I’m going to be on a local college radio show, The Genesis of Genius (it also has a website) tonight at 8pm. We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t got a good read on what it’s all about yet, but hey, it’s a UMM student, so I probably won’t be too snarly.
You may recall Ted Storck from his greatest hits here in Morris: he’s the guy who donated the chimes that annoyed everyone for years, who wrote bitter letters to the local newspaper when asked to turn them down, who complained when a vandal cut the wires (OK, that was wrong to do, but he also accused me of having done it), who, when the chimes were finally silenced by the city council, whined about how he should never do anything nice for the community, before stomping off to his retirement in Arizona.
I thought we were done with crotchety ol’ Ted — the chimes are gone, he’s moved away — but no! He’s taken to writing cranky letters to the local newspaper, about things that have annoyed him. And the paper is publishing them! Ah, Morris.
We’re going to Seoul at the end of May for our son’s wedding, and we’re going to spend about a week there (wish it could be more, but we have obligations back home).
So, besides the wedding at the end of our visit, is there anything we should not miss in our brief stay in South Korea?
I’m just watching the whole brand morph into something contemptible — they held out the longest, but it seems to be a general rule that mass media that promotes science will eventually sell out to peddle popular pablum. That’s happening right now before our eyes. Two things leap out at me:
The rush to produce religious apologetics. They’re coming out with a new “documentary”, The Story of God, that from this excerpt is clearly total crap with a good budget (they hired Morgan Freeman) and some quality production values.
That’s terrible. Videos of people gazing wisely into space are not evidence for a deity. Subjective anecdotes from a guy who nearly died recalling the hallucinations his oxygen-starved brain generated are not convincing evidence of an afterlife.
There is potential for a fascinating analysis of comparative religion, but this does not seem to be that story. That story would be the story of humans grappling with their mortality, not the story of an imaginary being called “god”.
The lack of appreciation of good, solid content. I’ve just learned that NatGeo is going to discontinue Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog. That’s shocking, too: Switek puts out quality science regularly, every week or two, and he has an excellent reputation. The reason given for kicking him out is that he didn’t generate enough traffic to the site.
That’s appalling. That sends a message: NatGeo doesn’t care about the quality of your content, just how many eyeballs swivel in your direction. If that’s your metric, then you’re doomed to drive right down into the pit of popular garbage.
Maybe they can replace him with a Kardashian.
Watching something that was good and valuable slowly rot away is depressing.
Aaaaaaaargh.
I have to go back to work, and oh boy, is there a pile of new stuff I have to deal with. My students are coming back to thousands and thousands of flies that need to be scored, so they’re probably going to be grumpy, too.
Now it’s time for me to straggle in and buckle down and dig out from under labors deferred.
Sometimes, the hard part of being a humanist is all the goddamn humans.
At the cell and tissue level, they’re pretty nifty, but once they start perambulating around they’re mostly all about stomping on you.
I’d probably be happier if all my interactions with the world were with computers and embryos. OK, and libraries. Libraries are cool. Especially computer-accessible libraries with books about embryos.
I can cope when you’re reduced to electrons and photons.
“Hello, stream of bits,” I’d say with my own spray of bits.
“You’re looking lovely, ray of light!” I’d radiate.
I’d happily arrange pixels to say, “You can’t screw me over now, abstract pattern of simplified information!”
But people…people mostly suck.
Sorry, people.
If it helps, just remember that you’re looking at a stream of electrons rendered into an array of photons. It’s how I’m trying to see you, after all.
Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke.
There are few things more rant worthy than a promise of a blog post on gender-sudoku that gets lost in off-line life.*
No, wait.
There are few things more rant worthy than a really bad text book. That’s what I wanted to say. I would be, of course, more upset at a text book that was terrible in ways I couldn’t identify as those would actually lead me to significant error, not having any reason not to rely on their representations. However, if one can’t identify the errors, one has no idea that one should feel deceived, angry, or ranty. But one should never be deprived of a good rant, should one?
The creation of The Orbit blog network got mentioned on Religion News today. They got quotes from me and Ed, too.
Many Orbit bloggers migrated from other atheist platforms, including Skepchick and Patheos, but the bulk came from Freethought Blogs. Rumors of discord at these platforms spread throughout 2015, but writers say they are focused on the future.
“This group decided it wanted to go off and do its own thing and more power to them,” said P.Z. Myers, whose Pharyngula blog is among the most popular at Freethought Blogs, which he now manages. He has already replaced The Orbit’s bloggers with new ones.
Ed Brayton, founder of Freethought Blogs who now writes at Patheos, said, “The Orbit is being launched by people I think very highly of and consider friends . . . I see no point in building up some sort of rivalry between blog networks. There’s room for everyone.”
I have to make some additions and corrections. Note that link about “rumors of discord” up there? That was from me. The “discord” came not so much from internal problems, but as I say there, from trolling assholes who harass just about everyone here. So if you’re looking for confirmation of Hemant Mehta’s bloviating, it ain’t there.
The other thing is that our new bloggers are not “replacements”. I’ve been nagging everyone in the back channel for years that we have to bring in fresh blood regularly*, and that our old method of delegating recruitment to a committee — when people are here to write, not serve on committees — was not working. We’ve got this nice flush of new voices here because we’d put together an alternative mechanism that is actually working.
*My secret is out, that I’ve been straining to draw in new people simply to sate my vampiric hunger.
This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob — he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel misconceptions that nobody actually holds. In his TV appearances, puppeted by an invisible army of scriptwriters, this tendency is barely held in check, but in his lectures or on the internet it’s torrential; a seeping flood of grey goo, paring down the world to its driest, dullest, most colourless essentials. He likes to watch scifi films, and point out all the inaccuracies. Actually, lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space; actually a light year is a unit of space rather than time; actually, none of this is real, it’s just a collection of still images projected at speed to present the illusion of movement, and all the characters are just actors who have never really been into outer space.
There’s a hint of a point to his long-winded diatribe; scientists who simply drily list the facts or point to a pretty picture from the Hubble telescope aren’t really promoting understanding. But we also need to dispel the nonsense that that writer seems to think are essential, like clouds inhabited by angels
or his Lord Jesus Christ
. It’s disgraceful when a scientist dismisses poetry or philosophy, but you can also go too far in the other direction, and dismiss reality. Both are deplorable.
I was ready to go off on a rant about that this morning, and then Tyson had to open his mouth and leave me completely deflated. An interview was published that just left me muttering, “Why, Neil, why?”.
I know we have a lot of polyamorous people on this network, and people who are not interested in long term relationships, but that’s not me. I’m a devotedly monogamous kind of guy, and today is our 36th wedding anniversary, so I had to do some math. (Isn’t that everyone’s response to important dates?)
Percent of my life spent married to one person: 61%
Whoa. That’s disappointing. That number is just not big enough. So I had to fudge it a bit. We started seriously dating in 1976, so…
Percent of my life spent romantically involved with that person: 68%
That didn’t help much. Only 2/3 of my life? She’s so much more.
But hey, I met her for the first time in third grade, so maybe I can nudge it up further.
Percent of my life knowing that person: 86%
That really feels like cheating. She was just that other kid in class who was better at math than I was, so that shouldn’t count.
I know 100% is mathematically impossible because there were those 8 empty years where I didn’t even know she existed, but I have to strive for a percentage that approximates her importance. At least 99%. I estimate that in order to reach the point where I have spent 99% of my life married to Mary, all I have to do is live to be 2300 years old. And she has to live that long too, or there’s no point.
We can do that. Easy.
Then maybe we can aim for 99.9%.
