Fire and Knowledge

For all you web developers, Luke Wroblewski’s “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is an excellent primer on getting people to use your service without a sign-in form hitting them first.

Our national cuisine seems to be food without obvious biological origins.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), pp. 154.

Seth Godin on why restaurants can’t have a bad table. Excerpt:

No one wants to settle for the bad table, your worst salesperson, your second-rate items. Not the new customers and not the loyal ones…

Which means you need to figure out how to improve your lesser offerings. Maybe the table in the worst location comes with a special menu or a special wine list or even a visit from the chef. Maybe the worst table, for some people, becomes the best table because of the way you treat people when they sit there…

Treat different people differently. But don’t treat anyone worse.

The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited Jews from owning land or embarking on civil or military careers)…. After this incredible dogma had been established, by mere reiteration, to the satisfaction of everyone, Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the ends of heretics of Jews. (One might wonder why eating the body of Jesus would be any less of a torment to him.) Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 99-100.

PZ Myers recounts how he tried to attend a showing of Expelled, the intelligent design movie that tricked him into an interview. The security guards were alerted to not let him in, so when he arrived with his family they asked him to leave or be arrested. Then he was told that he was not allowed to be even on the premises. But here is the sweet irony:

While forbidding PZ Myers, they inadvertently let Richard Dawkins in.

(See also Salon and Dawkins’s movie review.)

I’ve written a short post on charity: water on the DG Blog.

Not every branch of science can foretell the future—paleontology can’t—but many can and with stunning accuracy. If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you’ll do much better with scientists. They will tell you where on Earth to stand, when you have to be there, and whether it will be a partial eclipse, a total eclipse, or an annular eclipse. They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance.

You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anemia, or you can take vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you’re interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want (left-right, a boy; forward-back, a girl—or maybe it’s the other way around), but they’ll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy (here, 99 percent accuracy), try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? There isn’t a religion on the planet that doesn’t long for a comparable ability—precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed skeptics—to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close.

Is this worshipping at the altar of science? Is this replacing one faith by another, equally arbitrary? In my view, not at all. The directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its use. If something else worked better, I would advocate something else.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 30.

Why would any woman who would refuse, properly, to take the marital vow of obedience (on the ground, presumably, that subservience to a mere human being is beneath human dignity) then regard as “liberating” a job that puts her under the authority of a boss (man or woman) whose authority specifically requires and expects obedience?

—Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 183.