Vital news for this sacred day!

I am not yet in Madison, but I am in the Land of the Cheeseheads and am about to hit the road and expect to be there by early afternoon. And then I discover two coincidences, one happy and one mildly problematic.

By my good luck, Ron Numbers is speaking on the campus today, at 3:30 in Science Hall room 180. Hey, I should be able to make that! I just hope he doesn’t dispense some jewel of wisdom that compels me to rewrite my talk on the spot.

One concern: this is September 19th! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day! This means, of course, that I have to give my lecture in a hokey dialect, which always makes us People of the Pirate sound silly to those who have no respect for our traditions. This is important to us, and I sure hope others around us, even the non-believers, will honor our deeply held beliefs and join us in the ritual. It will fend off global warming, you know.

I hope someone lets Dr Numbers know. I will feel much better if he engages in a little sabre-rattling before the talk, and perhaps punctuates his major points with a holy “Arrrrr.”

Woe, woe is me

If things get quiet around here for a while, it’s not because I’ve received a letter bomb…it’s just not a good week. Lots of teaching piling up; lots of committee meetings; I’m trying to apply for a sabbatical, which in a small department means lots of work to make accommodations on workload; the family is a bit disrupted, with my father-in-law suffering a severe illness (the whole family, except for me, is about to fly back to Washington state for a while); writing deadlines are flying by and I’m scrabbling frantically for time to finish up; and I’m doing all this traveling and speechifying that’s eating up lots of time. So I’m a little bit stressed right now.

What to do? Well, of course: we’re having Greg & PZ’s Excellent Party tonight! Party on, dudes! Join us at the Black Forest Inn tonight, around 7, and help me forget my worries for a little while. I expect you all to show up and make me very happy — I’m going to be looking for you, personally, and if I don’t see your face I’m going to die a little inside. Do you feel the guilt yet?

Aferwards, I’m going to crawl into a cheap motel somewhere and put in a few hours of writing. Then, Friday, I drive to lovely Madison, Wisconsin.

Here are details of my talk there, but we haven’t worked out any post-babbling events yet. I suggest that if you want to get together with me, show up at the talk or after the talk, and we’ll figure out some nearby place where you Wisconsinites can drag me to cheer me up some more. The party tonight will not be sufficient, you know: it’s going to take a lot of work to haul me up out of this slough of despond.

Now…off to meetings and another quiet writing session before departure.

Richard Dawkins gets mail, too

Maybe he and I are going to have to have a competition to see who gets the nastiest letters. We do get a slightly different perspective on Christianity than most, I think, since our view is of a near-constant flow of letters like this one:

Warning! Uses Christian language!
i-ec87ab756172cec19d61ddd8fcd0d697-colley_sm.jpg
(Click for larger image)

I’ve got a little stack of similar letters growing on my desk, too. Although, to be fair, most are less scatological abuse, and more whining about how I’m so awfully hateful, but fortunately Jesus will toss me into a lake of fire soon.

Ramtha triumphant

In case you were wondering about that lawsuit by JZ Knight in Seattle — she was claiming that a former student had stolen the teachings of her Atlantean warrior spirit guide for profit — it’s over now. Knight won. Keep that in mind if ever a channeler tells you some flaky secret knowledge someday: it’s protected, privileged speech and the ghostie can sue your butt off.

We’re going to be in big trouble when John Edward‘s spirits copyright the alphabet.

Nice example of using creationism in the classroom

This is cute: college professor is preparing a lecture on homology, rummages about on the internet to see if there are any useful or interesting sources, and finds one that leaves him bemused and amused at the prospect of using it as an example in class…a bad example. The source is Conservapædia! The story concludes with a little understatement:

The Conservapedia entry on homology seems more concerned with acceptance of “custom and tradition” as a basis for “truth of religious matters” than with possible comparisons we might make among organisms. Indeed, it seems that the Conservapedia aims to dismiss important scientific approaches through superficial allusions. Perhaps we should be wary of trusting the Conservapedia, despite its subtitle.

It’s a nice example of using a creationist source to make a legitimate point in a science class, while not surrendering an inch of credibility to that source.

Virginia Tech gets a visit from the tinfoil hat brigade

Any physics-minded people at Virginia Tech who would like to deal with some crackpots coming to your campus? There is a talk at Virginia Tech this Friday by Bill Lucas on his claimed biblical model for the structure of atoms. It looks like very weird stuff.

CAMPUS BIBLE FELLOWSHIP

INVITES YOUR ORGANIZATION MEMBERS
TO A
CREATION SEMINAR on the

“EXPANDING EARTH: EVIDENCE FOR BIBLICAL CREATION”

PRESENTED BY

DR. BILL LUCAS, B.S., M.S., PH.D in Theoretical Physics

TO BE HELD ON

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008
AT 7 P.M.
IN SQUIRES STUDENT CENTER, ROOM #341

The presentation in is the form of a PowerPoint using many pictures to explain the new theory of gravity that supports a Biblical view of creation.

There will be opportunity following the presentation for questions and answers.

If you would like to check out the organization that Dr. Lucas works with, you can go to the website: www.commonsensescience.org

You really have to check out that Common Sense Science site — it’s very glib. They claim to have a new model for the structure of matter that involves spinning rings; nowhere do they explain what problems this model solves. I know, I’m not a physicist, so how would I know this isn’t really an exciting and revolutionary new idea? Well, there’s a couple of clues. First and foremost, it claims to be a new idea in physics, but there’s no math anywhere. That is very surprising.

Second, when you rummage around, you won’t find any scientific rationale for anything…but you will find repeated assertions that the model is compatible with Judeo-Christian beliefs. That’s an awfully feeble excuse.

And finally, if you expect their links page to give you some useful external sources to check against, think again. The only external sites mentioned are places like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, etc. You will not find any credible physics at any of those sites — actually, you won’t find any science of any kind.

And of course, the flier is the clincher. This will be a preachin’ fraud who will try to bedazzle the audience with pseudoscience.

If any of you go, let me know what he says! There could be real entertainment value here. You might also want to get in touch with Freethinkers at Virginia Tech; they’re trying to coordinate some kind of response.

What kind of music do Minnesotans like?

Let’s see…it must have a lot of accordions in it, or cowboys singing drunken love songs to their trucks, right? Just to blow your minds, my colleague with esoteric musical taste, Nic McPhee, is getting interviewed tonight, and he’ll be playing some of his favorite songs on the radio. This is our local university radio station, which has a limited license and can’t play anything that has cracked the top 40 in the last 10 or 20 years, but I don’t think Nic’s taste will conflict at all with the station rules.

So tune in to KUMM, 89.7FM, at 6:00pm Central and have those rural Minnesotan stereotypes broken. If you live farther away than Starbuck, Minnesota, you can also listen to the internet stream.

Just like Dover…

Well, well, well. Look what the Brunswick school board in North Carolina has been up to…

“It’s really a disgrace for the state school board to impose evolution on our students without teaching creationism,” county school board member Jimmy Hobbs said at Tuesday’s meeting. “The law says we can’t have Bibles in schools, but we can have evolution, of the atheists.”

When asked by a reporter, his fellow board members all said they were in favor of creationism being taught in the classroom.

The topic came up after county resident Joel Fanti told the board he thought it was unfair for evolution to be taught as fact, saying it should be taught as a theory because there’s no tangible proof it’s true.

“I wasn’t here 2 million years ago,” Fanti said. “If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”

The board allowed Fanti to speak longer than he was allowed, and at the end of his speech he volunteered to teach creationism and received applause from the audience.

How many fallacies can you find there? Evolution is a secular theory; it’s not our fault if atheists are copacetic with the evidence, while crazy creationists can’t abide it. Fairness is also not an issue here, since the reason evolution is taught is because it is the best explanation of the evidence. What would be unfair is bringing unsupported fairy tales into the science classroom and giving them a privileged place over hard-earned, well-supported science.

The facts of evolution, such as that the earth is old, there was a pattern of faunal succession, genetic mechanisms can account for variation, etc., are facts. Of course they should be taught! The parts of evolution that are theoretical, the way common descent explains observations in molecular biology, for instance, are no less valid and valuable for being theories. This guy is making the common mistake of thinking that calling an idea a theory is a demotion.

We do see organisms evolving now, in both the lab and in nature. We can indirectly see the effects of evolution even over time-spans which we could not live long enough to witness: we can infer evolution by comparing human and chimpanzee genomes, for instance, and by knowing rates of accumulation of mutations in populations, we can make estimates of the time course of change. Someone doesn’t have to be there to be able to assemble a convincing argument for physical events that have left physical traces.

Uh-oh. He got applause. Now people are going to push for the inclusion of this nonsense in their curriculum. Yep, here it comes…

Board attorney Joseph Causey said it might be possible for the board to add creationism to the curriculum if it doesn’t replace the teaching of evolution.

What kind of attorney is this? No, that’s not an acceptable legal solution. That state science standards mandate certain content in the public schools does not mean that if you meet the standards, you can then spin off any random line of baloney that you feel like. This was the Dover argument, remember: that they would just mumble some lip service to Intelligent Design, and all would be well.

Also like the Dover case, the proponents of introducing ID had already scuttled their case with public discussion at school board meetings of using it to introduce the religious concept of creationism, so the sectarian purpose was obvious to the court. Look here: Brunswick has already admitted that they’re floating this idea because some gomer was ranting about bringing bibles into the science class room.

Schools’ Superintendent Katie McGee said her staff would do research.

Babson said the board must look at the law to see what it says about teaching creationism, but that “if we can do it, I think we ought to do it.”

Somebody from the ACLU or NCSE ought to inform these people fast that their attorney is all wet and they are about to screw over their school district badly…before they go down that familiar path to self-destruction. The law says that they can’t do it.