The spooky facts about the sun and moon

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Nicholas Gruen

Here’s a picture of the moon and the sun juxtaposed. They cycle between being the same size in our heavens and being a bit bigger or smaller than each other. It’s spooky. Just the right size to deliver a total eclipse, or an annular one, depending on how they are feeling at the time. A proof of the existence of God if ever there was one. (Now for an explanation of cystic fibrosis). See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.

To make this picture, the Full Moon on May 6 was photographed with the same camera and telescope used to image the Sun (with a dense solar filter!) on the following day. Of course, on May 6 the Moon was at perigee, the closest point to Earth in its eliptical orbit, making it the largest Full Moon of 2012. Two weeks later, on May 20, the Moon will be near apogee, the most distant point in its orbit, so by then it will be nearly at its smallest apparent size. It will also be a dark New Moon on that date. And for some the New Moon will be surprisingly easy to compare to the Sun, because on May 20 the first solar eclipse of 2012 will be visible from much of Asia, the Pacific, and North America. Along a path 240 to 300 kilometers wide, the eclipse will be annular. Near apogee the smaller silhouetted Moon will fit just inside the bright solar disk.

Giving to the wealthy

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Nicholas Gruen

I’m not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I’d go on the Council of my daughter’s private school – which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it’s an Anglican School) and said that I wasn’t but that I was a bit shocked to be asked. I didn’t bore the Principal with the details of my religious status as a lapsed atheist. Anyway with that apparently smoothed over I was invited to an evening which turned out to be hard core fund raising.

A donation of 20K seemed in order, but was not forthcoming. And for whatever reason my candidature didn’t proceed any further. (I also opined on a tour of the campus that I thought it would be a pity if they ripped out the only remaining grass covered oval and replaced it with synthetic grass, no matter how much truer it made they hockey balls travel.)

Today I got an invitation to give money to Ormond College where I spent a year. It was cleverly crafted – written to me by someone in my year with a personal note to me. This was my chance to make a difference for the next generation. I could contribute to allowing someone hard of means to attend the College. Well that’s better than contributing to someone easy of means I guess. Anyway it transpired that to qualify, this person who was hard of means had to be someone whose parents had attended Ormond. And yes, they might have been hard of means, but then they might just have been good at minimising their income. I decided to pass.

God, atheism and euthanasia

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Ken Parish

Peter Singer

Last week’s ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate, not least here at Troppo. However some might not have realised that the trigger for this existential gabfest was an even bigger one, namely the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne (it winds up today). Keynote speakers were the three surviving members of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse” namely Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (Christopher Hitchens may or may not be otherwise occupied on an extended stint of Eternal Damnation).

Other prominent speakers included British celebrity philosopher AC Grayling and expat Oz celebrity QC Geoffrey Robertson. However it was among the second-string speakers that a tittle of tension arose. Disability activist Stella Young tweeted in relation to fellow speaker and Oz philosopher Peter Singer:

I don’t know whether to question Singer on whether or not he thinks I should be alive, or just eat some meat in his direction. #atheistcon

What did she mean? It didn’t take long to find out by some quick Googling. This article by Dinesh D’Souza (on an avowedly Catholic website I should note) explains:

Singer is a mild-mannered fellow who speaks calmly and lucidly. Yet you wouldn’t have to read his work too long to find his extreme positions. He cheerfully advocates infanticide and euthanasia and, in almost the same breath, favors animal rights. Even most liberals would have qualms about third-trimester abortions; Singer does not hesitate to advocate what may be termed fourth-trimester abortions, i.e., the killing of infants after they are born. …

Singer resolutely takes up a Nietzschean call for a “transvaluation of values,” with a full awareness of the radical implications. He argues that we are not creations of God but rather mere Darwinian primates. We exist on an unbroken continuum with animals. Christianity, he says, arbitrarily separated man and animal, placing human life on a pedestal and consigning the animals to the status of tools for human well-being. Now, Singer says, we must remove Homo sapiens from this privileged position and restore the natural order. This translates into more rights for animals and less special treatment for human beings. There is a grim consistency in Singer’s call to extend rights to the apes while removing traditional protections for unwanted children, people with mental disabilities, and the noncontributing elderly. …

However the Catholics have skin in this game, as D’Souza’s argument proceeds to reveal:

Continue reading →

Kantian Optimisation

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Nicholas Gruen

No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great.

Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency
Date: 2012-03
By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University)
Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate an interdependent kind of optimizing behavior, called Kantian. It is shown that in simple economic models, when there are negative externalities (such as congestion effects from use of a commonly owned resource) or positive externalities (such as a social ethos reflected in individuals’ preferences), Kantian equilibria dominate Nash-Walras equilibria in terms of efficiency. While economists schooled in Nash equilibrium may view the Kantian behavior as utopian, there is some — perhaps much — evidence that it exists. If cultures evolve through group selection, the hypothesis that Kantian behavior is more prevalent than we may think is supported by the efficiency results here demonstrated.

An hour of my life stolen

Posted on July 19, 2011 by James Farrell

Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I’m about ready to concede it’s not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with what had been billed (at the end of last week’s show) as a discussion that tackles ‘the existence of God and the great moral challenges of our time.’

In fact, the panel didn’t debate the existence of God at all, apart from one set piece by John Lennox about the complementarity of science and religion. Lennox was the only intellect of substance on the panel. He’s an Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist, who’s debated many of the prominent atheists, including Dawkins, Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. In addition to his debating skills and knowledge, Lennox benefits from a happy combination of scholarly gravitas and disarming humility, the latter aided by a charming Irish brogue which is in winning contrast to the superior English accents of Dawkins and Hitchens. Continue reading →

Groping for answers

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Ken Parish

I couldn’t help thinking that the media’s obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist. The latter rather crassly bills himself as “Godless” Gross. This week Gross went toe-to-toe with the ABC’s God-botherer correspondent Scott Stephens on the vexed question of the penchant of too many Catholic clergy to molest children.

Both wrote columns about a recent Catholic Church-commissioned major report on the subject by John Jay College, but reached diametrically opposed conclusions about causation. Gross puts the kiddie-fiddling down to priestly frustration born of unnatural celibacy. Stephens on the other hand adopts the John Jay College line that there was an epidemic of it in the 60s and 70s, probably caused by a combination of poor priestly recruitment decisions, dodgy training and the temptations of the Swinging Sixties. He cites figures showing that the reporting of priestly abuse was much lower before the 60s and has subsequently tailed off (so to speak) over the last couple of decades. Accordingly, Stephens argues that celibacy can’t be to blame because it was a constant factor throughout. The child-molesting epidemic must have had another cause:

This line of reasoning has been characterized as the “blame Woodstock explanation,” designed to give the Catholic Church some alibi for its crimes. It does no such thing. Indeed, there can be no more damning indictment than that the Church had so imbibed the proclivities of the age that it reproduced them in its own life.

That being said, only someone who is wilfully naive or intractably bigoted would refuse to acknowledge that the social antinomianism and fetishization of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 70s, along with the valorization of the pursuit of individual pleasure and free experimentation with transgressive sexual practices, created the conditions for a dramatic escalation in deviant behaviour – including paedophilia – both within and without the Church.

But surely there is another and rather more plausible explanation which doesn’t exonerate the bizarre institution of priestly celibacy quite so glibly. Is it not likely that priestly child abuse was just as prevalent before the 1960s but drastically under-reported because of the general prevailing social repression about matters sexual? Recent reports about the treatment of Aboriginal children and child migrants in Church homes through the 1940s and 50s rather suggest some such explanation. And is it not likely that apparent reductions in child abuse reports from the 1980s onwards are explained by the very permissiveness that the 60s ushered in? The Stephens/John Jay College explanation appears to rest on a tacit but patently spurious assumption that we’re now in a post-permissive age of latter day prudery where vulnerable young priests are no longer subject to licentious temptations. In reality, children are much more sexually aware today, so priests who might otherwise be tempted by pre-pubescent flesh know that they’re unlikely to get away with it. Perhaps better clergy selection and training has played a role too. You’d certainly hope so.

Paralysis by serial veto

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Nicholas Gruen

Church of Holy Sepulcher entrance If you look at the picture on the left, you’ll see a ladder on the upper right window looking at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You may not believe it, but there’s more chance than is usually the case with relics that the church is on the right spot. It’s location was not arrived at in the middle ages, but in the third century by St Helena, Constantine’s Mum who turned up in Jerusalem and looked for relics.

Anyway, the attentive viewer might assume that the ladder will be moved some time soon, it’s job in lifting up some tradesman to work on the window done. But you’d be wrong, something which is well illustrated by the companion photo from the late nineteenth century. There’s that ladder again!

In fact the ladder turned up sometime in the 1850s. So what’s it still doing there? This is the explanation offered by Atlas Obscura which offers itself as a “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, esoterica (I guess this qualifies in the latter two categories).

The church is run by six denominations – Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman catholic church, with lesser duties shared by Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches.

The whole edifice is carefully parcelled into sections, some being commonly shared while others belonging strictly to a particular sect. A set of complicated rules governs the transit rights of the other groups through each particular section on any given day, and especially during the holidays. Some of the sections of the church however still remain hotly disputed to this day. Arguments and violent clashes are not uncommon. In November 2008 the internet was flooded with videos of a fistfight between Armenian and Greek monks in one such dispute. A small section of the roof of the church is disputed between the Copts and Ethiopians. At least one Coptic monk at any given time sits there on a chair placed on a particular spot to express this claim. On a hot summer day he moved his chair some 20cm more into the shade. This was interpreted as a hostile act and violation of status quo. Eleven were hospitalized after a fight resulting from this provocation.

This state of affairs makes any agreement about renovations or repairs on the edifice impossible. The church is in a state of decay as a result.

The famous immovable ladder is a bizarre outcome of this religious stubbornness pushed to extremes. Some time in the first half of the 19th century, someone has placed a ladder up against the wall of the church. No one is sure whom he was, or more importantly, to which sect he belonged. The ladder remains there to this date. No one dares touch it, lest they disturb the status quo, and provoke the wrath of others. The exact date when ladder was placed is not known but the first evidence of it comes from 1852.

The ladder hasn’t moved since.

The immovable ladder is a nice metaphor for decision making with large groups or within complex systems of rules or regulations. Satisfying them all can be hard. And when the obstacles are not ‘hard’ ones, they can be soft sociological ones. Within bureaucracies one is ill-advised to offend anyone gravely – often even if they’re not very important. People don’t like other people getting their noses seriously out of joint and will go to some lengths to preserve harmony and consensus. So the immovable ladder goes into my slide pack to illustrate the problems of paralysis by serial veto. And below the fold, you’ll find a spooky codicil to the story. Just spooky. Come in Dan Brown, come in.