As the world burns…

For the moment, I’m sitting next to Celeste on a dust-covered couch - one of many in this covered pavilion at the center of Black Rock City, Nevada. Lots of whimsy,  nonsense, dust storms, and the American Dream are alive and well here in this god-forsaken desert. Somehow I found wi-fi access and am taking this brief moment to let you know that our gang is healthy and having fun, and we’ll be back to Maryland faster than you can sing a commercial jingle.

A little while ago, on the walk here, we heard someone reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas over a P.A., for anyone within earshot to enjoy. Tonight, we’re going hippie fishing. If you’ve never heard of it, just know that it involves fishing line, a glowstick, and confused ravers in the dark.

The icons of economic recession… tattoos?

I know there are still, and probably always will be, fuddy-duddies out there.  But I couldn’t help wondering whether the Washington Post was joking when they recently posted the op-ed Ink-Stained Wretchedness by Colonel Sanders-impersonator¹ Richard Cohen.  This is just a quick ‘WTF?’ entry… thanks to Aaron for pointing it out.

…the tattoos of today are not minor affairs or miniatures placed on the body where only an intimate or an internist would see them. Today’s are gargantuan, inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly. They bear little relationship to the skin that they’re on. They don’t represent an indelible experience or membership in some sort of group but an assertion that today’s whim will be tomorrow’s joy. After all, a tattoo cannot be easily removed. It takes a laser — and some cash.

Are we supposed to believe that Colonel—ahem—Mister Cohen gets to know the people wearing the art well enough to determine what their relationship to it truly is?  Is he an adept translator of Hebrew, Chinese, or Sanskrit (what Cohen calls “Hindi”) characters?  I suspect not.  And I sorely doubt that he gets to see the “minor affair” tattoos on the bodies of many “intimates” in person these days—so how does he know whether they are still popular? And let’s get this out of the way: watching porn does not provide our intrepid cultural anthropologist with a representative cross-section of today’s youth.

Is the Washington Post required to keep publishing this guy’s column?  Do newspapers have some kind of secret tenure system I’m not privy to?  For disclosure’s sake, I do have three tattoos, all of which are visual (at least in warm climate) to the general public.  And this fuddy-duddy did just call me a loser:

The tattoo is the battle flag of today in its war with tomorrow. It is carried by sure losers.

But, in his very next sentence, he continues:

About 40 percent of younger Americans (26 to 40) have tattoos.

What a grim vision of the future Mr. Cohen has.  I hope he can take some comfort in the likelihood that he probably won’t be around to witness much more of it.

¹ I think Brooks Wackerman does a better job.

The Great Catholic Cracker Crack-Up

Please read PZ Myers’ entry on what I like to call The Great Catholic Cracker Crack-Up at Pharyngula.  It’s comedy gold.

Atheist Soldier Sues The DoD, and The Evolution of Compassion

This April, The New York Times reported the case of U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, a soldier who started a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and subsequently had to be removed from Iraq due to numerous threats from his fellow soldiers.  Now, I’m not exactly surprised by this.  I’d expect the military to be drooling with evangelicals, of course.  And I could probably cynically overlook verbal harassment of an atheist in the armed forces, just because I expect that sort of bullshit from indoctrinated meat-heads.  But physical threats?  That really is beyond the pale.  Now, Spc. Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his freedom from religious persecution as protected by the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution.  You go boy.

Seriously, this is not the sort of reputation the military should want, given that non-religious Americans are the largest (non) religious group after Christians.  They have enough trouble recruiting as it is!  This is just another example, sadly, of Christians thinking the world revolves around them.  It’s bad enough that brave men and women who are devoted to the service of their country were blithely thrown into harm’s way in Iraq by a callous and evangelically-motivated administration… but non-religious soldiers’ lives are threatened by their loving, Christian comrades-in-arms as well?  What a disgusting blemish on our armed forces.  I hope Spc. Hall wins his lawsuit and the DoD cracks down on prosyletizing by officers.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, have I?  Still, life marches on.  I got some paperwork done that’s been taking forever (to put it mildly).  I also was inspired by the news I wrote about in my previous post, and decided to read Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Compassion.  This book tells the story of his experiment: a computer tournament in the early 1980s that pitted programs submitted by game theorists from various academic disciplines (as well as an 11 year old computer prodigy) in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game (a classic thought experiment).  It’s quite interesting, and you can expect me to write a more in-depth review when I’ve finished it.

P.S. - I would love to get some comments on my posts.  If you’re reading this, any feedback will be appreciated.  It’s hard to talk myself into posting when it feels like no one is reading! I’d really like to get this blog fired up.

What would a Barack Obama administration do for science?

So I was (again) reading over Barack Obama’s campaign press release about his plans to promote scientific research and education, and there’s a lot to like in there. Obama is aggressively in support of expanding federally funded embryonic stem cell research. So much has been said about that topic that I am not going to go into it right now, but to be clear: that’s a 180 degree reversal from the Bush administration policy on stem cell research. I also had not been aware already that Obama helped write and was an original cosponsor of the Minority Health Improvement and Health Disparity Elimination Act, which hopefully will become law after the current criminal administration is sent packing. The whole text of the bill is in the last link, but the Obama press release describes it thus:

The bill puts new emphasis on disparity research by reporting health care data by race and ethnicity, as well as socioeconomic status and health literacy. The legislation outlines mechanisms to conduct educational outreach to minorities, increase diversity among health care professionals, and improve the delivery of health care to minorities.

If we’re going to have national health care, this sort of thing is critical and taxpayers should actually be demanding it! Preventative medicine is always cheaper than treating ailments and disease, and the potential benefits of a healthy population go far beyond the lower cost of health care (increased economic productivity, decreased poverty, decreased crime, decreased drug abuse, the list is endless).

What really turns me on the most about Obama’s priorities, though, was this part of the document:

Improve and Prioritize Science Assessments: Assessments should reflect the range of knowledge and skills students should acquire. Science assessments need to do more than test facts and concepts. They need to use a range of measures to test inquiry and higher order thinking skills including inference, logic, data analysis and interpretation, forming questions, and communication. High-performing states like Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, use an assessment that calls for students to design and conduct investigations, analyze and present data, write up and defend results. Barack Obama will work with governors and educators to ensure that state assessments measure these skills.

I cannot overemphasize how crucial that is! American science education is fast becoming a joke on the international level. With rare exceptions, I was not taught how to use inference, logic, or data analysis in the public high school system, and I went to a half-decent public high school—ten years ago! Most inner-city and some rural schools are far worse. Prioritizing how to think over what to think is the key to producing bright, engaged, and enthusiastic students who actually get what science is all about and are well prepared to hit the ground running when they find the field of science that really inspires them. After I finish graduate school, to the extent possible, I’d like to be involved in changing American science education. One dream I have is to work for Eugenie Scott and the National Center For Science Education, which does great work defending public school curricula against religious zealots who try to force intelligent design into the science classroom. I donated $10 to them to offset the damage done when I bought a ticket to Ben Stein’s disgusting crock-umentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. If you ever doubt the sniveling academic dishonesty of I.D. proponents, watch that film (download a pirated copy off the internet, please) and read how well the good people who made ExpelledExposed.com eviscerate just about every claim the film makes.

So, having veered just a bit off topic for a moment there, I’ll try to bring this back to the Obama science plan and wrap it up. From what I’ve read, I am cautiously optimistic that a Barack Obama administration would be a very science-friendly one. I think he doesn’t go quite far enough in emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary physical, chemical, and biological systems research. He also needs to use that generic science document better to tie into other large issues that are addressed elsewhere on the campaign website, and which I haven’t yet had time to peruse. I hope to post in the near future my thoughts on Obama’s proposed energy and environmental policies, and his position on NASA (as well as contrasting these with those of John McCain). For the rest of tonight, though, I would be glad just to get enough sleep so as not to be a total zombie at work tomorrow. I haven’t quit my day job yet; the blogging doesn’t have me rolling in benjamins yet like I hoped it would

For now, I’ll leave you with this video from a few weeks ago when my favorite artist and role model Dr. Greg Graffin was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism by the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. It’s got him playing a few acoustic Bad Religion songs as well as talking about the award and why he prefers the label “naturalist” versus “atheist.” Wish I could have been there for this!

An adventure to the great outdoors.

If the trend of the last few weeks continues, this weekend will be here before I know it. I’m looking forward to it especially, because for the first time this year I’ll be going camping! My brother, some of his friends, my friend Don, and I (and others are welcome to tag along!) will be at Green Ridge State Forest. In my opinion, it’s Maryland’s best public camping area, with Assateague State Park in second place (because they don’t allow pets). There are great semi-primitive campsites with relative privacy (you typically can’t see your nearest neighbors) and backpackers are allowed to do real primitive camping.

I hope the weather cooperates so I can do a bit of stargazing. I want to camp as much as possible this spring/summer/fall. Who’s with me? Other places I’d like to camp soon include Buchanan State Forest (Pennsylvania) and Sky Meadows State Park (Virginia).

A life well spent: Aubrey Williams

I checked the website of my former college’s anthropology department today, and I was saddened to learn that one of my favorite professors, Aubrey Williams, died a couple months ago. The story was in the Washington Post, and I feel like shit for having taken so long to find out about it. Aubrey (he insisted on being called by his first name, including by his undergraduate students) was one of those rare teachers who you inevitably remember fondly years down the road. He was also a humble guy; I didn’t know during his courses, for example, that he had been a B-17 gunner in the European theater of WWII. I did know, on the other hand, that he’d been actively involved in organizing protests against every war since, up to and including the present war in Iraq. I remember him telling my Cultures of Native North America class, for instance, of the time he was invited to partake in a peyote ritual with members of the Navajo church. He said that he’d gotten up and began running at right angles (in sort of a giant square pattern), and that it took four adult Navajo men to capture and restrain him until he calmed down. He also told of the time he was served psilocybin mushroom tea by an indigenous medicine woman in rural Mexico. He’d hallucinated that he was inside a soap bubble, and could see the world curved around him. Needless to say, that drew a lot of snickers from the wide-eyed classroom full of undergraduates. But I got the biggest kick out of it, having recently had my first experiences with that same entheogen.

At the end of my last class with Aubrey (I’d taken two), he invited all of us to a barbecue at his home in Tacoma Park. That was definitely one of the most unique experiences I had in college: hobnobbing with my professor and my classmates over cocktails, while our final papers sat on his living room table, waiting to be graded. When we spoke that night he said he was leaving soon to consider a job offer as the curator of ethnography at the national museum of Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world and one where few westerners have ever traveled. As I later learned, that position was not funded as planned and it didn’t work out, but Aubrey still got to enjoy a rare vacation in the Kingdom of Bhutan. A selected autobiography of Aubrey Williams’ work can be found here.

I’ll always remember him for his intelligence, his humility, his passion, and his dedication to his students and his treatment of them as peers. His was truly a life well spent. Rest in peace, Aubrey, and thank you for making a difference in my life.

Presenting science as art with interactive experiments.

This year, I’ll make my fourth trip to Black Rock City, Nevada for the annual Burning Man arts festival, which is, to understate, a bacchanalian explosion of radical self-expression. It’s also a pretty wicked extreme camping experience, set on a flat, alkaline plane of dust at 4,000 feet above sea level. Temperatures can soar to 44° C in direct sunlight during the daytime, and drop to around 5° C at night. The elevation causes you to receive a higher dose of UV radiation; this means unprotected skin burns faster. On windy days, there can be sudden gusts at speeds in excess of 120 km/h. All that said, it’s a fantastic experience—visitors are almost certain to witness the most gaudy, gauche, irreverent, and sublimely beautiful art they’ve ever seen. It’s a commerce-free event; although tickets are pricey (it costs a lot to build the city’s temporary infrastructure), nothing is allowed to be bought or sold once you’re inside the city limits. Black Rock City is built rapidly each year, with the overwhelming majority of the work occurring in the week before and the week of the event. The Leave No Trace ethic is fundamental to Burning Man, and each year the federal Bureau of Land Management gives accolades to the Burning Man organization for its remarkably thorough cleanup and restoration efforts.

Another important ethic at Burning Man is participation. It is not a spectator event - the subject/object dichotomy is constantly under attack, and this is generally agreed to be a good thing. However, in each of my past three attendances, I contributed relatively little to the overall interactive wacky-ness of Burning Man. This year I want to do something special to participate, and I have an idea of what it is. I want to perform (and invite onlookers to help me perform) science experiments. The point is to teach the value of skepticism and the scientific method, while having an entertaining time. I haven’t settled on any particular experiments, yet. So, dear readers, here’s where you come in. I need your input!

Please tell me your most memorable childhood experience involving a science experiment. Maybe it was something mom, dad, or a cool aunt or uncle showed you. Maybe it was a science teacher at school doing something wacky in the classroom. Maybe it was something you saw Mr. Wizard do on Nickelodeon. It doesn’t matter where you saw it. I’m looking for the most visual, most thought provoking, and most entertaining experiments you can recall. Once I get at least a short list together, I’ll start performing some of them to get a good idea of how practical they’d be to perform in the desert environment. If I can, I’ll record videos of them and post them here on Survival Machine. If you want to help me perform it (and even appear in the video) just let me know. I’d also gladly welcome video submissions of you performing the experiment yourself. If anyone actually does that, I’ll make a post just to feature your video!

So, brainstorm, and let me know what you remember from the exciting world of science experiments!

Geology, Wizardry, Astronomy, Obamanation.

I’m back, and I apologize for the recent lack of posts. Shall we get started?

First, the astonishing. The Chaitén volcano in the Andes in southern Chile erupted on May 2 for the first time in about nine millenia! You can read about it in National Geographic News. The powerful eruption is dramatic enough by itself, but the next day a huge dirty thunderstorm gave us this show. Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, I wish I were there to witness it (click on the picture for a slightly larger version)!

Second, the bizzarre. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, drew my attention to this article: Magic trick costs teacher job. If you aren’t going to read it, here’s the short version: a substitute middle school teacher at a Florida public school was fired for… wait for it… wizardry. The guy did a 30 second magic trick in front of his class, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear, and then was dismissed for wizardry. In an attempt to cover his ignorant ass, a school official tacked on a few other accusations (e.g. “not following lesson plans”), and then claimed, “it wasn’t just the wizardry” — I can’t make this stuff up, folks. Anyone from Land’O'Lakes, Florida should be sobbing with shame right now.

And third, I finished my astronomy class! Unfortunately, buying a telescope is on hold until I finish paying for the class itself, but I learned some really cool stuff and have reinvigorated interests in things like the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world’s largest and highest-powered particle accelerator/collider. It was just completed and will begin operating this month to search for things like the Higgs boson, the only particle theorized by the Standard Model of physics that has not yet been observed. Confirmation of the Higgs boson and other new subatomic particles could lead toward the development of a Theory of Everything (also known as the Grand Unified Theory) of physics, incorporating the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitation forces. Creationists everywhere, hold your breath: will we discover proof of god? Literally, hold your breath.

Finally, tonight was a big one for Barack Obama. I don’t see how Clinton can continue her campaign beyond the next day or two without being ridiculed by the press. That’s pretty great news. I find it fishy that cable news (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) led in calling the race “too close to call” into early this morning when the Obama campaign had conceded earlier, and when CBS news (with no late-night cable news program ratings to worry about) had called it for Clinton earlier as well. I think the numbers were there to call the race, and they lied about it to keep viewers in suspense and thus glued to their tvs. Seems like a pretty simple scam for a news director to justify with mere plausible deniability about the race’s outcome.

That’s it for now, I’m sleepy. But I’ll say more, and say it more coherently, soon.

Where have all the flowers gone?

A number of compounding factors have put Survival Machine on the back burner for the last couple weeks (not that they’ve been unwelcome), but I will return shortly! I’m studying for the final exam in my astronomy class, which I’ve sort of slacked off in. Not that I don’t expect an A, but it needs some hard study this week.

Side note (nothing to do with science): I’m listening to The Mars Volta’s album The Bedlam in Goliath at the recommendation of numerous people, and I’m blown away. Incredible stuff, really. I’ve really never listened to anything by them before that I can recall.