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Me? I’m off hanging out where I can wear shirts like these and not feel like a complete slob or, you know, twelve.
Of course, it helps that they now make these things in women’s cuts. Nobody’s going to mistake me for twelve in one of these.
A slob, on the other hand? Maybe. But that’s what weekends away are for.
ScienceOnline09 is an annual science communication conference that brings together scientists, bloggers, educators, and students to discuss promoting public understanding of science. Peggy Kolm and I will be moderating a session on science fiction as a tool for science communication. We’re looking for input on the topic and to start an online conversation between science fiction writers and science bloggers.
Participation is easy:
Questions about science and its relationship to science fiction are posted below and at Biology in Science Fiction. Send us a link to your answers on your own blog or post the link the comments at either site. If you’re a writer without a blog, you can post your answers directly at either site.
We will then collect links to the posts on the ScienceOnline09 conference wiki, as well as our own blogs, and facilitate a discussion on the different ways science and science fiction are used.
Questions for Science Fiction Writers
Questions for Science Bloggers
Thanks for taking part, and we look forward to your answers!
It’s been more than a week, and I still can’t talk about it. The growl in the back of my throat isn’t going to come across well on a blog. Luckily, some people still have use of their voices.
Monica has the Olbermann video. Watch it if you haven’t. This should be on 24-hour continuous loop in every state that has voted down gay marriage–and 23-hour rotation in those that haven’t made it fully legal.
Dr. J is also bringing the righteous, taking religion to task for its role in this travesty.
If marriage is to be defined by religion then there is an obvious extension of this argument…any heterosexual people who are not religious should also not be allowed to get married. I can just see the ‘moderate’ ‘liberal’ religious people out there squirming away at this, saying I’m just being ridiculous. Well why? It is time you faced up to the fact that it is YOUR religions that are the source and fuel for most this sort of hatred and division and you by being part of it are totally complicit in this.
My friend Catherine takes a more forgiving and optimistic view than I do.
That said, Proposition 8 passed in California, other marriage bans passed in other states and Arkansas outlawed “unmarried people” from adopting and fostering kids. My partner and I have seen our share of changes, good and bad, in the 15 years we’ve been together. This year, her Mormon family fully acknowledged me as her partner; it took them 14 years but back in the spring, I was actually told that I was “part of the family.” It was a lovely grand gesture, even if we still can’t talk to her aunt about her forty year long relationship with her “roommate”; that remains off limits.
We’ve also seen the the possibility of legal marriage fail more times than pass, but the fact remains that we’ve seen it pass at all. We’ve seen churches change and families embrace what they wouldn’t or couldn’t before.
And then she gives us just a little more to celebrate. Congrats, guys.
Comrade PhysioProf is also in a rare celebratory mood. He’s bringing good news, so I’ll even forgive him for not swearing as much as the issue deserves.
A judge in the state of Connecticut has just entered judgment for the same-sex couple plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking the right to wed, based on the Connecticut Supreme Court ruling on Oct. 10 that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to wed rather than accept a civil union.
Dr. A reminds us that the election may be over, but that doesn’t mean the fight is. Want to do something to help? Of course you do.
I’m a post-doc with many responsibilities. You are too. Or you are running a lab, making lesson plans, grading papers, changing diapers, walking dogs, paying bills, traveling the world, treating patients, changing tires, writing books, cleaning toilets, catching criminals, or whatever it is you do. We are all busy, but we can take an hour out of our Saturday and unite to show the world we will not stand for Proposition Hate.
Go learn how you can help. Find your voice.
I woke up this morning to discover that Glendon (of the amazing Flying Trilobite) had tagged me with a meme. In thanks for his not tagging me with all three of them, here is my prompt response.
The 5 Things Meme
5 things I was doing 10 years ago:
1. Starting to think that writing was something I should take seriously.
2. Regrading the yard and putting in window wells to keep the water out of the basement.
3. Being a landlord.
4. Writing specifications for and testing a Y2K compliant GUI to replace a mainframe system.
5. Browsing at dial-up speeds.
5 things on my to do list today:
1. Find bread at the bakery that will handle grilled cheese, PBJ and pot roast.
2. Research just how much the crappy economy is trickling down.
3. Finish butchering a deer.
4. Shoehorn in quality snuggling time with boy and cat.
5. Get to bed a non-obscene hour.
5 snacks I love:
1. Apples.
2. Smoked almonds.
3. Candy corn.
4. String cheese.
5. Gin-Gins.
5 things I would do if I were a millionaire:
1. Give away more than I do now.
2. Pay off the house to be completely debt free.
3. Squirrel some away for cushion and additional income.
4. Write more.
5. Decide what my next challenge will be without regard for pay.
5 places I’ve lived:
1. Georgia.
2. Oklahoma.
3. In a trailer park in a rich suburb.
4. In an apartment when I already had a dorm room paid for.
5. In the hood, by choice.
5 jobs I’ve had:
1. Selling seashells, but not by the seashore.
2. Physics teaching assistant.
3. Psychology research assistant.
4. Team lead (twice, not happy either time).
5. Analyst (of three different sorts).
5 people I’ll tag:
Five people I don’t know enough about. Only five?
1. Betül, because her answers will be very different than mine.
2. Muse142, because she isn’t blogging enough right now.
3. Juniper, for the same reason.
4. JLK, because I can be the first to tag a new blog.
5. R.E.S.E.A.R.C.H.E.R.S., because I can cheat and get a twofer.
When I was little, my doctor worked in a clinic that had the coolest entryway. I didn’t much notice the entryway when they reopened the clinic in the middle of the night to deal with my pneumonia-induced 104 degree fever and delirium, but that’s another story. Usually, I loved the place.
We entered through a fully-enclosed glass walkway over a large-scale terrarium. There were lots of plants, a few turtles, and fish in the small pond directly under the walkway. My mother figured out, eventually if not right away, to leave some extra time before our appointments so we could just stop and stare for a while. No, we couldn’t wait until we were done.
The most exciting day was the one with the snake. It was the cutest little scarlet kingsnake, just tiny and absolutely adorable.
It was, by far, the mostly brightly colored thing in the entryway. It wasn’t doing much, but we stared anyway. It was just so pretty.
Then my mother was hustling us inside and into chairs in the waiting room. She didn’t go up to the desk to check us in as normal. No, she went back out to the entryway. Without us. We might have rebelled if she hadn’t come back in quickly. Everything proceeded as usual then, right up to the end.
It wasn’t until we were on our way out that she leaned over the reception desk and said, very quietly, “You might want to know that the snake in your entryway is a coral snake. Those are poisonous.” Then off we went.
We never saw the snake again.
An interesting postscript: As I was looking for pretty snake photos, I discovered that the U.S. no longer has an approved manufacturer of coral snake antivenin. Wyeth decided to get out of the business. It’s okay, though. They just extended the expiration date of the old stuff, so we won’t be completely SOL until this time next year.
Photos: Baby Coral Snake by cordyceps. Some rights reserved. Lampropeltis triangulum elapsoides from Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.
I lost a few friends this election season. First time it’s happened, and I’m not altogether sure how I feel about it.
One of them I cut loose. She was someone I’d hung around with in junior high and hadn’t heard from between then and me joining Facebook. I didn’t feel it was much of a loss to let her go when she used her status update to swear about how a particular political candidate shouldn’t be allowed into a particular town.
Sure, it was my candidate, but it was really the choke hold she wanted to put on political speech that made de-friending her an easy choice. Of course, the fact that she only ever used Facebook to tell people how cute her kids were helped too. I mean, cute kids are cute and all, but I want to talk to grown ups.
The other two are a little weirder. This is a couple with whom we’ve usually gotten together a few times a year. We still don’t have much in common except history, but that’s always stretched far enough for everyone to have a good time.
I’m not even sure what happened, really. I can tell when it happened, because with my memory for numbers, I could tell when my Facebook friends count dropped. I assume it’s the election, because I’ve always known they were conservative and, really, what else has there been for the last several months? But I don’t know what the trigger was.
Did I mock too much while watching the debates? Was adopting Hussein as my middle name for the duration beyond the pale? Or was I just part of an unbearable anti-McCain, anti-Palin tide? Was it something I did, or was this election somehow even more contentious than even 2004?
I’m not likely to find out anytime soon. I’m not the only friend they dropped, as word is that “no one” has seen them in ages. But it doesn’t stop me from asking.
What happened?
In case the new addition to the sidebar doesn’t say it loudly enough, I’m an atheist.
This won’t surprise anyone who knows me well, but this blog is here in part because few people know me well. It may not surprise regular readers of the blog. I do, after all, use rationality as a label for posts. It’s utterly unlikely to surprise anyone I’ve argued with online. But I think it’s still important to say, because a lot of people don’t think they know any atheists, which leads directly to the kind of idiocy we saw in North Carolina.
What does this mean for you? Aside from having a face (or another face) to put to atheism that is hopefully prettier than Christopher Hitchens‘, not much–necessarily. Yes, if you’re religious, I think some of the things you do and believe are irrational, but this is coming from someone who built a shrine for a jar of expired jelly (another story). Humans are irrational critters, and there’s something deeply satisfying about being irrational sometimes.
So, Why Atheism?
Nobody comes to atheism because it’s the popular choice. They come to it because none of the gods are any less silly or self-contradictory than the rest. They come to it because a non-arbitrary world is what they see when they open their eyes and look around them. They come to it because faith requires so many mental accommodations that it uses energy better spent on living. They come to it because every idiot they know (as opposed to just some of the smart people) is telling them to jump on the bandwagon.
Me? I was raised atheist, although it disturbed my mother somewhat when I told her so.
I was born to parents raised in a strict Methodist tradition. How strict? They got married because they wanted to have sex. No exaggeration. They had their big church wedding all planned and went through with it as scheduled, but they eloped a few weeks before because they were tired of waiting.
By the time I was born, they seem to have figured out that this was problematic (and thus, I may owe my existence to religion), because they decided to raise their kids outside any church and leave it up to us to choose once we grew up. I attended church services fewer than a dozen times as a child, mostly weddings and funerals, a couple of times after sleepovers with friends.
There were no prayers, no grace at meals. Christmas and Easter were strictly secular holidays (with the standard cartoony adopted pagan trappings). There was a bible in the house, but it had been a confirmation gift or something and lived in its gift box. It was never read.
So, Super-Rationalist Baby, Then?
Uh, no. The Christmas after I turned two, I was taken to see The Nutcracker ballet. I was mesmerized. (Christmas is still largely a mix of The Nutcracker and the Island of Misfit Toys for me.) This was followed by a long, late-night car trip to a destination coated and shiny with ice from a recent storm. I’m told that as I looked around me, I declared to my parents that I believed in magic.
Okay, I was two. Magic was probably a bit abstract for me to understand. I probably meant beauty. I conflated the two for a very long time, but I kept believing in them.
Oh, what didn’t I believe in? I believed in faeries and mermaids, trolls and djinn. I believed in Norse and Greek and Egyptian and Japanese gods and in tricksters from just about any tradition. I believed in beasties under the bed. If it was in my books, I thought I might just find it in the real world if I turned the right corner or opened the right door or found the right place in the woods. That’s how it worked in the books.
I believed longer than most children, I think, at least in those things. Even after I gave up believing in specifics, I had reasons to need to believe in a different world, and I didn’t know yet that adulthood would be that world.
So, What Happened?
I stopped needing to believe so much some time in high school. I still can’t tell you how I ended up changing, since my circumstances didn’t, but I did. Blame it on hormones, maybe. I got happier, even amid all the drama, and I started living in this world.
I still thought it was cool that there was real weird stuff out there, like ghosts and glimmers of ESP. I’d never seen them, not really, but they were in books that weren’t fiction. I looked forward to science figuring out how they worked. Oddly, though, even then I knew that I could make myself see them if I wanted to, just like the Ouija board could spell out something other than nonsense if I was half-willing to make it happen.
I went off to college around then, hung out at the pagan desk in the student center. With my dawning understanding of the role that desire played in belief, I was with the pagans but not of them. They were just a cool group of weirdos.
Then my favorite of the weirdos gave me Flim-Flam! as a present right around the time I was really getting into research design, and I realized that not all “nonfiction” is created equal. The whole experience rather shook up my standards for “proof.”
So, Then You Were an Atheist?
Nah. I considered myself a militant agnostic for a long time–when I thought about it at all. Being raised without religion, my beliefs on the subject didn’t seem terribly important. They still don’t, really, except when someone else’s views intersect with my life. But over time, I came to realize that I wasn’t exactly agnostic, either.
I call myself a practical atheist. I don’t believe we can prove there is nothing that we would ever call a god. However, every attempt at defining a god I’ve seen is either disproved or of no general human relevance or consequence whatsoever. On that, I am not agnostic. I’m not ignorant, either, as I spent a good chunk of my life reading all the world mythology I could get my hands on.
Nor am I agnostic on the question of whether religion should have any influence on important decisions. The ideas and philosophy of any religion must stand on their own, without the shield of religion, or they must be ignored in public life. The only weight that religion should be given is its cultural weight, and that only with all possible consideration for the question of privileging the culture of the majority. There is some use in recognizing that many of us want Christmas off from work because of family rituals that have sprung up around it but none in assuming everyone has these same family rituals.
It’s the question of privilege, really, that’s making me join the Out Campaign. It’s too easy to denigrate and mistreat people based on their minority status when no one knows who they are. If you read my blog, you know me, at least a bit. So now you know an(other) atheist.
Palin, that is. If so, you’re in luck. You can keep her with you for another year by getting the Sarah Palin 2009 wall calendar. No, really. See?
I couldn’t make this up. Well, I could, but I have standards.
Those teeth scare me.
That was my first thought on hearing talk of Dubya’s presidential memoir. My second was, “Heh.”
Bush’s immediate predecessor, Clinton, signed up with Knopf within months of leaving office, but his approval ratings were far higher than Bush’s, even though he was impeached for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The first President Bush, defeated for re-election by Clinton, never did write a memoir. He instead worked on a foreign policy book, “A World Transformed,” with his close friend and National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft.
Anti-Bush books have been dependable hit-makers during a rough decade for the industry, but publishers are unsure of the market for a book by Bush. Few believe he has a chance to get the $15 million Clinton received for “My Life” and some question the quality of a memoir by Bush and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, who has also expressed in writing a book, but is not known for being self-critical.
Full story here.
Dr. Isis, in her new digs, is writing about teachers letting themselves into students’ lives. She’s looking at it through the lens of writing, but there are…never mind, I’ll just tell the story.
Fall semester of my sophomore year of college, two things happened that shouldn’t be related. I got a gamma globulin shot, and I officially changed majors. The event that linked the two was the death of Jon, my buddy and lab partner.
Jon was an unrepentant geek. Band geek, physics geek, punner, the kind who taught himself to flip a pen around his fingers and would practice in class even though the pen would occasionally skitter noisily away. He was the kind of geek who crushed on female friends without any expectation that there could be more.
Anyway.
One weekend Jon went home to do laundry and see the family. He didn’t come back Sunday night because he thought he had the flu. A few days later he was in the hospital, then moved to the local university hospital, comatose and in need of a new liver. It was hepatitis.
I thank whoever decided that the hospital needed large waiting rooms. Jon would have been gratified to see how many of us huddled together there. He would have understood, too, as the wait went on for days and people drifted back to school except for an hour or two here or there. The three of us who hung around except to sleep and shower and work when we had to were the ones who had already been through bad stuff, who knew that the strain was survivable and ultimately better than not knowing what was happening. Jon would have stayed too.
It was a week before a donor liver was found. Jon’s kidneys had shut down and he was on dialysis. Neither Jon’s family nor those of us who’d stayed told the others that we could read the doctors’ faces by that point. Somehow, those told a story that the percentages couldn’t. They told us how critical the next few hours were.
The surgery went well, technically, but the liver never started working for Jon. His body rejected it, as sluggishly as it was doing everything else. Dialysis got more difficult as his veins stopped functioning properly. Somewhere in there, I made the mistake of telling one of the hopeful people that it was over, Jon was dying. I don’t think he forgave me.
Then Jon died, about a week after the transplant.
I think that was when they finally got around to asking which of us might have had close enough contact to be in danger. The night before Jon had gone home, we’d been out for beers with another friend. (Yes, I was barely eighteen. So sue me.) This friend was all but bawling over his impossible love, and Jon and I took turns stealing his beer and drinking it when he wasn’t paying attention. We still had to prop him up to walk him home, but we kept him away from dangerously drunk. I earned a gamma globulin shot for that. So did our friend, but he also got the girl in the middle of all the stress.
No one, by the way, ever figured out why Jon’s liver went bad. It wasn’t any of the known strains of hepatitis.
Going back to classes was hard. I dropped multivariable calculus without regret. I was taking it from the incomprehensible teacher who’d written the incomprehensible book, and having Jon as a study partner was the only reason I hadn’t already decided to take it at a different school. I took an incomplete in optics, meaning to go back when I could face the lab without my lab partner. I don’t remember what my third class was, something where the grade was dependent on midterm, final, and papers. It was flexible and not something Jon was taking with me.
I woke up the first morning I was fully back on campus to discover that there was a test scheduled in my fourth class–psychology–in three hours. I’d skipped one test, as allowed under the rules of the class, the first week Jon was in the hospital. I couldn’t skip this one. I went to the professor to ask for a one-day extension. I think I even managed not to cry in his office.
He said no. He explained that the ability to drop a test was there to cover bad situations and that it wouldn’t be fair to other students to make a special rule for me. He, not unkindly, suggested I start studying.
I did. I read the chapters I’d missed, even though I wanted to curl up into a tiny ball instead. I barely finished them, having to go back so many times because I realized I wasn’t taking anything in. The test was a nightmare. I knew I wasn’t doing well. I couldn’t concentrate, and I could barely remember what I’d read. I hated my professor and wondered how life could pile one unfairness on top of another.
When the tests came back, mine had an “A” at the top and no other marks on the page.
I may have learned more in that class than in any other I’ve ever taken.
All of which is a very long way of responding to Dr. Isis’s concerns about doing students an injustice in taking their personal situation into account. It certainly doesn’t have to be that way. It can even be an opportunity to help them develop.
