Hey Matt, any improvement with your dad?

Some in terms of mood, offset by greater physical weakness/shakiness and the frustration that goes with it as of last night and this morning. Still, we're now on more familiar ground. And as I said to Mom, I'll take frustrating problems over scary ones any day.

I can never decide if I'm more offended by Creationism and ID because it renders my entire profession and related fields useless, or if it amuses me more because of that...

Cindy considers the threshold for those questions, it seems, to be exceeded, and therefore she doesn't regard the results with confidence.

So then, how do we tell if the poll is giving bad data, because of bad questions, or if it's just one person taking issue with the results, but the poll and the data is still good?

I guess I'm just responding to the fact that Cindy's arguments about the subtle differences between various interpretations and personal definitions of Biblical literalism aren't very convincing to me. I quite understand that this is something where specific definitions of "literal" are going to be different from person to person, but there's enough similarity in the concepts that it is actually meaningful to me to know how many people believe in Biblical literalism or inerrancy -- if for no other reason than because these are terms I always hear from believers, not areligious outsiders trying to give unwanted label to something.

I have never encountered working definitions of "literal" or "inerrant" that were not sufficiently removed from my own working definitions of "open to interpretation" and "metaphorical" that gradations in the levels of literalism/inerrancy were of any great significance.

Hey, Sean? I drove through Sarnia on this trip. Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the Sarnia hand gesture.

I was going to say: dictionary. "Literal" is not a word that should be open to interpretation, unless you are literally illiterate.

All polls take complex situations and squash them into boxes of varying fit. But by making the respondent choose among [foo] number of choices, the poll-maker is recording the decision the respondent made, not just the choice she ended up going with.

But by making the respondent choose among [foo] number of choices

Heh. You study computer programming too?

No; I picked up that expression from here. Betsy, specifically, from whom I also picked up "wossname."

Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the Sarnia hand gesture.

Oh no. You're not. I think of the gesture, and that conversation in general, from time to time. And, if the last visits I made back to Michigan are any indication, there's a few other people who remember the gesture too. I'm pretty sure Joe and I have talked about it from time to time as well.