Near as I can judge, Pharyngula is the third most popular blog in the entire state of Minnesota, as measured by traffic and inbound links. This is a good and distinguished place to be, and I’m both pleased and surprised that this obscure little collection of rants has ranked so highly.
Except…
We’re coming into the home stretch for the semester here—this will be the second to the last week of classes, and just as I’m panicking about everything I have to cram into the last few lectures, what do I do? Disappear! Flit about from place to place! It would be a great way to dodge assassins if I weren’t also making my travel plans public.
Tonight and Monday, I’m going to be at a Teaching and Learning Conference at the UMTC. I’m not driving for a change, so this trip shouldn’t be too bad.
Tuesday is Café Scientifique here in Morris, with Tracey Anderson of the biology discipline telling us all about aquatic insects. This is a major concern to all Minnesotans, so if you’re in the area, come on down to the Common Cup Coffeehouse at 6 pm.
Wednesday I fly to Boston for dinner with a bunch of very interesting people.
Thursday I fly home.
Friday I sleep late, then try to get caught up on all the teaching prep I shirked this week.
Then the following Monday is the day I have to get student evaluations of my teaching. I’m really curious to find out whether abandoning my students the week before will have a positive or negative effect on their opinions…
Here are some useful, general suggestions for giving an academic talk. Most of them are fairly obvious and I already know them, but as usual, the hard part is actually following them.
(via Entertaining Research)
Larry Moran listened to Nisbet’s podcast on Point of Inquiry. No surprise—he didn’t like it at all. I finally listened to it last night, too, and I have to crown Larry the King of the Curmudgeons, because I disagreed with fundamental pieces of his story, but I’ll at least grant Nisbet that there aspects of communication theory scientists would benefit from knowing. So why does he ignore those aspects in his own talks?
I want to focus on one thing: conflict. The podcast revealed another unfortunate inconsistency in the framing approach.
David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It’s not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what’s been published lately.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)
Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)
I’ve read most of these, and I roughly agree with most of Barash’s assessments except that he’s much milder in his criticisms than I would be. I was also disappointed in Wolpert’s book, which was a bit too scattered.
Next on my list: Boyer. It’s going to have to wait a little longer, though, until this term ends.
Wow, but this is awful. Don’t watch it unless you’re feeling masochistic.
It’s a snotty, arrogant punk kid filmed in annoying style claiming that he has disproven atheism and that all science is based on theology. I think he might be something like a freshman philosophy major who has just discovered the problem of induction.
Heh…I knew it wouldn’t be at all difficult to get a feminist to back me up on my wild and crazy claim that feminists didn’t mind getting rude. There’s a nice photo of a long-skirted lady in a big hat teaching a British bobby the delicate ways of politesse, too. Maybe the critics can wait until we start roughing up the police before accusing us atheists of bad manners now.
Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden’s place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism ‘hurts the cause’, he brought up a historical parallel:
Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.
This prompted the usual cry of the accommodationists: but feminists weren’t as rude as those atheists.
Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists” for “women” and “theists” for “men,” and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.
To my surprise, I opened this week’s edition of the university newspaper, and there was an article about me (it’s near the end, on page 18). It’s complimentary, if you think words like “scathing” and “godless” are high compliments, as I do, and it’s also good to see what some of the students think. However! Yes, I say, However!
Those who know the mild-mannered Myers must surely
wonder where the fire comes
from in his blog. He is perhaps
best summarized as a writer
who demands an empiricist
understanding of truth, disdains
misrepresentation of his views,
and insists on a fair shake for
atheists. There is also an element of thrill to his writing,
the thrill of really nailing some
idiot.
Aaaaigh. “Mild-mannered?” I also did a phone interview yesterday with Jason Rennie for his podcast (it’ll air in about a month), and he said afterwards that I sound much different one-on-one than I do on the web. I have got to do something about this horrible image problem — it’s the Wizard of Oz effect. On the web, I’m this giant disembodied head with a stentorian voice, with flames erupting everywhere … and then these people keep insisting on pulling back the curtain and exposing the ordinary, dithering old man with soft-voiced professorial airs.
<sigh>
We are who we are, I guess. It’s just that I wanna be a pirate when I grow up, and my career track seems to be leading me towards the kindly ol’ granpa job, instead.
Darksyde has just announced a few details about the science panels that will be held at the YearlyKos Convention. One relevant piece of information is that I’m the guy in charge of the science caucus, and I have to organize something. If Darksyde had ever seen my office, organization is not a word that would have come to mind…
