I hope Bill Amend is okay with this. I couldn't care less about Bil Keane.

I know the webcomic PvP and its author Scott Kurtz are the subjects of many heated debates and passionate feelings. He's certainly a talented comic artist, but there seems to be little neutral ground when it comes to Kurtz and his work -- some think he's an iconoclast as well as an icon for mainstreaming webcomics, some (this would be me) simply enjoy his work and try to stay above the fray, and some find Kurtz to be an insatiable attention whore and his comic to be garbage. I don't think there's a whole lot of middle ground.

I personally enjoy it -- it's a regular on my webcomic reading list. It isn't the greatest ever -- Kurtz has a rather ad hoc attitude towards character development (for example, I've never really understood his reversion of Marcie to a younger character design, and welcome the return of a more realistic-looking Marcie in the wake of the Brent/Jade wedding arc). But it's certainly held my attention far longer than User Friendly, which is still modestly enjoyable but painfully anachronistic and repetitive (honestly, story and character development came to a halt after Pitr and Pearl met). But Kurtz does love to throw a bomb from time to time, and this one went off like a MOAB in an LP tank farm. (Let's just say the denouement is simultaneously one of the funniest and most vicious uses of media parody I've ever seen, even compared to the end of the first Scooby-Doo movie.)

I'm probably reading far too much into what is really just a slash-and-burn attack on a very monotonous and overly sweet family comic (Family Circus has nothing on For Better or for Worse, which is hardly an exemplar of greatness itself), but it seems to me to be an interesting comment on decorum. We move through life and often cover the more unpleasant sides of ourselves with polite fictions. This is fine; it keeps the wheels greased. But the darker side is when "decorum" becomes a mask covering serious dysfunction, abuse, or outright insanity; this sort of decorum is what made comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor so controversial, because they saw through it for the bullshit that it was. Even if Keane is nothing like Kurtz makes him out to be, there is still the point to be made that trying to maintain these fictions so that the maintainer doesn't have to face reality is precisely the point of insipid garbage like this.

I leave you with a paraphrase from the 1990s MTV cartoon Daria -- when a classmate of Jane and Daria's dies, it is pointed out (I don't remember by who) that the phrase "it really makes you think" implies that thinking is uncomfortable and an impedance to our daily lives. That observation, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem of dogmatism, and explains why I've thrown in my lot with the skeptics of the world. Maybe none of this was Kurtz' intent, but it does make me think, and frankly, I don't mind that.

It is finished

PZ Myers went and did it, and in exactly the ignominious and anticlimactic fashion it deserved to be done. Not that it will make any impact at all on the Catholic Church, but it gets the message across: nothing is sacred in any meaningful way.

I want a banana now. Unfortunately, I don't have any, so I may settle for a cup of coffee.

A line in the sand on altmed

Resistance is not futile, but it certainly feels like pissing up a flagpole sometimes.

I'm disgusted by the concept of health freedom (disclaimer: I wrote most of that article). It really is an epic disaster -- quacks and self-deluded people insisting on unfettered access, free of criticism, to patients and doctors, and invoking happyfuzzy words like "freedom" to justify it. I once tried to warn a fellow customer at a bookstore away from a Kevin Trudeau book, only to receive a response that she believed in "alternative healing". Fluoridation was voted down by a landslide in my home town because the fluoride fearmongers got more hearts and minds than the dentists (you know, the people who are actually experts on the subject). And vaccination rates world wide are dropping as the paranoid claim links with autism, infertility, genocide, and other spurious accusations.

I'm going to put a few links at the bottom of this post that have a lot to do with the stupidity that seems to be eating us alive. It causes the rationalists of the world great despair, and this is all I can offer to help change things:

• Quackwatch.org -- Stephen Barrett's uber-site of anti-quackery, and the hub of a growing network of skeptical sites, most of which revolve around medicine. One of the oldest, and best, and an absolute must-read -- the Snopes.com of altmed.
  
• Respectful Insolence, Aetiology, ERV, and Denialism Blog -- some of my favorite anti-altie sites on scienceblogs.com. Orac is a surgical oncologist, Tara Smith is a professor of epidemiology, Abbie Smith is an HIV researcher, and the authors of Denialism Blog are a med student, a lawyer, and a practicing medical doctor who all fight the good fight against teh st00pid.
  
• In The Pipeline -- In the same vein as the ScienceBlogs crew, pharma chemist Derek Lowe (not the ex-Red Sox pitcher) writes about the real world of pharma chem, in which things are not quite as evil as the alties make out (though Pfizer in particular takes a beating in Lowe's estimation, he still takes great pride in his work and other scientists in the industry).
  
• RationalWiki.com -- originally created as a response to the dysfunctional propaganda factory at Conservapedia, I've been involved on RationalWiki for quite some time and am one of a great many users (including PalMD from the above-mentioned Denialism Blog) who have been trying to make a humorous but authoritative reference for woo fighters.
  
• The Millenium Project -- Created by Peter Bowditch from Australia, this site focuses heavily on anti-vaxers and faith healers, as well as attempts to profit from peoples' gullibility.
  
• Don't forget more general skeptical websites such as the James Randi Educational Foundation, Robert Todd Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary, snopes.com, and many, many others.
  

I'm hoping to make some PSAs in the near future to put on YouTube so people can put them on local public access cable channels. In the meantime, consider these essential reading.

What's TI got in the calculator pipeline?

The TI-30Xa and TI-36X Solar appear to be in clearance mode at many of the retailers that are carrying them. Allow me to make baseless speculations about why.

1. The TI-30 eco RS could be coming stateside, perhaps in a package to match the TI-30XS MultiView. I've never really understood why they phased out the solar panel on the Xa in the States to begin with.
2. TI-36 eco RS? It'd be a logical next step. Maybe with a somewhat less flashy packaging?
3. TI-36 MultiView. I doubt they'd do much to promote it though -- they've only sporadically pushed the TI-30 version, and the TI-34 version is too new. It might wind up being a TI-only purchase like the current TI-36XII.

I have a better idea, TI: try making your designs just a wee bit less expensive? You're getting your ass kicked on the low end by anklebiters like Karce. And please please please don't bring anything that looks like the TI-30XB stateside. That thing is fugly.

McCain, you've got to be kidding me

Let's pretend for a moment that John McCain hasn't frittered away all the goodwill he built up on the opposite side of the aisle from the 2000 election. Let me get this straight: oil is over $140 a barrel, and airlines are using the outrageous price of jet fuel as an excuse to nickel and dime customers to death, and McCain is chartering a plane called the Straight Talk Express?

$140 a barrel. Green is big. Nobody believes McCain is a straight talker anymore. AND HE'S CHARTERING A PRIVATE CAMPAIGN PLANE.

Has he completely lost his mind?

Obama in '08. He's the least worst.

Musings on redistricting, part 1

In a recent article in the Boston Phoenix, writer David Bernstein pointed out that Massachusetts faces three possible political upheavals in the very near future -- the likely loss of Ted Kennedy because of his recent cancer diagnosis, the distinct possibility of John Kerry receiving a post in an Obama cabinet, and the likelihood of Massachusetts losing yet another congressional district after the 2010 census. It's worth noting that Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, way back in the colonial days, was the man responsible for creating the infamous "Gerrymander" district in Essex County. In the next few posts I'm going to offer a few thoughts on removing the politics from congressional representation. I'm going to start with a rough breakdown on some of the major areas in Massachusetts, and a few choice comments on the relevance of the current county divisions.

The reason I'm making this list is as background. Massachusetts, like its capital Boston, is divided into a number of "neighborhoods" that have their own cohesive regional identities, many of which carve up towns so that someone living in one part of, say, Boston will have a different congressman than another part. I live in Bill Delahunt's district, which stretches from Quincy to Provincetown. The logic of this district somewhat escapes me, as frankly the South Shore and the Cape have very little in common. The South Shore is relatively affluent and mostly serves as bedroom communities for Boston and Cambridge; the Cape is geographically isolated, with a wildly variable seasonal population and an economy almost solely based on service industries. While Bourne, Plymouth, and Wareham tend to be rather transitional between the two regions, they have a somewhat different identity to themselves. How these two areas relate when the only thing they have in common is lots of beach land escapes me. So let's begin.

• Metro Boston and the inner suburbs. Major communities: Boston, Newton, Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham. The capital of the state, and one of the few urban areas in the state that doesn't suffer from chronic and pervasive economic depression. Out of the last five governors, three of them have been from this area (Weld, Cambridge; Romney, Belmont, Patrick, Milton). The area is particularly known for its educational opportunities, as well as the high-tech industries along the Route 128 corridor and the biotech companies based in Boston and Cambridge.
• Cape Cod and the Islands. Formerly very rural, over the 20th century the Cape and Islands became a fairly populous exurban area with a huge seasonal population change and a very strong dependence on tourism and medical-oriented service jobs. The Cape is one of the more conservative areas of the state (I've often called it "Blue Massachusetts' Magenta Tail") and as such is politically very unlike Massachusetts as a whole; the entire area suffers from widespread income disparities and, lacking even a four-year college or significant industry outside service sectors, few opportunities for young adults entering or leaving college and setting out into the world.
  
• South Coast. Major communities: Fall River, New Bedford, and arguably Attleboro, Middleboro, and Taunton. During the whaling era, this was the richest part of the state, but this area is now mostly known as a somewhat depressed, blue collar/industrial area. The Massachusetts cranberry industry is centered here, mostly in Plymouth, Carver, and Wareham, with significant numbers of growers on Cape Cod as well.
  
• South Shore. Major communities: Plymouth, Quincy, Marshfield, Weymouth, Braintree. A relatively affluent area that is mostly a mix of suburban and rural.
  
• North Shore. Major communities: Saugus, Chelsea, Newburyport, Salem, Peabody, Gloucester. Generally thought of as working class, though the areas from Cape Ann north to the New Hampshire border are often quite affluent.
  
• Merrimack Valley. Major communities: Lowell, Lawrence, Methuen, Haverhill. Once a major industrial area, the Merrimack Valley has struggled to reinvent itself after all the mills closed, and Lawrence in particular is notoriously poor and rough. A very large immigrant population, mostly Caribbean Hispanic and southeast Asian.
  
• Metro West. Major communities: Depends on who you talk to, but Natick and Framingham are pretty universally agreed to be among the most important, along with places like Wellesley and Weston. Essentially defined as "somewhere between Newton and Worcester", Metro West is a mix of poor and wealthy with a lot of commercial activity concentrated around Route 9, with a large Brazilian immigrant population. The Hudson/Franklin/Hopkinton area is the fastest-growing area in the state in terms of population.
  
• Worcester and surrounding area: Worcester is far from the wealthiest place in the state, but it vies with Providence for the second largest city in New England, and has quite a lot of civic pride as Eastern Massachusetts' second city. Like Boston, Worcester is very much a college town.
• Central and Northern Worcester county: Worcester county is the largest county in Massachusetts in terms of land area, and the central and northern areas are largely rural, with the largest population center in the area being Fitchburg.
  
• Pioneer Valley: This part of Central Massachusetts includes the Connecticut River and the college towns of Amherst and Northampton as well as the Metro Springfield area. Much of it is rural in character, but the Metro Springfield area is heavily urbanized and in fact blends into the Hartford and New Haven metro areas to the south. Springfield itself is considered something of a synonym (along with Lawrence) for urban decay in Massachusetts.
• The Berkshires: Like the Cape and Islands, Berkshire County has its own regional identity somewhat separate from the state (indeed, many of the television and radio stations in this area are considered part of the Albany, NY market). The Berkshires are also a rather touristy area, strongly associated with the arts (most notably Norman Rockwell and, on Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie), and often have very little to do with Boston at all.

In the next post, I'll try to sift through some of this information and see how it meshes with the current congressional districts in the state.

New Chick Tract... "oy vey" doesn't begin to cover it

Moving On Up

Jack Chick has, apparently, enthusiastically endorsed the "Evolution->Hitler" meme that the cdesign proponentsists have been using since Expelled came out. I'm not really that surprised, but what's amusing is that as laughable as Chick's tracts have already been, this thing is as insulting to the choir as the people it's trying to convert.