It's been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke's satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become common place, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us. But the future is here! Finally we can all take flight as Martin Aircraft in New Zealand releases the first commercially-available jet pack! Click here to buy your jetpack! Read the comments on this post...

I have yet to see a computer language that offers anything not available in Basic, in so far as the language itself goes. But Basic has been maligned as the ruination of computer coding. There is an alternative opinion out there. Read the comments on this post...

Because pi day is coming...

From here Read the comments on this post...

As we all know, the Skepchicks are all about boobs and nothing else. Typical chicks. Can't think of anything else. And their boobs have commanded me to make one more request from my readers to consider donating some money to the senseless no-account purpose-free orgy that they will be hosting here in the Twin Cities here in July. Click here for details. And if you think I'm being sarcastic, that's funny. Because you're only reading what I'm writing. Your not seeing what I'm thinking. Read the comments on this post...

A while ago, I complained that the people running the LHC did not have their act together when it came to managing and disseminating information for the interested public. I took a little flack for that (see comments) but I was right. And I'm still right. We (the interested public) were just recently given a very nice overview of the potential for the next several months of research. Then, today, we find out that the LHC is fundamentally busted and will be shut down for a significant rebuild. And part of that news is that this has been the plan for a long time. But I guess they forgot. Or something. Can anyone explain to me what is going on?
Read the comments on this post...

If you are old enough to have seen the original release of The Empire Strikes Back at the cinema in 1980, you almost certainly remember the extraordinary short film that preceded it. Otherwise you won't know a damn thing about it: with not one picture or accurate plot summary anywhere on the web, Black Angel has become a bit of an internet holy grail in itself. ... check it out Read the comments on this post...

Matthew Montonini discovered a treasure trove of video lectures made available on YouTube by Villanova University, celebrating the approximately 2,000 years since Paul's birth.

Here are two samples. E. P. Sanders on whether Paul's legacy remains relevant today:



David Aune on what happened to Paul on the Damascus Road:



Other videos include Joseph Fitzmyer, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Mark Nanos, and others.

Those interested in exploring the religious themes and mythology of LOST will want to check out this video podcast (HT DocArtz) featuring an interview with Matthew Fox, exploring Jack's character as both man of science and man of faith:



Those looking for something less weighty and serious may enjoy this LOST meets Baywatch video (HT IO9):

Sean David Morton, the head of Delphi Associates Investment Group, has a gift.  He claims he’s a stock psychic.  As amazing as it sounds, he says that he “… called ALL the highs and lows of the market giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years.”  He has a monthly newsletter, a syndicated radio show and is the king of self-promoting his supposed psychic powers. The SEC thinks otherwise though.  They’ve charged Morton with fraud and misleading investors.  “Morton’s self-proclaimed psychic powers were nothing more than a scam to attract investors and steal their money,” says George S. Canellos, director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office.  They’re seeking a restraining order and return of Morton’s “ill-gotten gains” to more than 100 investors. Of course, religion plays a part too, as if that’s any surprise.  The SEC charges that Morton has diverted at least some of the estimated $6 million he’s made to his own private religious charity.  The rest he’s placed with foreign-currency trading firms.  He claims that he’s making a profit, but although he tells investors that their profit is audited and verified, no one can tell who it’s being audited by. That’s the one thing that always bugs me about people who buy into psychic nonsense.  If Morton really was psychic and could call *ALL* of the highs and lows of the market, why isn’t he the richest man alive?  He should have been able to get in low and get out high without fail if he could really see the market that accurately.  In fact, he would have been investigated for inside trading if he was really good enough to get out the day before a stock dropped, or buy in the day before it skyrocketed. Of course, Morton should have seen the coming investigation and accusations, shouldn’t he?  Exactly how do you surprise a psychic, they’re supposed to know these things!  Hopefully, Morton loses it all and spends time behind bars.  Maybe he can use that time to predict something else accurately: when and if he’s going to get a parole.

It is almost Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. One thing this means that US citizens and I'd bet some Canadians will be receiving the annual Brown Recluse Spider Warnings via Email. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

I'm grateful to Eruesso for pointing out that a show I watched sometimes when I lived in the UK, "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends," can be watched on Google Video. Here's the episode in which he visits the US Bible belt.

Thanks to Michael Bird, Jim Davila and Mark Goodacre for drawing attention to Richard Bauckham's new home page. It includes unpublished lectures, essays and sermons, including an investigation into the Pooh community and a piece on "The Johannine Jesus and the Synoptic Jesus." But perhaps the most interesting for those of us who interact with his publications on monotheism and Christology is an essay entitled "Orthodoxy in Christology."

On a related note, the Early Jewish Monotheisms blog has a report on the conference "Der eine Gott und die Völker."

When Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United, and the Supreme Court per Alito audibly responded, conservatives and liberals alike reacted with horror, albeit to different parts of the story. For we liberals, it’s terrible and a breach of decorum for Alito to talk back to the President; for conservatives, it’s terrible that Obama lit into the Court in the first place. We’re both wrong. Well, we, liberals are actually right, but our simple case doesn’t present the whole story. Alito’s outburst was a breach of decorum, sure, but one he was privileged to make if we were wrong in the first place. So let’s get to that question. Chief Justice Roberts, again speaking yesterday, regards it as impolitic for Obama to even address the Court in his speech. That surely overstates the case.  It would be wrong for Obama to attack individual Justices, or at least tacky, but the Supreme Court is a coordinate and equal branch of government, with a significant but not absolute role in the making of substantive law. The President can properly build an agenda, and Congress can properly legislate, to abrogate Supreme Court decisions or limit their effects. The Court is not a proxy for the Constitution; as the years since Roe should have proved, a constitutional holding is the beginning, not the end, of a dialogue about the document’s meaning. Presidents are entitled to input on that question, especially when that input is phrased not as an attack on the Court’s legal reasoning, but as clear concern for the holding’s effects. This, in fact, is exactly the path Obama charted: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. (Applause.) They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems. Roberts’ counterargument must rest on the theory that the Supreme Court is an utterly neutral body, immune and oblivious to politics, and simply engaged in a dialectic on the Platonic meaning of The Constitution, of which they are the sole arbiters. This is a polite fiction that we occasionally tolerate, but in which we’ve never truly believed. Since the birth of the strong Supreme Court, it has been a political body. Marbury v. Madison emerged from an acknowledged political staredown between the Court and newly-elected President Jefferson, and it was the Court, not Jefferson, that performed Kruschev’s miracle: it blinked, while appearing not to. Since then, men we call heroes have taken it upon themselves to question the Court, and wound up on the right side of history for it. Lincoln campaigned against Scott v. Sanford and secured its reversal by war; Roosevelt came the closest to true impropriety by threatening the Court not with legislative reversal, but with irrelevance through dilution. And, lest we forget, the modern conservative movement was built on attacking judicial power. Virulently. First for Brown, then for Roe (see, e.g., right), then for the principle of their existence (“activist judges!”). Conservatives can’t — or shouldn’t be allowed to — have it both ways, raising the Court’s mystique and grandeur as a defense only when it suits them. Roberts is right to the extent that it’s better for our political culture if politicians do treat the Court’s reasoning as inviolate, even as they freely question their policy. After all, policy is not their core competency. But that’s not a commandment Obama broke, especially considering the profound policy implications, and blatant policy motivations, behind the Roberts Court’s entire campaign finance jurisprudence.* If Roberts is troubled by controversy, well, to paraphrase his most famous dicta to date, the easiest way to avoid being criticized for questionable decisions is to stop issuing questionable decisions. * = As a favorite professor of mine says, there are two ways to read FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life — either Roberts knows something we don’t, and doesn’t say it, or he’s making things up.

In February, Germany's Highest Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled on the motion of a German residing in the Swiss city of Zurich, to pressure the German government into trying to stop the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine ever built, and that also has an easy to misspell name. --> read more

From this news story:
They plan to become doctors, researchers and professors, but these students from Liberty University, an evangelical school, also believe God created the Earth in a week, some 6,000 years ago.HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Somebody please tell them that working at the Creation 'Museum' or a place like Liberty University is supreme weak sauce, doesn't count, and is also made out of lame and FAIL?

Kthxbai.

In one of those classic news stories about religious Pedobear-wannabes kiddy-diddlers that make me want to both laugh and cry at the same time, a Catholic exorcist (Back to the Dark Ages!) claims that the recent sex scandals in the Catholic church is due to Satan being in the Vatican.

One has to wonder why this kook bothers to remain Catholic if even the Vatican is no match for the powers of Satan to turn priests into pedophiles. He has basically admitted that even the FUCKING VATICAN is powerless against BAWWWW SATAN BAWWWW, so what hope is there for the rest of the Catholic pedos priests?

I mean, it's never the fault of the individuals who couldn't keep it in their pants, right? It has to be the fault of some supernatural piece of shit in the sky, er, down there, right?

*snicker*

Must be nice being religious - especially the part where you never have to take responsibility for your own actions. Where do I sign up?

John Walton will be giving a talk at Butler University on March 18th at 6pm, in the Johnson Room in Robertson Hall. The talk will be entitled "The First Sunset: Cosmology in the Ancient World and Genesis One." There is more information on Facebook. This event is open to the public and all are welcome to attend.

Walton just published an article in The Bible and Interpretation entitled "Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology" which may give a foretaste of what to expect.

Joel Watts is planning on driving 5 1/2 hours to come hear Walton. Does anyone think they can beat that?

In other related news, The Telegraph in the UK had an article today about US creationists. Brooke Lester continues exploring a strange reference to a global flood. And last but not at all least, Hemant Mehta shares that if you get into debates with young-earth creationists - there's an app for that!

Craig Bennett (of Prefrontal.org) and Michael Miller, of dead fish brain scan fame, have a new paper out: How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?


Tal over at the [citation needed] blog has an excellent in-depth discussion of the paper, and Mind Hacks has a good summary, but here's my take on what it all means in practical terms.

Suppose you scan someone's brain while they're looking at a picture of a cat. You find that certain parts of their brain are activated to a certain degree by looking at the cat, compared to when they're just lying there with no picture. You happily publish your results as showing The Neural Correlates of Cat Perception.

If you then scanned that person again while they were looking at the same cat, you'd presumably hope that exact same parts of the brain would light up to the same degree as they did the first time. After all, you claim to have found The Neural Correlates of Cat Perception, not just any old random junk.

If you did find a perfect overlap in the area and the degree of activation that would be an example of 100% test-retest reliability. In their paper, Bennett and Miller review the evidence on the test-retest reliability of fMRI studies. They found 63 of them. On average, they found that the reliability of fMRI falls quite far short of perfection: the areas activated (clusters) had a mean Dice overlap of 0.476, while the strength of activation was correlated with a mean ICC of 0.50.

But those numbers, taken out of context, do not mean very much. Indeed, what is a Dice overlap? You'll have to read the whole paper to find out, but even when you do, they still don't mean that much. I suspect this is why Bennett and Miller don't mention them in the Abstract of the paper, and in fact they don't spend more than a few lines discussing them at all.

A Dice overlap of 0.476 and an ICC of 0.50 are what you get if average over all of the studies that anyone's done looking at the test-retest reliability of any particular fMRI experiment. But different fMRI experiments have different reliabilities. Saying that the average reliability of fMRI is 0.5 is rather like saying that the mean velocity of a human being is 0.3 km per hour. That's probably about right, averaging over everyone in the world, including those who are asleep in bed and those who are flying on airplanes - but it's not very useful. Some people are moving faster than others, and some scans are more reliable than others.


Most of this paper is not concerned with "how reliable fMRI is", but rather, with how to make any given scanning experiment more reliable. And this is an important thing to write about, because even the most optimistic cognitive neuroscientist would agree that many fMRI results are not especially reliable, and as Bennett and Miller say, reliability matters for lots of reasons:
Scientific truth. While it is a simple statement that can be taken straight out of an undergraduate research methods course, an important point must be made about reliability in research studies: it is the foundation on which scientific knowledge is based. Without reliable, reproducible results no study can effectively contribute to scientific knowledge.... if a researcher obtains a different set of results today than they did yesterday, what has really been discovered?
Clinical and Diagnostic Applications. The longitudinal assessment of changes in regional brain activity is becoming increasingly important for the diagnosis and treatment of clinical disorders...
Evidentiary Applications. The results from functional imaging are increasingly being submitted as evidence into the United States legal system...
Scientific Collaboration. A final pragmatic dimension of fMRI reliability is the ability to share data between researchers...So what determines the reliability of any given fMRI study? Lots of things. Some of them are inherent to the nature of the brain, and are not really things we can change: activation in response to basic perceptual and motor tasks is probably always going to be more reliable than activation related to "higher" functions like emotions.

But there are lots of things we can change. Although it's rarely obvious from the final results, researchers make dozens of choices when designing and analyzing an fMRI experiment, many of which can at least potentially have a big impact on the reliability of their findings. Bennett and Miller cover lots of them:
voxel size... repetition time (TR), echo time (TE), bandwidth, slice gap, and k-space trajectory... spatial realignment of the EPI data can have a dramatic effect on lowering movement-related variance ... Recent algorithms can also help remove remaining signal variability due to magnetic susceptibility induced by movement... simply increasing the number of fMRI runs improved the reliability of their results from ICC = 0.26 to ICC = 0.58. That is quite a large jump for an additional ten or fifteen minutes of scanning...
The details get extremely technical, but then, when you do an fMRI scan you're using a superconducting magnet to image human neural activity by measuring the quantum spin properties of protons. It doesn't get much more technical.

Perhaps the central problem with modern neuroimaging research is that it's all too easy for researchers to write off the important experimental design issues as "merely" technicalities, and just put some people in a scanner using the default scan sequence and see what happens. This is something few fMRI users are entirely innocent of, and I'm certainly not, but it is a serious problem. As Bennett and Miller point out, the devil is in the technical details.
The generation of highly reliable results requires that sources of error be minimized across a wide array of factors. An issue within any single factor can significantly reduce reliability. Problems with the scanner, a poorly designed task, or an improper analysis method could each be extremely detrimental. Conversely, elimination of all such issues is necessary for high reliability. A well maintained scanner, well designed tasks, and effective analysis techniques are all prerequisites for reliable results.Bennett CM, Miller MB. (2010). How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences