January 2006 Archives

The Top Five meme is apparently circulating around the Internets again. Who am I to say it nay?

Top Five Most Overused Speech Topics at Woodberry:
1) "Woodberry Students Should Have Cell Phones"
2) "Woodberry Freshmen Should Have Internet Access in Their Rooms"
3) "Woodberry Shouldn't Have Saturday Classes"
4) "Woodberry Should Admit Girls"
5) "Woodberry Students Should Pay More Attention to Lacrosse."

Top Five Birds I've Seen on My Yankee Flipper Feeder:
1) Red-winged Blackbird: not a bird that usually visits feeders, so no, I wasn't expecting that one.
2) Rose-breasted Grosbeak: or that one. But this guy's stopped off at the beginning of April during the last two spring migrations, so I'm hoping he'll turn up again.
3) Indigo Bunting: reasonably common in warm weather, but always a delight
4) Red-bellied Woodpecker: the female I nicknamed "Madame Red" hasn't turned up this winter, but I enjoyed watching her all last year.
5) White-crowned Sparrow: I love the combination of the bold black-and-white crown and the bright pink bill. They like the ground better, but I get 'em on the feeder sometimes.

Top Five Cautionary Tales for TV Actors:
1) McLean Stevenson: gave up third billing on M*A*S*H to take a lead role in Hello, Larry, a sitcom I can't describe because it didn't last long enough to leave an afterimage.
2) Larry Linville: gave up the role of Frank "Ferret Face" Burns on M*A*S*H to... um... well, I think he did some guest shots on Murder, She Wrote and maybe a couple of Quinn Martin Productions... maybe.
3) Shelley Long: gave up the romantic lead in Cheers to make one decent movie (Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler) and a host of duds such as Hello, Again and Troop Beverly Hills.
4) David Caruso: gave up some damn cop show or other to make some damn cop movie or other and ran back to TV to squint his way through some OTHER damn cop show or other.
5) Rob Morrow: gave up the role of Northern Exposure 's Dr. Joel Fleischmann, a role rife with rich possibilities for any actor--and the not-inconsiderable chance to regularly exchange repartee and/or tongues with Janine Turner, let's remember--to put on fake eyebrows and a Boston accent for Quiz Show before settling for some damn cop show or other.

Top Five Strong Bad Emails (available for the uninitiated HERE or at www.homestarrunner.com)
1) Dragon: An obvious choice, I admit, but it's impossible to ignore the introduction of Trogdor the Burninator into our culture. The first SB Email I ever saw, and the one that dragged me into the whole Homestar Runner experience. Great bit: "Burninating all the peasants... in their THATCHED-ROOF COTTA-GEHHHHHHS!"
2) Radio: Strong Bad (with the unwilling assistance of Strong Sad) explains radio formatting. Even funnier if you've worked in radio yourself. Great bit: "Dead air... um... dead air."
3) Japanese Cartoon: SB is transformed into an anime version of himself, complete with shiny robot boots and blue hair. A hoot and a half. Great bit: "My mouth would be real tiny when it's closed... ridiculously huge when it's open."
4) Fingers: Tired of questions about how he types with boxing gloves on, Strong Bad attaches some prosthetic fingers to them. Great bit: "Doingity, doingity, doingity."
5) Comic: Strong Bad digs deep into his subconscious knowledge of how young females behave and pulls out "Teen Girl Squad!" Great bit: "Ow! My skin!"

Top Five Complaints About the Star Wars Series Now That All Six Movies Are Out:
1) Boy, Obi-Wan sure aged a lot between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars, didn't he? I mean, Luke's born at the end of Episode III and can't be more than 20 in Episode IV, but Obi-Wan goes from looking 25 in the former to looking a good 65 in the latter. I guess he didn't take any moisturizer to Tatooine when he settled there.
2) If the Rebel Alliance was serious about hiding Vader's kids from him, why did they give one twin to the leader of the rebels (whose family would be an obvious candidate for capture and interrogation) and give the other to Vader's only relatives--without even changing the kid's name? (Tip o'the hat to Mad Magazine for pointing this out.)
3) I know this has been a problem since 1977, but jeez, man, "made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs"? That's like saying "I ran the Olympic marathon in under six miles." A parsec is a measurement of distance, not time. Pay attention, George.
4) In Attack of the Clones, Yoda (who's been jumping around like a bumble ball with light-saber attachments during his duel with Count Dooku) has to drop what he's doing (i.e. beating on Dooku) in order to catch the ginormous hunk o'steel Dooku's dropping on the helpless Obi-Wan and Anakin. But when a multi-ton hunk of machinery is preparing to collapse onto a couple of your injured Jedi pals, you don't have to waste all that Force mojo by catching the multi-ton hunk of machinery and throwing it across the room; you can just use the Force to pick up your injured pals--400 pounds, tops--and move them out of the way. I'm presuming that the Force can be used to hold bones, tendons, and arteries in place during the move, removing the need for back boards, sandbags and other restraints, so even if Yoda has to clamp down pretty hard to avoid disturbing any traumatized body parts, I can't imagine that the necessary PSI will increase the load to the point where he's laying out even half as much mojo as he has to use to catch the ginormous hunk o'steel. Frankly, I think he's just showing off.
5) Han shot first.

6:35 PM

A depressing number of the entries of this journal concern death. I've commented on the deaths of people I knew, such as my online friends Imre and GRC, as well as celebrities whose efforts were significant to me in some way, though the efforts of Barry Took, Johnny Cash, Stephen Jay Gould, and John Entwistle were hardly similar.

Today, sadly, I feel a new kind of death rearing its head: the admiration I once felt for a man has suffered a sudden, if inevitable, termination.

When I was in junior high and high school I spent a lot of time reading the two big science fiction mags of the late 70s--the venerable Analog and the upstart powerhouse Asimov's. I think it was in the latter that I stumbled across a story about aliens helping people install illegal solar-power-collecting equipment in their doghouses' roofs. It was co-written by a writer whose name I didn't know, but the unusual name itself stuck with me: Orson Scott Card.

I didn't read a lot of Card during college, but about the time I graduated, Kevin Maroney, who worked at Second Foundation bookstore and served as my contact to the world of superior comics and SF, tipped me off about a book called Ender's Game. It was a grabber--full of provocative ideas, complicated characters, and way-cool gadgetry. Every SF fan worth his salt wanted his own null-gravity Battle Room in which to test his martial skill. It earned both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel--a remarkable feat--and made its author's reputation for good. That author was Orson Scott Card.

Only a year later, Kevin pressed upon me a new book called Speaker for the Dead, which challenged its readers with grim moral questions, complex sociopolitical observations, and way-cool aliens. It also won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for Best Novel--and made its author the first in history to sweep both awards two years in a row. Obviously, that author was Orson Scott Card.

From there I dove into Card's work with abandon. I devoured his alternate history of the U.S., the Tales of Alvin Maker, his enormous short-story collection Maps in a Mirror, and the stand-alone books such as Wyrms, Hart's Hope, Pastwatch, and The Worthing Saga. I picked up a Card book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, in which I learned of the work of the incandescent Octavia Butler and of M.J. Engh's Arslan. I even got hardback copies of both his first novel, A Planet Called Treason, and his revised version, Treason, and got him to sign both when he visited Second Foundation. I was, to put it mildly, a fan.

I knew Card and I had some differences in worldview and experience; he was a devout Mormon, for one thing, and the father of four kids, one with severe cerebral palsy. I wouldn't have my first child until well after I'd plunbed into his work, and my religious experiences have been, uh, ecumenical. But I still found myself enjoying the way his mind worked; when he put forward a theory about the way human groups interacted, or the way in which they might even interact with non-humans, I gave that theory the best examination I could, and often I found myself agreeing with him. I didn't always like his answers, but man, he could ask my questions anytime. My enthusiasm for his work led to my choosing to teach Ender's Game to my ninth-grade students when I came to Woodberry in 1995, and their enthusiasm for the book convinced me that I'd made the right call.

I began to sense a bit more distance from him in the late 90s; maybe it was my own experience as a parent and a citizen of the world that was pushing me away; maybe I didn't feel like being given answers anymore; or maybe I was just getting farther and farther from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (which, as Marta Randall always reminds me, is thirteen.) He also seemed to be taking more and more public stances in support of his political and religious positions, rather than working those beliefs into his fiction. In particular, he took a firm position on homosexuality: it was sinful, wrong, and worthy of condemnation. It's not a position I share, and I found myself wondering why he had begun making pronouncements on the subject in the first place.

It's not surprising that a Mormon would follow the party line on sexuality, but the public confirmation of that party line struck me as odd. I began to feel conflicted about his work; it's possible to admire an artist's work while disagreeing with the artist--I've managed it with Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, Heinlein, and P.J. O'Rourke, among others--but somehow I couldn't do it so easily with Card. The contradiction between his fiction--which is, at its best, rooted in an acceptance of, even a love for, humanity--and his public position didn't sit right with me. My admiration grew less, as did my appreciation for his newer fiction, in particular the most recent ALvin Maker books, or the entire Shadow series, in which Card tries to rewrite the events of Ender's Game to make them more believable and adult. (This last, by the way, was something I considered a mistake back when both Heinlein and Asimov tried it; the work of one's youth succeeds or fails on its own merits, making up in youthful energy and audacity what it might lack in complexity or plausibility. It's a lot like trying to re-set the two-minute punk single you released when you were 21 as a full-length concerto for violin and double reeds; sure, it might work artistically, but the odds aren't good.)

But this morning, my ailing admiration took a turn for the worse, and if it's not dead already, it's on its last leg. For reasons I can only begin to guess at--though I'd surmise an attempt to keep his political worldview consistent with those who share his views on family and sexuality--Card has written an essay in support of "intelligent design."

It's a bad essay. I say that not only as a student of evolution, but as a writer, a writing teacher, and a former fan. It's illogical and inaccurate, based on arguments that have been examined and found wanting by generations of scientists and writers. (Robert Sprackland's terrific examination of some ID arguments can be found by clicking here.) Worse, Card's faltering attempts to criticize proponents of evolution are actually far better as criticisms of ID proponents. (Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers does a far better job of pointing out its weaknesses than I can.)

If Card supported real creationism because of his faith, I could at least hold some respect for his consistency. (In fact, he dismisses creationism with a barely-concealed contempt.) At its core, however, the "intelligent design" movement isn't even as consistent as creationism. Instead, it goes about bastardizing both science and religion. Those whose faith is too weak to stand without external support, or too inflexible to consider the possibility that God might craft his world with the tool of evolution, have instead seized on the pipe-dream that natural law might be used to prop up their beliefs about the supernatural. For Card to take this position--again, by proclaiming it to the rooftops--is for him to declare his political comfort zone more important than either a principled devotion to his faith or an unwavering support of reason. It is a declaration of intellectual and spiritual surrender. It is something no Orson Scott Card hero would ever do.

And that may make this the most depressing entry in this journal yet.

6:06 PM

I'm still dickering with the camera, but I seem at least temporarily unable to upload the other waxwing pic, so you'll have to live without that for the time being.

But there's good news: Molly Ivins is still kicking ass and taking names.

Molly's combination of progressive idealism and Texan realism has long appealed to me, but every once in a while she picks up her pen and just nails some deserving target right between the eyes. If you haven't already read it, go take a look at "I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President." You'll be glad you did.

10:01 PM

Here's the cedar waxwing shot I took. Though you can't tell until I figure out how to upload the other pic, I can tell you that I adjusted the color, shading, and highlighting to make the bird's field marks easier to see.




I think the shot's a nice one, but that's not the significant thing.

I hadn't confirmed my ID of those field marks until I looked at the photo.

When I saw the bird flit into the tree, I used the zoom lens to take the shot; then I magnified the bird in the camera's display until I could see the crest, the tawny color, and the yellow band across the tail. I identified the bird by looking at its photo. (OK, and by the fact that it was in a fruit tree; I'm not completely unaware of birds' feeding habits.)

I am slightly giddy at the possibility that I will be able to identify a great many more LBJs than I ever was before.

3:31 AM

Camera games:

I've discovered that the combination of the zoom on my new camera--a Kodak EasyShare Z740, for those scoring at home--allows me some features that are perhaps more interesting to the birder than to the photographer, though the photography options are nice, too:



Here, for example, is a shot of a male kestrel I spotted while Kel and I were walking the dog. It's not exactly the biggest thing in the shot, but the reddish back and bluish wings are definitely visible.

One delight about the software is that when you load the pics into your computer, you can actually enhance (or outright alter) the images to bring out colors, shades, contrasts, and so on. And once I'm done loading my shots of a cedar waxwing in the berry tree behind our house, I'll show you what I mean.

6:47 PM

On January 10th, 1916, a young woman named Bertha Ward gave birth to a daughter, Lea. Lea grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and in 1935 married one Karl Alexander Sutker. The two of them lived and worked together for nearly sixty years, moving to Walterboro and later Beaufort, South Carolina, and attempting ventures ranging from a restaurant to a marina, not to mention raising Suzy, Linda, and Larry. After the kids grew up and moved away, Lea worked as a store clerk and as a bank teller, while the kids got started on producing grandchildren, a project that finally concluded in 1987. By then, however, the grandkids were just about ready to go to work on their own kids, and in 1991, the first of the great-grands appeared.

Today Lea Ward Sutker turns 90. She has baked sands and mondel bread for four generations, and her matzoh ball soup is the standard by which all matzoh ball soup is judged (though her husband was known to cook a pretty mean batch himself.) She's as sharp with a dollar as she ever was, and there's not a more dangerous Scrabble opponent on the planet. Mama Lea is an elemental force, a woman with more will power than Green Lantern and more brains than Batman, and I'm proud to call her my grandmother. I can't count all the things she's done for me--finding a copy of T. Gilbert Pearson's 1936 Birds of America on the Beaufort Library's discard pile, lending me $500 so I could buy a Fender Rhodes 53 Electric Piano and join the John Santa Band, passing along the family menorah that sits proudly on our shelf--but I'm quite sure that my cousins, uncles, and aunts could fill up their own pages with similar debts. And that none of them have ever beaten her at Scrabble, either.

Happy birthday, Mama Lea. We love you.

Pete

4:09 AM

A few posts ago, I promised a more detailed review of Chris Mooney's new book, The Republican War on Science. I'm not sure how much detail you want, but here are a few points.

First, it's thorough. Mooney goes at this job the old-fashioned way: research and lots of it. There are 70 pages of end notes on only 255 pages of text. He conducts interviews with scores of people and provides a list organized by chapter, along with the names of those who refused interviews or did not respond to requests for them.

Second, it's broad-based. Mooney's thesis, as the title might suggest, is that the current GOP and the Bush administration in particular have politicized science to a degree never before seen, creating a split between our democratic government and the scientific community:

While we cannot allow scientific experts to rule us directly, we nevertheless need them desperately. Our leaders simply cannot do their jobs competently without considerable reliance on expertise that they themselves do not possess.

He opens the book discussing one of Bush's biggest scientific fabrications: his policy on stem cell research, which is based not on a firm moral position but on an attempt to give the right-to-life crowd a sop. Unfortunately, it's a policy based on bad science, namely a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of how many different stem cell lines exist, leaving researchers with only a handful of lines, many of them useless for research purposes.

From there, Mooney takes seventy-five pages to cover the history of science in government since WWII--how science advisors worked with every president from FDR to Clinton. The administrations of Reagan and even Nixon come off as downright scientifically advanced in comparison with the current one, which has downgraded the positions of science advisors and pointedly ignored science as a field except when it needs a pretext for establishing a policy it wanted to establish anyway--to my mind rather like its history of foreign policy decisions, though Mooney doesn't discuss that particular comparison.

From that point, Mooney goes through the major scientific issues that the Bush administration has handled, and effectively demonstrates that it has mishandled them: global warming, pesticide use, education (especially regarding "intelligent design" and sex education), protection of endangered species, cancer research, mercury poisoning, obesity, and of course stem-cell research. It has done so through a variety of methods: ignoring scientific consensus, fixing on convenient but unsupported science to justify its policies, claiming that controversy exists over even the most widespread scientific ideas, relying on industry-supplied research and experts to regulate (or often not to regulate) those industries, suppressing studies that reached politically inconvenient conclusions, demanding political litmus tests for experts serving on advisory committees, and requiring excessive layers of extra review for policies that need rapid or immediate implementation. In fact, on many issues, the Bush administration has used more than one of these techniques.

By the time Mooney has finished, you feel as though the administration is guilty not only of incompetence, but outright corruption, malfeasance, and fanaticism; you fully expect the Bush administration to have its own Lysenko step forward and explain that natural law itself must bend to the will of the Party. Mooney's style, as noted, is often a bit dry, but there are times, particularly toward the end of the book, where it seems he just couldn't hold back any longer:

Such flagrant misrepresentation goes far beyond mere dishonesty. It demonstrates a gross disregard for the American public, whom Bush represents, and for the population of the entire globe, whose fate depends in large measure on the behavior of the American behemoth.

This is from the summing-up of his indictment, the chapter called "Bush League Science," where Mooney really lays into the administration, focusing largely on the attempts of presidential science advisor John Marburger, a registered Democrat, to justify Bush's policies. Marburger comes off as a quisling, though Mooney never calls him such (though he does note that Marburger was called a "prostitute" by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner during a radio debate on the Union of Concerned Scientists' February 2004 statement condemning the Bush administration for misrepresenting and suppressing scientific information.)

In the end, Mooney is awfully convincing, I think partly because of his rhetorical approach; he lets the facts do as much talking as possible, rather than adopting a smug or hysterical partisan tone. In "Bush League Science," moreover, he helps prove his point with an interesting comparison, showing the different ways in which the Clinton and Bush administrations both handled the scientific consensus on the same issue: needle exchange programs. As Mooney puts it:

...the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other respected health bodies have found that these programs not only work, they don't encourage more drug abuse... [but] neither the Bush II nor Clinton administration had the guts to support these programs with federal funding. But only one administration felt compelled to abuse science to justify its stance. In announcing its decision to leave the funding of needle exchange programs up to "local communities" in 1998, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala fully acknowledged the science up front. "We have concluded that needle-exchange programs, as part of a comprehensive HIV-prevention program, will decrease the transmission of HIV and will not encourage the use of illegal drugs," she stated--even as she went on to explain, awkwardly, that the programs would not be supported...

In contrast, the Bush administration simply twisted the science. In an extraordinary February 2005 editorial, the Washington Post revealed that to justify the decision to oppose needle-exchange programs (which are especially disliked by religious conservatives), a Bush official directed the paper "to a number of researchers who have allegedly cast doubt on the pro-exchange consensus." So the Post actually called up these scientists and found that, lo and behold, they think no such thing.

In other words, the Clintonistas acknowledged the science, but chose to base their policy on something else (i.e. politics.) The Bushies simply pretended the science supported their policy.

To sum up: this is a book that will probably do little to convince Bush supporters of their man's corruption. On the other hand, it will probably raise his detractors to new heights of umbrage. And if there are those in the reality-based community who have not yet taken a stance on Bush, I think The Republican War on Science is a book that may go a long way toward helping them establish a stance.

4:16 PM

Guess what I got for Xmas?



That's right. A digital camera. And once I figure out a few things--like, say, how to limit the size of my picture files--who knows what might turn up here?

10:55 PM