Los Links: I Laughed, I Cried, They Became a Part of Me

Some of you will remember Los Links from back in the day when I could spend two days out of every week reading blogs, and then share the linky goodness with you. Life’s been too busy for a while for that, unfortunately. It should have been too busy tonight, but my brain said, “You know what? Fuck you. I’ve been thinking all day.” War at work, y’see: fighting to make things the best they can possibly be at an American megacorporation. It’s fun, and fulfilling, but taxing.

Thankfully, I had posts written (longhand) in advance, but my wrists said, “You know what? Fuck you. We’ve been typing most of the day.” So today ended with me lying about catching up on some freethought reading. If this continues tomorrow, I can bring you a roundup of recent geology posts. I suppose that won’t be so bad, now, will it? And then, on Wednesday, you will be guaranteed an original post of near-epic proportions, because we’re going to talk about why Mount St. Helens melted some bits but not all the bits on the cars. If we’re very fortunate, we’ll end up on Boing Boing again (thank you, Maggie Koerth-Baker!). I say we, because I wouldn’t have written up cars if it hadn’t been for you lot liking things like that, and as it turns out, you’re not the only ones. So, thank you, my darlings!

It’s not all happy fun times, alas. The thing with frequenting the freethought and skeptic blogs that I do is that Things That Are Not Happy get discussed, and if it weren’t for the bloggers and commenters restoring my hope for humanity, I’d have crawled off to a cave and become an official misanthrope by now. Between all of you, though, I am not willing to declare the vast majority of human kind irredeemable arseholes. Only a subset of it. Sigh.

There will be a humorous intermission, and loving comfort at the end. Stay with me. Continue reading “Los Links: I Laughed, I Cried, They Became a Part of Me”

Los Links: I Laughed, I Cried, They Became a Part of Me
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A+, Plus Drool-Worthy Geology, AW #49 Info, and Other Bits

Blowing the dust off ye olde computer to say “Allo, allo, I’m still alive!” Taking a break, still, although I’m dipping my toes back in to a desultory bit o’ work. Like, this post.

First off, I just want to throw my support to Jen McCreight’s brilliant Atheism + idea. When my brain is back from its temporary vacation, I’ll have something more to say than “Woo! Count me in!” But this, plus the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception, reminded me once again why I’m so damned proud to be a part of FreethoughtBlogs, and why I won’t ever give up on the atheist movement. People like Jen see problems that almost seem intractable, roll up their sleeves, and get to work.

Continue reading “A+, Plus Drool-Worthy Geology, AW #49 Info, and Other Bits”

A+, Plus Drool-Worthy Geology, AW #49 Info, and Other Bits

This Isn't A Review of Victor Stenger's New Book

God and the Folly of Faith. Cover Art credit Prometheus Books.

I’d actually like to do that book justice. I’ve read it. I’m still digesting it. I can tell you my foremost thought whilst reading it: “Damnit, Victor, I’m a geologist, not a physicist!” It’s been a long time since I’ve read up on physics. The middle chapters, in which he drills down pretty deeply into physics, put my brain through the kind of workout that still leaves you wobbly days later.

Continue reading “This Isn't A Review of Victor Stenger's New Book”

This Isn't A Review of Victor Stenger's New Book

I'm Sending You to the Salt Mines

This. Is. Amazing.

If somebody wanted to send me to work in this salt mine, that would be totally fine. I’d be all over that. It’s one of the most incredible places I’ve ever seen. Who would have ever thought that a bunch of salt miners would have spent extra time down in the mines to create something so perfectly magical?

Who would have thought plain ol’ salt could be the medium in which such beauty could be expressed?

I’m going to show you a glimpse of the whimsical part of it.

Image Source

Then go gape at the rest. While you’re at it, the geology of that mine is pretty wonderful, too.

I will never see humble old salt in the same way ever again.

I'm Sending You to the Salt Mines

This Student Gives Me Hope

I don’t know who she is, only what she has done. And what she has done is this: become a banned book library. When her school decided upon a list of things the kids absolutely must not read, due to parental outrage and a belief kids can be kept from great literature and harsh truths, she tested their limits by bringing in a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. When it caught the eye of a fellow student, she lent it out. And then things snowballed, and she now runs a clandestine locker-library full of banned books, which kids who had no interest in good books until they were forbidden to read them are now thoroughly enjoying.

Firstly, we have a young woman who’s passionate about books. I already love her.

Secondly, we have a young woman who’s not prepared to be told what she can and cannot read. Love kicks up a notch.

Thirdly, we have a young woman who’s getting other young men and women reading intensely. Love shoots through the roof and becomes adoration.

I have news for parents and school authorities who believe they can shelter children from things they think are too awful for young minds: you’ll fail. You have failed. You’ve always failed. Unless this was a very clever reverse-psychology ploy to get kids interested in books, in which case you’ve succeeded brilliantly. Bravo. A cunning plan – quite evocative of the way the potato was introduced to Greece.

Too bad I doubt the administration was that smart.

We jaded adults may believe kids these days are incapable of deep thought and literacy and scholarship, and we are so very, very wrong if we believe that. Look at this student. Look at what she and her fellow students are doing. Look at how much books matter to them. Enough to take not-inconsequential risks for. And they are smart enough and confident enough to decide what they can and cannot read, all for themselves, to hell with the naysayers.

I love this to pieces. It tells me that, despite rumors to the contrary, we’re not raising a nation of apathetic know-nothings, although we’ve been trying very hard to do so. No, we’ve got a crop of brilliant, bold, and brave kids coming up, and the world will be better for them.

I just hope that once my books get published, they’re summarily banned. I’d like to have this kind of readership. I want kids like this at my signings. Unleashing that wise, unruly literary mob upon the unsuspecting citizens of this increasingly stifled country would make me twelve kinds of happy, and prouder than I’ll ever have words to express.

This Student Gives Me Hope

I'll Take Wonder and Awe Over Mystery, Thanks

Seems it’s time to talk about science and beauty again.  You see, several people tweeted this XKCD:



And then, on the same day, Eric MacDonald has this post up:

This morning, in the The Independent, Michael McCarthy has an article entitled “Mere Science cannot account for beauty.” And while it may be true that mere science cannot account for beauty — there may be no strictly scientific account in terms of chemistry or physics of why we respond as we do to things that we find beautiful — I wonder why he felt the need to say it. Science has, in fact, revealed many beautiful things. Some of the pictures that Jerry Coyne or PZ Myers have put up from time to time on their blogs — close-up pictures of insects, the amazing variety of squids and octopuses, eagles’ nests, and eaglets — or the pictures of stars and galaxies and supernovae that Carl Sagan included in his books — show that scientists, far from negating beauty or awe at the wonder of nature, celebrate and revel in such things. The deeper they probe, the more they study and come to know, the more wonderful and beautiful nature seems.

Motion carried.

I used to be one of those woo-woo idjits swanning around mourning the fact that science takes the mystery out of things.  I also used to be one of those woo-woo idjits swanning around perplexed by the fact that an ostensibly benevolent universal consciousness took such delight in creating really ugly shit.  Inordinate fondness for beetles is only the tip of it.  Tended to ignore the ugly stuff, then, in favor of pretty things.  Oh, and I really wanted to believe in magic and faeries.

There had, I told myself, to be something more to this universe than just plain boring ol’ matter.  And why were those meanie scientists so intent on taking the mystery and magic out of life?  Sure, some of what they did was made of awesome, but did they have to be such bastards about it?  Did they have to make it impossible for me to believe in faeries?

For a while, I had this weird split-personality.  One side of myself read and reveled in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World while the other gobbled up books on Celtic magic.  I thought the world wouldn’t be quite so pretty without the possibility of mysteries beyond science’s ken.  I still liked watching science spank assorted silly people, like UFO conspiracists and fundies, but hands off my faeries, damn it.

Then, somewhere along the line, I grew up. 

And I found out something.

Science solves mysteries, yeah, but mysteries aren’t half as much fun unsolved as they are when they’re being solved.  That thrilling sense of mystery was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the numinous sensation of gazing upon a mystery solved.  What I mean by that is, having things explained didn’t lessen them a bit.  I mean, let’s go back to Eric’s post, where he demonstrates Mr. McCarthy wanking about butterflies:

With science, McCarthy tells us, he can explain that

it was an insect; that it belonged to the butterfly family Pieridae, the whites; that it had overwintered as an adult, one of only four British butterfly species to do so (the others pass the winter variously as eggs, or caterpillars, or pupae); that in its caterpillar stage it had fed on the plants buckthorn or alder buckthorn; and that it had hibernated disguised as a leaf, probably in an ivy clump, until the first warm day in March woke it up.

But that, he says, just “doesn’t remotely get it.”

Dude, McCarthy, you don’t remotely get it.  What has science told us about that butterfly?  Without science, we have a wee pretty little insect fluttering around, yes, okay, “like a piece of sunlight that had been loosed from the sun’s rays and was free to wander, announcing the spring.”  I get that, it’s very nice.  You can throw a bit of animism in there if you like, and talk about butterfly spirits if you’re feeling particularly frisky.  Whatever melts your butter (or flutters your butterfly).  But you, O wanker who recites some science facts whilst totally missing the point, aren’t seeing the real majesty here: science tells us that we and that butterfly are related.

That’s right.  Not closely related, mind.  The butterfly might not get invited were we to throw a family reunion, but trace the family tree back enough, and you’ll see that little brimstone butterfly and ourselves share a common ancestor.  We’re kin.  That may not be mysterious, but that leaves my jaw hanging, that does.  That gets me all giddy inside.  And we never would have known that if it wasn’t for boring ol’ science out there solving mysteries and banishing ghosts, gods, and all sorts of nature spirits.

Here’s another thing you might see, looking at that little butterfly: it’s made of star-stuff.  Literally.  All of the atoms in it got cooked up in stars or supernovae at some point in the universe’s history.  It’s not just that we need sunlight to survive: we needed gigantic exploding stars to make this planet possible in the first place.

If the two above facts do not induce a sense of awe and wonder in you, then you are bloody well hopeless.

Mysteries are nice, yeah, but they’re too easily ignored when they can’t be solved.  What really gets the awe and wonder going, what leaves me stumbling round in slack-jawed amazement, occasionally bursting into gales of giddy laughter, is the sheer magnitude of what science has revealed about the workings of the world.  It makes everything huge.  Back when I thought goddidit, I could just shrug stuff off.  ‘Course it’s pretty, God made it that way, or the faeries or the spirits or whoever.  But you can’t shrug off the beauty of the natural world so easily.  Not when it comes down to the intricate interplay of physics and chemistry and geology and biology, some or all of them combining in any one moment to unconsciously create something of extraordinary beauty.  It’s like a really good magician’s trick, the kind where seeing how it was done only makes you appreciate the illusion more.

Oh, and did I mention how science makes ugly things lovely?  Even slime molds that look like dog barf.

You woo-woo lot can go into agonies of ecstasy over the first butterfly in spring.  I shall sing odes to the slime mold, and the mud flat that could tell me a once and future story about its birth in the heart of a star, its wander through space until it became part of a primordial planet, its journey through the Hadean earth and its incarnations as, perhaps, a bit of magma or a solid bit of shell before erosion weathered it away to become what it is now, a home for the oysters, on its way to an eventual date with lithification once more, cycling ever onward.

I'll Take Wonder and Awe Over Mystery, Thanks

Totality!

Long-time readers may recall that in my deep past, I wanted to be an astronomer.  I’ve still got an abiding fondness for such things, but I don’t get to feed my inner amateur astronomer much up here.

So when Twitter started buzzing with word of a total lunar eclipse for the night of December 20-21, I looked out the window, saw clouds, and said, “Bah, humbug.”  But that didn’t stop me from heading outside at a little after 11pm to have a hopeful look.

The clouds had parted!

Stayed out there for almost an hour in flip-flops, too intent on watching the moon vanish to run back inside for sensible shoes.  This was the event of a lifetime, wasn’t it?  I mean, seriously, people, those of us who got to see it either outside or streaming live online were witnessing something extraordinarily rare:

This lunar eclipse falls on the date of the northern winter solstice. How rare is that? Total lunar eclipses in northern winter are fairly common. There have been three of them in the past ten years alone. A lunar eclipse smack-dab on the date of the solstice, however, is unusual. Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years. “Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21,” says Chester. “Fortunately we won’t have to wait 372 years for the next one…that will be on 2094 DEC 21.” 

Soooo lucky Seattle’s cranky winter weather chose tonight to have a lengthy cloud break at just the right time.  So lucky I follow Phil Plait on Twitter, and that he kept us all up-to-the-minute caught up on what we should see and when.   He also had a super-spiffy blog post up with about all you’d need to know.

If I’m still alive in December of 2094, I shall have to make sure I’m ready with a camera that can record the event.  By then, we should have much better.  But mine did remarkably good for a little pocket model, and would’ve done far better if I’d have binocs.  Still, got some fun stuff!

First Look, through thin clouds

That’s what made me dash back inside and snatch up the camera.  Over the next 40 minutes or so, I watched the bright bits of the moon get smaller:



And the clouds cleared away near totality, and the last sliver of moon gleamed:



You can just barely see it.  And then, boom: totality.  Which was about the time my camera said, “Sod this for a bloody lark, I can’t see a damned thing,” and packed it in for the night.  Luckily, Phil was able to catch some good images:

Totality! Moon is deep Orange. Gorgeous!

Last one. Deep into totality.

Awesome!  I’ll never forget the moon, nearly invisible, glowing a faint pale orange in the sky, deep in our shadow.  Love love love this universe!

How many of you guys got to see it?

Update:  You, my darlings, must click here to see my friend Michael Smith-Sardior’s outstandingly beautiful photo of the eclipse!

Totality!