It sounds like Michael Shermer’s Origins conference was a great event in the morning, an amusing event in the evening, and an absurd sellout to theological thinking in the middle. What Templeton money touches is tainted, I’m afraid.
Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.
People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.
The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.
Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.
I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.
If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.
The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.
Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.
This is too much verisimilitude. The movie below is of the mating behavior of the jellyfish Carybdea sivickisi, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the scientists have set it to good old classic porn music.
The second thing you’ll notice, that I found annoying, is that they used too high a power objective to film it, so everything is jerking everywhere and none of the participants stay in the field of view for any length of time. Why is it that porn is afflicted with so many gynecological close-ups? Come on, set the mood, show us whole individuals instead of fragmented zooms of body parts.
Oh, come on. A poll at a forum for the Minerals, Metals and Materials society that asks, “Which U.S. Presidential Candidate Would Better Advance Science and Engineering if Elected?”, and John McCain is winning 59% to 39%? That poll needs some adjusting.
This site, Academia.edu, is kind of nifty, but it’ll be even niftier when more people join up. It’s a web page that indexes academics, displaying them and their affiliations in a tree diagram. Play with it, if you’re one of us, sign up, and if you know a professor, let ’em know about it.
Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you’ve probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we’re short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We’ll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments.
We may have to switch to old media. I’ll be on KPFT radio tonight, at 10:30 pm Central, along with some other guy named Phil Plait. I think we’re going to talk about the Republican version of supporting science, which consistes of complaining about overhead projectors and bear DNA, while endorsing candidates who believe Jesus would hunt dinosaurs from his helicopter.
This is shocking news, but not too surprising: I know a few of the people in this facility, and when I talked to them last they were deeply concerned about this possibility. The University of Hawaii is planning to shut down the Kewalo Marine Laboratory. They’re doing it so they can funnel more money into the expansion of a cancer research center, which is certainly valuable, but not at the expense of closing half of their marine facilities. This is especially shocking because heck, when students here in the cold and land-locked midwest talk to me about going into marine biology, many of them ask about Hawaii — it’s only natural that they’d imagine a tropical island would be a haven for that kind of research, and it is. It’s just that the state doesn’t support it. This is an ironic fact:
The Kewalo scientists said that Florida, also an ocean state, has 22 marine labs. “Even Georgia would have more marine labs (four) than Hawaii” if the Kewalo facility goes, said Michael Hadfield, biosciences research center faculty member and former director.
So I should tell my students that Georgia would be a better place to study marine biology? That’s nice for the South, not so nice for Hawaii.
And it’s not as if Kewalo has been unproductive — they’ve turned out some amazing work. Mark Martindale is there, as the director. The man is a Very Big Name in the field of evo-devo — go back through my evo-devo posts, and he keeps popping up everywhere. He’s working on early pattern formation in the metazoans, and his papers are indispensable in understanding early evolutionary events.
An old friend of mine, Elaine Seaver, is also there and doing fabulous work on a promising new system, the polychaete worm Capitella. If you want to know about body plan evolution, we need the kind of comparative approach she’s taking.
Write. Contact:
Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education
Hawaiʻi Hall 211
2500 Campus Road
Honolulu, HI 96822
808-956-7837
Let them know what an incredibly short-sighted decision this is, and what a failure of vision in the making. Not only does it harm the university immediately, damaging their reputation and costing them a useful facility, but think of the message it’s sending, that productive and esteemed faculty at the University of Hawaii can have their work so cavalierly dismissed and their laboratories demolished.
This is truly a thing of beauty: Sean Hannity, after using the tawdry guilt-by-association gimmick against Barack Obama, gets the same thing done to him. Watch the man squirm in frustration!
Bonus! The clip is presented by Keith Olbermann!
Double bonus! It’s got Rachel Maddow commenting on it!
Super duper triple bonus! John Cleese sent in a poem about Hannity!
Ode to Sean Hannity
by John CleeseAping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity
Time for a group liberal smirk and swoon, everyone.
So very, very cold. I am tempted by this hat — as a purely practical matter, of course — since it would do such a fine and stylish job of keeping my brain warm during the long and bitter winter months here.
I could even wear it while blogging.
