[Anime] Mai HiME 10

I watched Mai HiME episode 10 last night in bed on my laptop, and my main reaction is that it seemed a bit rushed. The whole gag, a re-test for those who failed home economics held as an Iron Chef competition (I fully expected Midori to shout "Kono themo wa kore desu! Ke-ki!"), seemed forced, as if the writers had had a bad day for ideas.

On the other hand, we now have a seventh HiME, "Secret Ninja and her Hell Toad." There is no way we're gonna be introduced to six more in the next three episodes and care about them. And I'll be damned if Mai, Mikoto, and Natsuki haven't got the routine down: oufan shows up, Mikoto stuns it with a first blow from Miroko, Natsuki pins it with Duran's ice attack, and Mai summons Kagutsuchi who proceeds to make charbroiled mincemeat out of the immobilized oufan. Once the monster is identified, those three have takedown more or less routinized.

Hands up, people: who really wanted to see the bitchfight between Natsuki and Nao go down?

I'm betting Fumi is the anti-Miyu.

I'm hoping this goes to 26 episodes. I'm hoping Yukino is a HiME, and Haruka is not. I'm hoping this gets picked up and licensed; I'd love to have a commercial copy. My home-made DVDs are fine, but they're third-generation copies, after the initial on-air pull, the fansubbing, and the DVD transcoding.

Rain, Blood and Groceries

I've just been dragging this week. Mostly, it's because my sleep schedule is completly screwed up, between Omaha's illness and Kouryou-chan's reaction to that illness, I've been unable to get a full eight hours the past five days, and on at least one of those days I got only five hours. Add to that the news that not getting enough sleep inteferes with your brain's ability to tell if you're eating properly and it's a recipe for disaster.

Last night, after ripping through a half-dozen bugs at work, I received a call from Omaha that she was running behind schedule and would like to meet me downtown at the art museum for a pick-up. We were supposed to meet for grocery shopping. I ran down to the car and headed into the city. The heavy rain made seeing anything difficult. When I got to the museum, Omaha said "We have a bit of a crisis."

Kouryou-chan had been running around and had fallen face-first onto the concrete. She had bloodied her chin and scraped a knee and was crying with the pain and indignity of it all. We hustled into the car and Omaha tended to her injuries while I tried to get out of the way of hurtling buses and soaking pedestrians. I took a quick turn on the viaduct to get around Pioneer Square, then ran up to Costco. Omaha and Kouryou-chan spent time in the bathroom taking care of her, and then we did our grocery shopping.

We got home and met fallenpegasus there. Too tired and busy to cook, we made our way over to Huckleberry's, the local family diner. Omaha and Pegasus ran off together so she could have some not-family time, and I took Kouryou-chan home and put her to bed. She was pretty good about the whole bedtime thing, for once, and read bits of Charlotte Web to me, the part where Charlotte describes her cousins and their abilities.

BSOD

I woke up this morning to a very weird thing. A Black Screen of Death. Windows people have their blue screen, but in Linux terminal failure of the OS results in a black screen with a (slightly) more useful trace of where things went horribly wrong.

I don't think I've seen one of those since 1994. I hope there's not a problem with the 2.6.9 kernel; it's really stabilized my hardware and seems much more tolerant of the twonky miniBIOS in the big hard drive. There was a lot of network traffic going through the box at the time-- a usenet pull, bittorrent, and an rsync push-- but it was still annoying.

Anyway, I rebooted and was back up in less than 30 seconds.

Anthony Flew, neism, and elitism

Antony Flew came out of the closet yesterday as a deist, and over on the more erudite radical Christian websites you can positively hear the saliva hitting to the floor. They're positively wetting themselves over the opportunity to beat those of us with solid naturalistic metaphysics over the head with the drumbeat of "See? SEE? If Flew believes in God, you have to as well!"

Well, no.

First, Flew's argument is simply wrong. He's buying into the intelligent design argument while admitting up front that he has not kept up with the literature, knows nothing of genetic algorithms, has no idea what recent discoveries in protobiotics indicate, and is basically incredulous that the messiness of our genetic code is the process of mere stochastic evolution fed by entropic principles. Flew says, "It has become extraordinarily difficult to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism." In the words of Daniel Dennett, Flew should try harder; biologists are having no such difficulties. Flew is arguing from incredulity, a common and usually easily-spotted fallacy.

Secondly, and this is the most important point, arguments from authority hold no weight with me. Flew's approach is essentially similar to Paul Davies, another deist who argues from the anthropic principle: we exist, therefore the universe must support us. Well, duh, that's a bit like a puddle being amazed that the hole it fills supports it. From the wide and vast universe, we're pretty insignificant. So far. The anthropic principle in its basic form is tautological, and you cannot use a tautology to support an argument. So I'm not interested in what Flew's position is, I'm interested in how he arrived at it.

And thirdly, Flew has been quoted (I haven't read his own material) as being sympathetic to the "intelligent design" movement. I don't believe that for a second; Paul Davies isn't an "intelligent design" proponent, and neither is Flew. Davies, like most theologians, doesn't like ID because it gives God the wrong job-- tinkering with a universe that ought to have not required tinkering in the first place. (The "error of misplaced concreteness," as it is put in Catholic philosophy; why a Catholic reporter should crow about Flew's alleged embrace of ID is beyond me, except that "misplaced concreteness" is one of those big phrases the masses are expected to not know too much about. Of course I'm cynical about this sort of thing.) As long as the philosophical underpinnings of ID require a (I'll be kind) indeterminate and (deliberately) indeterminable agent, it won't be science, and it won't provide evidence.

None of this is stopping the religious punditry, which is thrilled at the idea that science might finally be wrested away from naturalistic underpinnings and infused with something one of them weirdly calls "neism," or naturalistic deism. Anything, anything, they beg, that moves science closer to the day when labs are overseen by priests and the church decides what truths should be disseminated to the masses.

We have to remember that truly traditional religious conservatives come from the Irving Kristol / Russell Kirk line, who want "sureties of prejudice" and believe that the ideal populace is as contented cattle, huddling together under English oaks, deaf to the buzzing of contentious ideas (to paraphrase Kirk). Kristol once infamously said of evolutionary theory,

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

Flew's consideration of deism gives these people a brief flame of hope that this aristocratic elitism will someday once again rule the world, with their particular family of aristocrats in charge. (Contrast this with meritocratic elitism, where through open competition and the market of ideas in a truly free environment, the best ideas float to the top and the worst die off.)

It is my job to crush that hope. Because this will blow over. Flew wasn't a leader, and in meritocracies we don't take orders from above anyway unless they ''make sense''. Flew admits that he doesn't have a coherent tale from first principles through evidence, a classic example worked out from beginning to end, that supports his position. Without it, his "deism", if that's really what it is, is still just wishful thinking.

And naturalism will remain the dominant paradigm in science. Because through the process of elimination, an a posteriori condition, naturalism has replaced all a priori assumptions about how the universe has worked; of all the assumptions we could hold, the one that natural phenomena arise from natural causes has produced the most spectacular (indeed, the only successful) results.

(I'm indebted to John Holbo at Crooked Timber for reminding me about Russell Kirk's work; I hadn't encountered or considered it in almost a decade. I'm also indebted to Brian Lieter for pointing out the difference between a priori supposition and a posteriori conclusions about choosing methodologies.)