Our first threesome! Three ex Catholics talk about how science rules and faith sucks.
In this episode, Joemma make their interviewing debut with none other than Irreligiosophy’s resident Aussie physicist and overall really smart person, Tort. Tort explains what physics is really all about, and how dumb arse/ass humans try and use theories such as quantum mechanics to explain or defend concepts that have nothing to do with physics at all. Joemma follow the discussion up to a point, but keep on wanting to replace reality with analogy. According to Tort, this human condition may be the root of the whole problem to begin with.
On a lighter note, we also discuss Tort’s in depth study of the quantum nature of Leighton’s penis, what happens when you throw your balls at sluts, and some Australian nutjob Christian conservative politics.
And, to top it all off, Tort has the best giggle in the whole of known space-time.
Could we be any worse at interviewing that Chuck & Leighton? There’s only one way for you to find out.
Joemma
13 Responses to “Episode Sv: Tort Law”
Don’t you have to have fans before you have fuck you fans month? (BAM!) Also Tort sounds like a cunt, what kind of stupid fucking name is Tort.
I looked up the Christian Democrat voting preferences he only gets 1% of the vote the rest comes from preferences (Australia has a preferential voting system, you number your candidates in order of preference and the candidates with the lowest number of votes are eliminated and their votes redistributed to the voters next preference, this is repeated until someone has 50% or if it’s an upper house seat like Fred Nile’s 1/21 of the total vote and 21 people are elected).
This episode was delightful. I’m going to have to remember the bit where Tort talked about how observing the electron with a photon is like hitting a ball with a hammer, so that next time someone tries to tell me observation changes reality I can brain them with a hammer. I also noticed that Joe took some cues from Leighton’s interview style of throwing in a groan-inducingly inappropriate joke from time to time. I don’t think Leighton would make that kind of pun. Or any, really. His ass didn’t get covered, though, even if there was good discussion of his penis.
Next interview: maybe Ptah? I think he’d be up for it.
Joe needs to suck it up and read Julian Jaynes.
Leighton’s arse is not my field. Chuck has had to listen to Leighton talking about it enough that he is probably an expert by now.
Great podcast. You guys should do one on Religion and (American) Politics focusing how things have changed in the last 50 years.
Heck, you could use America, which was shaped a great deal by Deists (best example is Thomas Jefferson), and how politics has gotten more and more religious since the 1964.
Actually the CDA gets about 3%-4% of the vote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_state_election,_2011
They only actually win seats because the legislative council uses STV, a proportional system. The specifics are honestly a bit too complicated to go into here. In most countries with proportional representation, people select a party list, and candidates are elected off of the list until every party has an amount of representatives proportional to their vote. STV basically produces a proportional result without requiring people to select a pre-set party list; they can rank the candidates in any order they want. This obviously seems superior, and would perhaps be much more widely practiced if it weren’t so complicated that it practically requires a course in college to understand properly. In most countries that use this system, they keep the district sizes small, about 3-5 or so candidates, which isn’t very proportional, but otherwise you’d have huge unmanagably large ballots, with 20 or so candidates from each party to rank. NSW is a bit weird in that they throw practicality to the wind and elect the upper house of the legislature from one huge 20-member statewide district. And they have a huge ballot with hundreds of names to rank (although, as a result, a system has evolved where people can just rank pre-prepared lists from the parties, which is how most people choose to vote). This a lot more proportional, and allows small parties like the CDA to have a representative elected if just a few preferences flow to them from eliminated candidates. The CDA doesn’t win any seats in the single member districts elected via what Americans usually refer to as IRV, which is basically STV in a single-member district, and the system the dude described above. His description isn’t valid for STV, though, because in STV you have to have shit to deal with the case where votes are wasted because a candidate got too many votes and will definitely be elected, whereas in IRV you only have to deal with the case where votes are wasted because a candidate got too few votes and definitely won’t be elected. And 50% isn’t a valid figure in STV; it’s repeated until they get a candidate gets more than a “droop quota” of votes. A droop quota just happens to be 50% in the case of a single member district.
I was on adderall when I wrote this.
The SecondLaw feed’s b0rked again.
The ampersand in “Chuck & Leighton” in the <itunes:summary> for “Episode Sv” needs to be “&”
I was going off the slightly more reliable NSW electoral commission (http://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/lc_summary.htm) rather than wikipedia but appear to have read the result below (Family First) rather than the CDP (who get 3-4%). Our voting system in NSW is not that difficult to understand although you have got it a little wrong. If you get 1.2 times the amount of votes you need to get elected then you get elected and all your votes are redistributed to the voters next preference but they only count as 1/6 of a vote so that the 0.2 left over is distributed fairly but still only counts as 0.2. In practice voting is very simple, you just number the candidates you give a shit about or you number the parties you want to vote for. 1 for your favourite, then 2, up to as many as you want.
Counting too is very simple if there are 21 candidates you figure out how many votes 1/22 of the total number of votes is, everyone who has that many votes is elected and you subtract that amount from their total. Then you allocate all their votes to the voters next preference. If they have 200 votes and you need 100 to be elected then all their votes now count as half (100 left over votes divided by 200 total votes) a vote for the person with a number 2 next to them (if you have voted for a party the top person counts as one then the next person counts as 2). Once you’ve elected everyone with more than 1/22 of the total vote you go to the person with the lowest amount of votes and eliminate them al their votes then go to the voters next preference still in the race, repeat until someone gets over 1/22, eliminate and redistribute their votes, keep going until you have 21 people elected… Not that hard.
The feed seems to incorrectly formatted. When I checked the feed in Google Chrome I got the error message:
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 169 at column 51: xmlParseEntityRef: no name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Please fix.
It’s valid now. Fucking ampersands.
Your greatest episode yet. Can’t wait for Ptah to man up and actually take a stand on the ‘cast.
You should see what jesus-is-savior says about Kent Hovind. It is priceless…
Oh, and Chuck? When do we get our next podcast from you and Leighton? Don’t make me come over and punish the two of you…
Who the fuck is Chuck? Enjoyed the episode by the way. I was feeling a little bit dumb by the end of it, so I went back and listened to Tort’s explaination of entrophy again…………………. didn’t help.