My last post about the automobile industry was inspired by some comments I had left in response to Cuban’s post on Hacker News, a tech-themed site I often read. The comments weren’t well-received, largely (I think, given the well-received responses to it) because they implied that innovation, at least in terms of improving the product, couldn’t solve this particular dilemma. Now that I think about it, I’m not surprised. A hacker (as the term is meant there) is almost by definition an innovator, so the people there tend to value innovation above all else.

And not just innovation, but a certain sort of innovation, the sort the user sees. Y Combinator’s mantra is "make something people want", with the theory being that if you do that, all else will fall in line. While that’s largely true with software, it’s not the same in the manufacturing world because what people want, often more than the product itself, is to pay less money for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I value innovation as much as anyone else. I think humanity can solve almost all of our problems with science and reason. In fact, the automobile industry, including the American car companies, has knocked out more than their fair share of woes. The price of transportation as a percentage of overall income has been dropping for a long time.

But I came to realize that innovation means different things in different industries. In much of the tech world, especially on the web, innovation means nothing more than making a better product from the end user’s perspective. It’s clear that even if it cost Google 2x as much per search to operate as it does Yahoo, they’d still be making a lot more money. The same is true of most any web startup.

The reason for that is twofold. For one, the apparent cost to the user is $0. Technically users are paying to use both services, and more on Google than on Yahoo, but they’re doing it in a circuitous way by clicking advertisements and then purchasing things on the pages on which they land. It’s sort of a happy payment, since those Google or Yahoo ads are taking you to pages you wanted to spend money on. They’re scratching an itch. The fact that users "pay" more to use Google actually makes them happy. Nobody wants to pay more for a typical mid-sized sedan.

The other reason is that two times zero is still zero, and the cost of serving up a page is, for most web companies, effectively zero. I know a lot of people who run a lot of startups, and not once has anyone ever mentioned to me what it costs for them to serve up a page view. With the exception of the startups that primarily serve up large files (YouTube for instance) most have probably never checked. Hardware and bandwidth are so cheap when sending mainly html and a few images that until you’re serving millions of customers per day it wouldn’t even be worth the man hours it takes to find out.

Because of that, most startups don’t really worry too much about optimizing in terms of hardware costs. They just try to get to a point where scaling is just slapping in more boxes, which granted, is often a hard point to get to but only costs man hours. The marginal cost of a page view is still nothing.

In fact, marginal cost doesn’t even make sense as a metric for most web-based businesses. The vast majority of the expense comes from the engineering it takes to get to where you can slap in more servers. The time spent figuring out how to shard your database costs orders of magnitude more than the hardware you do it on. It’s an industry that’s almost entirely fixed costs.

In manufacturing, marginal cost means everything. That was the primary source of innovation for Henry T. Ford exactly 100 years ago. He didn’t invent the car, and he didn’t even make a higher quality one. He made a cheaper one by perfecting processes, such as the assembly line, that reduced the marginal cost.

Let’s say, for instance, that a Toyota Camry costs $50 million per year to engineer, but sells 1 million units. That’s a cost of only $50 per unit worth of engineering for a car that retails for something like $25,000 on average. The product innovation expense is trivial. It’s a tiny fraction of a percent, essentially a rounding error. For a car that costs $15,000 to build, the labor and raw materials are the overwhelming concern.

Innovation in the automobile industry has, for a century now, been more about reducing marginal costs than improving the product. They’ve been essentially doing the real world equivalent of rewriting your whole website in C, which every startup would be doing if serving up a page view cost them even $1 worth of processing.

So I think that’s the primary difference between the automobile and software industries. One is primarily about making the product better, the other primarily about making it cheaper. Both require innovation, just two very different kinds.

But even with both types of innovation, in an efficient marketplace, one company can’t be expected to significantly out-innovate another because it’s too easy to copy. You can’t patent the concept of an SUV. You can’t even usefully patent something like rain-sensing wipers (presumably, since multiple manufacturers offer them) because someone can trivially improve upon them or anything else you do. It’s not like a drug, where a precise chemical compound could have wild variations from one that was only 90% the same. (Pharmaceuticals are another industry in which the marginal cost is considerably less a factor than research and development.)

And really, I don’t think we’ve seen a discrepancy in terms of product innovation occur in the automobile industry. It’s hard to say because it hasn’t been a fair fight, but Americans have clearly had their share of hits. The largest trend in cars over the past decade would be the SUV, and they’ve led the charge there. Of the top 15 best selling, they produce all but numbers 2, 9, and 15. They own the pickup truck market just as well. The Mustang has been the top selling sports car for 22 years. And GM still has the world’s largest market share, though just barely. They’ve clearly been making cars people want for a long time, even while doing so at a tremendous cost disadvantage.

I view innovation in any competitive industry a lot like Olympic running. You would never expect a runner to finish 10% faster than the second or third best. For instance in this year’s 100m final, Usain Bolt set the world record of 10.2 seconds. Second place was 10.24, or 0.39% behind. The reason for that is simple, you’re taking a selected group of the best runners, all of whom put everything they have into it, all of whom have access to the same technology and practices. Is it therefore surprising that they all tend to perform similarly?

Humans are like that. There’s a lot of variance in a random sample, and Bolt might be able to finish in only half the time I could. But when you take the best tiny fraction of a percent, you find that they’re all pretty damn close to each other in ability. That’s no less true of automotive engineers than it is runners. Unless you believe in some sort of genetic superiority, you can’t expect the best American engineers to perform significantly better than the best Japanese.

What we’re doing to our automobile industry, in forcing upon them such a tremendous cost basis, is taking the second best guy in Usain Bolt’s record-setting race and giving him a 2 second head start. And when we do that, it doesn’t matter how bright our guys are, or how hard they work, or how well they execute, because the competition is going to be at least 99.5% as good. It’s human nature. Our team might finish less than two seconds behind, and in fact I think they have, but the other guys are really fast too.

Even if we’re a little better, and we might be, it’s not by much, and it shouldn’t be, and no matter what we do it never will be. To think otherwise is simply racist, and it’s provably wrong. The Japanese and Germans have their fair share of bright, hard working people (hell, a lot of them are Americans) and we just can’t expect to beat them in a race while starting that far behind the line.

That’s why the Detroit bosses want to level out the playing field. They want everyone starting from the same place. Unless the competition just gets lazy, in the global economy it’s the only way they have a fighting chance. And if we’re going to bail them out and invest American tax payer money into their future, we owe it to our citizens to stop letting our opponents jump the gun.

I was playing Rock Band with my cousins recently, two of whom have the misfortune of having a Rush fan for a parent, when 9 year-old Justin and I got in an argument.

Him: Neal Peart is the best drummer ever.

Me: {laughs}

Him: Yes he is.

Me: What do you know?

Him: I know he’s the best drummer ever.

Me: Ok, name one other drummer.

That turned out to be game, set, match. His older brother named one: “the drummer from Guns ‘N Roses”.

Mark Cuban echoed a lot of popular sentiment about the car industry here that I feel is just poorly reasoned. Every time the beleaguered industry does just about anything anymore, they’re pilloried for it, and it just doesn’t make sense.

First there was flying the corporate jet to Washington, where the Congressmen questioning them asked ridiculous things like “who here is willing to sell their jet now and drive back?” as if you can just put a Gulfstream V on Craigslist and it’s gone later that day. Then they advertised in the Wall Street Journal thanking Americans for the bailout (to which I was opposed, by the way) and they’re criticized for spending on that.

Just because a company is having a hard time does not mean it should stop making efficient investments. In fact, it maybe should make more of them. A corporate jet is not just a luxury to a large corporation whose executives are required to travel frequently. It’s an investment. The cost of an hour of a corporate executive’s time sometimes makes them well-worth it. I’m not sure if that’s the case for Chrysler specifically, and that would have been an intelligent question to ask before suggesting they eBay their entire fleet.

Same with advertising. Advertising isn’t a luxury for a car company, it’s a necessity. When done properly, every dollar in ads amounts to more than a dollar in profits. As an investor in Chrysler, which George W. Bush has essentially made us all with the bailout, the last thing I want them to cut is their ad budget. I’d maybe want them to examine it for cost efficiencies, but cutting it out entirely would be certain death.

Also, an ad calling us their investors is, I think, brilliant. People have been shown to greatly prefer patronizing businesses they own stock in over ones they don’t. If Chrysler can make Americans feel a sense of ownership, it might have some small effect on people when it comes time to buy a new SUV. I don’t know if that approach will work for them or not, but it’s certainly a valid angle.

Worse yet there’s this silly notion that American car companies are losing because they simply aren’t innovative enough. Bullshit. They’re losing because every car costs $2,000 more to build due to higher wages and health care. That’s it. End of story.

You can’t out-innovate $2,000 per unit. It’s not possible. It’s just too much money for an industry that’s become largely commoditized. It’s like trying to compete with Bud Light but being forced to sell at Sam Adams prices.

When every mid-sized sedan is more or less interchangeable, $2,000 is just a tremendous difference, and as a result every American car for twenty years, in order to compete, has had to either cost that much more, or cut back on that much worth of features. They’ve largely chosen the latter, because the former would have destroyed their volume, and as such they’ve gotten a reputation for shoddy quality. They’ve closed the gap a lot in the last 5 years, which is a testament to just how hard they’re trying, and in fact they might be out-innovating slightly, but they just can’t win a battle that’s perpetually uphill.

It’s not as if Americans can’t engineer good cars. Our engineers are just as intelligent and driven as theirs. Our aviation and defense industries prove that. It’s just that their cost basis means they’d have to out-engineer the Japanese by an impossible margin to compete. And the car industry is so massive and has so many companies vying for supremacy that there just isn’t $2,000 worth of slack laying around to pick up. Cost-cutting has, since Henry T. Ford, been the primary focus of the industry, and they’re pretty good at it.

Cuban says they should focus less on reducing costs and instead “figure out what cars consumers want, and how much they need to sell for.” To illustrate just how stupid that idea is, here are the top 10 selling cars in America (source):

1. Ford F-Series

2. Toyota Camry

3. Chevy Silverado

4. Honda Accord

5. Honda Civic

6. Toyota Corolla

7. Nissan Altima

8. Chevy Impala

9. Dodge Ram

10. Ford focus

Looks to me like they’ve figured out what cars Americans want. They’ve got 5 of the top 10 models, including numbers 1 and 3. What more do you want from them? Actually, what you want is for them to make a profit on those proportional to what their competitors do.

Americans don’t just say “I want a mid-sized sedan and I want to pay $25,000 for it.” They decide what type of car they want and then shop around. They want to get what they want and pay the least for it they can. American manufacturers have determined the price they need to sell for, and they’ve been selling at that price. The problem is that price is above the cost for Toyota to manufacture it but below that cost for GM.

Also here’s an interesting line about total profits from a slightly outdated NPR comparison between GM and Toyota:

$4.15 billion loss from North America operations off-set by profits in Europe and Asia for an overall loss of $3.8 billion

Note that in other parts of the world, where their per-unit costs are on par with the Japanese, they actually make money.

And that’s why the executives are focused on lowering employee wages and benefits. You can’t out innovate $2,000 in a commodity business. And even if you could, doing so should net you $2,000 in extra profit over your competitors, not parity. Forcing them to continually fight uphill will inevitably lead to failure.

All of that is why I’ve never purchased an American car, and why I was against the bailout. They’ve been unable to convince me to buy one because their cars weren’t as good as Toyota’s. It may not be the fault of their engineers, but I’m still not driving a vastly inferior car just so unskilled laborers in Detroit can make $50 an hour flipping switches and pushing buttons.

And they’ve been unable to convince me that the bailout is a good idea unless there were strict guidelines ensuring that changed. They seem to have been unable to convince the Senate of that too, but thanks to Bush being as fiscally liberal as he is socially conservative, they didn’t have to.

Sometimes you see something and you think to yourself “nothing good can come of this”. Enter massify.com. It’s the film industry equivalent of a thirsty baby playing with an open bottle of Drano.

Apparently they crowd-sourced an entire movie. Everything from the script to the casting was voted on, presumably by the same lunkheads who turned Digg into an extension of Apple marketing interspersed with unfunny comics and left-wing commentary. It’s a process scientifically designed to produce a film that’s mediocre for its budget range, which apparently was somewhere in between what a student film normally costs and my monthly car insurance payment.

Nothing good can come of this.

The trailer can be found here, but if you don’t feel like watching, let me sum it up. It’s every other low-budget slasher film trailer you’ve ever seen, but more low-budgety. Lots of short, blood-soaked clips fading out of and into blackness, some roars and creaky fence sounds. But in this case they couldn’t even afford the narrator with the really deep voice that everyone else uses, so they just show some words, because if there’s one thing we know slasher film fans love, it’s reading.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s neat the way the process worked, but I guess I’m unable to see the value in coming up with a novel way to produce more cinematic detritus. Hollywood regurgitates this crap 10 times a year, except (judging from the trailer) with more polish. They don’t need crowd sourcing to add to the dung heap.

It’s true that this gives a lot of people outside of the film industry a chance to participate, but I’m not so sure that is a good thing. The industry is sufficiently easy to at least attempt to join that anyone not motivated enough to try doesn’t belong on the set or in the production credits. Letting a gas station employee play director is perhaps less dangerous than letting him be a thoracic surgeon, but it’s no more likely to achieve a good result.

Hollywood isn’t incapable of good movies or new ideas, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that if you walked by a theater today. There’s an entire independent film system out there working very hard at making actual art. Lots of unknown people from a gas station in Whereversville end up getting their movie produced that way (or even through the major studios occasionally) every year because they send in something good. Not every movie is written by a John August or a Josh Friedman.

In fact, the one thing the movie industry has going for it is that it’s still much more meritocratic than most of the rest of America. A good script is a good script, no matter who wrote it, and the same is true of acting and directing. If a gas station attendant is still years away from breaking through, there’s a good reason for that. The system is flawed and imperfect, and probably ripe for change, but it still functions at a level where if anyone is so good that they can’t be ignored, they’ll end up on top.

So while the process is definitely new, I’m just not sure that making a movie via the crowd is a good idea if more of the same crap that’s been destroying the industry that some of us still love for the last 20 years is the result. Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon clinging to some silly notion of the movie as America’s greatest art form, but this looks like something that nothing good can ever come of.

One of the things every startup worries about is getting plugged on TechCrunch. I know we did. Will they cover us? Are we ready for the exposure yet? Can our server handle the traffic? We had the first one covered since we were part of Y Combinator, but the rest were concerns.

Everyone wants that TechCrunch bump, and wants it to go smoothly, but what nobody told us was all of the crap that happens as a result of the coverage. I don’t blame any of it on TechCrunch, it’s just a side-effect of their success. Once you get listed on their site, if you have contact information available you’re bombarded by a stream of annoying bullshit.

The worst was a Dell salesman. I think his name was Matthew Lamm. He emailed pitching hardware, which would have been fine if that were the end of it. We weren’t interested in buying their stuff and told them so. Then he put me on some sort of list, to which he sent out every out of office notification. Every time there was a holiday I got email notifications about his being away. A salesman I don’t know whose product I was not interested in buying was telling me he was away for Christmas. It was just frequent enough to annoy me, but not quite enough for me to take time out of a busy day to filter them out. Worse yet, I finally sent him a terse email, got off the list, only to wind up back on it when he left Dell and a new salesman took over his accounts.

As annoying as that was, though, at least he had some sort of email software that sent them all individually. A few of the CrunchLeeches (what I call them since they feed off of the blood of startups covered) just send out one giant email with everyone CC’ed, meaning that everyone who replies is emailing you too. Limelight Networks is the most recent offender. (I’ve had this problem with RockYou too but not due to TechCrunch.) Just this week I got a Season’s Greetings from Limelight, which I think is a CDN (way to pitch static file hosting services to a fantasy sports startup there buddy) and surely enough in came the replies. I am willing to sell the list of a few dozen emails found therein to any competitor who wants them. It’s not very nice, but then neither is Limelight blasting my email to a bunch of people I don’t know or care about, and adding more garbage to the giant pile of emails that greets me every afternoon when I wake up.

Then there are the slightly less odious but many times more voluminous headhunters. Every single one in the entire country at this point has cold-emailed me to tell me about a candidate they have who would be great for us. Of course, we use Ruby on Rails and Flash, while all of the candidates are .Net or Java guys. I suppose Rails and Flash devs are too in-demand at the moment to waste time with headhunters, but still, it would be nice if they at least tried to match up technologies, rather than just spamming me every programmer they get who likes sports. Or, you know, didn’t bother me at all.

All of which is not to say that it’s not worth being on TechCrunch. It is, especially if you’re the right kind of startup. It’s just that your junk folder is going to be bursting afterward.

I really enjoyed watching this clip from The Daily Show today. Jon Stewart goes right to the topic I would have and asks a lot of the same questions I wish I could. And, you get the impression he’s just as dissatisfied with the answers as I would have been.

He really gets to the crux of the Gay Marriage debate which is that there is no good secular argument against it. It’s great to see him force one of the religious right’s more likeable leaders to dance around the issue, because it shows that even the comparably sane and intelligent portion of that segment of society still can’t just answer a question.

There are, as far as I can tell, only three non-religious rationales behind banning gay marriage that are ever even proffered and one is off topic. They are:

1. It’s bad for everyone’s children. I heard this a lot in the debate about the California initiative, parents saying "I don’t want my children to have to learn about gay people." I don’t know where CNN found all of those Californians without basic cable to interview, but trust me ladies and gentlemen, your kids already know. 

It’s 2008. Your kids are going to become aware that there is a such thing as same-sex couples. Little Timmy having two mommies isn’t going to be their first exposure, and even if it were, gay people already have children all the time.

You can’t restrict a civil liberty just because it means kids may have to learn about it in school before you’re ready for them to. I’m sure some people once didn’t want their children learning about interracial marriages for the same reason.

2. Gay couples are unfit to raise children. I would actually be open to hearing about this if the argument were over whether or not gay couples were allowed to adopt. You’d have to prove it (which would be tough because almost all data points to the opposite conclusion) but at least it wouldn’t be a straw man. But in reality gay marriage and gay adoption aren’t the same, and arguments against one, even if they were correct, wouldn’t be arguments against another.

In fact, if conservatives believe so heavily in marriage, and they don’t want to stop gays from adopting, they should want them to marry. I realize that sentence was logic, which is kryptonite to the religious right, but it’s true. If they’re already having children, and marriage makes them better parents, it’s in everyone’s best interest that they be allowed to.

3. It’s the way it’s always been. This is by far the most common one. As Stewart points out, for one, it isn’t the way it’s always been. It’s the way it’s been for a while, but not back in the Biblical times social conservatives seem to want to use as a template for modern society. Our marriage system would be almost totally unrecognizable to them. Women marrying in their late twenties to men they actually chose? Unheard of.

But even if it were the way it has always been, that wouldn’t make it right. Slavery had always been legal on this continent, until it wasn’t anymore. Women were always not allowed to vote, until they could. Even most social conservatives wouldn’t argue that those precedents were good ones.

I think that’s the fundamental difference between the socially progressives and the conservatives. Progressives realize that just because something is done one way, and has been done that way for awhile, doesn’t mean it’s right. Conservatives think "that’s the way it’s always been done" is a legitimate argument for anything, even when it hasn’t always been done that way and they’re just too ignorant to know it.

Every great moment of human progress came when someone realized that the way it’s always been done was wrong. Every scientific advance, every great business, every great political movement. Each one has someone behind it who realized that there was a better way than the present one. Einstein realized that the way we thought about time and space was wrong. Sam Walton realized that many things about the way retail chains operated was wrong. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement realized many of our laws were evil.

It’s no shocker that the GDP per capita of the socially conservative states trails so  far behind that of the blue, they’re too busy doing things the way they’ve always been done to invent the ways we’ll do them in the future. And unfortunately our electoral college gives them disproportionate power allowing them (as happened in 2000, when they lost the popular vote but won the election due to it) to hold our nation in place against its own collective will.

Huckabee mentions that not all people who want to ban gay marriage are homophobic. I suppose that’s true. They’re not afraid of gay people (not all of them anyway) they’re afraid of change. They’re progressophobic.

I’ve read a few articles lately about startup founders advising other people whether not to start up themselves (usually not) and it’s given me a sense of déjà vu. Back when I was a B-list professional poker player I got a lot of inquiries from people I didn’t know asking me if they should go pro. A lot of other pros who were asked that question said no every time. And they weren’t really wrong to do so, because if you’re asking someone you don’t even know that question, no is at least 75% likely to be the correct answer.

It’s not a very helpful one though. I realized early that people aren’t really asking you if they should go pro. They’ll make their decision regardless what you tell them, and if they got far enough along in the process to start asking, the smart money was that they were going to do it in the near future. I’d bet that the majority of them did, even though almost all of them were told not to.

So instead of just giving them a flat out no, I asked them a bunch of questions. Do you have kids to support? How much do you need to make each month to make ends meet? Do you have enough saved up to break even for three months (or six if you’re playing live) and still have a bankroll left? What’s your win rate and sample size? Yada yada yada.

My goal was to help them at least realize that going pro means a hell of a lot more than just quitting your job and gambling all the time. And it even means a lot more than just being good at poker, because something like 30% of people are winning players, but only a tiny fraction of them could successfully do it for a living. Success as a professional is more about bankroll management than poker skill, and avoiding going broke is a lot harder to do well than beating a $10/$20 game.

A lot of people probably ignored everything I told them anyway, just as they would had I said no (or yes for that matter, since they were going to anyway, though they’d blame me if it went badly for them). But I know I saved a few people from a lot of agony, and ended up encouraging a few who went on to have success with it. By not advising them one way or another, but rather giving them more information, I helped anyone who I could, and I at least didn’t hurt the rest.

I think startups are much the same as poker. People often ask if they should do one, but they’re not really looking for a yes or no answer. Most of them are just thinking out loud or looking for confirmation of the decision they’ve already made (or, if you say no, someone to tell “I told you so” after their IPO) but many are looking for information to help them come to their own conclusion. So you try to help the ones who might actually consider what you say and make their own informed choice, and assume the rest will ignore you anyway. Just saying no is definitely more convenient for me, but I don’t mind taking a few seconds to help someone.

Just like poker, startups can be a great way to go, you just have to be prepared and know what you’re getting into. If you’re used to steady, professional employment it’s a big change. You’re jumping out of the hot tub and into a frozen, stormy ocean. While other people might just advise staying dry, I try to give them a metaphorical wet suit and a life raft.

There may be something, somewhere in this incomprehensibly wide universe cooler than Rock Band 2, but if so I’ve never seen it. Harmonix did just an incredible job on that one. If I didn’t have so much damn work to do I’d be playing that game until I was blind, deaf, and so weak in the fingers that I couldn’t even sign my name.

The one thing about these Guitar Hero type games that anyone will tell you is they tend to change your musical preferences a bit. Most notably, you start to appreciate or even like some songs you previously despised. For instance, I used to change the channel the instant I heard 3 notes of any song by Kansas, but now on the off chance I stumble across Carry On Wayward Son I’ll turn it up.

If you’re a rock fan it’s inevitable that some of the songs on any one game you already loved, some you maybe didn’t but will grow to, and some you can tolerate. But on every version there are one or two that are just so awful that having to play them a few times makes you want to pour Quickrete into your ear canal just to be sure you’ll never have to suffer through that again. In previous discs it was usually something by Slipknot, but this time it’s We Got the Beat.

As with most tragedies, I was curious how The Go Go’s happened. It’s good to learn about that sort of stuff, lest history repeat itself. At some point in the future it’s not inconceivable that I will have a daughter, and if, by chance, she starts down a treacherous path of life choices that, if left unchecked, could lead to her forming a new wave band, at least now my few minutes of reading Wikipedia will enable me to recognize it and seek professional help before it’s too late.

While I realize new wave is no laughing matter (I rank it right behind AIDS and terrorism) I did find one thing was pretty funny. Apparently the lead singer, Belinda Carlisle, was briefly a member of The Germs but she had to leave because she got sick. Oh, the irony. That’s like having to leave AC/DC because you got electrocuted. Or quitting Journey because you felt like travelling. Or Bad Religion because you joined the Church of Scientology.

I could go on with this all day, but I’ve got songs to unlock.

In a couple conversations lately about science (one about global warming here, one about evolution elsewhere) and many in the past I’ve seen people who believe in the scientific perspective compared to religious people. The logic was that unless you’ve confirmed the data yourself (i.e. measured polar ice caps or studied finch bones on Galapagos) you’re just taking the word of someone else, so what’s the difference?

The difference, in actuality, is enormous. It’s based on the relative methods of the scientific and religious communities, the two of which are worlds apart. Putting your faith in one is not the same as putting faith in another.

The method of the religious “thinkers” is to say something is true because it is in a 2,000 year old book of 4,000 year old mistranslated Jewish folk stories. There’s no experimentation. There’s no logic. There are no revisions as new facts come to light. The Bible still claims that the Earth is square and rests on pillars, even though that was disproven millennia ago (in fact Eratosthenes estimated its circumference a couple hundred years before the Bible was even written). If you have enough money, you can pay Russians to blast you into space where you can see for yourself that that is not true. Most religious people of course aren’t stupid and don’t need to take a ride on a Soyuz to believe that, but they still subscribe to the overall epistemology and believe many things just because they were told them through a chain of sources that leads back to mistranslated folk stories, despite having no data available.

Science couldn’t be more unlike that. A good description I just found on Wikipedia is “Using controlled methods, scientists collect data in the form of observations, records of observable physical evidence of natural phenomena, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work.”

Just the fact that scientists run and publish experiments and collect data (which anyone can therefore check up on and attempt to replicate) and incorporates a process of revision as new theories and data are formed makes it the exact opposite of religion. Even if you never verify a single experiment, just knowing that you could and that others do makes it the exact opposite of religion.

There is, of course, a certain amount of faith involved for civilians when it comes to science, since one cannot verify for themselves even a tiny percentage of the knowledge they come across in their lifetimes. To expect people to do so, or compare those who trust in peer-reviewed data and experimentation to those who trust in folk stories, is absurd. We have a very limited amount of time on this planet, and too much we need to accomplish just to survive. But relying on something that is published, cited, cross-checked and open to public debate has no similarity to religion whatsoever.

Most people don’t believe in evolution because it’s fashionable. They believe in it because a large body of scientific evidence points toward it. And they’re trusting that a large group of scientists have reviewed that evidence, so there’s still some faith involved because that’s how we as humans manage to make any progress at all despite only having 40 or so useful years of life, but to compare it to trusting in mistranslated folk stories is just plain silly.

Just in case you were having fun at any time in the last few decades, or hoping for any life-saving drugs in the next few, the Catholic Church recently decided that seven deadly sins wasn’t enough and updated the list for the first time in 1,500 years. Here’s some of the stuff we can’t do anymore:

Genetic modification is now officially verboten because we all know that the Bible, a book that claims the world is flat, clearly states that altering DNA is out. I think it was Leviticus 10:13 that described amino acids and the ATP synthesis system.

Polluting the environment is out now too. I guess they should stop signaling the Papal election by burning a tire.

Becoming obscenely wealthy is on the list, but becoming ridiculously wealthy is still presumably O.K. No word on becoming only moderately wealthy by selling obscene materials though.

Causing poverty is a sin, which is bad news for the last few Republican Presidents. “Mr. Lucifer, tear down this wall of fire.” We can safely say no Democrats will be winning any elections in Hell for a long time, unless maybe the War in Hades drags on for a few millennia.

And my personal favorite from the list is taking drugs. Music sure must suck in heaven if that one’s correct. The thought of an eternity full of gospel and country makes me want to go burn down a church full of babies and old ladies. If there’s a just and loving God, he’d let Jimi Hendrix in no matter how much acid he dropped.