I’m not the only one who gets crazy email: Pam Spaulding got an excellent example of grade A wackaloonery, and at first I was a little jealous, until I looked more closely. It’s the same mail I got back in February! I’m still the champ!
It looks like somebody taught the poor fellow about paragraphs in the past month, which helps. It’s not in Comic Sans, either — I may have to give Pam a few suggestions.
For the past few years, I have been receiving postcards from Theo Nelson regularly. They are lovely and colorful handmade cards with a poem on the back. I got another one today — all the others are lined up on a wall in my office — and I thought it was about time to mention it. It’s Spring again!
Of course, Spring in western Minnesota doesn’t look much like that: what we have is lots of gray rain, gray dirty snow shrinking into lumps of gray dirty ice, and brown grass poking up through mud…but we’ll take it!
(Reverse of card below the fold)
I’ve received a few queries about the end of the Battlestar Galactica series, and I can’t offer an opinion — I didn’t watch it. Since there seems to be enough fans here, though, I’ll turn you loose on it. Great? Sucked? Eh?
I didn’t watch it because I haven’t watched much of the series at all. There are a couple of reasons: 1) I’m old enough to remember the original BSG, and was not at all interested (I know, it’s radically different, but I didn’t know that at the beginning); 2) it’s on the Sci-Fi Channel, which has become the label of instant recognition for cheesy formulaic crap; 3) I did see a few episodes early in the run, and was turned off by the god-happy nonsense in those few shows — again, I heard that they went off in some interesting directions after that, but the damage was done to my impression, and 4) it’s the kind of series that demands long investment in the full story, and I’ve never had the time to catch up with it all. I may grab the DVD of the whole series at some point, just to give it the attention so many people tell me it deserves.
This is an amusing tale of creationist hypocrisy. Ken Ham is complaining that one of his staff members was “ambushed”, because he wasn’t given a solo interview, but had to share the discussion with a critic (meanwhile, Ham has no compunction about “ambushing”, in the same sense, scientific discussions). What I found most interesting, though, were Ken Ham’s complaints about the BBC.
This past week, Dr. Jason Lisle–our astrophysicist*—was invited to be on a BBC radio program out of Southampton , England (where I spoke a couple of weeks ago). We were told that it was just going to be an “examination of creationism.” Well, we are somewhat leery when it comes to dealing with the British media–by far, British journalists and commentators (and particularly those from the BBC) are the most mocking about biblical Christianity of all the media we’ve worked with over the years. We have had probably 20 different countries send reporters to the Creation Museum since we opened 22 months ago, and most of them have been fair and balanced in their coverage–but not so with the typical British reporter.
Take a bow, any typical British reporters reading this. Could you please come over here and give lessons to typical American reporters?
*You have to giggle at the idea of an astrophysicist who claims that the universe is only 6000 years old.
The Pope is on a grand tour of Africa, where he has been striking up a theme of — brace yourself — opposing superstition. The man who heads an institution with an official top exorcist is asking Africans to “shun witchcraft”, and to reject fear-mongering talk of evil entities…
In his homily, he urged his listeners to reach out to those Angolans who believe in witchcraft and spirits. “So many of them are living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they even end up condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers,” he said.
Right. Don’t believe in malign spirits, like, say Satan. Has the Pope become an atheist lately?
Oh, I guess not. He’s still demanding that people believe in supernatural occult powers that have battled and defeated other supernatural occult powers.
In his homily, the pope urged Catholics to try to persuade those who had left the Church that “Christ has triumphed over death and all those occult powers.”
If only they would turn their powers of skepticism, critical thought, and rejection of unfounded supernatural phenomena on themselves, the Vatican would implode overnight.
Jerry Coyne says lots of basic (but well-stated) things about evolution, creationism, and education in an interview with American Scientist. Here’s a taste:
Some creationists seem to feel that it’s the scientists who are being dogmatic here–that you’re somehow invested in this idea or want it to be true, or that your training has blinded you to other possibilities. How do you respond to that?
I think they’re the ones who are dogmatic, because the difference between religion and science, which is the difference between religion and evolution, is that we question things. Nobody worships Darwin as a religion. We don’t adhere to a set of dogmas that are unchanging and unquestionable. We all recognize that Darwin was wrong about a lot of stuff. His theories of genetics were wrong, his theories of biogeography were wrong–that’s been corrected by plate tectonics–his stuff on sexual selection is very good but not complete. Evolutionary biology is constantly changing and revising its conclusions. But the main conclusions that Darwin made–that evolution occurred, that it occurred through natural selection, that there were common ancestry and splitting and that it happened slowly–those have all been supported.
Read it all.
This week, I’ll be heading off to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a few days, and more than a few of you have been asking me for the details. Here’s my itinerary:
Wednesday – March 25, 2009
4:00-4:30 pm – Interview with Jeremy Beahan – Reasonable Doubts Radio Show/ Podcast
5:00 pm – Check into Hotel: Days Hotel Downtown GR.
6:30 pm – Meeting Setup @ WCC (Jeff Seaver will pick you up at Hotel at 6:15)
7:00 pm – CFI Featured Event @ WCC Format: 45-60 minute presentation with Q&A following (RSVP here).
9:00 pm – After event Social at Vitale’s Restaurant.Thursday – March 26, 2009
9:30-11:30 am – Breakfast with Science Professors. Discussion topic: Evolution Education Mezze Restaurant – Downtown Grand Rapids (Attendee’s TBA).
11:45-12:15 – Interview with Ed Brayton of Declaring Independence – WPRR 1680
12:30-2:00 pm – GRCC Campus Event: Discussion. Some will have “brown-bag lunch” – we can provide food for you based on your preference or get lunch after this event.
4:00-5:30 pm – GVSU Campus Event: Discussion
7:00 pm – 3 Beer Discussion (RSVP here): Social Event & Dinner with CFI Members (you are invited to join us for as long as you are interested)
Maybe I’ll see a few of you there!
(via Dave Littler)
One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.
I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.
The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.
But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.
The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.
Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.
The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!
It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.
Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
