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.

I’m a-comin’ home to Seattle!

I get to spend a few days visiting with my mom and brothers and sisters at the end of this month. In addition to attending Norwescon and inseminating people’s brains with Science, I’ll be speaking on the University of Washington campus on 27 March. I’ll be in Kane Hall…and how weird, I remember taking classes in that building ages ago.

I’ll be oscillating between my mother’s house in Auburn, the DoubleTree at SeaTac, and at least one trip out to the UW. I might find a few moments in there to fall into a stationary phase somewhere within that triangle if anyone wants to intercept me.

I’ll never understand airline pricing

So last month I registered for the Women in Secularism 2 conference in Washington, DC, reserved a hotel room, and went to book a flight out…and was shocked at the prices, roughly $500-$600, and some of the cheaper flights wanted to land me in Baltimore. It made no sense — I could fly to Seattle (and will be, later this month!) at a fraction of that price. So I didn’t book, and just waited.

And then I checked again today, and found lots of flights at half the original price. It’s like playing Calvinball, the rules just change at the airlines’ whims.

Anyway, yes, I’m going to flit into DC the morning of 17 May. How many of you will I be seeing at the event? Now might be a good time to arrange your flights, because who knows what the prices will be like tomorrow.

I’ve been being mainly non-verbal today

Mainly because I’ve been writing like a fiend for the last two weeks when I haven’t been driving across the state. So I took a couple days away from the computer, mostly.

Went on a little seven-mile round trip hike in the National Park next door. No great feat compared to what I used to do routinely, especially since the total elevation gain was less than 500 feet. But it’s the first hike of that length I’ve done in some months, so it did me more or less in. Especially the part about the mile and a half furthest from the trailhead being on deep sand. Which meant three miles hiked on deep sand, as I had to come back. Ow my aching lower extremities.

Along the Boy Scout Trail in Joshua Tree National Park

The trail led to Willow Hole, a seasonal wetland with the aforementioned trees in the middle of the bouldery part of the park called the Wonderland of Rocks:

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Just upstream from Willow Hole.

Got there, sat, drank water, heard my favorite desert birdsong, from the canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus):


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All in all, a good day. Ow.

Didn’t you just love public school?

Miri is ruining everyone’s fun again, telling stories about being bullied in school, and showing this fierce video.

I was lucky. I wasn’t really bullied; my fate was to be neglected and marginalized. I was the dirt poor kid who wasn’t a jock or popular, so I was mostly uncategorizable and overlooked. An example to illustrate the weird social limbo I was in: I was only one of four kids at the school to be a national merit finalist; I’d gotten a near-perfect score on the SATs. We all got invited to the principal’s office when this was announced, and he sat us down: the basketball star, the doctor’s kid, the straight A student (and no resentment against any of those three — all were good people), and me. The principal knew all the others well, they had a good reputation, and he was joking around with them, and then he turned and gave me this look…’whothehellisthis and whyshouldItalkto him’, sniffed and turned back to the others, without saying a word to me.

We got the honor of a few minutes announcement at a school assembly, and it was similarly weird. Each of us four were announced, the teachers and principal said a few lovely things about them, and then they came to me, last, and just said my name, nothing more, before moving on. It was nice to be mentioned, but man, I was clearly regarded as the aberrant weirdo who was only there by mistake. I was the outlier, the person from the wrong class (make no mistake, classism thrives in America), the nobody who didn’t fit.

Again, I wasn’t bullied much in high school. I wasn’t angry at that treatment. What it did instead was make me someone who never felt a lot of self-worth and just kind of generally alone and miserable. But fortunately another thing I lacked was the serious depression that many people experience, even when they aren’t neglected, and so I’ve managed to cope.

I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to actually have a teacher take an interest in me and encourage me, but at least I never had one make my life difficult. I was too invisible for that.

Berkeley meetup et cetera

Having reviewed my schedule for my Bay Area visit, including the fact that Tuesday evening will likely be mainly consumed with helping my Dear Old Mom celebrate her 40th birthday,* I have concluded that I will be having a beer at the Jupiter in Berkeley starting at approximately 5:30 on Wednesday the 27th. The Jupiter is close to the Downtown Berkeley BART station. As the bearded hippie, I will be easy to spot. Hope to see you there.

In other news, I gave my old growth desert lecture a couple weeks back here in town, and a report on that lecture has just shown up in the local press. The reporter, a lovely person, got a couple minor details wrong but I’m always glad for a sympathetic story on desert plants showing up in desert newspapers.

* for approximately the 30th time