Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Doing what you must know is shoddy science, in the hope that it will provide cover for propagating the gospel, shows a poor opinion of your fellow creatures, of the gospel, and of God. Of your fellow creatures, because you are resorting to trickery, rather than honest persuasion or the example of your own life, to win converts. Of the gospel, because you do not trust its ability to change lives and win souls. Last and worst, of God, because you are perverting what you believe to be the divine gift of intelligence, and refusing to learn about the Creator from the creation. And for what? To protect your opinion about what measure you think it fitting for God to employ." -- Cosma Shalizi, 2005-08-02

Chalk up yesterday as another day lost to "stuff that feels a lot like migraine except for not being excruciating so I keep thinking I shouldn't take drugs for it but I still can't get anything done", and today to side effects of the drugs I finally gave in and took which should make me a lot more functional later.

At Pennsic, keith_m043 was gently pushing me to test my blood sugar. I'm guessing (and if I'm wrong I expect he'll correct me and if I decide it actually matters I'll ask directly) that this was partly because of his own increased awareness of the risk and dangers of diabetes, and the fact that I've gained a lot of weight over the past decade and some of my fibromyalgia symptoms can mimic or hide other conditions, but I have noticed eating-related issues on my own that are probably worth checking into at some point. Though my getting a blood sugar reading of 150 (units? We don' need no steekin' units! Though I guess I should ask Google what the conventional units are...) after eating an unhealthy quantity of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies (have I mentioned that Pennsic really isn't very much like camping?) and a probably-healthy quantity of grapes just before leaving site seems to indicate that I'm probably not already diabetic, I have noticed that for the past ... uh ... year I guess, I've been hit especially hard by postprandial depression. (For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, it refers to metabolic depression -- sluggishness, "want to curl up on a sunny rock and nap", drowsiness -- after eating, not mood.) Not sure what that suggests. Haven't asked a doctor or the web about it yet. Too sleepy when I think of it. Like now. Sleepy.

As I was preparing lunch, I found myself thinking two questions: "Why did God make nightshades so yummy?" and, "Why did evolution make nightshades so yummy?" But because I'd recently been reading a really long discussion on AlterNet (are there any other kind there?) about science versus politically-inspired-religious-pseudoscience, which of course included a lot of people getting evolution wrong in both subtle and unsubtle ways (on both sides, dammit), I immetiately had to rephrase the second question, "What is it (if anything) about the things that make the edible nightshades so yummy that conveys some advantage to the plants so that environmental selection for that property is unsurprising?" (Though now that I think more on it, that needs the companion question, "What (if anything) about nightshades makes it unsurprising that humans would evolve to like the taste of them?" It could all just be a huge accident that never got selected against, of course, but I fid myself wondering whether it's not.

The first question is, in many ways, more fun ... but the scientific questions are in most ways more interesting. I find both questions meaningful, but hey, I have unscientific religious beliefs. (Consider: the only scientific religious belief has to be agnosticism, because science's answer to the question of the existence of God is, "That's not a scientific question, so science does not have an answer for it." Atheism is as unscientific as theism. Militant agnosticism ("I don't know and you don't either") is arrogant when it assumes that science is the only tool for exploring truth; properly the scientific answer is simply, "science doesn't know and doesn't attempt to find out, ask me when I'm not wearing my lab coat and feel like giving you a non-scientific answer".) There's what I know as an armchair scientist, and there's what I know as an armchair theologian and as someone with personal subjective experience of the divine, and my belief in God is not counter-scientific or anti-scientific, merely non-scientific. It's only when we make claims that science can disprove, or claim to have scientifically proved the existence (or nonexistence) of God that religion gets into trouble with science.

(One of my philosophy professors in college was convinced that he had formally proved the existence of God. I wished he'd run his proof past the math department. I think it was the same prof who thought he'd mathematically proved that there had to have been a "first moment of time", whose proof of that was mathematically flawed, but wouldn't believe a mere undergrad (math major) correcting him on a mathematical concept. Cool guy and very good to learn philosophy from in general, but the math thing bugged me. (Not saying one way or 'tother about whether that conjecture can be proved, but the way he'd tried to do it relied on a very different understanding of the number line than mathematicians have.))

But I digress. My first trip to Florida convinced me that oranges are evidence that God loves us ("Look! Single-serving bags of orange juice! And they grow on trees! Isn't that convenient? And God made these for us!"). I must give thanks for the evolution of potatoes and chili peppers. (Okay, human-directed breeding gave rise to various specific breeds and tweaked the yum-factor, but there was an ur-potato and ur-pepper from which current varieties descended, and somone had to stumble across them (along with tomatoes and eggplant) and realize they'd found something worth cultivating.)

Hmm. Babbling, topic drift, too many parentheses, awkward sentence structure, tangents, no sense of where any particular thought is going ... oh yeah, it's definitely naptime. Wonder whether this will look at all salvageable by editing once I wake up again.