If it’s Tuesday, it must be NY

Wheee, I’m going to zip into New York again next week. I’m flying in on Monday to talk at the Inspiration Festival on Tuesday. I’m on the Seed slate with:

Chris Mooney – Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine
Lisa Randall – Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Natalie Jeremijenko – Design Engineer / Technoartist, Yale University
PZ Myers – Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota
Randy Olson – Lecturer
Jonah Lehrer – Editor-at-Large, Seed magazine
Pardis Sabeti – Researcher, Broad Institute / Lead Singer, Thousand Days

And here’s my job, in one very short talk:

From Galileo to da Vinci, and, from Einstein to Lichtenstein, such paradoxical contemporaries of their respective ages defy opposition in principal by the very existence of their creative nature. When modern Science and Culture collide, what can we learn about ourselves and the way we see the world? A look at 10 trends set to reveal the future of the future.

I’ll have to leave before the session is over to catch my flight home, but it looks like a good line-up and I wish I could hear it all. I’ll be talking about developmental biology and what it says about us, and I don’t think any of the others will be competing with me on that subject, at least.

Nerds, rise up!

Smarting from her failure to crack the top 1000 in the science blogger hot-or-not contest, Janet has declared a Nerd-off, in which us geeks, dorks, nerds, and poindexters compete to see who is the King or Queen of the pocket-protector crowd.

I think I should get bonus points for bragging about it a whole year ahead of time.

This conflict could spill over elsewhere, I warn you. Already the fellows at Sadly, No have joined in…even if they aren’t science bloggers, their nerdiness has long been apparent. I bet they were in the A/V club in high school. Actually, most of the big-name bloggers are obviously nerdworthy: come on, Duncan Black has to be a major geek, right?

I also think I should be declared victor for this photo alone. Man, if we open up this competition to photographic documentation, Janet doesn’t stand a chance.

I am nerdier than 99% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Yeah, got this Nerd Score without even breaking a sweat.

As long as James Kakalios is gloating about his nerdy comic book habit in the comments, I’ll have to document what’s on my desk right now:

i-b25092645732b205011c5e890e449213-desk.jpg
From back left to front right, that’s Darwin, Marx, and Freud; a naked mole rat; a bowl of cocktail squid and Fetopia beads; a nice springy squid; and the books are The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Five Fists of Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and The Prehistory of the Far Side(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)

It’ll be a warm February in Minnesota before I’m outnerded.

And really, Buffy’s biology is wonderful!

Physicists get all the fun. Jennifer Ouellette has announced a book I’ll definitely be buying: The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). How could I not? It will go on the shelf next to my copy of The Physics of Superheroes(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).

So, where’s The Biology of Superheroes? The creators of superheroes trample all over the principles of physiology and genetics as thoroughly as they do those of physics, so there’s got to be a story in there somewhere.

New York has everything

I’m sorry to say that on our last trip to New York, we missed this museum.

Peruse an 1814 sketchbook by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and eventually you’ll come across a bashful, wide-eyed octopus. You’d never guess that the innocent creature leads a secret life of debauchery. But a few years later, there he is on a woodblock print, still wide-eyed, now presented by Hokusai in a moment of infamous passion—his bulbous head pushed between the legs of a young woman, delivering a rather well-received session of cunnilingis. Hilarious and startling, it’s just one example of the explicit shunga, or “pictures of spring,” in an exhibition at the Museum of Sex surveying four centuries of Japan’s cartoonish pornography.

Next time!

(via 3quarksdaily and Jennifer Ouellette)

Old myths re-examined

Truth is something unearthed gradually, and we have to be prepared to revise our interpretation of it based on the evidence. Several readers have informed me of recent developments that will require us to radically re-evaluate our perspective on the universe.

  • Geocentrism can make a comeback! Since astronomers are arguing about the definition of something as fundamental as a “planet,” that obviously means that all of physics is in disarray, and completely wrong.
  • As long as we’re resurrecting old fables, we might as well get them right this time: clearly, God is a giant squid. There’s even physical evidence.
  • There’s also a mythological tradition in place! I’ve always wanted a solid gold octopus god headdress. With a hat like that, I could probably persuade lots of people to give me money.

I think that settles it: Peru is the center of the universe around which all things revolve, and the creator of that universe is a cephalopod somewhere offshore.

Krauss on Kansas

Although I do think Lawrence Krauss’s op-ed in today’s NY Times, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate, is a good, strong piece of work, it doesn’t go quite far enough. He’s specifically targeting a couple of the Kansas state school board members for ridicule. First he slams Steve Abrams:

The chairman of the school board, Dr. Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, is not merely a strict creationist. He has openly stated that he believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago, although he was quoted in The New York Times this month as saying that his personal faith “doesn’t have anything to do with science.”

Then he takes on John Bacon:

Another member of the board, who unfortunately survived a primary challenge, is John Bacon. In spite of his name, Mr. Bacon is no friend of science. In a 1999 debate about the removal of evolution and the Big Bang from science standards, Mr. Bacon said he was baffled about the objections of scientists. “I can’t understand what they’re squealing about,” he is quoted as saying. “I wasn’t here, and neither were they.”

And then he explains how science works, and that their complaints are fallacious.

However, he also waffles and misses the major lesson of the problem of creationism. Abrams and Bacon are advancing these complaints about evolution for religious reasons, but Krauss backs away from that battle.

I have recently been criticized by some for strenuously objecting in print to what I believe are scientifically inappropriate attempts by some scientists to discredit the religious faith of others. However, the age of the earth, and the universe, is no more a matter of religious faith than is the question of whether or not the earth is flat.

Ah, you see, when it’s a matter of physics and astronomy, the professor of physics and astronomy resolves the problem of conflict with faith by declaring his domain to be a non-religious question, and therefore those who argue otherwise are not doing so out of faith, but out of ignorance. That’s fine, I agree, but I also think the whole of our understanding of the natural world is completely outside the purview of religion—they have an ugly history of always getting it wrong, you know—and that clearly the root cause of Abrams’ and Bacon’s ignorance is their faith. And that’s an observation he’d like to hide away, because it knocks his conclusion all cockeyed.

But when we win minor skirmishes, as we did in Kansas, we must remember that the issue is far deeper than this. We must hold our elected school officials to certain basic standards of knowledge about the world. The battle is not against faith, but against ignorance.

I will remind you all that the title of Krauss’s piece is “How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate.” He’s right that one way is to elect school board officials who are raving ignoramuses who advocate the insertion of nonsense into public school curricula. But he’s missing an even more pernicious and common way to make children scientifically illiterate: raise them in a household that values faith above reason. He’s choosing to fight the symptom rather than the disease, and I think his approach is doomed to ineffectuality.

Age of the Earth

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

Just as a lark and as a little exercise in making HTML tables (and to make clear what one error was in that last post), I threw together this table of the geological time scale, taken from Mayr’s What Evolution Is. I come from that generation of biologists where we were required to memorize the timescale to this level of detail; I’m a bit rusty on the dates now (but these are pretty much the same as what I had to learn in the late 1970s), and I was just realizing that we don’t even mention this stuff in introductory biology anymore.

[Read more…]

Creationist email to the fraternity

One more piece of creationist email for you: this one was addressed to me and all of my fraternity of Godless Atheists, which I think means you readers here. Never mind protesting that some of you are Christian—get used to it, to these guys you will never be truly Christian.

Anyway, it’s not a very entertaining letter. It was, as usual, amusingly formatted (Outlook Express is evil software), but I’ve stripped all that gunky Microsoft html out of it to simplify posting it. It’s your usual argument from poorly understood physics: the Big Bang is evidence of Jesus, really tiny numbers prove Jesus, mangled information theory proves Jesus. It does have one novel argument I haven’t seen before, that a kitchen spray bottle proves Jesus, but I don’t think it’s going to get much traction in the scientific community. I haven’t bothered to reply to it, but if anyone wants to shred the nonsense in the comments, maybe the authors will find it online.

Oh, and welcome to the Atheist Fraternity! Remember, we’re getting together with the Atheist Sorority on Friday night for a Toga Party!

[Read more…]