Carnival of the Africans #5

The 5th, and so far the best, edition of the Carnival of the Africans is out at 01 and the Universe. My picks: Prometheus Unbound on what we should tell our children, other things amanzi on the shockingly poor quality of Russian-trained African doctors, Psychohistorian on some silly astrology in South Africa, and Retroid Raving on (yet another) shake-up at South Africa's main research funding organization.

Angela of The Skeptic Detective is hosting the next edition of the carnival on January 28th. If you're an African science blogger, or have blogged about African science issues, please check out the guidelines and consider participating!

Oh, we also need hosts for future editions, if you'd like to volunteer, please send me an email...

Afrikaner theocratic totalitarianism

My uncle, a pastor in the Reformed Church in Johannesburg, told me today about a batshit crazy and seemingly growing movement among Christian Afrikaners: the Ezra Movement. (Note: the website is in Afrikaans, although there are several English documents available if you click on "Esra Verslag" at left). The mission of the movement is "To contribute to the reformation of family, church and civil government in South Africa, through education in, and defence of, the Biblico-Christian worldview in every sphere of life and thought" (my translation). Their basic doctrine is theonomy, the belief that the Bible, literally interpreted, is the only souce of human ethics. As a consequence, these guys quite literally and unselfconsciously advocate religious totalitarianism. The following, from "Covenant and State" (English pdf) by University of Free State law professor Andries Raath (pdf), is particularly hair-raising:

The State is instituted by God to exercise His wrath upon evildoers, and to praise and protect those who live righteously. We see that the State is called upon to administer righteousness in society. (p. 43)

According to Raath, then, the South African constitution should be set aside, its liberal freedoms severely curtailed, and the government should "demand obedience to both tables of the
Ten Commandments" (p. 52). Chillingly, Raath goes on to say that he "rejects the ridiculous idea of the right to life, according to which the right to life for evildoers is guaranteed" (p. 57) and thus apparently advocates the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, witchcraft, adultery... As I said. Batshit. Crazy.

Incidentally, an unprovable but highly plausible argument I've heard a couple of times is that the divergence between Dutch Calvinism (which became far more liberal over time) and Afrikaner Calvinism (which until recently did not) is due to the Enlightenment. Holland, of course, has long been an important intellectual center, and Dutch culture was thus strongly influenced by the Enlightenment. South Africa, on the other hand, was isolated from these developments and could thus not benefit from them. The result? The enormous difference between South Africa's shameful, intolerant and illiberal political and cultural history and Holland's mostly tolerant and liberal political history. Of course... this claim is untestable and speculative and, given that I'm a fan of the Enlightenment, I could be suffering from confirmation bias. But, it's certainly interesting and plausible.

TED 2009

As most of my regular readers will know, I'm a huge fan of the yearly TED conference so it should come as no surprise that I was unreasonably excited about the release of the TED 2009 speaker schedule (also have a look at the program guide). The theme for this coming year's conference is "The Great Unveiling" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and there are some awesome speakers scheduled: Bill Gates (you know, the Microsoft guy), Tim Berners-Lee (a key figure in the rise of the web), Jill Tarter (the SETI astronomer), Mary Roach (author of Bonk and other cool sciency books), Dan Ariely (the noted behavioral economist and Ig Nobel Laurette) and Alex Tabarrok (the economist and Marginal Revolution co-author).

I can hardly wait. Srsly.

(Via the TED Blog)

Fun with RSS

Thanks to fellow SA science blogger Orion Spur, I found myself perusing RealWriteWeb's 100 Best Products of 2008 (a fantastic resource), and there came upon their list of the Top 10 RSS Syndication Products of the year. It's via the latter that I discovered PostRank, perhaps the most useful RSS tool since the invention of Google Reader... So why do I like it so much? Well, say you subscribe to a high-volume but intermittently interesting feed. That is, you're subscribed to a blog that's very good but gets updated very regularly -- a bit too regularly. Traditionally, in such a case, you basically had two options: unsubscribe and miss out on the good stuff or wade through tons of not necessarily interesting posts in order to get to the good stuff.

PostRank, bless it, adds a third option... Using a PageRank-esque algorithm (that takes account of the number of comments, Diggs, inbound links, del.ico.us saves and so on) PostRank gives a feed's individual posts a score of between 1 and 10, and these rankings in turn allows filtering for quality. So, for example, I love Phyrangula but I can handle only so many three-line posts about some random US politician defending creationism (or whatever). So all I have to do is add Phyrangula's feed to PostRank, specify that I only want to see "Great" posts (i.e. those with a PostRank score higher than 6), and then subscribe to the custom feed that gets generated, using my customary feed reader. The result? No to Jolly Squidmas wishes, but yes to the conversion of a prominent atheist blogger to Christianity. Best of all, there are two helpful Firefox addons that works with the service: a feed manager that makes handling all those RSS's simple, and AideRSS Google Reader integration that improves Google Reader with various PostRank tools.

Of course, the filtering is only as good as the algorithm, but so far I'm very impressed with the results. Obviously, also, there are a bunch of other ways PostRank is useful; I've only focused on the filtering because I'm so keen to reduce my RSS reading duties...

DNA & Dating

I blogged back in January about ScientificMatch, a dating service that, perhaps rather unromantically, matches people based on their genes. I see New Scientist magazine has caught on, and has published a great article about this rather odd development. The author of the piece, Linda Geddes, summarizes the scientific rationale for the service, delves into several of the criticisms thereof and, most interestingly, subjects herself and her fiancée to the testing. Good stuff indeed.

My bottom line, for what it's worth, is that it's plausible to think this kind of genetic matching is an improvement over sheer chance, but I doubt very much it'll be superior to our evolved sexual psychology. (Although I do suspect it'll in general predict compatibility better than questionnaire-based online matching services). So, if you're wealthy and lonely, give it a try... otherwise, stick to the singles bars.

Joburg skeptics in the pub

I'm up in Johannesburg for the holidays and it seems my timing is perfect: I'll get to attend the 2nd Joburg Skeptics in the Pub. The details: we're meeting on January 5th at 18:30 at Tony's Bar in the Malanshof shopping center (click for map) in Randburg.

If you're anywhere in the area, drop in... I have no doubt it'll be a great deal of fun.

Èncephalon 61

The 61st edition of Encephalon is out at Sharp Brains. My picks: Mind Hacks on how medical jargon affects our understanding of disease, The Neuroskeptic on 'non-material neuroscience' (aka Egnor vs. Novella), Cognitive Daily on men's faces as angry faces, and Neurophilosophy on reconstructing visual images from brain activity.

Participate in an experiment...

My favorite psychologist Richard Wiseman has teamed up with New Scientist magazine to conduct an interesting looking mass psychology experiment. Participating is simple: you fill in a brief questionnaire and then email in a portrait photograph of yourself. Allegedly, the aim of the experiment is to investigate the relationship between personality and appearance and somehow merging the photos together will aid this endeavor. I, for one, don't buy this for a second: my guess is deception is afoot and that they'll simply throw away most of the answers to the questionnaire and then use the photographs to replicate the finding that average faces are usually judged to be more attractive than almost any individual's face. Whatever the case may be, participate, it'll be fun...

Oh, and I see Wiseman appears on this week's edition of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast. I haven't heard the interview yet, but I'm sure it'll be worth a listen.