You young folk and your irritating ways

Millennials are those people born between 1980 and 2000 — an arbitrary block of time containing many diverse people (including most of my students!), but because we’ve got a label, we get to stereotype them. And isn’t that just a solid indictment of the whole principle of stereotyping right there, that we can do it over such a meaningless distinction?

What it’s really about, as Matt Bors explains, is providing us old people with reasons to complain about those young people, which is a way we geezers try to boost our self-esteem.

You asked, I deliver the fish porn

Since everyone insisted, here’s a photo of our incipient zebrafish system, built by my student Josh.

tankphoto

What it is is a set of ordinary plastic shelving with some custom built plastic trays to catch water overflow, and then an array of simple 2-3 liter tanks (the smallest size Kritter Keepers, if you must know — you can get them for about $2 each). There is a 110 liter reservoir tank down below, with an immersible pump that can generate a flow of about 1900 gallons/hour, currently greatly throttled down since we only have a few tanks in place. Water is pumped out of the reservoir to two places: 1) towards the ceiling, where the PVC plumbing splits — with valves, we can select to have the water pumped right out to the sink nearby, or to a bypass line that just has the water going up and back down, or in normal operation, to a line that has a big hunk of 3″ PVC pipe packed with bioballs and charcoal for filtering, and 2) to a big bucket of sand for additional filtration. Water is just flowing all over the place here.

Most importantly, the main outflow line is tapped in 3 spots to some irrigation hose leading to six of these nifty little widgets that provide a trickle of water out nine smaller drip lines, which lead to the fish tanks. It’s amazing what you can find in hydroponics gear. If ever Minnesota legalizes marijuana, I could also cycle fish water (mmm, rich & tasty fish poop) into racks of plants and pay for all this stuff.

Here’s a quick and dirty diagram if that explanation doesn’t help. Not that the cartoon will necessarily help, either. Blue circles are valves. Arrows indicate the direction of water flow.

tanksystem

It’s been running for a couple of weeks solid with no problems (I wish I could say the same for the backup system we set up yesterday, which blew gaskets all over the place and made a mess overnight), so we’ve actually put a few fish in there. With any luck, we’ll have embryos this week!

God must not have liked his game

Remember that “Left Behind” video game that blew in with a gust of laughter at its premise and then faded away feebly? It’s maker is still around, but it’s all gone downhill for Christian video gaming.

When he started Left Behind Games in 2002, Troy Lyndon—a one-time boy genius who with his former company became Inc.’s entrepreneur of the year at the age of 28—was sure his apocalypse-themed video games would make him millions even as they brought the gospel of Christ to gamers the world over. Eleven years later, Lyndon is 48, personally bankrupt, lives in a 450-square-foot apartment in Honolulu and makes ends meet by coaching entrepreneurs and selling insurance. On nights and weekends Lyndon is still the chairman and CEO of Left Behind Games, a publicly traded business with 10 billion shares outstanding, each worth one one-hundredth of a cent.

It’s also a company with regular filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission—called 8-Ks, intended to update investors about events that could affect the company’s fortunes—that read like dispatches from a beleaguered general who still believes he’s fighting the good fight. “Yes, LFBG is still operating,” says the company’s latest 8-K, filed at the end of last week and written by Lyndon himself. In it, he blames the company’s misfortune on the proliferation of new gaming platforms, the rise of downloadable games, the latest recession, Christian retailers, the “death” of online marketing, the political views of the authors of the books upon which Left Behind Games’ games were based, and the SEC itself. The regulatory filings document an extended corporate unraveling, and a very human hope that it all will work out in the end.

So…praising the Lord and tapping into the evangelical Christian world isn’t a sure-fire formula for fiscal success? Tsk, tsk. That’s a sign of the End Times right there.

I’m hoping that in ten years someone will be writing a similar story about the hubris and collapse of Answers in Genesis. But that’s just wishful thinking right now.

Next phase begins!

We think our fish facility is complete now. We have run it through the fishless cycling process. Now I have to drive 60 miles to get some cheap pet store danios to give it the live test, so I’m going to be offline for a bit.

Once those are thriving and we’re totally confident that everything is going to work, we’ll be ordering a bunch of defined strains and raising those up…and doing our preliminary baseline analyses on the embryos. It’s progress! Science marches on!

Boom times for delusionists

delusionist

True confession: I have not read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. I have a copy, I started it on the basis of recommendations from smart people, and…I couldn’t make it past the introduction. It’s 800+ pages long, and it’s a solid block of rambling philosopherese. You know how some philosophers think that saying something ten times in increasingly convoluted language is communication? That’s Charles Taylor. It’s also Stephen Meyer, another philosopher who babbles on for 800 pages, but that’s about evolution, so I feel compelled to force my way through the nonsense. Taylor is a Catholic writing about secularism (but with less bias than you’d think, I’ve heard!), and so I lacked the imperative to plow ahead.

But now I’m in luck — a NY Times op-ed writer, which we all know is a sign of quality, has written a summary of the book. Only it’s by David Brooks. So now I get to see what a badly-written, complex book is about, as seen through the comfortably muddled brain of a painfully shallow tendentious thinker and equally awful writer. Others will have to judge whether Brooks summarizes the book fairly; all I can see is Brooks cheerfully wallowing in ideas that he already “knew” were correct.

I can see glimmerings of stuff I agree with, but it all gets a final twist that is most disagreeable. It’s frustrating because I don’t know how much of it is Brooks’ gloss and how much is Taylor. For instance, Taylor rejects a common myth of secularism:

Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?

This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.

Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.

See, phrasing it as a “subtraction story” is what I find objectionable: it’s an additive story. Science and culture grew, adding more richness to society and the world of the mind, and making certain old ideas untenable but replacing them with many more. Why is it being called “subtraction”? I don’t know. At least Taylor is said to disagree with it too, although what the heck does he mean, “a mottled accomplishment” by “both science and faith”? Curse you, David Brooks, you cracked and sooty lens!

Advances in human understanding — not only in science but also in art, literature, manners, philosophy and, yes, theology and religious practice — give us a richer understanding of our natures. Shakespeare helped us see character in more intricate ways. An improvement in mores means we take less pleasure from bear-baiting, hanging and other forms of public cruelty. We have a greater understanding of how nature works.

These achievements did make it possible to construct a purely humanistic account of the meaningful life. It became possible for people to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge.

OK, where’s the “mottling”? This is secularism as an unalloyed good.

But, Taylor continues, these achievements also led to more morally demanding lives for everybody, believer and nonbeliever. Instead of just fitting docilely into a place in the cosmos, the good person in secular society is called upon to construct a life in the universe. She’s called on to exercise all her strength.

People are called to greater activism, to engage in more reform. Religious faith or nonfaith becomes more a matter of personal choice as part of a quest for personal development.

That’s the downside? That now we’re expected to be autonomous moral agents rather than unthinking servants of an established order? Sign me up for more of that. Brooks goes on to list doubt as a negative for religious people. I really don’t get it. I regard doubt as a virtue.

And then Brooks tells us about another problem: malaise.

Individuals don’t live embedded in tight social orders; they live in buffered worlds of private choices. Common action, Taylor writes, gives way to mutual display. Many people suffer from a malaise. They remember that many people used to feel connected to an enchanted, transcendent order, but they feel trapped in a flat landscape, with diminished dignity: Is this all there is?

Whenever a conservative uses that word, “malaise”, you know what’s coming: people are going to be said to be miserable because they aren’t living in a world exactly like the conservative’s ideal of the situation 50 to 100 years ago. That “enchanted, transcendent order” was the Catholic church that has spent the past few hundred years shaming healthy human sexuality while supposedly celibate priests were raping children. I suppose it was great if you were high up in the social ladder — hierarchies are always wonderful if you’re at the top of they pyramid of human misery — but imagine being a woman or poor in Western society at any time in the past: “trapped in a flat landscape, with diminished dignity” is a good description.

Secularism has the potential to break the old order and allow a new flourishing. What sad-faced Brooks describes is not malaise, but a new hope that encourages a restlessness for change, one in which smug overpaid NY Times op-ed writers are probably going to lose a few privileges.

Brooks’ (and maybe Taylor’s) only consolation is that maybe people will successfully find new religious lies to believe in.

But these downsides are more than made up for by the upsides. Taylor can be extremely critical of our society, but he is grateful and upbeat. We are not moving to a spiritually dead wasteland as, say, the fundamentalists imagine. Most people, he observes, are incapable of being indifferent to the transcendent realm. “The yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as,” Taylor writes.

Yes, it is.

Maybe Taylor is unable to see it himself since he doesn’t personally share the secular mindset, but yeah, seeking justification for your life in imaginary wish-fulfillment and magic is the real dead-end. When you turn away from that immature dream and look at how wonderful life is, that’s when you’ve grown up and can hope to find deeper satisfaction. I’m reminded of the end of the epic of Gilgamesh, when the hero returns disillusioned from his quest for immortality and realizes how awesome the accomplishments of real people are.

But this refocusing on the real world is not for Brooks. Oh, no; the happy message he takes away is that we’re still spiritual.

Orthodox believers now live with a different tension: how to combine the masterpieces of humanism with the central mysteries of their own faiths. This pluralism can produce fragmentations and shallow options, and Taylor can eviscerate them, but, over all, this secular age beats the conformity and stultification of the age of fundamentalism, and it allows for magnificent spiritual achievement.

I’m vastly oversimplifying a rich, complex book, but what I most appreciate is his vision of a “secular” future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.

What the hell is a “spiritual achievement”? How can you have “spiritual rigor”?

I can imagine the relief that Brooks felt on reading a book about secularism and discovering that people are still buying the bullshit the priests and New Age wackos and other spiritual charlatans are selling. The kingdom still has employment opportunities for delusionists, his job is secure.

Convergence Day 4 #cvg2013

Whew — the con is over. After a long weekend of late nights, it all ended with a few last panels, lots of packing up, and the long dreary drive home…and then passing out, sleeping in, and struggling to get back into my routine.

This was my fourth day at Convergence.

The first event of the day was “Science and Religion: Friends or Foes?” with Heina Dadabhoy, Bridget Landry, Daniel Fincke, me, and Debbie Goddard moderating. You can guess which side I took. Landry was the sole theist, and even at that, she’s one of those very liberal Catholics. It was therefore a bit one-sided. I did get one woman who came up afterwards and smugly told me that we scientists are so arrogant and think we know everything and lectured me about how evolution and the Big Bang were “just a theory” and they could be proven wrong at any moment. I sort of blasted her and she went away, yelling about how rude I was.

My last panel was “Ask a Scientist”, with Laura Okagaki, Lori Fischer, Matt Lowry, Tom Mahle, Siouxsie Wiles, Indre Viskontas, Nicole Gugliucci, Bridget Landry, Bug Girl, and me — a mix of physicists, chemists, and biologists. This is an event they run every year in which a large and diverse group of scientists who are attending are put up on the stage and then the audience gets to ask questions, any questions they want, and we try to answer them. Matt Lowry moderated and made the useful suggest that every question be phrased as a tweet to keep them short and to the point…not many people were able to do that, but it helped. There was a good mix of questions, too — all the expertise on the stage got a workout.

And then we went home. It would have been good to stay for the dead dog parties, but hey, Mary and I have work to do.

Next year, CONvergence will be held on the 4th of July weekend again, 3-6 July. The theme is “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, and it’s to be a celebration of the urban fantasy genre. Skepchick and FtB will be there again! Plan ahead, mark it on your calendar, and come on out!

Hanging out with desert kit foxes

What, what time is it? July? Hell.

I have some catching up to do around here.

While I get less threadrupt, if any of you are available for and interested in a G+ hangout with the Desert Kit Fox project I wrote about this morning earlier this week, back in May, we’ll be doing one at 8:15 PM California time today. Dipika Kadaba and her team will be out at a field study area in the gathering dark, demonstrating how they’re using their drone at night to detect kit fox dens using IR videography. We did a dry run last night and it was impressive.

To join, you can check out my profile here.

I’ll post the youtube version after the show. Here it is:

By the way, if you were meaning to contribute to the Desert Kit Fox Project’s Indiegogo fund, you’ve still got four days to do it. And they’re slightly less than halfway to their goal.