For some of the real right-wing nuts, check out the Republic Broadcasting Network.)

Some weekend snark...

From Living the Scientific Life:

To Be a Good Republican, You Must Believe ...

• Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
• Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
• Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
• Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

Another American jihadist

Another Muslim extremist was arrested today for planning a terrorist attack in the United States. Shockingly, the attack was to take place at a funeral.

OK, it wasn't a Muslim. It was actually a white Christian good-ol'-boy.

A first-year Liberty University student was arrested in what police said was a plot to detonate explosive devices Tuesday, the day of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's funeral.

Liberty University is the college-like institution Falwell founded to proved impressionable young adults what they think is a college education. It teaches creationism, geocentrism, and denies the existence of gravity. I'm just kidding about those last two. That would be nutty.

"Extremist" and "terrorist" are not how the press will describe this guy, I wager.

Fantastic Firefox plugins

Sorry, I just couldn't find a way to make that title alliterative.

Anyway, I just came across two new great Firefox plugins that I'd never heard of before. So I thought I'd make a post about what I use. If anyone else knows of useful plugins, I'd love to know what they are.

• Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater: Make banner ads a thing of the past.
• All-in-one Gestures: This is such a simple idea, yet so incredibly useful. Control Firefox just by using the mouse.
• Copy Plain Text: One of my pet peeves is that cutting-and-pasting from Firefox pastes rich text, with all the text formatting and links retained. This cuts and pastes from Firefox just as plain text.
• Download Statusbar: Creates a status bar for downloads in progress, rather than a pop-up window.
• Yet Another Window Resizer: If you ever create webpages, it's important to know how they will look on screen resolutions other than yours. This makes changing the window size a snap.

The stuff nightmares are made of

You know how, when you're out running errands or something, you're in the middle of the store, and it occurs to you, "Wait. Did I remember to put on pants this morning?" And then you actually have to stop and check? Does that happen to everyone, or just me?

I blame his deathstyle

Warning: There are what may be dangerously high levels of insensitivity in this post.

The Lord struck down Jerry Falwell today. Falwell had a tendency to blame the misfortune in people's lives for either their sin or the sins of those around them. So one wonders what Falwell did to bring about the wrath of the Almighty.

Perhaps I take his words a bit personally. But he accused me being the cause of the terrorist attacks five years ago. He pointed his finger in my face and said I helped 9/11 happen. So yes, I take that personally. As of last week, he was still claiming it, even after his so called "apology".

I take no particular pleasure in his death, but I do not mourn him. I am sorry for what his family is going for and, frankly, hope none of them ever read this.

But he was an odious man with vile beliefs who said repugnant things. The world is better off without him.

What if they gave a terrorist attack and no one came?

Remember a couple of months ago, when an ill-advised marketing campaign left strange electrical devices around Boston, causing local authorities to think they could have been bombs? It made the news for days. This week's arrest of five men accused of planning to attack Fort Dix has similarly garnered a great deal of attention, even though the men had not even started planning any attack.

Would it come as a surprise to you if I'd told you there had been an actual terrorist attack in the US two weeks ago? Doesn't it seem odd that this has barely made a blip on the news? This wasn't an theoretical attack in the pre-planning stages, this was an actual bomb, placed where it would kill many civilians, with shrapnel added to maximize casualties. The bomb squad had to detonate it in place.

I suspect it was because the alleged bomber wasn't a swarthy Muslim immigrant, but a white Christian man. I certainly hope it was not because the target of his wrath was a family planning clinic and thus his near-victims were somehow less "innocent."

This isn't the only case. While the Fort Dix arrests have been plastered all over the news, this case of a group of men allegedly planning a machine gun attack also hasn't been widely publicized. They had fabricated about 200 explosive devices.

David Niewert over at Orcinus writes:

Of course, acknowledging that this is the case would require a major readjustment of the media's constructed narrative about the "war on terror." So it continues to turn a blind eye, and in the process it profoundly misinforms the public.

And yet Ann Coulter still gets to complain about terrorists being "ragheads."

More reading:

• http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/05/other-kind-of-terror.html
• http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10638.html
• http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/04/27/the-terrorism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

Go peddle crazy somewhere else

I don't understand the level of credulity among the American people. It seems like every ten years or so, some event of national significance always gets credited to a vast, evil conspiracy. The Moon landing was a hoax, the government killed Kennedy, the CIA created HIV to kill black people. These days, it's all about 9/11 and how it wasn't really perpetuated by Al Queso, but rather by the government, or the CIA, or the Jews. Some say the Towers weren't brought down by planes at all, but by by missiles protected with hologram generators.

Yesterday, Washington Journal had Charles Allen, a (the?) Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence on. (The program is here, and you'll have to scroll down to the correct link; sorry, no permalinks. He starts about 2:00 into the full program, the first call is about 4 minutes in.) I just happened to come across this by chance. He seems fairly reasonable on the investigation of terror groups and talked a bit on how and why people become extremists. One caller asked about the search policies of container vessels, which is a legitimate issue and something we should be having a discussion about.

Allen talked briefly, then the show took about a dozen calls. It must have been Crazy Person Day, because the very first caller, a grandmotherly-sounding woman from Virginia, wanted to know why no one follows up the "Zionist connection" to 9/11, how they were "dancing on top of their cars" as the buildings fell, and how they had cased the buildings to plant explosives.

It was also two-for-one Crazy Person Day. A later caller from Las Vegas claimed the 9/11 attacks were a "false flag operation" in order to goad the US into war. This is the bit of what he said that steamed my broccoli:

Why don't you address what a lot of the people of the country think, that this is an inside job and your investigation, the 9/11 investigation, did investigate up to the point that the building was hit, but how did the building come down because physically, a lot of physicists says it's impossible, your pancake theory doesn't work, it was a free fall, that's a demolition job.

First of all, I'd like to meet these physicists that say a building collapsing is "impossible." Secondly, how do these people thing demolition works? You collapse some of the supporting beams and let the building fall down under the force of gravity. The planes hit WTC1 and WTC2 at about the 95th floor and the 80th floor, respectively. That means that once supporting beams gave way, the equivalent of either a 15- or 30-story building was dropped onto the rest of the tower. It would have been miraculous if the buildings didn't collapse after that.

Last week, a California highway collapsed after a tanker truck caught fire under it. The construction of the highway was probably mostly concrete and steel, much like the Towers. A picture is here, pretty impressive stuff. The tanker truck was carrying a lousy 8000 gallons. Each plane that hit the WTC was carrying the equivalent about one and a quarter tanker trucks full of fuel. Is it really such a stretch that that could have catastrophically damaged the building?

About one in six Americans believe the Towers were brought down by explosives, rather than by the planes. More than one in three believes the US was either complicit in the attacks or knew about them and did nothing. All without any evidence or explanation. Those are numbers I find very frightening.

Game designers having fun

I play a lot of computer games (too many?). One thing I like to see in a game is a sign that the game designers enjoyed themselves when making it. Jokes, meta-comments, amusing little subtleties all contribute to the atmosphere of a game. They probably also contribute to the quality. I figure a team that's comfortable enough and creative enough to put little tidbits like that into a game is in a situation where they will design a better product.

For example, Might and Magic VI has a setting typical of fantasy games. Throughout the game, however, the player explores ancient ruins and environments that show highly advanced technology. One temple requires the player to collect words of power from long-dead inhabitants of the temple: the captain, first mate, navigator, communicator, engineer, and doctor. It turns out these are all the names of Star Trek characters spelled backwards. In another part of the game, the player meets a character shunned by the rest of her village because her cat smells very bad.

Right now, I'm playing World of Warcraft (yes, I'm an unimaginably huge geek). A few Sundays ago, on Easter, I kept running across brightly colored objects. What they are should be pretty obvious:

If only a conservative pundit had been at Virginia Tech

Last time, I mentioned how Sean Hannity had been complaining in his radio show about how "liberals" were politicizing the Virgina Tech shooting. His sole example was something Rosie O'Donnell said on The View. Since then, conservative pundits have blamed the shooting on gun control, atheism, secularism, "Paki" Muslims, gays, universities "coddling" students, video games, and even vaccines. Yet, somehow, this is all the liberals fault. I've been wanting to write about what one conservative said about the massacre for a while, but every time I think about it, it just makes me so damn mad, so I've put it off.

The fact is, I haven't really heard much from liberals about the causes of this shooting. A discussion of gun control vs. concealed-carry-type laws might even be reasonable at this point. (Frankly, I think both arguments are flawed, but that's neither here nor there.) The outcry about the underlying causes, usually having to do with some value or another not being sufficiently important in modern America, seems to be coming mainly from the Right.

The worse of these was John Derbyshire, writing this in National Review Online:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

The level of insensitivity in this is just stunning. Derbyshire wrote this on April 17th, the very day after the shooting. He wrote it with perfect hindsight, complete knowledge of what had happened that day at the school, and probably a nice hot cup of coffee next to his laptop.

I've been in a lot of university engineering classes. How to disarm an gunman with hand-to-hand combat was not something we covered. Nor did we ever discuss how to tell a Walther P22 from a Glock 19. We didn't even discuss how to tell if the Glock was using the standard 15-round magazine, or if it was using one of the optional 15-, 17-, or 33- round magazines, all while a crazed gunman was shooting at you through a crowd of people. Maybe this explains why I'm not an employee of National Review Online. Hell I'm probably one of those wimps that would actually be upset by the fact that I'd just been shot with one of those lousy .22 caliber bullets.

Oh, but it gets worse. The next day, Mark Steyn blogged in National Review Online, saying this about the victims:

They’re not "children." The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men.

You see, the reason these college students were killed was the fact that they just weren't masculine enough. Had this happened in the 1950s, I suppose, the gunman would have quickly been tackled by muscled, football-playing, corn-fed, Midwestern men. But these students? Pussies, every one of them.

He also makes a cheap shot referencing Monica Lewinsky. For conservatives, everything is about the Clenis.

This Republican fixation on masculinity isn't anything new. It's the standard fare of those that tell us we live in a society with crumbling morals, depraved values, and the wrong kinds of religion. If we just buy their current book, it will tell us all about what's wrong with the country.

Just a few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald wrote about something very similar in "The right-wing cult of contrived masculinity":

[The conservative movement] is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archtypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

This really is no different from how Derbyshire wrote about how much more of a hero he would have been in the Virginia Tech situation, had he been there.

Politicizing tragedy

I was driving back from my interview (more on that later) this afternoon, when I came across Sean Hannity's radio show. This show, like most of the news over the past couple of days involved the shootings at Virginia Tech. Hannity was ranting about the about how "liberals," the "pundit class" (presumably liberal pundits), and "reporters" (we all know how liberal they are) are politicizing the tragedy of the shooting to make political hay. The sole basis for his rant was the fact that Rosie O'Donnell spoke about gun control on The View this morning. Hannity gave no other example of the liberals politicizing this issue.

Rosie is indeed a kook. She's said numerous nutty things over the years. She's even a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. But she's one host out of four on a weekday morning gossip show, for crying out loud. She's hardly the spokesdyke for the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

The ironic part is that I originally intended this blog post to be about the fact that both President Bush and John McCain couldn't even comment on the Virginia Tech tragedy without mentioning their support for gun rights. Hannity did the same in his rant.

Shortly before listening to Hannity and having to turn it off in disgust, I had been in Southern IL listening to Scott Doody on The Working Man Show. This gun nut kept saying that even though we give the government 50% of every dollar we earn, "we can't rely on the government to keep us safe." That's a fairly standard conservative, gun-rights talking point. (Hint: if you're paying 50% of your income in taxes, there's probably a deduction or fifty you're not taking advantage of.)

This guy kept ranting about the cops in Virginia and how they were "fat" and "lazy" and "incompetent" and stood outside the building for twenty minutes while the shooter rampaged inside. He went on about how, had he been there, he would have charged in guns blazing. This nut then goes on to suggest this whole incident wouldn't have happened if there had been a concealed carry law to allow students to wear firearms to class.

What a fucking idiot.

I had been listening to The Diane Rehm Show earlier, and she had an hour-long interview with three people who actually knew what they were talking about, including Susan Riseling, the chief of police for the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Riseling says that the police went to an "active shooter protocol," meaning the first four law enforcement officers, regardless of jurisdiction or agency form a diamond and storm the building. She said they came to the exterior doors and found them chained shut, but that stopped them for less than 60 seconds. Law enforcement (I'm not sure if they were campus or city police) were inside Norris Hall while the shooting was going on.

I'd also like to point out that it was only on NPR where I heard any mention of the victims of this shooting. They had several profiles on the students, professors, and resident associates that were killed during this, describing who they were and putting a "face" to this tragedy. I don't think I heard the name from a single victim from any other news outlet all day. SRN News, which seems to be the radio news source used by most conservative radio stations and self-describes as "Christian radio's definitive source for news," didn't mention the victims, except to point out that two were members of Campus Crusade for Christ, and that Virginia Tech has a strong CCC presence.

So, please, don't tell me that it's the liberals that are politicizing this event and how it's the conservatives that just want to grieve and heal.

Crappy scientists, take one

From Replace the Lies with Truth and Kevin's Space, I see that Paul Cameron has a new "study" out proving how the evil homosexual agenda exaggerates the numbers of gays in society and how they tend to die young. This is already being touted by Christian media and has been cited by Porno Pete's Americans for Truthiness Truth about Homsexuality. The study is crap. I'm no sociologist and even I can drive a truck through their methodology.

I want to point out here how Cameron and his son are co-opting the scientific process to give their study a veneer of validity it doesn't really deserve. Let me point out that my background is in the physical sciences, so my observations are based on that. Things may be a bit different in the sociological realm, but I doubt by much.

The noise being made by the Cameron about their study, mostly being made via press release, is in regards to "Federal Distortion of The Homosexual Footprint," a poster they presented at the 2007 convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. Their conclusion was that there are fewer gay men and lesbians over 60 that self-identify as gay, therefore they die young.

At a scientific conference there are generally three tiers of events: invited talks, regular talks, and posters. Invited talks are a fairly big deal. They're given by respected scientists, they're fairly long (usually about an hour), and there are relatively few of them. They're the most prestigious. Regular talks are given by scientists and grad students. They're shorter, perhaps fifteen minutes with five minutes for questions, so there are about five times as many of these as the invited talks. They're the bread-and-butter of scientific conferences. Now, sometimes, the authors of regular talks are asked to write their presentation up into a paper, and these are published in a proceedings. Proceedings can be cited by someone else in a scientific paper, but they're not considered good citations, because they haven't undergone peer review and are not generally as high quality as a real paper.

Posters are the lowest tier at a conference. Basically, you put your poster up in a room of about fifty other posters and stand in front of it. People walk around the room looking at posters, possibly asking questions about them. Often, poster sessions include food subsidized by a company, because otherwise, people wouldn't show up. These are invariably done by graduate students; I've never heard of anyone else presenting a poster. They're not peer-reviewed and, most of all, they're not documented or published anywhere. There's barely any evidence that the Camerons even presented this poster, let alone what it said or if anyone paid attention to it.

Here is how the press release is touting Cameron's credentials:

Paul Cameron, a reviewer for the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the Postgraduate Medical Journal...

The fact that Cameron is a reviewer for these journals means nothing. It's about as prestigious as saying he's a dues-paying member of a psychological organization (which he may not be, since he's been kicked out of two of them).

The way that peer review works is that a scientist submits a paper to a journal. The editor of that journal sends the paper to two or three other people to look it over and critique it. If there are any major flaws, errors, or inconsistencies, the reviewer sends comments back to the editor, who forwards them back to the original scientist. He can then revise the paper, or respond to the commenter. Once the comments have been addressed to the satisfaction of the reviewers, the paper is them published. (I imagine this is very field-specific. Again, this is only in my experience.) Editors are usually fairly indiscriminate about who they ask to review a paper.

So the fact that Cameron's press release lists among his credentials the fact that he is a reviewer for these journals says more about his lack of esteem in the scientific community than anything.

What a great way to start the week

So it turns out that the water company didn't actually do their scheduled repair on Friday. Unfortunately, they didn't tell anyone that. So Monday, just as I'm leaving for work, the water pressure just goes out. Great. They also didn't warn anyone that they would be turning off the water. So not only was I avoiding using my water supply for half the weekend, I got to do it all over again at the beginning of the week, but without having laid in a supply of clean water. Thanks, guys.

Leave me behind, you go on ahead

Billy has started Softcore Gamer, reviewing computer games for the casual gamer. Sort of in that line, I was going to actually pick up and play Left Behind: Eternal Forces, to see if it really and truly was as awful as all the reviews said it was. The game was released about six months ago, and has been almost universally panned, so I figured I'd be able to pick up a copy fairly cheap.

I was wrong. Not only is the game still retailing for around $40, used copies are still going for about $25 on eBay. Much as I wish to keep you well-informed, Gentle Reader, I don't like you that much.

Most of the non-gameplay objections to the title center around the fact that the game, which takes place post-Rapture, involves either converting neutral characters to Evangelical Christianity or killing them. So it's a choice of my way or eternal damnation. Good. Evil. Black. White. There are no shades of gray. Just like in the real world, kids!

Even if I could find a copy of the game cheap, I'd now be reluctant to install it. It turns out that the game comes enabled with spyware. Eeeew. The game displays in-game advertisements for EBGames, GameStop, the Ad Council, and other businesses and organizations. These can be updated by the software online, and it also uploads viewing information and God knows what else.

Just to give you an example of the sort of philosophy that this game espouses, the neutral characters in the game that the player can recruit come in both male and female versions. The male version can be pretty much any character type: doctor, disciple, manly strapping construction worker, etc. Female neutrals can be: musicians and nurses. That's it. Nurses, seriously? One wonders what these women are even doing outside the kitchen. (Note: The game's Wikipedia page says otherwise, but I've found two reviewers, PC Gamer and Ars Technica, that both make a note of it.)

So you'll have to excuse me, but I'm going to leave this game behind.

A great start to the weekend

Some utility or another has been doing quite a bit of work outside my apartment. There were those little flags laid out for a while, as well as some recent spray paint on the ground. Then there were strange holes dug around the yard. Then yesterday, I got a notice saying that the water company had to shut the water off for a few hours to fix a leak. So I'm under a boil order until 9 p.m. tonight. Great, what a lot of fun.

The Darwin robot

Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting much lately. I have a few things rolling around in my head and I'll get around to putting them online when I can. Or when I feel like it. Here's something to keep you entertained in the meantime. It's programmed in LabVIEW, too.

Why do I know more about the Bible than him?

This charming letter appeared in the News-Gazette this Wednesday.

I do not understand why Schmeling thinks that he should be a priest. Apparently, he does not read the Bible. If he did, he would know the following: God said, "Ye shall be holy; for I am holy." The apostle Paul said, "What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." Because Schmeling lives an unrighteous life, he should not be a priest.

Moreover, God demonstrated in the Bible that he does not like homosexuality. He destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of it. Ironically, the definition of the word sodomy described the same homosexual behaviors that had happened inside of Sodom. Homosexuals had polluted these cities so badly with their homosexuality that God only found three righteous people whom he could save from destruction.

Homosexuals want to use the powers of religious offices to pollute churches. Homosexuality being accepted in today's society is important to homosexuals. If homosexuals can use these powers to get society to accept homosexuality, they certainly will.

No matter how homosexuals interpret the scriptures for the homosexual movement, they cannot change how God feels about homosexuality. In the end, he will demonstrate to them how he feels.

Paul Hayes
Urbana

What is it with self-righteous Christians and the hating of the queers? It seems to be all they focus on these days. From passing Constitutional amendments, to firing journalism teachers that publish a student's letter in the school newspaper calling for an end to gay bullying, it's a wonder these Christians still have time to feed and clothe the poor.

Even I know that the story of Sodom is generally viewed by Biblical scholars to be a condemnation of the inhospitality showed by the city dwellers toward the strangers in their midst. Hospitality was of vital importance to many of these ancient cultures. The Greeks were especially aware of it, since their gods regularly traveled in human form; offending a stranger could get you the wrath of Zeus. The ancient Middle East was no different.

Frankly, Mr. Hayes, I might give your beliefs some credulity when San Francisco is destroyed by a rain of fire and sulfur. Until then, you're full of crap.