Not Bloody Likely

I frequently pay in cash. I closed my curtains on the way out of the house this morning*. Turns out I must be a terrorist.

Terrorism is a problem. But the solution to that is not racial intolerance and kangaroo courts for teenaged soldiers recruited by extremists. I mean, if someone is willing to kill themselves in order to do something, how much of a deterrent will any sort of punishment be?

The above paragraph, and I suspect the objection to the ad about loners, relies on the assumption that when the media talks about "terrorists" what they really mean is "Muslims". It turns out that when you run the numbers, that doesn't make any sense..

Let's do some more math. Bayes' rule is pretty much the most important thing ever. It tells you what the likelihood of something is based on prior knowledge. In this case, let's calculate out the probability that someone is a terrorist, given that we know they are Muslim.

Using that link with graphs about terrorism and assuming that there are about 1 million Muslims in the US and about 300million people, we can calculate that

P(Terrorist | Muslim) = P(Muslim | Terrorist) * P(Terrorist) / P(Muslim)

We can get the first term, P(Muslim | Terrorist) = 0.06, from the pie chart at Loon Watch. The second P(Terrorist) = 318 / 300M = 0.0000011. comes from there, too, and our assumption about population. And finally, P(Muslim) = 1M/300M = 0.0033.

So, P(Terrorist | Muslim) = 0.06 * .0000011 / 0.0033 = 0.00002 = 0.002%

That means that out of every 50,000 Muslims you meet, 1 will be a terrorist. Compare this with the fact that of every 50,000 people you meet in NYC, 290 of them will be a violent criminal. Maybe it's time to ban I < heart > NY shirts from public places.

* The curtains keep the temperature of the apartment down on sunny days.

Deus Ex Radioactiva

When you get down to a very small level, sometimes refered to as the quantum level, the universe becomes a strange place, at least to our human sized preconcieved notions of How Things Work. Radioactive decay is an example of this sort of weirdness: we can never tell when a particular atom is going to decay, but if we have a big pile of them, we can say how long it will take for half of them to have undergone decay with pretty good certainty.

Let's assume for a moment that the Christians are right: God exists and He's a vicious tyrant bent on forcing His creations to live in eternal pain, but who has nonetheless managed to convince a handful of those creations that He is loving and kind and just, mainly so that they will go out and visit unspeakable horrors on His other creations.

It would not be unthinkable that a creature that clever would be able to set up the universe in such a way that His own presence would be undetectable. How might He go about doing that? Why, with quantum mechanics, of course! You see, He would make everything run according to some probabilistic law: the outcome of any particular event would be completely unpredictable, but the pattern of those outcomes would become quite apparent given a large enough sample set. In this way, He could intervene by changing the outcome of a single event without violating His own laws.

The result of this would be a completely undetectable God who was able to alter the universe in large and detectable ways. In fact, given the current body of evidence, this is about the only way God could exist. So there you have it, Christians: your God is the ultimate jerk who uses only your belief in Him to determine where you spend all enternity while covering His tracks and making it completely impossible to detect Him until Judgement Day. And to me, that sounds a lot like "He beats me because He loves me."