Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Both from NBA.com: "75%: Rajon Rondo's shooting percentage per 36 minutes when Dwyane Wade is off the court in this series." Huh? What is a "shooting percentage per 36 minutes"? "the Spurs turned loose 36-year-old, 6-foot-11 Tim Duncan as the world's oldest, tallest point guard to put down the rebellion." Since there are several point guards older than Duncan, this has to be a combined measure: when you multiply his age times his height, Duncan comes out as "oldest-tallest"... or something like that.

Conspiracy theories are usually impervious to evidence. Two I see all the time on sports talk boards are: 1) The NBA tries to guarantee that all series go to seven games, because that yields more revenue; and 2) The NBA tries to guarantee that large-market teams get to the finals, for the same reason. All one has to do to debunk these theories is to glance at a list of NBA final series . Since 1989, only three finals have gone to seven games. There have been more sweeps (four) than seven game series. And San Antonio, Orlando, Detroit, Cleveland, Indiana, New Jersey, Portland, Seattle and Utah make up 20 out of the 46 finals teams. This year, the western team is guaranteed to be San Antonio or Oklahoma City. These theories are usually psychological crutches, explaining why the conspiracy theorist's own team just lost a game, or has never won the finals. So the one about "The NBA only lets the large-market teams win" will be forwarded by someone from, say, Charlot...

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”-- GK Chesterton (Hat tip to Jason Peters.)

"I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony." -- John 3:11

Pretty bad. So bad that George Scialabba , writing in The New Inquiry and asking "How Bad Is It?", thinks the fact that seventy percent of Americans believe in angels is a symptom of "our civilization’s decline." Whatever you think of angels, this is historical ignorance on a pretty stunning scale, since in whatever the earlier golden age from which he thinks we have declined, 95% or 98% of people believed in angels.

Bob Murphy noted that Christopher Hitchens claims to have disproved the existence of God in ten minutes. Well, I haven't viewed it, because if I want to watch and listen to a bloated, blithering drunk ramble on for ten minutes, I just go talk to myself in front of the bathroom mirror for that long, thank you. But, in the meantime, I can eliminate eliminative materialism in far less than ten minutes. Here goes: Over at Ed Feser's blog , godinpotty defines eliminative materialism as follows: "Yes, physics is a complete description of reality, other descriptions are mere illusions that you might need to use for your pathetic human life..." (I think this is a fair definition, and it comports with others I have seen, although obviously "pathetic" is merely adding color here, and not part of the "meat" of the theory.) This is an obviously incoherent position. It holds that: 1) The only things that exist are those things described by physics; an...

I just cracked up thinking about the day when my Brazilian friend Christiano, who was doing a bit of carpentry for me, came down from the attic to inform me it was full of... monkeys. "Dude," I told him, "do *not* let the EPA know I've got the only indigenous monkeys in the US living in my attic, or we'll never be able to do another speck of work here." Now, what do you think he really had found up there?