Ewww!

Last week Calista had a sore throat and a cough, and this week she's given it to me. The first few days were just annoying scratchiness, but since Wednesday I've had that deep-pitched frog voice, enough so that my co-workers have been making me say things like "This is CNN" and "No, Luke. I am your father!"

Fortunately, I hadn't been coughing much. Normally, I catch one little bug and cough my lungs out all winter, sick or not. But last night it caught up with me. About 1 a.m. there was a tickle/scratch in my throat that woke me up and would not leave me be. I started coughing. I went downstairs so as not to wake up the rest of the house. The coughing fit just got worse and worse. Then I notice the splatter of red. I do a double-take, and realize I've coughed so hard and so long that I've given myself a nosebleed. A pretty convincing, sloppy, biohazard-level-3 one at that.

I don't get nosebleeds. At least, not voluntarily (I've been given them on occasion, but that's a different animal entirely). What a disgusting, messy concept. It didn't take much to clean myself up, but geeze.

Such is the excitement that fills my days and nights.

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Idiot

The office bookcase project continues at a (surprisingly) steady pace. The end cabinets are up, as are the shelves, and I've actually got a few books acting as placeholders. Looking in my office, the casual observer can now actually tell what's going on and taking shape. It looks like a bookcase, albeit a skeletal one.

The other week, when the heavy lumber phase kicked in, my brother looked at my work and offered the observation, "Holy crap! Are those 2x12s? What are you trying to do--stop a car from crashing through your office!?" I calmly replied that I don't do things in half measures, and that when I build a bookcase, I build it to stand the test of time. But yeah, now that you mention it, since my office is in the front of the house, stopping runaway cars is a useful secondary role for it.

So last night I'm installing the corner shelves--they are diamond-shaped, and bear more than a passing resemblance to Superman's "S" shield--and giving a combination nail/glue treatment to the little support braces that are to prevent the shelves from sagging back in the corner. I'm using 2-inch long finishing nails to anchor the supports, which is working very well going through the sheetrock into the wall studs. Except. Like the idiot I am, I utterly and completely forgot about the big "window" between the living room and my office that I covered up and converted into an alcove with shelves on the living room side. Remember that? So I'm happily nailing the supports up, and then head to the kitchen to get some iced tea (putting up shelves is thirsty work). Coming back from the kitchen, I see a vertical row of CDs--one on each shelf--dangling precipitously on the edge of falling. Puzzled, I try to push them back into place. Nothing doing. So I pull them down to see what the obstruction is, and find myself looking at the business end of more than an inch of nail sticking straight through the wall. I'd closed the window with 3/4 inch plywood, and while that's good and thick, it's not thick enough to handle 2-inch long finishing nails. With much grumbling, I removed all the affected CDs and awkwardly hammered the nails back through to whence they came, eventually replacing them--with much additional awkward effort--with suitably shorter ones.

Doesn't change the fact that I'm an idiot that manages to find incredibly creative ways to waste both time and effort.

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Once more to the well

One more evolution/science/creationism-related post before my mania subsides and I move on to other obsessions. Ny next post will be different. Honest.

First, go check out the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal On-Line. They've got a great page devoted to creationism and Intelligent Design titled Creation Watch. It is, simply put, a marvelous resource of essays and articles that effectively refute the falsehoods and deceptions of ID proponents, and also a compilation of links to stories currently in the news. There's a lot of good information and interesting reading here, and I encourage folks to check it out.

The other link I want to point out is Texas Citizens for Science. TCS is something of a grass-roots effort by Texans who are trying to keep Texas from going down the dark path of Kansas. With arch-conservative Republicans holding all the statewide offices in Texas, and their fundamentalist allies clamoring for religious concessions, things don't look too rosy. Fortunately, there are enough moderate Republicans and Democrats to prevent any major lunacy from taking hold. But any Texans concerned about the future of science education in our state should sign up for the TCS mailing list to know when action will be needed.

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The Bible as a museum guide

I wish I was making this stuff up, but I'm not:

God made dinosaurs on the sixth day of Creation, the same day he made people, according to Rusty Carter's interpretation of the Bible.

"The word 'dinosaur' was not invented back then, but in Job 38, there's two large creatures, behemoth and leviathan," said Carter, director of the Littleton-based Biblically Correct Tours, as he prepared to give his first tour of the school year.

Either or both creatures were probably dinosaurs, he said.

The thought of how many children's minds these folks are warping disturbs me to no end. You say the Earth is only 6,000 years old (give or take)? Right. Oh, yeah buddy. You've got a real firm grip on reality.

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Credit for creationism

Well, it's happened. Some Christian fundamentalists have sued the University of California for not accepting creationism as valid science credit:

LOS ANGELES The University of California is accused of discriminating against high schools that teach creationism and other conservative Christian viewpoints.
A group representing the state's religious schools has filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming U-C admission officials have refused to certify high school science courses that use textbooks challenging Darwin's theory of evolution.

And I say to them, "More power to you!" To think that I could've skipped all those tedious science course in high school and waltzed right into Texas A&M on the strength of my Cherokee ancestry:

The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

The beauty of this is that not only does it encompass the origin and end of the world, but it also covers meteorology (New Orleans was innundated not because of Hurricane Katrina, but because one of the cardinal point cords frayed a bit), astronomy and space science, geology and ultimately biology:

When all was water, the animals were above in Gälûñ'lätï, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni'sï, "Beaver's Grandchild," the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Gälûñ'lätï. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.

In the event that you aren't of the fundamentalist Christian bent, and aren't entirely comfortable with the creation-by-committee approach favored by the Cherokee, don't despair! There's hope for you! Universal truth can be found via the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.

Man, posting all that has made me humgry. Who's up for Italian?

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God's place in science

Hmm. I've just been forwarded (via the IAFA mailing list) an interesting New York Times article regarding ongoing efforts by the Templeton Foundation to reconcile science and faith:

By financing programs like "Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest" and "The Origin of the Laws of Nature and the Existence of God," Templeton almost single-handedly sustains the modern movement to reconcile science and religion - or, as some see it, he is keeping it alive on its death bed with extraordinary means of support.

This is not about intelligent design. While the foundation assumes the existence of a deity, it rejects biblical literalism as much as it does New Age fuzziness; no "crystals and faeries," it admonishes grant seekers.

And then, later on in the article, the fun stuff begins:

This is not the God of deism, who cranked up the universe and let it run. In drafting the principles of physics he left trapdoors - what Dr. Polkinghorne calls "causal joints" - through which to intervene, placing the earth in a hospitable orbit or unleashing the cascade of mutations needed for a microbe to evolve into a man. The trick is to do this without appearing to violate his own laws.

Some theologians speculate that this happens on the subatomic level, when a particle appears to dart probabilistically, with a roll of the quantum dice. Maybe it is God doing the shuffling, and what appears to mortals as quantum indeterminacy is divine intervention in disguise.

While I generally trend toward deism, simply because I don't believe a Creator that could put forth all the effort involved in creating an entire universe would need to stoop to micro-management, nor blatantly violate the laws of creation that He specifically established, quantum indeterminacy is actually an arguement I could consider. Of course, it still preserves that unproveable ambiguity that has been the bone of contention between science and religion lo these many years (which, assuming there is a Creator, I find particularly elegant and also speaks to the Creator having a delightfully subtle sense of humor).

Given my recent preoccupation with that very issue here in recent days (as well as recent months and years) I think the article apropos.

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...it's good enough for me!

Back in July I posted about Pope Benedict XVI's apparent hostility towards science and evolution. That even though he hasn't spoken out on the issue, his apparent tacit approval is emboldening to those arch-conservatives in the church that would remake the Vatican in Pat Robertson's image. Well, another bishop is jumping on the Creationism bandwagon:

The theory of intelligent design is a rational explanation of the origin of life based on observation and not a "religious tenet superimposed on the facts," said Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh.

The bishop discussed intelligent design and evolution in a column appearing in the Sept. 16 Pittsburgh Catholic, the diocesan newspaper.

And:

The bishop wrote that belief in intelligent design as a conclusion of human reason goes back thousands of years to the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

"They concluded that intelligent design has nothing to do with religious faith and everything to do with reason and science as we name them today," he wrote.

"One can easily conclude from reason alone that there is intelligent design in the universe," the bishop wrote.

Yeah, and I can conclude from reason alone that the sun, moon and stars revolve around the Earth, which is flat and the center of the universe. All I have to do is look out the window. It's common sense.

For all his theological acumen, it is obvious that Bishop Wuerl has no scientific background or training. And you know what? Neither did Plato or Aristotle. Does the Bishop really want to buttress his arguement with Aristotle, who literally set science back hundreds of years with his erroneous notions?

• That fossils are the remains of once living organisms was understood by the Greeks (e.g. Anaximander ~610-540 BCE). Herodotus (~484-425 BCE) recognized that marine fossils found strewn around the Egyptian desert are the remains of marine organisms that lived there at a time that part of the continent was under water.




• They recognized that fossils document evolution and that fossilized organisms occurred in environments suitable to that particular organism. These understandings virtually disappeared due to Aristotle (384-322 BCE) who claimed fossils were natural artifacts and had never been living organisms.


• The Christian church accepted Aristotle's views, which persisted until the 18^th century, despite repeated arguments by observers of natural phenomena including Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

All of this sudden hostility to the rationality of science makes the publication of a cardinal's diary describing the conclave that elected Cardinal Ratzinger to pope all the more frustrating. Ratzinger won a razor-thin election and despite claims to the contrary, has very little "mandate" to base his directives upon:

The diary of the anonymous cardinal is also significant because it shows that Ratzinger didn't garner a huge margin -- he had 84 of the 115 votes in the final ballot, seven more than the required two-thirds majority.

His two immediate predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope John Paul I, are believed to have garnered 99 and 98 votes respectively, and that was when there were only 111 voting cardinals.

"It does seem that somebody wants to indicate that the conclave was a more complex process than was being depicted and that Benedict's mandate was not a slam dunk," said David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio journalist who is writing a biography of Benedict.

That we ended up with Ratzinger by the tiniest of margins is bad enough (why can't we return to the ancient tradition of papal ascent by popular acclaim of Roman citzenry?). But it's who we could've had that brings me to the verge of tears: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit, from Argentina:

It's hard to question Cardinal Bergoglio's concern for the poor when he does many things to display humility. For instance, upon receiving his appointment, he instructed supporters to donate the money that they had raised for Vatican festivities. He refused to live in the Buenos Aires archbishop's palace, choosing instead a small apartment where he prepared his own dinners. He traded in a chauffeured limousine for public transportation. But, beyond his austerity, he's taken public stances on numerous political and socioeconomic issues that have plagued his native Argentina, which is still recovering from financial turmoil. In this light, perhaps it's fitting that he once presented a report on behalf of the Synod of Bishops -- a position that he described as "keeping watch" for the people.

I goggle at this man's credentials. He's humble. He's austere. He cares for the poor and isn't a Vatican insider. He's a chemist and a Jesuit, which means he not only respects science, but understands it. He isn't a liberal, as some would hope for--in many areas, he follows very closely in John Paul II's ideological footsteps. Reading descriptions of him online, he comes across as pragmatic. Perhaps most importantly, though, he didn't want the job, unlike Benedict XVI, who pretty much started campaigning for it before John Paul II breathed his last.

The man embodies the core Christian values that so many members of the church--and not just the Catholic Church, but other denominations as well--seem to regard as a nusiance at best and barely pay lip service to. I'm sure I'd disagree with much of what he would do as pope (John Paul II disappointed me a great deal, even though I still consider him one of the greatest popes of the past several centuries) but I can only hope that when the next conclave rolls around, the 68-year-old Cardinal Bergoglio is still available to assume the shoes of the Fisherman.

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