Some Science for the end of April 2013

Woo and yoga
Someone asked me how I could like yoga and be down on “alternative (quack) medicine”. Well, there have been some rigorous studies done on yoga and it CAN be recommended for physical therapy purposes (e. g. back aches). Via our National Institute of Health.

Frogs
This Tiger Frog from Ghana is a cutie:

Movies: I want to see this one:

Note: my beef with religion, at least as practiced in the west, is that too many of them require people to accept “miracles” (resurrections, parting seas, virgin births, etc.) on “faith” (sans evidence). So once you “accept” that the laws of science (naturalism) can be suspended at set times, then, well, why trust science with anything? Seriously: if there is, say, water on your basement floor and a pipe joint above that with green on the joint…well…if you didn’t SEE it drip, then maybe the water and the green just appeared because of the work of some devil or pixie? Why not…if suspensions of naturalism are allowed?

My beef is NOT with religions that don’t require acceptance of miracles.
It is my opinion that a deity/spirit/whatever that is interested in humans and human affairs makes no sense, but that is the realm of opinion.

Space:

How about a storm that has an eye 1250 miles wide and winds of 330 miles per hour?

The eye of a super-hurricane at Saturn’s north pole looks like a peaceful red rose in a fresh bouquet of pictures from NASA’s Cassini orbiter. But don’t be fooled: That rosy appearance is merely due to the false colors ascribed to infrared wavelengths.
This storm’s eye measures 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) in diameter, about 20 times wider than the average hurricane’s eye on Earth. The outer clouds at the hurricane’s edge are traveling at 330 mph (530 kilometers per hour), which would be off the scale on our planet. The vortex whirls inside Saturn’s mysterious hexagonal cloud pattern, and it’s not going anywhere.

How do you like this image of the moon taking from space near the earth?

Here is a picture of a solar eclipse via Scientific American:

Miloslav Druckmüller, a mathematician at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues were on Enewetak as the eclipse’s shadow raced toward them from the northwest at more than twice the speed of sound. This composite of 31 images from the eclipse shows the solar corona, the wispy “atmosphere” of the sun peeking out from behind the moon as well as the cratered, rayed surface of the moon itself.

Back on Earth Again
This species of fish, commonly found in China, Russia and Korea, has been found in New York. It is an invasive species.

Even more interestingly, it can actually breathe outside of water for a short period of time (days) and even hunt.

Ames Iowa: AMS meeting: Reality

I am in the background, near the rear of the room (white beard).
This is a small group, but the speaker and many that you can see are among the world’s best topologists.

It was a different story at my hotel room:

Workout notes
5.7 mile run over lunch; 57 minutes.

Commentary
Going to research meetings is always eye-opening. On one hand, I often learn something and pick up techniques and ideas that I can use.
On the other hand: I am seeing people who, for the most part, research and direct graduate students for a living. This is very different from what I am used to (teaching moderately talented undergraduates relatively elementary things).

The blunt fact is that the researchers are not only the best that graduate school graduating classes have to offer (I wasn’t) but they are also people who do it full time; if you teach a 11-12 hour load (with administrative duties to boot) you are NOT going to research at that level. But it is easy to forget that if you don’t take in one of these from time to time. Those who don’t: often lose perspective.

Posts
Yes, this is a Salon article and the title is misleading. But it does raise a point:

The heads and hearts of atheists may not be on precisely the same page. That’s the implication of recently published research from Finland, which finds avowed non-believers become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things.

“The results imply that atheists’ attitudes toward God are ambivalent, in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response,” concludes a research team led by University of Helsinki psychologist Marjaana Lindeman. Its study is published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.

Lindeman and her colleagues describe two small-scale experiments. The first featured 17 Finns, recruited online, who expressed high levels of belief, or disbelief, in God. They read out loud a series of statements while skin conductance data was collected via electrodes placed on two of their fingers.

Some of the statements were direct dares to a deity (“I dare God to make my parents drown”). Others were similarly disturbing, but did not reference God (“It’s OK to kick a puppy in the face”). Still others were bland and neutral (“I hope it’s not raining today”).
The arousal levels of the believers and non-believers followed precisely the same pattern: Higher for both the God dares and otherwise unpleasant statements, and lower for the neutral ones.

Compared to the atheists, the believers reported feeling more uncomfortable reciting the God dares. But skin conductance data revealed the underlying emotional reactions of the two groups were essentially the same. This suggests that taunting God made the atheists more upset than they were letting on (even to themselves).[...]

The second experiment was designed to test that hypothesis. It featured 19 Finnish atheists, who participated in an expanded version of the first experiment. It included 10 additional statements—variations on the God dares which excluded any mention of supernatural forces. For example, in addition to “I dare God to turn all my friends against me,” they read out loud the statement: “I wish all of my friends would turn against me.”

The results: The atheists showed greater emotional arousal when reading the God-related statements than while reading the otherwise nearly identical sentences that omitted the almighty. To the researchers, this indicates that “even atheists have difficulty daring God to harm themselves and their loved ones.”

Note: the “n” is rather low.

The article goes on to make conjectures as to why this might be so. I’ll make mine:
my position of atheism is NOT so much an emotional one as an intellectual one. I see no evidence of divine intervention in human affairs and the idea that there is a “interested in human events” deity in such a large universe with billions of galaxies and billions of stars per galaxy makes no sense to me. I just don’t believe it.

But I WAS raised Catholic; my dad wasn’t a religious man but believed in a deity of some sort; mom believed in “magic tricks” of a deity (one that intervened). So I was raised that way and I have the resulting emotions. I sometimes ask a non-existent deity to eternally condemn inanimate objects when they break or spill (or when I break them ).

But emotions and emotional actions are hard to turn off.

I’ll give an example: I know that my stuffed frogs are inanimate objects. But I’d feel bad if, say, they burned in a fire and I’d get very angry if someone “mistreated” them. That is an emotional, irrational reaction. I’d have the same about religious stuff even though my mind knows better.

19 April: guns, Boston Bombing and religion

Workout notes
Weights only: 5 sets of pull ups (three different bars and various groups); 10 reps each
hip hikes/Achilles stretches
Bench: 10 x 135, 2 x 185, 2 x 185, 7 x 170.
Ab sets: crunch, twist, sit back, v. crunch: 3 sets each
incline: 2 sets of 8 x 140
military: 2 sets of 12 x 50 dumbbell (each arm), 1 set of 10 x 80 machine
row: 3 sets of 10 x 65 dumbbell (each arm)
curl: 3 sets of 10: machine, dumbbell (30′s), pulley (57.5)
pull down: 3 sets of 10 with 160
side plank (full arm extension; none of this sissy forearm stuff with stacked ankles)

Weather: it is sleeting. The Wildlife XC race is cancelled this year. But there is a road 5K nearby that I signed up for.

Religion
Among some in the atheist community there is a debate about whether “religion is good for people”. Personally, I see some practices as being good:

yoga (for physical fitness), meditation (for emotional health), getting together (human companionship). None of these things has much to do with specific religious belief (Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Thor, elves, pixies, etc.)

But religion is really amoral. Some teachings are good, others are bad and some are horrific.
So Jerry Coyne wrote about this; why he spent so much time and effort on a dumb article from a right wing source I’ll never understand.

Background Check Amendment
The vast majority of the votes on the background check amendment was predictable. However there were a few surprises; one negative against us, and a few positive for us. Nate Silver’s analysis of this is interesting.

Boston Bombing
I know: innocent until proven guilty, etc. But these guys got in a shoot out with police and were seen robbing a 7-11 (convenience store) prior to the shoot out, and they were there with what appeared to be the package that turned out to be the bomb.

The dead one (26 years old) was a boxer who wanted to make the Olympics. His younger brother (still at large) is 19. They lived in the United States for some time, but were originally from Chechnya. Yes, they are Muslim but not Arab.

Here is the boxer:

He, like me, neither drank alcohol nor smoked. I suppose that it is odd that I am shocked; after all, why should a physically fit lifestyle have anything to do with morality?

5 April: Pretty day but

I am not sure if it is something I ate, but I feel just a tiny bit sick (to the stomach).

I sure feels like a “this didn’t agree with me” type of thing.

Workout notes (reduced to save energy for the weekend)
Some stretching; reduced weight workout
rotator cuff, hip hikes, Achilles exercises (full set)
pull ups: 4 sets of 10 (3 at the start, 1 at the end)
bench: 10 x 135, 8 x 170 (disappointed)
incline: two sets of 8 x 145
military (dumbbell): two sets of 12 x 50 (each arm)
abs: 2 sets of 10: twist, crunch, sit back; 2 sets of 20; v. crunch
pull down: 2 sets of 10 x 160
curl: 1 set of 10 x 30 dumbbell (each arm), 10 x 70 machine
row: 2 sets of 10 x 200 (Hammer)
stretches.

Posts
Science vs. Superstition This Natalie Angier article came out in 2005 I think. I just read it last night; it was pretty good. She reported that scientists asked her to make the case for evolution and point out that it is an accepted fact in science, which of course, it is. Scientists reject the magic of creationism. However with regard to the other magical tricks in the Bible, which are just as unscientific, well, the story is different:

Scientists think this is terrible—the public’s bizarre underappreciation of one of science’s great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they’re right. Yet I can’t help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America’s religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist “science,” they roll their eyes over America’s infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection. If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans’ resistance to evolution must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion’s core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate “magisteria,” in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you’ll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she’ll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that’s your private reliquary, and we’re not here to jimmy the lock.

Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University’s “Ask an Astronomer” Web site. To the query, “Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?” the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, “modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions.” He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of “God intervening every time a measurement occurs” before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn’t—and shouldn’t—”have anything to do with scientific reasoning.”

How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. “No, astronomers do not believe in astrology,” snarls Dave Kornreich. “It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.” Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science “one does not need a reason not to believe in something.” Skepticism is “the default position” and “one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something’s existence.”

This is a bit different from places like UU churches, where Jesus centered magic is, for the most part, rejected (correctly), but other forms of woo should be considered; not rejecting these sorts of things is being, ahem “open minded.”

Topless Feminist protests against Islamic repression in the Ukraine
Yes, you have young women with no shirts. Yes, their beef is legitimate. Yes, guys will love these photos for other reasons. But this is the kind of thing that disgusts me:

(the uncensored photo is available at the link). If this is indeed a real photo (and not staged), why would anyone treat another human being like this? I don’t get it.

Snarky Photos

Parenting FAIL

Why Theism Makes No Sense to Me

I’ve seen a few debates about religion, theism (believing in an active deity) and atheism (denial of the existence of such a deity).

Yes, I’ve read the debates between “well, believing in God is good for you” versus “no, it isn’t”.

Of course, I have an opinion (which I think is evidence based) on whether or not religion or religious belief (or “spirituality”, whatever that means) is good or not, but, that is NOT the point of this post. It could be that, say, believing in Jesus makes you as smart as Stephen Hawking and being an atheist makes you, oh deeply depressed.

But that has nothing to do with “truth” though it might have something to do with “what one WANTS to be true”.

And no, I am not talking about the power of suggestion or the value of religious myth (here, “myth” means “story with deep personal meaning” rather than “falsehood”).

What I am talking about: does it make any sense to believe that some deity intentionally created humans and “cares” (in a human like way) about the welfare of humans (e. g., “loves us”)

Yes, I know about evolution being a directionless process and a belief in “guided evolution” really isn’t compatible with science.

So, yes, that is one reason that theism makes no sense to me; we were put together by a bunch of jerry-rigged steps (e. g. the Vagus Nerve) As an aside, I can recommend Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish for an excellent discussion of how humans are put together.

But perhaps there is some clever “work around” this.

But consider this: get a grip on the massive scale of the univers (this is a cool, well put together tool)

And you can watch this:

Now we are one planet orbiting a rather ordinary star in a rather ordinary galaxy. Each galaxy has roughly between 10 million (dwarf galaxy) and 100 TRILLION stars, and we know that there are, visible to us, over 170 BILLION galaxies.

So on an emotional level: am I to swallow that Bronze Age people, who knew so little, got such an immense question right? What is more likely: WE (what are “we” anyway: Homosapiens? Or all the other members of hominidae included too?) are the center of some creation, or that, well, we just aren’t that special? Why our life form? What about other life forms on other planets, or even other galaxies?

To me, theistic belief, as I have seen it practiced, is VERY ego-centric. Oh sure, “God centered, not me centered” I hear. But you are assuming that there is some super awesome “thing” that cares about you. Please.

It makes far more sense to assume that rather dull humans (as in: human beings, on the whole, really don’t know that much; not that believers are substantially dumber than anyone else) are just making stuff up so they can feel better about themselves.

I also wonder about all of the other gods relegated to the waste bin and wonder about a time when the current ones will be as well.

PS: if you say “see, you SAID that “humans don’t know that much”! True, I did. But “humans don’t know that much” in no way implies “therefore my conception of a deity is correct” or even “therefore my conception of a deity is plausible”.

Richard Dawkins, Admirals, Climate Change, and Krugman’s LOLZ…

Fun
Hot Yoga At Home has posted another video (after a hiatus)

Click on either screenshot to see the 2:45 video. It lifted my spirits.

Science When Admiral Locklear was asked about the “top threat” in the Pacific, he said(Will Rogers in National Security Blog):

Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reported the statements on Saturday. Here is an excerpt from his article:

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

“People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

Locklear said his Hawaii-based headquarters — which is assigned more than 400,00 military and civilian personnel and is responsible for operations from California to India, is working with Asian nations to stockpile supplies in strategic locations and planning a major exercise for May with nearly two dozen countries to practice the “what-ifs.”

…

[W]hen it comes to pragmatic military planning, Locklear said he is increasingly focused on another highly destabilizing force.

“The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.”

Then there is this from NASA (via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

WASHINGTON — Vegetation growth at Earth’s northern latitudes increasingly resembles lusher latitudes to the south, according to a NASA-funded study based on a 30-year record of land surface and newly improved satellite data sets.

An international team of university and NASA scientists examined the relationship between changes in surface temperature and vegetation growth from 45 degrees north latitude to the Arctic Ocean. Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.

“Higher northern latitudes are getting warmer, Arctic sea ice and the duration of snow cover are diminishing, the growing season is getting longer and plants are growing more,” said Ranga Myneni of Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment. “In the north’s Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.”

The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The weather here: wetter than normal, and warmer than normal. We had snow toward the end of February but not much during January. We have fewer snowstorms, but heavier ones along with more total moisture (due to rain).

Education Michelle Rhee goes on and on about the need for “great teachers”. I’ll have to read her book to see if she provides any actual evidence. The review that I linked to doesn’t say whether it does or whether it doesn’t; it does say that she neglects the argument about poverty and early childhood intervention in programs such as Head Start.

I can say this: there is such a thing as talent. For example: the best track coach in the world would have never been able to make a runner out of me; I just don’t have the ability. And I wonder: if kids show up to school after being neglected (in terms of nutrition, parental attention, being read to, etc.), are they all but doomed? I don’t know; I haven’t read the evidence. I have read studies that show things like Head Start make a difference in poor areas. There is more here.

Richard Dawkins: gets a shout out on The Simpsons as a “Devil” character in Ned Flanders’ nightmare (via Friendly Atheist):

Paul Krugman: LOLZ
This is too good to be true. The Dailycurrant published a satire story about Paul Krugman filing for personal bankruptcy: the idea was that he tried to “spend his way out of personal debt”. Most of us know that Dailycurrant is satire (e. g., it had Sarah Palin being appointed to the faculty at Harvard University). But evidently, some right wing outlets DON’T know that it is satire and ran with the story. Paul Krugman stayed silent until one of these “media” outlets bit…and then had LOLZ.

Achy Butt; disbelief and cheap shots

Workout notes I felt bad (tired) yesterday and, well, pretty good today.
rotator cuff
Pull ups: 5 sets of 10; last one broken into 8-2
bench: 10 x 135, 4 x 180, 7 x 170, 8 x 160
incline: 2 sets of 8 x 135
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 65 each arm
military: 2 sets of 15 x 45 lb. dumbbell
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 52.5 superset with 3 sets of 10 x 160 pull downs; last set: rotated grip.
abs, hip hikes and new piriformis exercises (felt good)
I did 1 set of 10 push-ups with a single arm row (30 lb.) and 1 set of 5 reps of dumbbell dead lifts (75′s)
Side plank, stretches…

New (to me) piriformis exercises:

They FEEL good; whether they will be effective for me in the long run remains to be seen.

Then 5K run on the track:
9:13, 8:50 (18:04) 8:26 (26:31) 1:09 (27:40). Felt good.

The question: should you spend your time explaining science or destroying religion? Or…neither?
Jerry Coyne has a discussion of this at his website. My answer: explain science and how to think; let people form their own conclusions.

One caveat: of course, religious practices that are especially harmful (suppressing women, discriminating against gays, enforcing religious belief) should be vigorously opposed.

Academia
What a freaking idiot. A tenured professor resigns prior to get fired..because he videoed female students in the bathroom.

Politics

Seems reasonable, right? “I am not an emperor” means “I am charged with enforcing existing law, not passing law”. But leave it to the right wingers to take this statement out of context and claim that President Obama is COMPLAINING about not being an emperor. (note: I am linking to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub which condemns this “taking out of context”). Sadly, this is a case where I’ve seen political opponents of President Bush do similar things.

Trying to say it correctly

One of the irritating things about writing mathematics is that one has to be accurate in what one says, but one also WANTS to speak comprehensibly. Here is what I am trying to say: “for a certain subclass X of wild knots, to each equivalence class of knots of class X there corresponds a sequence of equivalences classes of tamely embedded solid tori.” This is accurate but obscures what I am trying to say: sequences of solid tori are a knot invariant for knots of type X.”

(If you are wondering what I am talking about: a tame solid torus can be thought of as a possibly knotted solid bagel in space. A smooth knot is an image of a differentiable, one to one map of the unit circle into 3 space, and a wild knot is an image of a continuous map of the unit circle into 3 space which cannot be deformed (by a continuous, one to one function of 3-space to itself) into a smooth knot.

This is an example of a wild knot; one can define a tangent vector to every point of this knot EXECPT for one exceptional point. It is that point that makes the knot “wild”.

The knots I am studying are wild at ALL of their points.

So…back to the posts

Atheism I am fortunate to work at a university; among faculty members atheism is common. In fact, at some math/science conferences, atheism is either the majority or plurality positon.

But not everyone has that luxury; sometimes atheists are asked some rather inane questions; e. g. “why do you hate God?” “if you don’t believe in God, where do your morals come from?” “If you don’t believe in God, how do you explain the earth/world/universe?”

(quick answers: My hating your deity is like YOU “hating Thor” or “hating Zeus”; our morals come from the same place that the rest of our knowledge comes from: “each other”, and “no I can’t explain how the universe came into being, but “goddidit” is not an answer.”

So, here is a pretty good list of 15 such questions.

Oh, and to the old “why do you talk about it so much”: I can give four reasons. One: it is a major social issue and social issues interest me. I enjoy thinking about them. Two: in the society I live in, political leaders (yes, BOTH parties) often bring in “religion and values” into the discussion. So, I feel free to weigh in with my point of view. Three: sometimes, people bring it up to ME. Admittedly, this issue is rarely, if ever, brought up to me by people who know me well. When people bring up ideas for critique, I attempt to critique them as honestly as I can.
Four: religion often gets in the way of the proper understanding of science. One big way: evolution is an undirected process, and many religions teach that humans are an intentional creation by some deity. I believe that religion can NOT be reconciled with, say, the traditional Abrahamic religions, though some have redefined their religions to the point where their deity becomes some sort of holy word salad.

Speaking of salads: check out these “vinegar valentines”. People have “played rough” with each other for a long time.

Ok, back to work….

Come together? Not in this lifetime…

Workout notes Since I won’t be running on Saturday, I figured out that I needed a medium/long run today and one on Sunday (weights and medium walking tomorrow).

So I went to the university gym (local roads still have icy patches) and decided to run somewhere between 8 and 10 miles, split between our “8 laps to the mile” indoor track and the treadmill.

What happened: 10K (50 laps) on the track in 1:01, 5K (3.11 miles) on the treadmill in 29:04. The track: 19:55 (2 miles), 9:49, 9:35, 9:40, 9:37 (58:38) then the treadmill went 9:50, 19:05, 28:12, 29:04 (slight variation of the incline). That is 1:30:04 or 9:40 mpm for 15K. That is far from stellar but better than my usual post-blood donation week workouts.

Note: I decided to leave the track as it is a “some rubber on concrete” type of operation; it is probably just a tiny bit softer than pavement but I could feel the pounding a bit. The whole time: first 58 minutes: one walker (a guy); last two minutes: two guys got on. It was very, very empty.

Posts
I like the Field Museum in Chicago, but there is trouble afoot. Evidently, there is some movement to cut back on the science research being sponsored/performed there. As Jerry Coyne points out: that is really the heart of a top caliber museum, even if the cutting edge research is hidden from view. Yeah, I’ve noticed the “dumbing down” of the displays, but the reality appears to be this: (opinion only)
the more expensive a museum is, the more patrons it needs. The more patrons it draws, the more “regression to the mean” effects occur which leads to the museum playing lighter demands on the visitors.

I still remember my trip to the Los Alamos science museum. It was small, and I spent 4 hours there! But you should have seen many of the other visitors; it was a “come in…give a blank glance and leave” all within 15-20 minutes time.

This was one of the exhibits: they explained why the Tokomak had to be in the shape of a torus: the only two smooth surfaces that have nowhere vanishing vector fields are the torus and the klein bottle, and only the former embeds in 3-space (this is a consequence of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem).

They gave a display of the “hairy ball” theorem, etc. The museum worked for me, but I wonder how popular it was with the public in general.

Speaking of education Randazza’s blog takes another swing at campus speech codes. The argument here appears to be: if you don’t let students discuss emotionally charged topics, then the dialogue becomes sterile and students with differing views might tend to withdraw into like minded groups.

I don’t know; one thing is that student with student speech is different from faculty to student speech. Here is why: when I am in the front of the class room, my job is to teach mathematics and NOT to have a captive audience for my social opinons. And were I to say something like: “well, Mexicans are too stupid to ever learn math”, I would probably damage my credibility to teach mathematics to this student population, thereby harming my ability to do my job.

On the other hand, being too PC might also harm our ability to educate. Example: yes, the earth is about 4 billion years old, modern animals did evolve by a process that shows ZERO signs of being designed and the current animal kingdom shares common ancestry. Those are FACTS.

Other facts: certain racial groups in the United States commit certain crimes at a higher rate than other groups (African Americans are more likely to commit homicide (and be victims too, especially males), white people are more likely to drive while intoxicated, etc.) Statistically speaking, women are not as physically strong as men (though a female Olympic weight lifter is stronger than all but a tiny percentage of males). Certain groups score higher on IQ tests than other groups. Countries with higher religiosity commit homicide at higher rates than countries with lower religiosity, and the same applies to states in the United States.

These are all facts and all of these make one group or another uncomfortable. But part of education is learning to confront uncomfortable reality and make sense of it.

So, I understand the need to, say, keep a skinhead group from burning crosses on the quad lawn. But controversial topics SHOULD be discussed on a college campus!

Politics
This is tough to remember: politically speaking, one person’s obstructionism is someone else’s “stand up and fight for us”. Our House of Representatives consists of people from wildly differing districts and while Congress has a low approval rating on the whole, people, in general, disapprove of OTHERS in Congress and not their own Representative. Example: my friends (and I!) might think that John Shimkus is a delusional idiot but he is reasonably popular in his district.

I admit that I live in a place that made things worse. For the longest time I was in a Republican US House District (IL-18) but, thanks to redistricting, put into a Democratic leaning one (IL-17). So for the first time since 1990 (when I lived in Austin, Texas), I voted for the winner in a contested US House race. I did vote for Ray LaHood a couple of times, but that is when he had zero or crackpot opposition.

As far as Republicans go, read this “mainstream” article from Town Hall:

As a candidate for president of the United States, it is incumbent on me to make a statement regarding the Sandy Hook massacre and to explain how my policies would help prevent other such massacres should I become president. As I discuss this sensitive topic, it is also incumbent on me to sound more rational and articulate than the incumbent. That will not be difficult.

[...]

First and foremost, concealed weapons permits decrease violence. The rationale is simple if we consider that crime only happens when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian. Everyone knows that the gunless are suitable targets for violent crime. This is particularly the case when there is no one around to guard them.

So my plan will turn these teachers into capable guardians. I really think everyone will benefit when teachers stop taking “social justice in the classroom” and other silly education classes in order to be certified to teach our kids. Simply put, there can be no social justice when children are being slaughtered in the schoolhouse.

2. More male teachers (and fewer metrosexual students). Some have suggested that most female teachers would not feel comfortable around guns. So they might be deterred from teaching if they have to go through weapons certification, which requires firing a weapon. This is not a problem as far as I am concerned.

For far too long, men have been grossly underrepresented in the teaching profession. This has had a profound impact on young men. From kindergarten to high school graduation, they are too often in the position of trying to please a female authority figure. This lack of balance affects their relationships with both women and men. A constant concern with pleasing women eventually turns a man into a woman. That is why we have so many young adult metrosexual males talking about their feelings.

Simply put, having gun toting male role models in the classroom will be good. Having your student taught by Ted Nugent just might keep him from becoming Ted Baxter.

3. Fewer liberals in the teaching profession. For years, conservatives have been looking for a cure to the problem of liberal indoctrination in our schools. [...]

Ok, on the flip side of this: what would I find appealing? This Slate article is about how a candidate can appeal to the “no specified religion” voter (different from an atheist voter; the atheist voter would be a proper subset of this block).

I’ll highlight a couple of points:

2. Even if you’re religious, don’t gratuitously bash or exclude those who aren’t. For the most part, the nonreligious are politically realistic. We know that in a society as religious as the United States, some amount of pandering is an electoral necessity. But just because you speak to churches doesn’t mean you can’t also speak to the unchurched. In March 2012, for example, the Reason Rally brought together tens of thousands of American nonbelievers on the National Mall in Washington, DC. One of the speakers at that event was Iowa senator Tom Harkin, and despite some grumbling over his support of non-evidence-based medicine, we recognized that it took political courage for him to address us. The next time he’s in a tight race, it’s very possible that a few Iowa nonbelievers will remember that, and will be willing to do just a little bit more to support him.

[...]

6. Stand up for science. The nonreligious have no use for religious dogmas being passed off as science. We want candidates who take a firm line against creationism or abstinence-only sex ed, who affirm that these are religious ideas that can be taught at home or in church, but which have no place in our secular public schools. But it doesn’t end with opposing religiously motivated pseudoscience: we also want to see good science promoted and supported. We want candidates who’ll support generous funding for fundamental scientific research, and not just those branches of science that have military applications. We want to see candidates who accept, and are willing to act on, the overwhelming scientific consensus about the reality of human-caused climate change (as compared to the conservatives who deny it for explicitly religious reasons). We want investment in alternative energy, in next-generation infrastructure and mass transit, and in making higher education as widely available and affordable as possible. Since it’s a well-known fact that greater education correlates with less religious extremism, this is not only good policy, it’s good politics, and it benefits both progressive Americans and America as a whole.

Yes, Sen. Harkin’s support for quack/woo “medicine” irritated me too. But no one is perfect.

Well, one more day….

Yoga (crowded class; saw Lynn and T was wearing her usual tight spandex…)

Then 32 minute warm up jog (3 miles), 9 goose loop laps (29:45; 9:37/10:13/9:55) .5 on, .22 off, then one hard .36, then 2 miles of jogging.
The day was pretty, I felt fine but I didn’t have that extra “umpf”; 13 seconds slower than last week.

Note: the weather has cooled off a bit. But my previous strategy of doing my slow running outside (in the heat) and my faster (ok, less glacial) running inside (treadmill/indoor track) wasn’t all crazy.

Academia:
Class starts tomorrow; department meeting today.

Posts

What is more likely: Bronze Age people living in a planet in a galaxy that is like millions of other galaxies got it right (when they got almost nothing else right) or they were just making stuff up?

However, there are millions who think that the Bronze Age people got it right….one of them is Hike Huckabee:

Why is everybody so down on rape? This is what Mike Huckabee wanted to know today, on his radio program, which also featured Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin as a guest. For instance, did you know that Ethel Waters was conceived when her mother got raped? Do you know what a world without rape would look like? A world without Ethel Waters, that’s what.

This is what Mike Huckabee said today, as transcribed by the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey, about the upside of being raped and then getting pregnant:

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape,” Huckabee said of the late American gospel singer. One-time presidential candidate Huckabee added: “I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s, he leads a large Christian organization. He, himself, was the result of a forcible rape. And so I know it happens, and yet even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.”

Anyway, stop being so racist against rape-babies, everyone.

Yep….Hiroshima and Tokyo were nicely rebuilt after being a-bombed and firebombed respectively. This clown is just completely tone deaf.

I wonder if this represents a split in the Republican Party between the religious clowns that the “money first” types. Yes, I got a private message from one of the religious types saying that I am misreading things. I don’t think that I am; I really don’t think that religious conservatism has a long term future in the industrialized world. My guess is that in 1-2 more generations, religion will be as dead here as it is in Western Europe. We’ll still have conservatives but they won’t be religious ones.

Note: I disagree with this article slightly. Yes, more Republicans are creationists, but many Democrats embrace woo and new-age nonsense. The difference, as I see it, is scope. We might have someone like Senator Tom Harkin trying to get “alternative medicine” (aka “quackery”) into the health care bills. But that doesn’t compare, in scope, to the scores of creationists in Congress, state legislatures and school boards who are trying to ruin science and science education.

Note: ironically, I don’t see religion as being a left/right thing. Many in the Democratic coalition are religious (example: African Americans). This has an interesting effect on President Obama’s reelection strategy and it is NOT the obvious one.