The end of an era

April 25, 2011 • 3:57 pm

UPDATE: As Maddoxflower reports in the comments below, and which was verified not only on the NBC news last night but by this report, rumors of the typewriter’s death are much exaggerated. Typewriter fans: a few places are still making them.

There will be no more typewriters produced on this planet.  According to the Atlantic, the world’s last typewriter factory, Godrej and Boyce of Mumbai, India, has shut its doors.

With only about 200 machines left — and most of those in Arabic languages — Godrej and Boyce shut down its plant in Mumbai, India, today. “Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India — until recently,” according to the Daily Mail, which ran a special story this morning about the typewriters demise.

Godrej and Boyce’s Prima—the last typewriter model on Earth

Love in the time of hawks

April 25, 2011 • 2:34 pm

Today we have two nice photos submitted by readers.

The first, sent by Doc Bill, shows him in a moment of affectionate communion with his beloved tabby Kink (Felis catus), so named because of a 70-degree bend in his tail.

And reader Lynn Wilhelm snapped a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) in the bushes near her home. She recounts:

I was driving from a client’s house and saw the hawk swoop across the street and into a 10’ tall holly tree.  A neighbor was standing nearby at her mailbox and missed the landing.  I was able to get some pics while it hung out in the tree for about 5 minutes.  I don’t know if it’s a young, inexperienced one or not, but it didn’t seem too interested in us.  I thought maybe it was after a bird’s nest because a mockingbird started bugging it, but found no nest in the tree.  I can’t believe I got within about 10’ of this gorgeous bird, hardly had to zoom at all.  The mockingbird hung out and eventually the hawk flew up to a higher nearby pine with the mockingbird still after it.  After a bit the hawk got fed up and slowly flew off with the mockingbird on its tail.

Ross Douthat and the case for hell

April 25, 2011 • 1:59 pm

In today’s New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat (I always want to put in a “b” after the “u”) makes “A case for hell.”

He points out, rightly, that while belief in heaven remains steadfast among Americans (the latest poll shows it around 80%), belief in hell is waning (though not as much as Douthat thinks—it’s still about 70%).

Why this supposed waning? Douthat proposes a version of Peter Singer’s “expanding circle” hypothesis: as more Christians become aware of the particulars of different faiths, it becomes more and more untenable to think that all those nice people will fry for eternity simply because they were taught different stuff.  What religion would consign Gandhi to eternal immolation in boiling sulfur?

But,

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so. . .

. . . Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

Only a blinkered faithhead could think that human life could seem “less fully human” without hell.  What kind of loving god—anyone’s god—would torture people for eternity? And for things like adultery, homosexuality, miserliness, and masturbation?  That’s inhuman.  What is human is to make choices based on their perceived effects, not on the threat of eternal reward or damnation.

Of course, the whole question is moot if there isn’t a god. But that’s not something Douthat wants to consider.

Radio interview

April 25, 2011 • 5:59 am

I was interviewed by Clay Farris Naff at KZUM Lincoln about the scientific evidence for evolution and my take on the current spate of “critical thinking” bills circulating in state legislatures.

My remarks, along with those of Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education, can be found as a podcast at Star City Blog (Steve is part 1, I’m part 2).

I haven’t listened to my part, for, like many people, I hate hearing myself.

Monster flower blooming in Switzerland

April 25, 2011 • 4:45 am

Several readers have informed me of a rare botanical event happening in Basel, Switzerland.  You should go immediately to have a gander at a very rare—and ephemeral—flower shown on a webcam at the University of Basel.

It’s an Amorphophallus titanum from Sumatra, loosely translated as “giant misshapen penis,” a concupiscent but accurate descriptor.  Isn’t it lovely?

This species has the world’s tallest flower structure, reaching up to 3 meters.  It flowers only very rarely, though, so this event in Switzerland is a must-see.

Unfortunately, like the world’s largest flower, Rafflesia arnoldii, it smells like a decaying corpse.  That’s to attract flies and beetles which, thinking it’s a dead mammal, come to feed—and pollinate it as a byproduct.

The flower remains open for only a day or two, though it takes several weeks to grow. The Basel site gives time-lapse photographs, showing the flower beginning to appear at the end of March.

You can see other pictures of a 2009 bloom here, from which these pictures were taken.

The damn Pope doesn’t understand evolution

April 24, 2011 • 7:20 pm

So much for the Catholic Church being on board with the evolution peeps. According to the Associated Press, His Holiness dissed Darwinism in his Easter Vigil talk last night:

Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn’t a random product of evolution.

Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point “in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.”

“If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature,” he said. “But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason.”

Church teaching holds that Roman Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds: A Christian can, for example, accept the theory of evolution to help explain developments, but is taught to believe that God, not random chance, is the origin of the world. The Vatican, however, warns against creationism, or the overly literal interpretation of the Bibilical account of creation.

Hey, Pope!  Haven’t you heard about natural selection? Human evolution isn’t all mutation and genetic drift, you know.  And do you really want to undo the minimal acceptance of evolution (granted, theistic evolution involving injection of a soul into australopithecines) offered to Catholics by Pope John Paul?

There’s so much fail in the above that it’s not worth dissecting, except to say that the Pope continues to steer the Catholic Church away from evolution and toward creationism.  Perhaps this is a reflexive stance from reading the New Atheists, but what he should have read was The Selfish Gene—or any textbook on evolution.

But let the Clergy Letter Project ponder Random Ratzi’s statement before they start telling Catholics that their Church is totally down with evolution.

h/t: Hempenstein

Amis on Hitchens’s rhetoric

April 24, 2011 • 1:35 pm

Over at the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens’s pal Martin Amis has a lovely piece—almost an elegy—on Hitch’s ability to rhetorically demolish his opponents:

. . . Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the “destruction” of his interlocutor. This isn’t Christopher’s policy – but it is his practice. Towards the very end of the last century, all the greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said: “It’s like a wall coming at you.” In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there’s a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million “results” in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher’s search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes.

Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs.

and

Over the years Christopher has spontaneously delivered many dozens of unforgettable lines. Here are four of them:

Click over to read the four, and much more.

Easter science: the JC Project

April 24, 2011 • 1:06 pm

I happen to share the same initials as our Savior (except for his middle initial “H.”), and so it’s appropriate on this day of resurrection to highlight a scientific initiative, The JC Project, that shows perfectly the compatibility of science and faith.  P. Z. will be helping with the first step of this experiment.

Be sure to click on the diagram.

h/t: Kyle