Monthly Archives: March 2015

Andrew J. Hoffman at Stanford Social Innovation Review comments on a recent encounter with a denier:

In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a potential donor—a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest in environmental issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began at 7 a.m., and while I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, the potential donor began the conversation with “I think the scientific review process is corrupt.” I asked what he thought of a university based on that system, and he said that he thought that the university was then corrupt, too. He went on to describe the science of climate change as a hoax, using all the familiar lines of attack—sunspots and solar flares, the unscientific and politically flawed consensus model, and the environmental benefits of carbon dioxide. …

Why is this so? Why do such large numbers of Americans reject the consensus of the scientific community? With upwards of two-thirds of Americans not clearly understanding science or the scientific process and fewer able to pass even a basic scientific literacy test, according to a 2009 California Academy of Sciences survey, we are left to wonder: How do people interpret and validate the opinions of the scientific community? The answers to this question can be found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.

Precisely what I’ve thought about.  My (always contingent) conclusion is that, for a denier, at this juncture, crucial ideologies and interpretations of history, and assumptions about the nature of that history, take precedence over the elements of science: observation, deduction, the testing of hypotheses.  If a scientific conclusion clashes with an ideology then there is a problem with the science: bad observation, unknown variables, even vast conspiracies.

My remark about history encompasses this: an analysis of history is performed and certain lessons are drawn from that analysis; then an assumption is made that those same lessons will hold in the future.  This is where I suspect intellectual mayhem is committed, as certain ideologies, effective in one environment, will not perform as expected in another environment – and, as anyone paying attention knows, environments are changing: population levels, available land, resources, pollution, understanding of justice.

Many groups perform such analyses, formal or informal, correctly or incorrectly, which is to say, with or without bias.  Andrew continues down a different path than I had hoped, noting increasing polarization:

Then he briefly discusses the psychology behind group dynamics, and then moves on to communications strategies.

Here’s the thing for me: ideology is based on goals, on hopes, on dreams.  It seems to me a subtle assumption of this article is that science is just another ideology.  Science is not ideological, not at its best.  Some practicioners are flawed, it’s true, but the very structure of science is designed to call them out and invalidate their conclusions.  Science is all about understanding what’s happening right now, right here: the what, the why, the how, from abstract principle to gritty reality.  That’s what needs to be communicated to any ideologue: science is neither for or against, it’s simply a way to study reality.

(Interrupt to help Deb with rogue crackers.)

And, just maybe, measure the ideology against reality.  Perhaps that is one component of the reaction against the scientific consensus – people naturally, tribalistically, attach themselves to the ideology, and it takes on a significance greater than truth after a while.  When the ideology is threatened, community is threatened: the interloper is demonized, even if it’s science, because the community is more important than the science.

(h/t NewScientist 28 February 2015)

… Senator Ted Cruz (R – TX), the Houston Chronicle reports:

Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.

Make no mistake, Cruz is smart, holding degrees from Princeton (B.A. in Public Policy, cum laude) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).  While his appeal will mainly be amongst the Tea Party conservatives, he is Hispanic and so may pull in some voters from that ethnic group.

After appointment as Solicitor General of Texas, which he used to argue conservative causes, sometimes in front of the Supreme Court, he defeated sitting Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst for the Senatorial nomination, and then handily beat the Democratic nominee Sadler by nearly 16 percentage points.

For all his educational and political acumen, he’s struck me as a bit of a bull in a china shop so far in the Senate, but perhaps this is purposeful.  Can he avoid the blunders of Mitt Romney?  Can he build an appeal to the Independents who decide elections these days?  Or can the Democrats paint him as a dangerous conservative who would roll back important gains?  He certainly does not care for the ACA, but the longer the ACA is in place, the more favor it may gain.  It’s a quicksand landscape out there…

UPDATE: When I mentioned “Cruz is smart” to my wife, she remarked, “So why is he Republican?”

Rohollah Faghihi reports that a conservative critical of the current Iranian administration,  Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, unexpectedly wins an election to head the Assembly of Experts, responsible for electing Supreme Leader:

Seemingly, Yazdi’s victory was the result of the quiet activities of conservatives. According to an Iranian newspaper, Movahedi Kermani, a key conservative figure, had visited Qom, considered one of the power centers of Iran, one day before the election. This visit is indicative of a coordinated effort to obtain the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts.

A red herring may have been waved about:

What may have misled the moderates was the publicity campaign of conservatives over the possible nomination of Shahroudi. One day before the election, Hujjat al-Islam Reza Taghavi, a member of the conservative Combatant Clergy Association, said: “I assume that the majority of Assembly of Experts’ members are in agreement with Shahroudi [chairmanship].” It’s possible that moderates felt assured that either Rafsanjani or Shahroudi would be the new chairman. (Yazdi denied that his nomination had been planned.)

And yet the loser, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may in the end have a different goal in mind:

Political observers feel that perhaps Rafsanjani’s nomination was aimed at reminding people that the upcoming Assembly of Experts election is vital. Rafsanjani’s nomination in the 2013 presidential elections — which was denied by the Guardian Council – certainly helped create an early level of enthusiasm for the election.

The current period of Assembly of Experts is to end next year, and the next election scheduled Feb. 26. We’ll see then if Rafsanjani’s gambit pays off.

However, others see the conviction and harsh sentencing of his son, Mehdi, on corruption charges as indicative of his permanent loss of power:

Many Iranian analysts have interpreted the harsh sentence handed down to Mehdi Hashemi as politically motivated and aimed at hammering the last nails on his father’s political coffin.

This analysis may contain a kernel of truth but it is a mistake to ignore the essential reality of the case, namely that prosecutors had a very strong case against Hashemi junior, who besides corruption was also convicted on an additional security-related charge.

Undoubtedly the sentence damages Hashemi Rafsanjani and may come to be regarded as the moment when he was finally ousted from the system. A key figure in the post-revolutionary Iranian establishment, Rafsanjani fell out of favour in the summer of 2009 in the wake of street protests following Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election to the presidency.

The undercurrents of Iranian politics seem to be at least as murky as our own.

In NewScientist (21 Feb 2015) Teal Burrell conveys new information about the brain in “Brain boosting: It’s not just grey matter that matters” (print: “Meet your other Brain”) (paywall):

To test her idea, [Heidi] Johansen-Berg [at the University of Oxford] turned to a 2004 study, which had found that learning a new skill such as juggling changed the density of grey matter – an example of classic synaptic plasticity. Johansen-Berg decided to recreate the study, and measure changes in white matter too. A group of volunteers agreed to learn how to juggle, and after six weeks, brain scans showed that their myelin had increased more than that of a control group who had no training (Nature Neuroscience, vol 12, p 1370).

“We saw a change not only in the grey matter but also in the underlying white matter pathways, suggesting that these pathways strengthen in some way as a result of experience,” says Johansen-Berg. The changes to white and grey matter took place over different timescales, suggesting two separate processes. Johansen-Berg thinks the increase in white matter would have enabled faster conduction along the circuits coordinating juggling. What’s more, the effect was seen in everyone who learned to juggle, regardless of how good they became, which means it is the learning process itself that is responsible.

This was the first study to reveal that training can alter white matter in healthy adults, and it opened the door to a plethora of similar findings. Since then, numerous activities have been linked to extra myelin, from learning to read, to meditating, and learning a new skill like playing the piano or another language.

Myelin is one of the keys to a properly functioning brain, and a lack of it, for any reason, may lead down the path to Alzheimer’s, MS, and ALS.

Harvard contributes information on the apparent role of myelin in accelerating intelligence here, including this possibly contradictory information:

But the new research shows that despite myelin’s essential roles in the brain, “some of the most evolved, most complex neurons of the nervous system have less myelin than older, more ancestral ones,” [Professor Paola] Arlotta, co-director of the HSCI nervous system diseases program, said.

Websites dedicated to reporting on myelin are here and here.

Subject: Neutrinos ugetiPills Online transcends

Message: There are many swamps slavishly swimming a blast was utterd from the horn

Really makes you wonder what’s going on out there sometimes.  Rogue emails mating and having mutant children?

Yeow.

NewScientist retitles articles from print edition to digital edition.  My policy will be to use the digital edition titles in all cases, and to mention the print title as “(print: title)”.

NewScientist (21 Feb 2015) (paywall), “I can’t keep up with climate change” (print: “I’m always drawn back to the ice”), an interview with Antje Boetius:

Does that make it difficult to understand the changes that are happening now?
The environment is changing faster than we can research it. It’s a shitty feeling for a scientist if you are trying to learn something from that change and you know you’re far too slow. People only started seeing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing 30 years after it began. That is crazy. The change is happening right now and we can’t wait 30 years to conclude: “Oh, by now the entire typical life of the Arctic has been lost – wow, we have finally shown it.”

Is it hard to live with that feeling?
One year I do the climate change work and the next I like to do exploration work because it’s just too depressing otherwise. In 2016, I have a mission to explore a gigantic underwater mountain that starts in a hole at a depth of 4000 metres and climbs 3500 metres. I’ll go with robots and cameras to explore what life we find on these very steep walls. That’s not as sad as climate change research.

(Emphasis mine)

“Very Louisisna”

Say that five times fast.

(h/t Steve Yelvington)

Gallup has the latest poll data on Hillary:

I know this would please my mother, who was absolutely infuriated (in her quiet, self-effacing way) when Obama took the nomination – Dad said she felt it was women’s turn in the Oval Office, and certainly Hillary had the best shot.  She is also doing very well in the general race insofar as the female vote goes:

This seems reflective of her overwhelming national prominence: First Lady of Arkansas; national First Lady in charge of a national health initiative (which fell flat, equal parts poor leadership and Republican antagonism); Senator from New York; very competitive campaign for Democratic Nominee for President; and Secretary of State.  I don’t see any other woman, or for that matter any person, matching that list of achievements.  We can argue her record is not spotless: the health initiative never really made it to credibility, as I recall, a failure of politics, I suppose – I don’t remember any serious analysis; as a Senator, her reputation was as a quiet, hard working freshman; her failure to win the nomination race involved strategic blunders, generally blamed on her advisors (HillaryLand was their collective name), which still rebounds on her as she should have either picked better advisors or learned to listen outside of them; and a good rep coming out of the Secretary of State position, despite Republican attempts to make Benghazi into some sort of conspiracy.

I’ll go with the general consensus – the nomination is hers if she has a quality, open-minded team behind her.  She doesn’t have her husband’s charisma (which, to me, just came off as smarm – I voted for him twice, but never without my skin crawling).

Larison is less certain, seeing the beating in the midterms cannot be a good thing for Democratic hopes of retaining the Presidency:

It is hard to see how any Democratic presidential candidate would benefit from having their party beaten as thoroughly as it was [in November].

From NewScientist (20 March 2015) (paywall), a serious device:

TALK about early adopters. The next generation could start lifelogging even before they are born. A wearable device lets expectant mothers listen in on their developing baby’s heartbeat and movements continuously, rather than just when she goes into the hospital for a scan.

The device consists of a lightweight harness with sensor-laden straps that go over and around the bump. Its inventors believe the system will offer peace of mind to pregnant women, as well as help doctors to monitor high-risk cases remotely rather than keeping women in hospital for observation. It might even reveal new insights about pregnancy itself.

Want to blackmail someone and the information is digital?  According to NewScientist (21 February 2015), Dark Secrets (paywall) is the place to go:

Darkleaks could facilitate all kinds of disclosure, positive and negative, via an anonymous marketplace. The service is available to download online as a free software package and its source code has been published openly online via code-sharing website Github. Users can upload a file with a description that can be viewed by potential buyers browsing the marketplace. This is all done within the software itself.

Its developers say that individuals may wish to use the service to anonymously auction off “trade secrets”, “military intelligence” and “proof of tax evasion” among other, rather more unsavoury, things.

Darkleaks promises to make transactions for this sort of material anonymous. A blog post announcing the tool insists: “There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers.”

Commenters on SatoshisGhost’s Twitter feed suggest there may be some limitations to how well this will work:

An owner of trade secrets could try to fish on their spying competitors. She could actually leak her own trade secrets, force competitors to burn bitcoins for these, then never reveal the secret.

Over at Coin Desk, the system’s developer gives his long range goals:

Amir Taaki, the project’s systems developer, told CoinDesk he hopes to “[devalue] business models based around proprietary secrecy” by providing a financial, rather than moral, incentive for insiders to reveal information.

This ties in with my observation of a few years ago, submitted to (but not published by) Andrew Sullivan, proprietor of The Dish (no longer active), that we may encounter a time where virtually no information can be considered truly private – all of it available for purchase, if you know it exists.

Indian parents will go the extra mile:

Images of parents and family members clambering up school buildings and clinging on window ledges to pass cheat sheets to their children have left authorities in despair.

NewScientist (paywall) summarizes a Nature article (another paywall) concerning a new mystery of Mars:

So it was that much more surprising when, on 12 March 2012, amateur astronomers around the world noticed a strange blob rising out of the planet’s southern hemisphere, soaring to 250 kilometres above the surface.

They watched for 11 days as it grew to around 1000 kilometres across, even stretching a “finger” out into space. “I was really quite amazed that it was sticking out the side of the planet quite prominently,” says Damian Peach, who lives in Selsey, UK, and was one of the first to spot it.

Poor weather and other issues meant no one had their eye on Mars the following week, and by 2 April it seemed to have disappeared. Then on 6 April a second object of the same type emerged from the same spot and lasted another 10 days. It, too, has not been seen since.

No one has a clue, which makes this quite tantalizing.  For comparison, 100 KM altitude is considered to be the edge of space on Earth.

A friend forwarded an email he received pointing to a web site called the Daily Jot.  The archives do not permit simple linking, so I’ll just quote the whole entry right here:

The Church should follow God not men

You have got to give credit where credit is due. These communists know how to advance an agenda. They know what they want and they go after it in an organized way. They don’t care what the facts are or who they have to lie to, they are all assigned their areas and they go after it. Communism by definition seeks to abolish all religion and all morals and replace it with government. Government becomes god; morals are defined by the government. This is exactly the way of the current White House. When it comes to foreign policy, it is directed by an Islamist Marxist agenda. When it comes to domestic policy, it is directed by a Marxist communist agenda. Everyday that agenda advances on many fronts.

Global warming, for example, is not about global warming. It is about government wealth redistribution. The science of global warming has been proven to be fabricated, yet the communists keep bullying their way to get higher taxes. On February 24, UN Climate chief Rajendra Pachauri, resigning under fabrication charges, said of global warming “It is my religion.” Socialist healthcare is another one. After implementation, there are still about the same amount of people who do not have it. But the government is collecting more taxes and redistributing a share of them to those who sign up for socialist healthcare. Healthcare has thus become more expensive and less affordable.

Immigration is another example. The idea is to bring in as many anarchists as possible and redistribute wealth enough through education, healthcare and other benefits to get their votes. These people unknowingly may become slaves of the state, but their vote will keep the communists in power. There is another element to all this: the church. These communists have been very effective at coopting the church to believe in their social causes. Tugging on the heart opens up the purse strings. Communists in our government have become expert at getting the church to believe that God says to support their godless humanistic agenda. Communism seeks to destroy God and country. It is an ally of the devil.

So now here we are at another crossroads–the Islamist Marxist White House (puts a knot in my stomach just writing those words) has decided it is in the best interest to govern and tax the internet. It is selling it to the people with the lie of “net neutrality” and “internet freedom.” Both are antonyms for what is really about to take place. You think Homeland Security and the IRS are spying on you now, wait till this goes through–they will be snooping on everything and you will be paying them to do it. It will be soft tyranny as many will be cautious to speak their mind on what was once the last bastion of free speech in the world. The “church” should stand against such evil. Communism is humanism and godlessness. Peter and the Apostles said in Act 5:29, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” ​​​

The reason “Islamist Marxist” puts a knot in your stomach is because the two are oppositional – and the Anarchists wouldn’t have anything to do with either one of them.  And that’s just the start of the problems here.  I give you this in case you haven’t any coffee this morning – it’ll certainly wake you up.

(h/t William Cloose)

Facebook now permits sending money to your friends:

Facebook‘s instant messaging service isn’t just for sending smiley faces and photos anymore. Now you can use it to send money instantly to your friends.

Facebook, the social networking company, announced Tuesday that American users of its Messenger app would be able to link their debit cards to the service and use it to message money to one another just as easily as they send a snapshot or text.

Later we learn China’s WeChat already supports this capability.  What better way to make it easy to spend money on Facebook than if it already has your debit card in place?

Ross Douthat brings up a subject that’s been bothering me for years:

ONE of the anxieties haunting the 21st century is a fear that technological change will soon make many human lives seem essentially superfluous.

It’s a fear as old as the Luddites, but the promise of computing, robotics and biotechnology has given it new life. It suddenly seems plausible that a rich, technologically proficient society will no longer offer meaningful occupation to many people of ordinary talents, even as it offers ever-greater wealth, ever-widening powers and, perhaps, ever-longer life to the elite.

Then he veers off to his own specific concerns in the area of religion; I think he might have pushed a little further to discover that underlying this concern are the concepts of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) – these are the great enablers of the technology about which he is concerned. The usurpation of today’s jobs by creatures of our own making is what concerns me.

The NewScientist magazine has articles covering the new capabilities of robots and artificial intelligence on a regular basis; and, unlike most of the articles I read in that venerable pop-sci magazine, I do not get excited about what I read in articles on these two topics.  Unlike articles on astronomy, cosmology, even medicine, these two topics have a future, unpredictable ethical component that leaves me pondering.

Not being a creature of any great faith, I can hope there will be new jobs, new endeavours, hell, new adventures for future generations – with robots and even AI right along side them – but, honestly, I have no certainty in that.  And, yet, I know the Libertarians would no doubt suggest exactly that, having been a subscriber to REASON Magazine for 20+ years (I let it lapse several years ago when it abruptly converted into a cheerleading squad for the GOP).  Their thesis, at least back when I was reading their monthly output, would be that the robots are simply freeing us to find new endeavours, which in turn will improve the general lot of mankind.  And perhaps they’re right.  Foreseeing the future is rarely mankind’s forte.

My reaction when reading about AI is mixed: an interest in the technique, but a real feeling of WHY?  This planet positively crawls with nearly 8 billion people, most of them fairly smart and capable of doing the same work asked of an AI based program, in most cases much better.  However, in the future that may become less and less true.

Of course, the AI can generally do what it does well much more cheaply than a human; after all, a human is an active agent in deciding to trade their labor for (generally) money, and, if they’re not an active agent, we may strip away the euphemism and call them slaves.

Which leads to the next question: when does an AI become a slave?  Professor Nick Backstrom begins to address the question in this paper (page 8) with his Principle of Substrate Non‐Discrimination:

Principle of Substrate Non‐Discrimination
If two beings have the same functionality and the same conscious experience, and differ only in the substrate of their implementation, then they have the same moral status.

I prefer a more informal approach: if it’s self-aware, capable of self-analysis, and has the drive to survive (and that seems axiomatic on the face of it), then it’s a creature worth our respect, by which I mean it should be related to as moderated by a moral code – not by our use of the power button.

So what do we owe to a new life form?  Assuming a classic computer, it’s easy enough to replicate; if we assume a new, magical piece of computing machinery, maybe not so much.  Where one robot can be built, so can a slew.  Are we bound to create more sentient creatures once we’ve built one?  That’s the ethical question that bothers me – if we can build something self-aware, then must we make more?  The potential is there, as the Catholic Church might assert; whether we must fulfill that potential is not clear.  Bostrom suggests the question may be out of our hands; the AI may replicate itself, assuming sufficient resources.  I do have to wonder, though, whether an AI will have the drive to replicate.

On an entirely different tangent, whenever I read some gushing over the latest robot, it always crosses my mind: are we just looking for the next slave?  Well, the answer is actually yes: everytime we automate some process and take a human out of the loop, we’ve once again tried to accomplish some purpose at a minimal outlay.  I can’t help but note how the ancient evil of slavery relates to labor saving machinery; but I shall not even consider equating the two.  My suspicion is that if a machine does become self-aware, those humans profiting from it will deny it, and then fight any liberties which it may demand for itself, or others will demand for it.

Circling back to Ross, to which world does that lead us?  Immeasurably richer as our silicon/metal slaves do all the labor and we sit back, eating grapes?  A few extremely rich people surrounded by the jobless masses with no means for making a living?

Perhaps this is what we’ll value in the medium future, products with the label: “Made by Human Hands”

Miscreant caught in the act with Arts Editor Deb White.

A move is on to rid the $20 bill of Andrew Jackson and replace him with a woman:

That’s where Women On 20s comes in. Founded by Barbara Ortiz Howard and Susan Ades Stone just in time for Women’s History Month, Women On 20s is holding an online competition to choose a woman to eventually replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. “We think there’s no greater gender gap than on our money,” Stone told Quartz. “Of our print denominations, every single one bears portraits of men, something that hasn’t changed since 1929. I like to call that ‘Money 1.0.’ It’s time for a change.”

Meanwhile, WiseGeek tells what’s gone before.

The Rose Ensemble does a wide variety of early music from diverse cultures and eras.  If you liked the selection below, here’s more of their work that’s nothing at all like the previous post.  The second frame has a whole playlist of their early American music (Hey! They even sing in English!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMfepresjmw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQV9Qy0iVV0&index=11&list=PLhPtp_Ezpp1OcGNjQIsk5bPUU12pzIKeI

Amidst the shadows and the trees,
within the shelter of the leaves,
deep in the wood, where no one sees,
they dwell.

Among the shadows on the ground
it’s perfect to be small and brown;
overlooked and unrenowned,
and safe.

They play in warm, green, dappled light,
then steal away when comes the night,
and hide themselves from mortal sight
‘til dawn.

Under the birdsong and the dew,
around the branches of the yew,
they come again when day renews
once more.

Amidst the shadows and the trees,
within the shelter of the leaves,
the small, brown folk do as they please
this day.

— D.J. White

The most lovely Rose Ensemble performing ancient music….

“Kennedy is the daughter of former President John F. Kennedy and uncle of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated when she was a child.”

Well, I see they’ve since fixed it – but without admitting it.  Perhaps they’re having as bad a time as I finding the proper word to describe the implied sexuality of Ambassador Kennedy.

Today ThinkProgress (among many other sources) reports the Presbyterian Church has modified their definition of marriage:

The nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination voted on Tuesday evening to change their definition of marriage to “two people,” cementing the group’s formal embrace of same-sex marriage. … The new language doesn’t require Presbyterian ministers to officiate same-sex unions, and pastors can individually decline to perform a marriage — just as they can with any straight couple. In addition, although the vote has crossed the threshold for ratification, presbyteries will continue to vote until June, when it is expected to take effect. As of Wednesday morning, the tally stands at 87 presbyteries in favor, 41 against, and one tied.

This serves to remind me of my own thoughts on the issue, which oddly enough I have not discovered voiced elsewhere.  First, context: having had gay friends for years, I’ve never had a problem with gay marriage; not being religious makes that easy.  I was absolutely delighted to vote against the proposed Minnesota amendment banning gay marriage a few years ago, and was thrilled as the survey results showed it slowly slipping over the line into defeat, ringing in the right of gays to enter into marriage.  However, that’s hardly a reasoned position.  I choose to ask, Why deny homosexuals the right to marriage?  I’ve run across the following objections, briefly, excepting the last:

1.  It’s against my religion.  This, of course, is the abandonment of reality-based reason in favor of the dictum of a divinity, and as such is difficult or impossible to counter.  I join the great mass of folks on both sides of the issue in agreeing that no church should ever be forced to host such a marriage; but then, who would want to use an institution hostile to a fundamental part of themselves.  It is not always impossible to counter such claims, as sometimes the internal logic of the institution can be turned against such an argument.  Yet, in the end, it doesn’t matter: we are a secular nation and should not employ purely religious proscriptions that lack any basis in rationality.
2. It’s unnatural.  Sorry, define natural.  OK, now, is humanity natural?  Yes, it is; every year scientists make another discovery that diminishes our perceived uniqueness; someday, we’ll measure ourselves only quantitatively against other species, and not qualitatively.  As a part of nature, then, we can then identify other species in which same-sex sexual activity occurs, with long time pairings, and say, well, that appears to be natural.  There are numerous examples, such as giraffes.
3. It’s immoral.  Immorality is a societal consensus, without a doubt; it evolves over time.  It’s evolving right now: if you disagree and consider yourself Christian, then I must ask if you approve of stoning witches, or keeping slaves; both were at one time acceptable, but no longer.  Morality evolves as we learn more and more about running successful societies.  Making the immorality argument puts you in quicksand, not on the mountaintop.
4. Marriage is designed for children.  Now this argument was new to me, but I’ve come to realize this is actually an opportunity for the pro-gay marriage side.  Let’s skip semantic squabbling over evolution vs purpose.   Let me draw an analogy.  I’m a software engineer, and over the years, I’ve had a few instances where I’ve written some code for some problem, applied it, had it work fine – and then someone takes it, applies it to a problem with little in common with the first problem, and again it works fine.  Whether something is tangible (fire, for example) or intangible (marriage), it’s putative purpose is not a limitation.  Consider fire, which we can theorize was first used to cook meat – but then someone discovered it worked great for smelting iron; glass, first for windows, then for microscope lenses.  Did the original design intent restrict later uses?  One of the great hallmarks of humanity has been its ability to take something, tangible or intangible, and apply it to a problem in another domain successfully.  The originally advanced argument is not really an argument, it’s simply a statement about an original design purpose, with no relation to new purposes to which it might be applied.  In the end, assessment cannot be made against the original purpose, but on how well the new purpose is fulfilled.  To that end, a careful statement should be prepared.  Perhaps “gay marriage will bring greater stability to a subpopulation which historically has been persecuted, engaged in unsafe sex, and suffered terrible illnesses because of those activities.”  If those ends are not achieved, then there might be an argument against gay marriage.  Of course, a similar statement for heterosexual marriage could also be formulated; one wonders what an honest assessment might find.

A Song About Shadows and Trees

Ancient gnarled willow,
Bowed with the weight of years,
Broken-limbed,
Face turned from the light,
Beholds his image on the ground
Growing straight
And tall
And ever taller
As the sun goes down.