Recruitin’ the freshmen

This morning was Purdue’s big activities fair, where freshmen get to go scope out all the different student organizations they can join. We were there, representing the heathens:
Last year we were stuck with the religious clubs, but I think they got the hint that we didn’t belong there and we were just with some other random clubs this year. Though behind us were all of the religious clubs, and they got to see the back side of our sign – “There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.” We didn’t get too much trouble from freshmen. One felt they need to go give us a flyer from another booth about finding Jesus, one started swearing loudly about how dare there be atheists here, and one kid from France tried to debate us for a half hour. We got about 30 signatures for our mailing list, which is pretty good and about what we accomplished last year. Many more people were interested but didn’t sign up, so hopefully they’ll check out the website and come to the callout. We passed out about 1,500 flyers, though apparently when people actually read them, this is what happened:
Yep. 90% of the flyers on the floor are ours. I’m sure their thought process went something like, “Hmm, what’s this? Gah, atheists?!?! I MUST LITTER!”

Oh well. I’d consider the day a success!

With school comes much non-theisty drama

Hey everyone. I just wanted to give all of you a heads up that I’m probably not going to have many updates for the next week. School’s starting on the 24th, which means I’ll be a going a bit crazy trying to get stuff done. Have to visit the family, finish up a lot of work, get books and supplies together, see friends I haven’t seen all summer, and organize Society of Non-Theists events. And speaking of non-theist stuff, we already have some drama going on. Instead of explaining, I’ll just show you the email I sent to the appropriate people here at Purdue:

Residential Life Managers,

On Tuesday, August 11 the Residence Hall Association held a religious diversity panel during Resident Assistant training. I am emailing you on behalf of the Society of Non-Theists because I received a complaint from an RA, who for their protection will remain anonymous. They said that while you included an atheist on the panel (which we thank you for), the discussion was upsetting for many reasons:

  1. Said atheist did not appear to know the basics about non-theism (wasn’t able to define atheism and agnosticism, had a hard time answering other questions)
  2. Said atheist had never been involved in the very active non-theist community here via either the Society of Non-Theists, the Skeptics Society, of the Lafayette Freethinkers
  3. Said atheist was a student going up against religious leaders and professors, resulting in an unfair power differential in the discussion
  4. Said atheist was jibed and teased because of his lack of belief by the other panel participants

Obviously, not being an RA, I was not personally at this event and cannot confirm how accurate these statements are. However, especially since I have previously received complaints about an unfavorable environment towards non-theists in the Resident Halls, they concern me. Non-theists are one of the most disliked and stereotyped groups in the United States, so promoting tolerance and understanding is one of our organization’s biggest goals. To have an unknowledgeable atheist student representing the largest “religious” minority in the US up against highly knowledgeable adults frankly makes us look bad and is detrimental to our progress. It is also incredibly inappropriate for the other panelists to tease each other or debate whose beliefs are more valid in a panel about diversity and acceptance.

We are incredibly happy to finally be included in the discussion about religion diversity, but we want to make sure these events themselves do not discriminate. I do not claim that the atheist was “set up” or that this was some sort of conscious act of discrimination, but that is was rather due to a lack of knowledge about the atheist community at Purdue and at large. For future events, we ask you to please make sure there is no power differential (for example, have everyone be students) and to contact our student organization for a representative who is knowledgeable about non-theism.

Thank you for your time,
Jennifer McCreight
President, Society of Non-Theists at Purdue University
http://www.purduenontheists.com/
jmccreig@purdue.edu

Hopefully we get some sort of positive response. I’ll keep you guys updated.

Secular Student Alliance Conference!

Yes, I just can’t stop posting! Or as PZ said, “I think the blogathon has permanently warped her brain.“

After our trip to the Creation Museum, we drove north to Columbus, OH for the Secular Student Alliance conference. Passed two signs that each had five of the Ten Commandments (I think Mark was waiting for a third sign to appear), and stopped in a rural gas station totally forgetting I had atheist buttons and stickers all over me. Whoopsie. I already mentioned how when we were checking into the dorms we watched part of an episode of Wife Swap featuring an atheist and evangelical family with PZ, which was good fun. Oh, and the fact that PZ’s dorm room was directly across from ours. Weeeeeee.There were a lot of great talks at the conference, covering activism, basic club running, volunteering, cooperation with other groups, and just some silliness. I met a lot of great people who I knew of but I had never personally met – Jesse Galef, who works for the Secular Coaltion for America and sometimes posts at Friendly Atheist; Debbie Goddard from the Center for Inquiry, who helped bring Eddie Tabash to Purdue last year; Lyz Liddel, the SSA’s Senior Campus Organizer, who has helped our club so much and delt with thousands of my emails; Ashley Paramore, who video blogs as healthyaddict; Jon Sussman, who I talked to for various SSA things and who made a big list of topics for me for my blogathon…and I’m probably forgetting people, so I apologize. I also met a lot of cool people from Indiana, and I really want to try to organize some state wide freethinker event.

The talks were excellent, but I don’t want to talk about them too much since they’ll be online soonish, and then I’ll link you to my favorite ones. And I’m totally burnt out from all those other posts, heh.

Some highlights:

– Meeting people who read my blog! It was very cool and weird having people saying “Oh, you’re the Blag Hag!” (which, in retrospect, was an unfortunate name choice). If I looked freaked out I promise I wasn’t – I’m just sort of socially awkward and not used to this whole random-people-knowing-me thing yet. Hi everyone!!
– Someone asked me for my first autograph! A student had PZ, Hemant, Ashley and me sign two Creation Museum tickets, and they’re going to try and auction them on eBay so they can start a club at their university! Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure my signature just devalued them…
– Jon Weyer, a Christian minister who gave a wonderful talk about cooperating with religious groups, had a little contest where the first six people who could name what PZ and Ken Ham were riding in my comic would get a free book! Seeing all the people who ran up there was very cool. I then shunned one of my close friends because he got it wrong. Boo.

– They used my I Squid Cephalopods design for some of the signs!
Photo by evodevo_mike
– My group of Purdue people and Hemant went to Buffalo Wild Wings for some much needed relaxation…and after spending the day in the Creation Museum, I had a MUCH needed giant glass of beer. Mmmm Blue Moon. Oh, and being outnumbered by math geeks at the table was interesting…
– PZ actually remembered my name, which I did a little internal fangirl flail about.
– PZ also said he reads all of his comments on his blog, which I find absolutely amazing. Oh, and just so you know, I do too – I get so excited when I get emailed about a new comment.
– Playing freethought trivia games. Sadly I could recite the Chinese zodiac, yet couldn’t name more than four of the last ten US Vice Presidents. Ultimate failure. I could practically feel my history teacher father’s scorn from miles away.
– Watching people play “throw the atom bombs in the volcano to blow up the Thetans” while wearing Xenu crowns:– Saturday night had incredible fun socializing and PZ actually attended, and I’m pretty sure I can’t say much more than that (but Jesse already said it involved Captain Morgan, so draw your own conclusions). Multiple male students commented on my boobs, so I’m pretty sure they weren’t listening to Hemant’s atheist dating advice.
– A group of us decided that a required session for next year’s conference should be a “sexy lingerie party.” Still trying to convince people about that one.
– Collecting way too much atheist flair (plus a FSM one which you can’t see in this photo):– Listening to George Carlin for three hours on the drive home.

And I may not have gotten to ride the Triceratops at the Creation Museum…but I got something even better (click for larger):Photo by Gus Brunsman
The whole conference making Cthulhu faces! Though no, we didn’t all transform into Cuttlefish. I guess PZ wasn’t trying hard enough.

As long as I can travel there, definitely looking forward to going to the conference again next year! It was super fun and got me totally motivated for this upcoming school year. Now, time for me to go plan club events!

Oh yeah? Well our atheist club has superheros for officers!

I finally got around to doing a little housecleaning around the Society of Non-Theists’s website. Freshmen should start poking around for club information in a couple weeks, so I wanted to make it look like we actually do stuff (which we do!). And I finally got around to updating the Contact page with some officer bios so it looks like we’re actually normal (well, relatively) human beings with actual personalities.

It amuses me to no end that we have a blonde, brunette, and red head. It’s so delightfully stereotypical. I keep having images of Charlie’s Angels or the Power Puff Girls or any superheroine trio. And having three women as officers is definitely going to help club attendance – girls will feel welcome, and boys well…yeah, I don’t need to explain why boys will come.

Now if I can only convince my fellow officers that we all need matching spandex outfits…then club attendance would increase by 1000%.*

*If I hear about people contacting the officers in order to be creepy instead of real club business, I will smite you.

Homeless Atheist leaves Millions of Dollars to Charities

There’s a great story over at NPR about a homeless man who surprised them by leaving them $4 million dollars when he died. He had to money to live luxuriously, but instead he lived the simplest life possible:

“When Walters retired, he evidently retired from the world of material comforts. He didn’t have a car.

“He just gave up all of the material things that we think we have to have,” Belle says. “You know, I don’t know how we gauge happiness. What’s happy for you might not be happy for me. I never heard him complain.”

Evidently, among his few possessions was a radio. Hence those announcements listeners hear now and again on NPR stations.”

He also donated smaller sums of $400,000 to various non-profit organizations, including a Catholic mission where his best friend worked.

“Belle stayed with Walters when he was ill. She became his nurse and ultimately the executor of his estate — as well as one of the beneficiaries — despite fundamental differences between them.

“He was an atheist and I’m a very profound practicing Catholic, and I’d never met an atheist,” Belle says. “And that just blew my mind that somebody could not believe in the Lord.””

I really love seeing stuff like this, but especially when it involves an atheist. It’s only more proof that you don’t need to be religious to be a good, charitable, self sacrificing human being.

And an extra special bonus? He was a Purdue alumnus! Go Boilermakers for producing the occasional awesome person.

This should be fun

So I was lamenting earlier about my failure to come up with interesting group activities for my atheist organization. The same member quoted in that post just came up with a great idea – a Photo Scavenger Hunt! Grouping up members and making them take photos of themselves doing silly things or in front of silly things before a time limit runs out. “That’s not as awesome as an orgy!” you say. Well I disagree! Why? Because it’s going to be a Freethinking Photo Scavenger Hunt! With wonderful items on the scavenger hunt list like:

– Depict evolution somehow
– Laugh/cry in front of a place of worship
– Act out your favorite ridiculous scene from a holy book

etc

Now all I have to do is finalize the list by Sunday…but I figure a lot of you here are even more creative/hilarious than I am, so I’m going to ask for your help. What do you want to see on that scavenger hunt list? Email me at jmccreig(at)purdue.edu.

DO NOT LEAVE COMMENTS WITH IDEAS IN THEM BELOW OR I WILL DELETE THEM AND SMITE YOU WITH A FIREY HEATHEN RAGE! General comments about how awesome this idea is are okay, but I don’t want club members getting a sneak peak at the list (especially since a lot read my blog). You’ll probably get some of the best photos posted here, so put those thinking caps on!

I'm a scientist! Pt 3

So what do I actually study?

Since I’m trying to milk this for all its worth, let’s just start with my study organism: kangaroo rats!
Specifically I study banner-tailed kangaroo rats, Dipodomys spectabilis. They’re nocturnal rodents that live in the Southwestern US and Mexico. Their entire diet consists solely of seeds – they don’t even drink water. They’ve adapted to the desert life by being extremely efficient at conserving water. For example, their urine (when they rarely pee) is 24% salt – ours is 6%. How do they do it? Simply put, the path from their lungs to the outside air is long enough that the water vapor cools and condenses before it escapes the body – and they sniff it back up. This allows them to only lose 5% of the water we’d lose in respiration.

Oh, and they’re adorable:That silver thing you see on it’s ear isn’t a staple of kangaroo rat fashion – they’re ear tags. Each contains a unique number, and we use them to keep track of each individual. We trap them during the summer and we’re able to tell if they’ve changed homes since last year, who they’re living with, how much they’ve grown, etc. We also take small ear snips so we have tissue to do DNA testing with. There’s really an endless about of studies we can do using this data, but so far most of the work has focuses on dispersal, inbreeding, and paternity.

Did I mention they were adorable?
Their main predators are coyotes (rarely), owls/hawks (commonly), and rattle snakes (frequently). I just because I was lucky to get the photo, here’s one in action (the krat was less lucky):This is post 23 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I’m a scientist! Pt 3

So what do I actually study?

Since I’m trying to milk this for all its worth, let’s just start with my study organism: kangaroo rats!
Specifically I study banner-tailed kangaroo rats, Dipodomys spectabilis. They’re nocturnal rodents that live in the Southwestern US and Mexico. Their entire diet consists solely of seeds – they don’t even drink water. They’ve adapted to the desert life by being extremely efficient at conserving water. For example, their urine (when they rarely pee) is 24% salt – ours is 6%. How do they do it? Simply put, the path from their lungs to the outside air is long enough that the water vapor cools and condenses before it escapes the body – and they sniff it back up. This allows them to only lose 5% of the water we’d lose in respiration.

Oh, and they’re adorable:That silver thing you see on it’s ear isn’t a staple of kangaroo rat fashion – they’re ear tags. Each contains a unique number, and we use them to keep track of each individual. We trap them during the summer and we’re able to tell if they’ve changed homes since last year, who they’re living with, how much they’ve grown, etc. We also take small ear snips so we have tissue to do DNA testing with. There’s really an endless about of studies we can do using this data, but so far most of the work has focuses on dispersal, inbreeding, and paternity.

Did I mention they were adorable?
Their main predators are coyotes (rarely), owls/hawks (commonly), and rattle snakes (frequently). I just because I was lucky to get the photo, here’s one in action (the krat was less lucky):This is post 23 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I’m a scientist!

I figured I’ve been blogging long enough with vague references to lab work and research and biology conferences that I should actually tell you guys what my research is. I’m not going to go super in depth for two reasons: one, if you’re not a biologist, you probably wouldn’t know what the heck I was talking about, and two, we’re still trying to publish my work, so I don’t want to give it all away before it’s officially out there.

So before I get into specifics, let me give you a little background information about what I do.

My official job title is not “Undergraduate Slave Technician” but a Forestry & Natural Resources Signature Area Fellow in Ecological Genetics (phew, try saying that three times fast). That’s really just a fancy way of saying I get paid slightly more because FNR had a special fund for smarty pants undergraduates doing more than one year of lab work. I’m actually a student of the Biology Department, which is in the College of Science, while FNR is part of the College of Agriculture. The only difference? Ag gets better funding at Purdue. Genetics is genetics no matter what department you’re in.

The laboratory I work in is pretty diverse as far as projects go. Most of our research is on ecological genetics and using genetics to answer questions about conservation. While a lot of labs have only one or two study organisms, we basically have everything. Birds (a ton of species from Hispanola, Eastern Imperial Eagles from Kazakhstan), amphibians (from Tiger Salamanders to whatever we find squished on the road), fish (Lake Sturgeon, my favorite sexually ambiguous fish), and mammals (hurray for Kangaroo Rats!). And our actual research is just as diverse: investigating long term population histories, genetic diversity and the effects of human structures, noninvasive ways to monitor population densities, discovering the genetic mechanisms for sex determination, the genetic basis for mate choice, dispersal…we’ve basically done it all.

When I started research, I have to admit that I really didn’t see the point of conservation projects. I didn’t know much about the fragile nature of ecosystems or why we need to protect our wealth of resources on earth, even at the very least for selfish reasons. After working in the lab for a while, I have a new appreciation for conservation. Personally, it’s not the kind of research I want to be doing – I’m still a bit of a cynic about conservation, and I’m not passionate enough to devote my life to it. My cynicism doesn’t make my the best spokeswoman for it, either. But regardless, I do appreciate the work done much more than I did before, and I’m glad I got what’s going to be a diverse lab experience before I go devoting my life to human genetics or something (or who knows what).

This is post 20 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I'm a scientist!

I figured I’ve been blogging long enough with vague references to lab work and research and biology conferences that I should actually tell you guys what my research is. I’m not going to go super in depth for two reasons: one, if you’re not a biologist, you probably wouldn’t know what the heck I was talking about, and two, we’re still trying to publish my work, so I don’t want to give it all away before it’s officially out there.

So before I get into specifics, let me give you a little background information about what I do.

My official job title is not “Undergraduate Slave Technician” but a Forestry & Natural Resources Signature Area Fellow in Ecological Genetics (phew, try saying that three times fast). That’s really just a fancy way of saying I get paid slightly more because FNR had a special fund for smarty pants undergraduates doing more than one year of lab work. I’m actually a student of the Biology Department, which is in the College of Science, while FNR is part of the College of Agriculture. The only difference? Ag gets better funding at Purdue. Genetics is genetics no matter what department you’re in.

The laboratory I work in is pretty diverse as far as projects go. Most of our research is on ecological genetics and using genetics to answer questions about conservation. While a lot of labs have only one or two study organisms, we basically have everything. Birds (a ton of species from Hispanola, Eastern Imperial Eagles from Kazakhstan), amphibians (from Tiger Salamanders to whatever we find squished on the road), fish (Lake Sturgeon, my favorite sexually ambiguous fish), and mammals (hurray for Kangaroo Rats!). And our actual research is just as diverse: investigating long term population histories, genetic diversity and the effects of human structures, noninvasive ways to monitor population densities, discovering the genetic mechanisms for sex determination, the genetic basis for mate choice, dispersal…we’ve basically done it all.

When I started research, I have to admit that I really didn’t see the point of conservation projects. I didn’t know much about the fragile nature of ecosystems or why we need to protect our wealth of resources on earth, even at the very least for selfish reasons. After working in the lab for a while, I have a new appreciation for conservation. Personally, it’s not the kind of research I want to be doing – I’m still a bit of a cynic about conservation, and I’m not passionate enough to devote my life to it. My cynicism doesn’t make my the best spokeswoman for it, either. But regardless, I do appreciate the work done much more than I did before, and I’m glad I got what’s going to be a diverse lab experience before I go devoting my life to human genetics or something (or who knows what).

This is post 20 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.