What does it take to be a science journalist?

Science journalists, you really piss me off…at least some of you. Here are a couple of headlines about that recent paper I summarized that make me want to slap someone.

“Eye evolution questioned.” No, it’s not. That’s just trying to stir up a non-existent controversy. The eye evolved. This was a paper exploring the details of how specific photoreceptor types with the eye evolved. (I should mention that the summary is OK, but the headline was stupid. Maybe I ought to slap the editor.)

“Ancient Origins of the Human Eye Discovered.” Aaargh, it’s a paper about brachiopods, not humans, and it’s about the evolution of protostomes as well as deuterostomes…it’s about the whole frackin’ animal kingdom, not just our self-exalted little twig.

Both of those headlines are about the very same paper, and I get the impression the reporters hadn’t even read it, but instead relied on teasing out comprehensible angles from interviews. We ought to have a rule: if you can’t read the research and comprehend it, you shouldn’t be writing about it. I know, suddenly 9/10ths of the science journalists in the world are abruptly unemployed.

Ben Goldacre offers some excellent commentary on this problem. Read it if you’re hoping to be a professional science communicator. I agree with him: you don’t need a Ph.D., but you do have to have some knowledge of the field you are reporting on, and most importantly, a passion to learn more about it.

Old fool gets attention for being ignorant

Before you say it, I know I’m giving him attention, too. Cardinal George Pell, the old fool, got lots of press for being a climate denialist, again. After a talk, he denounced the climate scientists for not being scientific, while he, the guy who believes angels and saints and great magic boojums in the sky, knew better because “‘I spend a lot of time studying this stuff.”

I suspect he’s another graduate of Google University.

But Pell is irrelevant. The real question is, why do the newspapers cover his pronouncements in any serious way? The man is comic relief, nothing more.

NPR can go die in a fire

This is unbelievable. James O’Keefe, he of the Acorn fraud, of the aborted seduction, the unimaginative weasel whose sole game is staging bogus scenarios with his ideological opponents and trying to catch them saying embarrassing things, has done it again, teasing an NPR executive into saying disparaging things about the Tea Party lunatics. I saw the recording; it was tame, I’d say stuff a thousand times more disparaging about those racist morons while knowingly on the air.

But it worked. NPR caved in, suspended the administrator, and now another one has resigned. Why? I don’t know. Because the cowards at NPR are afraid that the Republicans are going to kill all their funding, so they are running away from any confrontation with the political party that wants to destroy them, as if that will help.

Don’t think for a minute that this craven behavior will stay the budget axe, though. All it has really accomplished is to destroy any interest I have in supporting the organization. Why should I? They’ve already surrendered to the deranged right wing. Their usefulness as a non-propaganda news source is dead.

Worse, they’re giving the Breitbartian vermin a little thrill of power. This isn’t the end. How many more news organizations are going to fold in fear before these stupid bully-boys?

One movie, ruined!

In a too rare fit of quality, our local theater is showing The King’s Speech this week, which I keep hearing is wonderfully well made and a serious Oscar contender. I was thinking of going, but now Christopher Hitchens shreds its historicity — it’s about yet another royal fascist-sympathizer — and Katherine Preston explains that it’s got the neurology of the speech defect all wrong. I don’t think I can watch it at all now. I can enjoy a fiction without apology, but I find it impossible to watch a false story that pretends to be true.

The reviews are annoying, too — they all praise the quality of the movie-making and the acting, while telling me that the core premises of the story are false. How can I enjoy it when Something Is Wrong On The Screen?

The Nature of Existence

I forgot to mention that I did attend the local screening of The Nature of Existence, the new movie from Roger Nygard in which he traveled the world asking various people grand questions about the meaning of life, etc. It was entertaining, and it is subtly subversive of religious views, so I will recommend it. But I do have a few reservations that I was also able to bring up in the Q&A after the movie.

One thing that was alarmingly obvious when watching it is that almost all the gurus and authorities and religious figures that he interviewed were male. There were exceptions — the 12 year old daughter of his neighbor (who was an unrepentant atheist, and I thought the most sensible voice in the whole movie), a lesbian priest, the wife of a pastor — but otherwise, this show is one long sausage-fest. When I pointed this out, Nygard was apologetic and recognized that this is a significant omission, but explained that he simply hadn’t noticed when he was filming the material. Isn’t that the whole problem, that we’re oblivious to these omissions of half the population of the planet?

Another problem was actually a tactical decision, and I can actually understand why it was done this way. All of the interviews were friendly; Nygard made a conscious decision to be entirely non-confrontational and just allow the interviewees to speak without criticism. It’s a policy that opened doors and allowed him access, and encouraged the people to speak at length. I can’t imagine him making this movie any other way, but still…there were parts where the lack of a critical interrogation meant the subjects were able to effectively hide the more hateful parts of their beliefs. For instance, he interviewed the odious Zakir Naik, the Muslim fanatic who thinks it is a religious obligation to kill opponents of Islam (apostates should merely be imprisoned), and who also considers homosexuality grounds for execution. He also interviewed pompous ol’ Orson Scott Card, and his raving homophobia was left unexposed.

So I was left with rather mixed feelings. The movie only illuminates the middle ground of religious belief, and while it exposes the absurdity while avoiding being judgmental, it also manages to bury the worst aspects of religion. That’s tactically sensible and I consider it an overall good because it will get the movie watched by more people, but man, it’s not my style, and it sort of grated on my nerves. It was nice. I kept waiting for something to explode.

Roger Nygard in Morris

The University of Minnesota Morris has a special guest coming to town: Roger Nygard, the filmmaker best known for making the movie Trekkies, about the Star Trek culture. He’s here as a guest of our philosophy department, though, because his latest movie is The Nature of Existence, in which he asks various people about the meaning of life.

I don’t know. Wandering around the world asking strange weirdos to explain why the world was created sounds like a lousy way to do philosophy, and an even worse way to do science, but it might be a great way to do entertainment. We’ll have to see.

He’s going to be doing a marathon screening of the companion series to the film from noon to 9pm on Sunday (tomorrow!) 30 January, in Imholte 109. This event is free and open to the public.

But wait! There’s more! And all totally free!

On Monday, 31 January, you can meet with Roger Nygard from 3:30-4:30 in the McGinnis Room of the university library. And then at 7pm, in Imholte 109, there will be a screening of the movie The Nature of Existence…again, open to the public. This event is sponsored by the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium, the International Programs Committee, and the Morris Freethinkers.

I’ll be dropping in on some of the events, depending on whether I can get all caught up in my lecture prep for the coming week (with my current load, I will die if I don’t have most of the work laid out on the weekend); I’ve also got to get some preliminary work done organizing some talks for the week after, which contains Darwin Day, in case you’d forgotten. I will peel myself away for at least a little while, though, to be entertained but probably not enlightened.

Are you writing a vampire novel, too?

Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won’t name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I’m seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I’ve read, anyway.

The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story.

However, there is one little problem. The taint (vampirism, in this case) makes the victim inhumanly strong, with lightning reflexes and acute senses, and also immortal and immune to mundane threats like bullets, poison, knives, and suffocation — decapitation and being burned to ash are the only serious threats (and granted, her enemies know this and are trying to chop her head off). Meanwhile, the traditional weaknesses of vampires — sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water, etc. — are all dismissed as superstitious misconceptions of the Middle Ages. They don’t affect her.

Also, it turns out, vampirism gives its victims a hypnotic glamor that makes them irresistible, and also an awesome sexual stamina. There is a cost, in that they have to drink blood, but it turns out that nipping a pint from a willing and enthusiastic partner once a week, preferably during the throes of orgasmic ecstasy, is enough to fuel all those superpowers.

So I’m having a little difficulty getting into the story. Every time the protagonist moans about her curse and these evil, rotten vampires who must have their heads ripped off before they eat her baby sister or whoever, I’m thinking the story should be about getting this poor crazy woman into a mental hospital to address her self-esteem issues, and about how she should be joyfully trying to share her gift with her family and friends. It’s very confusing.

Just a suggestion if you’re writing one of these stories: could you either make the curse a real curse that generally puts one into an undesirable situation, or could you write a story about happy, enlightened, lucky people who are overjoyed at their amazing new abilities? ‘Cause the whiny gripey moaney stuff over objectively glorious circumstances is gettin’ old.

This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?

He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.

Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.