Loooong day

The Café Scientifique was very well done and informative tonight—so where were all you guys? Of course, what the event really meant was that it’s nearly 9:00, I’ve been running around all day, the alarm goes off tomorrow morning at 5:45AM, I teach at 8:00, and somehow I’ve got to explain MHC and T-cell receptors to a class full of sleepy students…and I’ve scarcely cracked the textbook today. So I’m tuning out for a while, to return again after a brief night’s rest.

Another Tuesday, another Café Scientifique

We’re having another Café Scientifique here in Morris this evening—come on down! Nic McPhee of the Computer Science discipline (who also has a weblog, Unhindered by Talent) will be discussing “Privacy, security, and cryptography: What happens to your credit card number on-line, and is that e-mail really from your boss?“. It is open to everyone, of course, and is being held at the local coffeeshop, the Common Cup, from 6:00 to 8:00 this evening.

Another reason to visit Washington state this summer

Besides being my boyhood home and the place where most of my relatives live, they’re finding dead Humboldt squid washing ashore in Puget Sound. Paradise!

Dan Penttila has been walking Washington’s beaches for more than 50 years, made a career of studying small fish born there, and knows pretty much what to expect.

But he could hardly believe it when one day in January, he stumbled over a squid, a species normally found in the warm waters off Mexico and Southern California: the Humboldt squid.

I wonder if the FSM is Danish?

I am put to shame—the flying spaghetti monster gets far more entertaining hate mail than I do.

I learned this from an account in USA Today about the FSM, which also has this beautiful jewel of a quote:

“It’s too bad that they’ll get attention for this sort of drivel when we have a robust scientific research program that the media doesn’t seem to want to write much about,” Discovery Institute spokesman Robert Crowther said in an e-mail interview.

A “robust scientific research program”? Hee hee…I had no idea they had such comedians at the DI.

I guess nobody likes Bruce Willis

So…I went to that Bruce Willis movie I mentioned earlier. It was OK, a rather predictable cop thriller in which he does his usual schtick of getting beat up and bloodied and shot, while still defeating the bad guys at nearly every turn—but at the same time he doesn’t do the hokey super-cop stuff we saw in the Die Hard movies. At least I was pleasantly surprised, as I went in to it with low expectations.

I mentioned that we usually don’t have a problem with obnoxious people here, though, and that was true tonight, but for a different reason: I was the only person at the movie.

There I was, front row center, in a lovely old art deco movie theater, big screen, popcorn, the works…and it was all just for me. It was much nicer than you’ll get with your usual home theater set up.

Eight good essays on Mooney

There is a most excellent online seminar on Mooney’s Republican War on Science going on over at Crooked Timber. The usual gang is reviewing it, with the addition of the inestimable Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. Wait a minute…Steve Fuller? That Steve Fuller? Steve Fuller. Steve Fuller!

Jebus.

I saw some glimmers of some interesting ideas at the start of Fuller’s ultimately long-winded essay, but they expired even before he started defending the “positive programme behind intelligent design theory” and collapsed into tired pro-creationism mode. When he called George Gilder and Bruce Chapman “technoscience sophisticates”, two people who know no biology and are proud of it, yet rail against basic evolutionary biology, I gave up. I don’t know what a contemptible pseudoscientific poseur like Fuller is doing in there, actually—maybe they should have invited Tom Bethell or some similar anti-science crank in, to give even better balance.

Oh, well. You can skip over that one. The rest of the online seminar is much more sensible.

The virtues of the small town movie theater

Kung Fu Monkey has an excellent rant about the theater experience, and how it is ruined by loudmouths and cell phones.

I just have to say that since I moved to Morris, I love going to the movies. I’ll even go to bad movies. And it’s all because the ambience has completely changed. Rogers recommends bringing back real ushers to silence the kibitzers and chatterers and inconsiderate babblers, but we’ve got something better: everyone in the theater knows everyone else. Nobody gets to make a public nuisance of themselves and then vanish into the anonymity of the crowd.

He’s exactly right. The community experience, the ability to just watch a movie and enjoy it, is the number one factor that has me going back over and over again, even when they’re showing garbage on the screen. I mean, seriously, I’m actually considering going to the theater this week to watch that lame Bruce Willis vehicle, 16 Blocks. I don’t even like Bruce Willis movies.

Francis Beckwith and the cold, cruel realities of tenure

Way back in the dim and distant past, like two years ago, there was a bit of a disturbance in the blogosphere, a minor contretemps after a certain Harvard law student, Lawrence VanDyke, published a “book note” in the Harvard Law Review. It was rank creationist nonsense, a work of pathetic scholarship, and it got publicly shredded by Brian Leiter, and I also got in the act. The book reviewed was an apologia for Intelligent Design by Francis Beckwith. In a later amusing twist, NRO published a defense of VanDyke and Beckwith by an anonymous “Texas free-lance writer”, who it was later discovered was Beckwith’s grad student, Hunter Baker. It’s all tortuous ancient history now, of course, and no one but those few of us involved in the dustup remember it.

What brings it all back is the news that Francis Beckwith has been denied tenure at Baylor. Hunter Baker hasn’t learned his lesson, and has written an overwrought defense, again in a pathetically semi-anonymous way, as “Graduate Student X”.

I have two things to say about it all.

One is to offer my personal sympathy to Francis Beckwith. Tenure is a brutal, evil machine that puts everyone through a hellish torture, and often spits out the deserving and rewards the undeserving. Do not ever judge someone by whether they have got tenure or not—it’s too arbitrary for that, and often represents a kind of insubstantial and subjective matching or mismatching between a person and an institution. So on a personal level, I wish Beckwith well and hope he and his family move on to a satisfying position elsewhere.

The second is that although it is nearly impossible to speculate on what’s going on in tenure committees—he could have been denied tenure on the whim of some old fart with a grudge—it’s hard to imagine that the politics of Intelligent Design did not play some small part in it. Beckwith tied his fortunes to those of the Discovery Institute and the ID movement, and at the very least we can say that that was not enough to salvage his tenure at Baylor. In fact, given that he has a respectable publication record and seems to be a personable fellow, it’s hard to avoid the speculation that they might have wanted to steer Baylor away from the disaster of Intelligent Design. A solid record of publishing large quantities of something that is being shown to be utter crap is not helpful to one’s tenure chances.

Is that a legitimate reason to deny someone tenure? Sure.