End-of-term madness descends

The next few days are going to be horrible. Today, I’ve got Cafe Scientifique (6pm, Common Cup Coffeehouse in Morris), in which I’m giving a talk on junk DNA. In addition, though, I’m also scrambling to get a lot of grading done — I’ve got to be all caught up before we roll into finals week. Just to add to the stress, I’m also going off to give talks at the Orange County Freethought Alliance annual meeting on Saturday, and at the University of California Riverside on Sunday. Why do I do this to myself? I don’t know. Probably because I’ll enjoy myself at these events, meet lots of interesting people, and learn new stuff.

But, aaargh, papers, exams, responsibilities and obligations!

Don’t go outside!

I made the mistake of leaving my snug warm house. It’s windy out there! The temperatures are right there on that edge where one minute it’s snowing, the next it’s sleeting, the next it’s raining, and then back ’round again! It’s cold, damp, and piercing; I prefer a calm dry -20°F to this soggy frigidity.

I’m staying indoors the rest of the day. Slippers on. Snuggly blanket close at hand. Not looking out the window ever.

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be curled up in the corner, gibbering

It’s been a long night and a busily obsessive day ahead of me. This is what has been and will be tying me up for a while.

pageproofs

Yeah, first pass page proofs for some book. It’s perfect timing: I’ve been trying to get students status reports for my classes, I’ve been grading stuff, I’ve had meetings, we had a blizzard, and oh, right, aren’t taxes due sometime soon? I think I’m going to break soon.

Status update

This stupid dilatory storm finally arrived in Morris last night, and dumped 4 or 5 inches of wet heavy stuff on us. It’s still coming down heavily, but this morning I braved the blizzard and cleared my driveway and sidewalk…I’ll have to do it again later, since it shows no sign of letting up, and the snowplows also haven’t cleared my street yet.

This is just to let the world know that I’m still alive.

It’s not a certain thing, you know, and it’s a rather disappointing fact of life that I’m not likely to die by getting eaten by a tiger or splattered by a falling meteor, but the prosaic, mundane heart attack while shoveling snow…yeah, that’s the most likely fate for someone like me. Boring, isn’t it?

There’s no way I’m ever going to be allowed into Valhalla, damn it.

How I spent the last few days

I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on “Moving Atheism Beyond Science”. I argued that modern atheism is built on the twin pillars of anti-religion and science, and not that there’s anything wrong with either of those, but that we have to have a wider foundation. In particular, I defied the recent trend to broaden science to encompass morality — I see that more as a conservative effort to refuse to step out of our comfort zone of science to consider philosophy and ethics — and most of the talk was a review of the ways science has failed to support a moral standard. Science has a definite place of importance, but let’s stop using it as our sole hammer.

Then I attended Norwescon, a science-fiction convention. People give me weird looks when I say I’m going to a con as a scientist/educator — but really, this is another example of stepping out of our comfort zones and reaching out to a different population of people…and SF people are a very receptive audience for science talks. So here are the sessions I was up-front and talking (there were others where I just sat back with the audience, of course).

Evo-Devo: More than a cool band name. This one was cool and right on my interests. I shared the panel with Annie Morton, a local ecologist, Jim Kling, a science journalist, and Dr Ricky, a scientist and also author of a food blog, Science-Based Cuisine. I started off by giving a definition I’d been asked to give on Twitter: Evodevo: Primacy of regulatory mutations in the evolution of form in multicellular organisms. I know, it’s much narrower than the standard definition which emphasizes comparative molecular genetics, but I was trying to summarize the current focus. And then we went back and forth on the details.

The Anthropogenic Extinction event. Somehow, I ended up on a series of depressing panels. I shared this desk with Annie Morton again, and Kurt Cagle. Short summary: we’re doomed. My final statement was that one basic rule is that you don’t shit in your own nest, and now that we’re a global species, we apparently have forgotten it.

Bullies Still Suck: Why We Don’t Just Get Over It. Oh, jeez. The most depressing panel ever. I was on it with Mickey Schulz (Geek Girls Rule!) and Maida “Mac” Cain. I think I was there to represent targets of online bullying, but here’s the deal: it was attended by a large number of SF con nerds and geeks who could give us all lessons on what real bullying is like. I didn’t have to say much at all: the audience spoke out with testimonials about their lives as four-eyed nerds, gay people, trans women, Asperger kids, “sluts” so-called, and rape victims. I think my main job here should have just been to shut up and listen.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It, with Gregory Gadow, Peter Blanton, Russell Campbell, and Dr Ricky. We were supposed to talk about our favorite doomsday scenarios. I don’t have one. I did say I thought all the emphasis in the popular press on big explosions and cosmic collisions and such was egocentrism, that that’s not how most extinctions occur. I gave the example of the Heath Hen, a chicken-like bird that was common on the eastern seaboard at the time of the European colonization, and that gradually was reduced to a single isolated population on Martha’s Vineyard by habitat destruction and hunting, and when it was down to the last few hundred animals in the 19th century, efforts were made to give it a sheltered sanctuary. The population briefly rose to a few thousand individuals before a fire killed many, then a storm killed more, and then a disease spread from turkey farms to kill even more, reducing them to 7 individuals, mostly male, and the last lonely bird died in 1932. That’s what we should expect. No grand spectacular drama, we’re most likely to flicker out with a dismal whimper.

Blinded by Pseudoscience. I wasn’t suppose to be on this one, but Dr. Ricky asked me to get on the stage with Janet Freeman-Daily, Gregory Gadow, and Ro Yoon. We talked a lot about cancer quackery, especially the Burzynski fraud, and tried to deliver some suggestions about how to detect when you’re being lied to: too good to be true promises, demands for money up front, lack of scientific evidence, etc.

Designer Genes. Gregory Gadow was the moderator, and it was largely a discussion between me and Edward Tenner…and we pretty much agreed on everything. I think the theme was unintended consequences: sure, we can and will be able to do amazing things with somatic and germ line gene therapy, but trying to do this with complex systems is likely to have all kinds of unexpected side effects. Correcting single gene defects is one thing, but ‘improving’ the human race is a far more complex problem that isn’t going to be easily accomplished.

Remedial Exobiology, with Annie Morton and Dame Ruth. This one was very well attended and less depressing! At a science fiction convention, there were a lot of authors in the audience who are very interested in the topic of implementing good biology in their stories (sorry, but I said that there were almost no science fiction stories that addressed biology competently, and we also snickered at James Cameron a bit). I tried to be fair and give shortcuts: I said imagination is good, you don’t have to master all of biology, but instead of just starting with bipedal anthropoids and building a new alien on that body plan, at least browse through the available and highly diverse morphologies present in other lineages on this planet, and build on that. One person in the audience also recommended this book, Eighth Day Genesis: A Worldbuilding Codex for Writers and Creatives, as a tool for inspiring science-based creativity.

And now I’m winding down and getting ready to fly home and resume teaching biology in Minnesota again. I encourage all science educators to stretch out and try talking about their favorite topics in different venues: it’s how we expand the relevance of science!

I survived my meeting with Seattle Atheists

It looks like Seattle Atheists are a good active group, and they hammered me with questions for about an hour after my talk. It was OK, they fed me good Puerto Rican food afterwards. My mother and two sisters came along to see what I was up to, as well, and they survived my ferocious rhetoric and haven’t disowned me yet. So I guess it was a good evening.

Now today I’m heading up the hill to Norwescon, where I’m going to be talking science on an evo-devo panel this evening, I think.

Skeptech: help me!

Miri is justifiably enthused about Skeptech, which has just announced their schedule. It’s full of cool stuff and lots of interesting people — you should go if you’re anywhere near the Twin Cities. It’s free on 5-7 April — I’ll be there the whole weekend.

But I have a sad admission. I’m on the schedule. Look at my name. Look at my topic. TBD. Oh, sure, I’m in good company: Maggie Koerth-Baker is also TBD. But I have to fix that, and I’m planning to do that this week, since I’m staying home for Spring Break. So help me out, people! What should I talk about?

I’m also working up my Seattle talk, which is slowly congealing. I’m going to talk about scientific and atheistic ethics there, and the message isn’t hopeful: I’m going to discuss our woeful failures, and suggest that morality ain’t gonna be found in a test tube. But there’ll also be some optimism for how broadening our foundations to encompass humanist values can compensate.

Now I could do that talk at Skeptech, too, which would simplify things. But I’ve also been considering some other possibilities. Let me bounce a few ideas around here, you can tell me what sucks and what sounds fun.

  • A realistic look at transhumanism. What biology and the evidence of evolutionary history says about it (with some swipes at that clueless hack, Kurzweil, but also some talk about the neglect of developmental ideas by most transhumanists.)

  • Science and the internet. What scientists really ought to do with blogs, social media, open source publishing — where we’re going wrong, where we’re falling down on the job, where we’re succeeding.

  • The coming apocalypse. It’s not likely to be a sudden catastrophe, and it will make a lousy movie. It will be death by a thousand little cuts…but that means a thousand little band-aids might be the best strategy for staving it off. (A related panel is already on the schedule.)

  • The biology century. The 19th century was all about chemistry; the 20th was physics. The 21st will see a surge of biological innovation. What will the equivalent of the atom bomb be? What will be our flying car?

  • Or something completely different.

As you can tell, I looked at the schedule and noticed a dearth of science talks so far (Jen McCreight is also TBD, maybe she’ll help fill the gap), so I’m leaning sciencey, sort of science-fictioney even. If you’re going, or even if you aren’t, tell me what you think would be interesting and relevant.

Venue change for my Seattle talk

The time is still the same — Wednesday, 27 March, 7:00 — but my talk has been removed from the UW campus. They’re testing fire alarms that evening, and unless you want to hear the talk punctuated with klaxons and periodic trooping out to the lawn, it’s best that we move it.

It’s now being held in Ballard, in the Nordic Heritage Museum (3014 NW 67th St), which is just awesome. I’ve got incentive to show up early now so I can tour the place. Unfortunately, I notice that Archie McPhee’s has relocated out of Ballard to Wallingford, so I can’t combine the trip into an opportunity to also stock up on essentials. Well, not quite as easily, anyway.

Yikes

We had freezing rain last night. I live across the street from the university, and I struggled to get halfway across the road…and then saw that the sidewalk ahead of me, which has a nice curving downward slope, was a perfectly shiny glassy sheet. We ought to do physics experiments in a frictionless environment! Unfortunately, I’m a biologist who finds accelerating down an icy ramp to be an uncomfortable experiment that is hazardous to my discipline, so I chickened out and am stuck at home.

And I had a day full of meetings planned, darn.

Unfortunately, I’ve also got a prospective student popping in to my office a little later this morning. At least, we planned that meeting — I don’t know if he’s making it in, or if I can cross the street in time. I’ll be braving my 100 meter commute a little later, I guess.