She is “in the condition to have babies”

Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she’s been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.

Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made after consulting with the Vatican. Here’s a good rule: never consult the priesthood of a death cult before making a life-and-death decision. They always give stupid and evil advice.

Berlusconi’s rationalization is appalling and repugnant. He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?

It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.

Snubbing degrees as a new kind of snobbery

There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president’s wife is addressed as “Dr. Biden”, since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.

And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors “Dr.”

Yeah, right. How many appendectomies have Dr Kissinger, Dr Condoleezza Rice, and Dr Martin Luther King done, huh?

They claim that this is the convention. Step onto any college campus. Look at the directories and ask around. You’ll find that the formal title for faculty and staff with doctoral degrees is “Dr.” (although you’ll also find that many of us prefer not to be addressed quite so formally). All I can assume is that these lazy journalists are completely unfamiliar with higher education…and I am not surprised.

You can find more reactions from Mike Dunsford and Wesley Elsberry. I anticipate more — this is a fine example of media contempt for intellectuals.

Another movie I’m not going to see

I thought Expelled was an awful concept, but now there’s another movie that’s come out that is even worse: The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t plan to, since I was horrified by the trailers … and now Gary Farber has collected the key points of many reviews. There ought to be a law that no remakes can be released that are worse than the originals, just to discourage this kind of abomination.

The original movie was a wonderful SF classic. I’ve got it on DVD here, and I think just to spite the hacks who ripped it off, I’m going to watch Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal sometime this weekend. It has some great lines in it: “It isn’t faith that makes good science, Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity” and “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason”, and of course, “klaatu barada nikto”. And the theremin! I’d watch it right now if I didn’t have a lot of work to do tomorrow…

CNN screws the pooch

As part of an ongoing program of reducing their relevance and demolishing their credibility, CNN has just completely shut down their Science, Space and Technology unit. Who needs good science coverage, after all, since nothing important happens in that area…and as the US continues to dumb down its educational system, the number of interested viewers is probably dropping, too.

The media knows where the profits lie, and it’s not in that expensive journalism stuff — it’s in the cheap and popular domain of opinionated airheads shouting at each other. This is symptomatic of a deep intellectual rot in this country.

A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision

Simon Ings has written a wonderful survey of the eye, called A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and it’s another of those books you ought to be sticking on your Christmas lists right now. The title give you an idea of its content. It’s a “natural history”, so don’t expect some dry exposition on deep details, but instead look forward to a light and readable exploration of the many facets of vision.

There is a discussion of the evolution of eyes, of course, but the topics are wide-ranging — Ings covers optics, chemistry, physiology, optical illusions, decapitated heads, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ many-legged, compound-eyed apts, pointillisme, cephalopods (how could he not?), scurvy, phacopids, Purkinje shifts…you get the idea. It’s a hodge-podge, a little bit of everything, a fascinating cabinet of curiousities where every door opened reveals some peculiar variant of an eye.

Don’t think it’s lacking in science, though, or is entirely superficial. This is a book that asks the good questions: how do we know what we know? Each topic is addressed by digging deep to see how scientists came to their conclusion, and often that means we get an entertaining story from history or philosophy or the lab. Explaining the evolution of our theories of vision, for example, leads to the story of Abu’Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haythem, who pretended to be mad to avoid the cruelty of a despotic Caliph, and who spent 12 years in a darkened house doing experiments in optics (perhaps calling him “mad” really wasn’t much of a stretch), and emerged at the death of the tyrant with an understanding of refraction and a good theory of optics that involved light, instead of mysterious vision rays emerging from an eye. Ings is also a novelist, and it shows — these are stories that inform and lead to a deeper understanding.

If the book has any shortcoming, though, it is that some subjects are barely touched upon. Signal transduction and molecular evolution are given short shrift, for example, but then, if every sub-discipline were given the depth given to basic optics, this book would be unmanageably immense. Enjoy it for what it is: a literate exploration of the major questions people have asked about eyes and vision for the last few thousand years.