DVDs and Linux and legal stuff, oh my!

Normally, I have a Mac at my home in Ohio, but for the next few months, I'll be doing an internship in Maryland, so now my primary computer is a Thinkpad laptop that dual-boots between Fedora Linux 9 and Windows XP. I have a Netflix account, and my laptop has a DVD drive, so in theory, I can play DVDs on my laptop. Actually, I already tested that theory on the Windows side of my laptop, and it works out pretty well, since IBM includes an older copy of WinDVD in its Windows installation. On the Linux side, the law makes things much, much dicier.

I originally thought that the only problem with playing DVDs on Linux was the DMCA, which makes it at the very least legally questionable to workaround the protection against playback on DVDs, called CSS, although the folks at Ubuntu seem to think that it's legal to work around CSS for the purpose of merely playing the DVD. However, garden-variety patents, especially those that apply to MPEG-2, the format in which the video on DVDs is encoded, is yet another legal problem, with over 640 patents related to MPEG-2. There is a central authority, called the MPEG-LA, that licenses all this at about $2.50 for each MPEG encoder and decoder. For users of Mac and Windows, this is all behind the scenes. The providers of DVD players pay the royalties, and the cost is bundled into the application or the operating system. Not so much with Linux, and worse, the MPEG-LA itself does not offer end-user licenses. Fluendo does offer licensed codecs, but the MPEG playback bundle is 16 Euros, or about $25 in U.S. currency, way more than $2.50 a pop. Of course, Fluendo has to shoulder the costs of writing the codecs, not just the licensing, so that adds to the cost.

What's really frustrating is that there is legal DVD playback in a few corners of the Linux world. Older versions of Mandriva had LinDVD, but not newer ones. Turbolinux 10 had PowerDVD, but apparently Turbolinux 11 doesn't, although some online documentation tantalizingly indicates otherwise. Linspire currently has it ... for now. There are still no standalone commercial DVD players available for Linux for end users to purchase, which means that to get cleanly legal DVD playback on Linux, one has to take into account the hardware support and other quirks of the distribution. Plus, installing a whole operating system is a rather extreme way to get access to a particular application. Dell offers legal DVD playback in its Ubuntu-based hardware offerings, but that does me little good, since replacing the whole laptop is even more extreme—and more expensive—than replacing the distribution. Fluendo has been promising a legal DVD playing application for some time now, but has yet to deliver. Legal DVD playback is so close, yet so far.

Sigh. As problems go, this is hardly the most important, but if you can't vent on a blog, where can you vent? :)

[ETA: Looks like Linspire doesn't have DVD playback right now after all, judging from a Linspire forum thread. For example: "The problem is that the license we had for the LinDVD player we had in the past, made by Intervideo, expired and Intervideo has said that they have killed the project...we have been vigorously pursuing them to get them to allow us to distribute the product again."]

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On the frequency of blog posting

I've noticed that I haven't blogged as much as I used to, and at times I've been tempted to just mothball this blog. Then, every so often, I think, "Hey, I want to blog about that," and so I do ... and so the blog creeps on. A big part of the reason for this is that the blog started off mostly as a repository for my thoughts on religion. Since I've said most of what I wanted to say about that, my frequency of posting has accordingly fallen off.

There is other stuff rolling around in my head, though. A while back, I've threatened to make good on the subtitle of my blog, "A vanity press thinly disguised as a blog." That may yet happen. However, I'd like to at least try to make any efforts at vanity writing at least tolerable, and preferably something to laugh with rather than laugh at, and to avoid "Cerebus Syndrome."

Anyway, my blog's not dead ... yet.

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Gender differences and religion: Is it about risk-taking? Maybe.

In a now somewhat older article on the blog Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers commented on a press release about two papers by Rodney Stark on why men tend to be less religious than women. Here's a snippet of the release:

"Recent studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills."

The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, and so "going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men," Stark said.

Myers' response was a bit of a distortion, "Did this guy just compare atheism to murder and rape?" The answer is pretty obviously no. However, Stark did appear to indicate that atheism is impulsive, which seemed a bit strange to me, and certainly doesn't square with the deconversion stories that I read. To give Stark the benefit of the doubt, I googled and found the two articles that were mentioned in the press release:

• "Physiology and Faith: Addressing the 'Universal' Gender Difference in Religiousness," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. (2002) 41:495-507.
• Alan S. Miller and Rodney Stark, "Gender and Religiousness: Can Socialization Explanations Be Saved?" American Journal of Sociology. (2002): 107: 1399-1423.

In my opinion, the second article, coauthored with Alan Miller, was the better one, and certainly the more thorough of the two.

I noticed two things about both articles. First, they were more generally about irreligion rather than just atheism, although atheism would definitely be considered a subset of irreligion in these articles. Second, if the authors of the articles had discussed a tendency among males to take risks in general rather than impulsive risks in particular, the second article would have been more plausible at explaining gender disparity in religiosity. That second article did tentatively show that when the risks to being irreligious are lower, as is the case in Japan, there is less disparity between the religiosity of men and women. This would have been explained just as well by a more general male tendency to risk-taking, rather than a specifically impulsive one. Of course, that assumes that there is a such a general male tendency, which opens up a whole host of issues. However, testing that assumption would at least be more promising than trying to explain away the very non-impulsive nature of many deconversions.

I don't think I'd put too much stock in either article, though.

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Is this for real, or is it Landover Baptist?

This is definitely Landover Baptist:

America should be shocked! Under the guise of family entertainment, George Lucas has created a device by which youths are instructed in the ways of ungodly sex! His latest Jar Jar Binks toy contains a 10 inch push-up tongue made of strawberry flavored candy. The tongue is shaped like a male sex organ. It is hard, and has a flushed red color, suggesting a youngster wrap his or her mouth around a fully aroused genital. Parents across the country are purchasing this 'innocent' novelty for their youngsters, completely unaware of it's demonic nature.

This is from a candidate for Congress in Indiana:

The GPD (Great Porn-Dragon) is seeking so set up this country as a Broke-Barack mountain of gay pride Obama-Nation where a nation that was conceived in liberty now conceives in illigitimacy at 40% in Indiana, where a nation that grew as a Christian lamb is now phoenix-izing itself to speak as a porn dragon. The GPD desires for all men to go the way of the dog. The GPD increases his success as he systematically genocides out the feminine bodies of our tribes.

I wonder if he wants to preserve our precious bodily fluids. It would be interesting to see him and wanna-be presidential candidate Lee Mercer have a conversation.

Hat tip to Stranger Fruit.

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Mooney and Nisbet getting stuck in the counterintuitive frame

First, I want to get something out of the way.

Now I write here as someone who has defended Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet on the issue of framing, and has done so quite recently, but even I eventually got disgusted with them after their most recent debacle. My thoughts on them went through several stages:

1. Hey, they aren't that bad!
2. Whoa, even the more sensible ScienceBloggers are mad at them.
3. Wait a minute, I can see why they (Nisbet/Mooney, not the sensible ScienceBloggers) are in the wrong here.
4. What the heck did I ever see in these guys?

Truth to tell, Nisbet and Mooney aren't wrong about everything, but looking back, I can see how they've mishandled atheists who really don't believe that evolution, and science in general, can be compatible with religion.

Ok, now onto what I really want to talk about.

Mooney, in a blog post from 2006, writes about what he calls "counterintuitive mode." In his own words, "This is where journalists, who are trying to find something novel or clever or surprising to say, try to turn conventional wisdom on its head, or to attack their own presumed allies." In some of Mooney's more recent work, he does this by starting off with a kernel of truth that is counterintuitive, and then blows it up out of proportion.

In his article "Sometimes Refuting Unscientific Nonsense Reinforces It," (which I had earlier defended) he starts off by pointing out that when dealing with denialists who are trying to mislead the public into thinking that there is scientific uncertainty about an issue, "if you try to answer their arguments, you’re inevitably committed to conveying more abstruse technical information and, thus, more uncertainty as soon as they wail back at you (which they thoroughly enjoy doing)." In other words, the seemingly obvious move of directly responding to lies with the facts can end up backfiring. Mooney also notes the Catch-22 of how making a "big fuss" over denialists can attract attention to them. Where Mooney takes these facts, however, is another story:

Couldn’t all the energy and resources bestowed on rebutting our enemies be better used to help promote our friends—perhaps, say, by devoting resources to getting the word out about individuals who have written pro-environment books? Rather than reacting, couldn’t we be setting the agenda?

Now I won't go into the details of why Mooney's particular solution to the conundrums that he raised won't work, since others have done this already, notably Mark Hoofnagle on the Denialism blog and Joseph Romm on the Gristmill blog, and I'd just be repeating their points. What I will note is that he is trying too hard to be clever by suggesting something that would defy common sense. If he were to suggest, as Hoofnagle did, that one should focus on how denialists lie and twist facts, rather than addressing denialists as if they were errant scientific peers, that would be interesting, but not that provocative. Instead, he proposed something that grabs attention because it looks so wrong. Trouble is that in this case, it looks wrong because it is wrong.

Mooney does something similar when dealing with PZ Myers' expulsion from the free screening of the screwy documentary Expelled, the movie about how "Big Science" supposedly tries to silence dissent about "Darwinism." Now Mooney did have a point in saying, "The controversy raises the profile of the movie, people—especially a movie like this, which is by its very nature courting controversy and baiting evolutionists." In other words, negative publicity could end up, counterintuitively, help the prospects of the film. The catch is that he overplayed his hand, insisting that this was a "gift" to the perpetrators of Expelled, rather than something that could help or hurt them depending on how well they played down the hypocrisy angle. Nor did it help that he gave credence to one of the perpetrators, Kevin Miller, for affirming Mooney's stance, as if Miller would likely have spun the matter any other way!

Nisbet, while not offering that much in the way of counterintuitive ideas, went on to do the part of "counterintuitive mode" where one attacks presumed allies, in this case PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog. I'm not sure what he was thinking. He already considers Myers to be a "Don Imus" atheist, so what was he expecting when he basically told Myers to shut up about his beliefs on science eroding religious belief? Worse, what he did further distracted from the hypocrisy of Myers being expelled from Expelled.

The odd thing is that both Mooney and Nisbet, if they weren't stuck in the so-called counterintuitive mode, could have pointed out the drawbacks of the publicity about expelling Myers from Expelled. They could have pointed out that we should expect those behind Expelled to spin the publicity in their favor—and yes, they should have used the word "spin"—which would highlight the problems with the publicity while keeping the dishonesty of Expelled's people at the fore. They could have pointed out that, yes, Myers' interview in the movie Expelled played right into creationist talking points, while noting that those behind Expelled were cherry-picking scientists to do just that, which would again highlight the dishonesty. Nisbet could also have emphasized that people with different belief systems can see the same coverage of events and come to radically different conclusions, and pointed out that those trying to spin the negative publicity about Expelled were trying to exploit that. Instead, there was far too much focus on knocking those who were more or less on their side.

Mooney and Nisbet, at least when it comes to framing, try to get too cute, too clever, and they've ended up shooting themselves in the foot.

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Chris Mooney on inadvertently enabling denialists (MOSTLY DELETED)

This used to be a blog post giving a partial—and I emphasize "partial" here—defense of Chris Mooney's article called "Sometimes Refuting Unscientific Nonsense Reinforces It." However, I came to the conclusion that I gave him far too much benefit of the doubt and was a bit unfair to some of his harsher critics, namely Brian Switek, PZ Myers, and ERV. For really insightful commentary, see Mark Hoofnagle's response on the Denialism blog, Joseph Romm's response at the Gristmill blog. and Kristjan Wager's blog Pro-Science had a briefer post on the matter.

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Christvertising: Brought to you by Objective Ministries?

Objective Ministries is a satire that had been subtle enough for some people to wonder if it was real, and now Christvertising seems to be doing the same thing. I doubt that it is really done by the same folks that did Objective Ministries, but both seem to have the same approach. Judging from some of the videos on the site, this looks like something a guy did from his house:



This bit of blasphunny comes with such gems as "If you like your product, so do we, but more importantly, so does God," and using "in-depth reports" to come up with the best "brand-prayer alignment" to maximize his supposed clients' "image efficiency and profit growth." It's a strange mix of Christianese and corporate-speak.

Hat tip to the Friendly Atheist.

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