Turning science into a party

Lucky Cambridge: a whole bunch of organizations, including Harvard, MIT, and the Cambridge public schools and libraries are collaborating to put on the Cambridge Science Festival—9 days of science activities around the town. That is exactly the kind of broadly supported activity in the service of science education that can make a difference in public perception. It’s an excellent idea…now if only more communities had that kind of concentration of scientific organizations to make that kind of sustained activity possible.

(via Science Made Cool)

It’s all about the context

Hey, maybe this fits into the framing debate. The famous violinist Joshua Bell stood in a Washington DC subway station, playing Bach on his Stradivarius, in a test to see how many commuters would stop and appreciate the magnificent music.

A few people stopped, but no crowd formed, and he got a total of $32.17 tossed into his violin case. That actually isn’t bad for 45 minutes of playing, but I suspect he isn’t going to give up his day job.

Johnny Hart is extinct

My uncle Ed, my fun uncle who took a long, long time to grow up, had two favorite comics on the funny pages: The Wizard of Id and B.C. I liked them, too, and we followed them regularly. Of course, that was in the 1960s and early 70s, and I’m afraid they were afflicted with that syndrome common to long running strips: fading relevancy, recycled humor, the growing impression that the caroonist was phoning it in and didn’t really care anymore, as long as he got his syndication check. Johnny Hart, the creator of those strips, was a particularly sad case, because compounding the problem of staleness was an especially annoying and intrusive simple-minded religious stupidity. And now he’s gone. It’s unfortunate, in part because I regret any death, but also because he wasted so many of his last years cranking out crap and soiling his reputation.

I’ll forget about his religion, and remember instead my uncle chuckling over the Sunday funny pages.

Welcome Shifting Baselines!

We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson’s Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument:
Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?

“But it tastes so good,” I whimper.

Al Gore slaps me to the floor and kicks me in the ribs a few times. “But it’s bad for overfished oceans!”

I don’t know what to do. I’d have fish or some nice marine invertebrate every night for dinner, but I have a different constraint: my wife and daughter are not fans. About the only time I have seafood is on those rare occasions I go out for dinner without the family, and since I’m not giving them up, I guess I’m effectively adopting Jennifer’s position and, if not giving it up absolutely, at least cutting back consumption greatly.

Disagreeing with Wilkins

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels’ throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:

This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism – it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.

Alas, as is common for criticisms of this kind, the “best” of the religious views are mentioned as a mythic monolith on a far-off mountaintop, rather than actually stated, making them rather difficult to take on. I think it’s because whenever anyone tries to state them, there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing and admissions that they don’t actually believe in these arguments, they’re just trying to be fair and state that there are good arguments out there. It’s basically a bait-and-switch: They say, “I may believe X, but here’s Y; you can’t refute Y!” Then we pound on Y for a while, and they say, “Why are you wasting my time with arguments against Y? I believe in X!” So you pummel X for a bit, and they announce, “I may believe X, but here’s Z; you can’t refute Z!” And so it goes, endlessly. This is the theme I argued in an essay on Edge.

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I am insane

Hrrm … I seem to have stretched myself a little too thin this weekend. Early this morning I drove off to Minneapolis and Minicon to pick up Skatje and catch a few panels at the con, and then I drove back — I just got back a half hour ago — and despite the fact that there are a great many interesting things to talk about, this day has been a bit too much. Minneapolis really must pick itself up and move about 150 miles further west — I’ll appreciate it, and St Paul will be eternally grateful.

I will address Wilkins/Rosenhouse, Grayling, Klinghoffer (grrr), Mooney, Laden, etc., but right now my brain demands a total shutdown for a little bit.

If you really need a good Easter anti-religion rant to tide you over, read Skatje’s. She got to sleep in the car while I was dodging semis on I94 for most of the day.

300

The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I’d heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie’s hidden meaning was: it’s a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! “But of course!” you’re all saying to yourselves, “It’s so obvious, now that you mention it!”

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