Teaching ... or not Teaching

Over at the Science Blogs the Seed Overlords have asked the bloggers "What makes a good science teacher?" You can read their answers over there, but reading all the posts got me thinking ...

Not that I'm a science teacher, but I do teach. And while I most certainly don't think that "if you can teach something, you can teach anything", I do believe that many things are common to all teachers.

So I'd like to talk about something that happened earlier this week.

I had a student making up some grammar work. I was looking over her shoulder as she sat there, staring at her paper... it was short form adjectives.

A brief digression for those who don't know (which is probably most of you): Russian adjectives come in two forms, called (not surprisingly) long and short. Long form adjectives are attributive, that is they directly modify nouns: chelovek vysokiy = the tall man. Short forms, on the other hand, are predicative, meaning, they 'really' mean "is handsome, is sick, is sufficient" and so on: chelovek vysok = the man is tall. Russian adjectives also agree with their nouns in number, gender, and case.*

Back to the story. The question she was working on was simple: there were a number of long form adjectives in masculine nominative singular, and she was to provide the short form. She had filled in a few of them - the ones that she'd obviously memorized.

Looking at what she'd filled in, I could see a pattern: she'd gotten the ones that take what's called a fugitive (or fleeting) vowel: bolnoy - bolen; spokoynyy - spokoyen; dovolnyy - dovolen. She had blanks for the others: krasivyy - ?; vysokiy - ?

So I thought I'd give her a hint. "Why are you putting the E in?" I asked.

"I don't know... It's supposed to be there, isn't it? Isn't it?" She started erasing it out of bolen.

"No, no," I said. "Not 'why are you doing that, dummy?' It belongs there! I meant, 'what's the reason for it?'"

She honestly didn't know. Somewhere along the way, she'd memorized these not-really-irregular, very common short forms, but no one had ever explained to her what was going on.

So I started off with the Socratic method, trying to make her understand that she understood. "What does the E do?" She looked at me, uncertain. "What if the E wasn't there?"

She looked at the words. "You couldn't pronounce most of them?"

That's close enough. The fugitive vowel is placed between the final consonant of the root and any consonant-beginning suffix. You certainly could pronounce "spokoyn", and probably "dovoln" for that matter, but she had focussed on the consonant cluster, which is the key. "So," I asked, "these others, you don't need the E. But what makes you need the E in this group? What did you do to make that cluster show up?"

"Took off the ending," she said, paused, and then wrote krasiv.

"That's it," I said, and she confidently filled in the rest.

Now - she went at it backwards, having memorized what she called the "irregular" ones. They aren't irregular: the fugitive vowel is a perfectly regular and predictable phenomenon. You just need to know a little bit about where they come from and when they show up. (It has to do with Russian root and syllable forms, and an historical loss of certain vowels... Think of it as similar to the way the E shows up in the past tense of some English verbs - in pronunciation, I mean, not spelling - but not others: hated, batted, but played, skied.)

To make a short-form, predicative adjective you replace the long-form ending with the short-form one. For masculine, that means replacing -YY (or IY or OY) with the zero ending, meaning that, for instance, krasivyy is krasiv and vysokiy is vysok, and so on.**

If the stem of the adjective has the adjectival-making suffix N, so that it's root+N, as in bol-n or spokoy-n (Y is a consonant), you have an impermissable consonant cluster. (It's the adjoining of stem and suffix that makes it impermissable, not the actual consonants involved.) So the fugitive vowel comes in (back, actually - it's as if we didn't write the silent E in words like "hate" until we added the D of the past tense so that we didn't have T+D together). So, instead of boln, it's bolen.

The point being, whoever had this woman for basic grammar should have made it clear that making the short form adjective was a completely regular process: remove the ending, insert the fugitive vowel if required. Instead, someone assumed she'd just figure that out when the "irregulars" were listed.

It didn't happen. She memorized those few forms and floundered without the rule.

So... what's my point? I guess it's that language teachers need to remember that adults aren't acquiring their second language, they're learning it. This means that many, probably most, of them will not generalize the rule the way children do. Things need to be explained to them.

I don't teach beginners; the students I get are intermediate level. Most of them have memorized a lot of patterns, but have no feeling for the reasons for what look like exceptions. I've had a lot of students tell me they "never understood it before." It's very gratifying to see them understand - to actually see the moment when it becomes clear.

That's why I teach. My evaluations say I'm good at it. I like that.

---

* Russian has two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and six cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, instrumental, and prepositional (also called locative) - plus remnants of a couple more, found mainly in fossilized phrases).

** For those who are wondering, for feminine you replace -AYA or -YAYA with A or YA; for neuter you replace -OYE or -YEYE with O or YE; and for plural you replace -IYE or YYE with I or Y. Easy peasy. That means, no fugitive vowel in the short form, since the N becomes part of the new final syllable: bol+n+- = bolen, but bol+n+a = bolna

What It Means

Another great quote from LtCmdr Charles Swift, the military lawyer who took the Guantánamo tribunals case to the Supreme Court - and won:

It means that we can't be scared out of who we are. And that's victory, folks.

Exactly.

Because, as I (and others) have said before, this case - this whole argument - isn't about them, and what they do. It's about us, and what we do.

And who we are.

And whether we intend to stay who we are, or turn into them.

Shadows on Saturn

Wow. What a gorgeous shot of Saturn's rings casting shadows on the planet.

This will be one of Cassini's last shots of the rings more-or-less edge-on. Towards the end of July (after two close flybys of Titan), they'll begin moving Cassini by 180 degrees with respect to the sun - which will give us, at the end of the year-long manuever, a view "looking down" at the rings. It's going to be a spectacular year!

Such good law, even this court can see it

In "a stunning rebuff to President Bush" the Supreme Court ruled the military tribunals at Gitmo to be "illegal under both American law and the Geneva Conventions" (quotes from BBC World News).

Bush said he'd "conform with the ruling of the Supreme Court" - said it with a shrug and a grimace, as if to convey how freaking annoyed he is that he couldn't get the Court to announce that Congress had in fact given him "a blank check". Instead, the Court said that the rule of law is everywhere, not just where Bush (or indeed any President) wants it to be.

Lt Commander Charles Swift, the military lawyer who took Hamdan's case and fought it all the way, said, speaking of the Court: "They brought the law to Guantánamo Bay."

LtCmdr Swift - you deserve a nation's grateful thanks.

I hope you get it.

Jesus is not a Republican

That's the title of an article a friend sent me, an article written Randall Balmer and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You need to be a subscriber to read that, so I'm providing it here.

It should be obvious I'm no evangelical. I'm not even, really, a Christian, except by heritage. But this article strikes me as important.

A couple of excerpts to whet your appetite:

Evangelicals have come a long way since my visit to Edman Chapel in 1972. We have moved from cultural obscurity almost invisibility to becoming a major force in American society. Jimmy Carter's run for the presidency launched us into the national consciousness, but evangelicals abandoned Carter by the end of the 1970s, as the nascent religious right forged an alliance with the Republican Party.

In terms of cultural and political influence, that alliance has been a bonanza for both sides. The coalition dominates talk radio and controls a growing number of state legislatures and local school boards. It is seeking, with some initial success, to recast Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The Republicans have come to depend on religious-right voters as their most reliable constituency, and, with the Republicans firmly in command of all three branches of the federal government, leaders of the religious right now enjoy unprecedented access to power.

And what has the religious right done with its political influence? Judging by the platform and the policies of the Republican Party - and I'm aware of no way to disentangle the agenda of the Republican Party from the goals of the religious right - the purpose of all this grasping for power looks something like this: an expansion of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the continued prosecution of a war in the Middle East that enraged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just-war criteria, and a rejiggering of Social Security, the effect of which, most observers agree, would be to fray the social-safety net for the poorest among us. Public education is very much imperiled by Republican policies, to the evident satisfaction of the religious right, and it seeks to replace science curricula with theology, thereby transforming students into catechumens.

America's grossly disproportionate consumption of energy continues unabated, prompting demands for oil exploration in environmentally sensitive areas. The Bush administration has jettisoned U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which called on Americans to make at least a token effort to combat global warming. Corporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence and deference once reserved for the deity.

The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor and the believer's responsibility for the poor. Sadly, that obligation seems not to have trickled down into public policy. On judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion. At the same time, it approves a corresponding expansion of presidential powers, thereby disrupting the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances.

And, after some discussion about other issues, including torture and abortion, he declares:

Equally striking is the rhetoric that leaders of the religious right use to motivate their followers. In the course of traveling around the country, I have been impressed anew by the pervasiveness of the language of militarism among leaders of the religious right. Patrick Henry College, according to its founding president, Michael Farris, "is training an army of young people who will lead the nation and shape the culture with biblical values." Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, in Ohio, issues swords to those who join his organization, the Center for Moral Clarity, and calls on his followers to "lock and load" for a "Holy Ghost invasion." The Traditional Values Coalition advertises its "Battle Plan" to take over the federal judiciary. "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare," Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, famously declared about his political tactics in 1997. I wonder how that sounds in the ears of the Prince of Peace.

Such rhetoric and policies are a scandal, a reproach to the gospel I honor and to the Jesus I love. I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood.But I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deprive those Jesus called "the least of these" of a living wage, and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, even those designated as my enemies.

This article is insightful and provocative. Read it - you can use it in conversation even if it doesn't apply to you.

Happy Birthday, Antoine and The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

author of The Little Prince,

was born today in 1900

I am... Green Lantern?

Er... I am Green Lantern!

I guess... (I have to confess, I never read much DC ...)

Your results:

You are Green Lantern

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Green Lantern 80%
Superman 70%
Hulk  55%
Catwoman 50%
Batman  50%
Robin  47%
Supergirl 47%
Spider-Man 45%
Iron Man 35%
Wonder Woman 32%
The Flash 20%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

O-for-three! O frabjous day!

America squeaked by.

By one vote, the Senate struck down the "flag-burning" amendment. (Oh, well, it'll look like a line drive in the box score of history...)

Freedom of speech stays more important than symbol-worship.

Whew!

And see my earlier post The thing the symbol stands for for my full thoughts on the matter.

the brief absence

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging recently. My ISP has been down (except for a couple of minutes here or there) thanks to the monsoon-like rains (well, I don't know what a monsoon is really like, but they've been steady and strong) we've been having. Mudslides maybe, maybe a downed tree? I don't know, but we seem to be back up!

Yay!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Wordplay (wanted to see Water, but it was sold out - Wordplay was quite enjoyable, though - I never finish a puzzle that fast!)

DVD: Watched Serenity (again!) ... and it won't be the last time, either.

Read: Finished Bones, Rocks and Stars - The Science of When Things Happened, also Postscript to Poison and When Last I Died.

The thing the symbol stands for

Jonathan Alter over on the Newsweek site has an excellent essay about flag-burning - or, rather, about the proposed amendment.

As he points out, flag burning is very rare - maybe half-a-dozen cases in the last 15 years. Even at the height of the Vietnam War there weren't 50. But even if people were burning a flag every day, no one should let their outrage at this form of protest lead them to amending the Constitution to make one symbolic act unconstitutional.

He explains his belief that this amendment is a true, valuable litmus test:

The flag burning amendment is in a category by itself: the only argument for it is based on pure emotion. But ours is supposed to be a government of reason, not emotion, especially when it comes to the most precious repository of our rights. The American Constitution, the apogee of reason in the history of self-government, is real; the American flag, for all of its beauty and deep meaning, is symbolic. For more than 200 years, we'’ve occasionally used the amendment process to expand rights. This would be the first time we would enshrine their restriction. Polluting the Constitution is far more dangerous than burning the flag.

I agree with him. But there's more.

As - what will people do instead? I mean, assuming that more flags aren't actually burnt once it becomes such a loaded and 'unconstitutional' action, of course. What will people do next to protest?

And more importantly - What will we have to do to stop whatever that is?

We've always had a fringe of people who make the symbols of our country almost more important than the substance. Torture our enemies? Okay. Warrantless wiretapping? If that's what it takes. Kick down the doors of innocent people? Omelets and broken eggs. Burn the flag? Off with their heads!

Perhaps if we spent more time making sure the country was a thing whose symbols people would cherish instead of seeking instead to force people to act as if they cherished them we'd have fewer problems.

As Mark Twain once observed, you attack the flag at your peril.

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

That was in 1901 - in 1907 he expressed the same emotion from the other side:

Yet to-day in the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor -- to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable.

That's the real trouble here. We need to remember why it is that this country is different. It's the Constitution -- it's the enshrinement in Law of Reason, not emotion. It's our honest attempt to make a nation governed by Reason, by reasonable men and women extending the Rule of Law to all citizens, not just a favored few.

If we lose sight of that ideal, then we've lost much, much more than a single beloved symbol. We've lost everything that symbol stands for, and everything that makes that symbol worth defending.

Two years ago now someone I work with insisted that when Iraqi insurgents behead Americans, it gives us the right to strike back. "My country is better than that," I insisted.

We're hearing the same thing now, after two American soldiers were tortured to death, that this is so horrible that nothing excuses it - a position I agree with - and that anything we've ever done is somehow retroactively excused, or at least justified. "They're monsters," we're told. Maybe they are. And yet - as John McCain (a man I have serious disagreements with on other topics) once said, "It's not about them. It's about us."

My country is better than that.

I still insist that.

Oh, yes, it's easy to laugh at Dale Arden in the movie Flash Gordon, when she tells Ardala that she must marry Ming, because she promised to. "We keep our promises; it's one of the things that make us better than you," she says.

But there's something real and meaningful in that line. Because unless we are better than they, why do we have the right to exist at their expense? Mere might makes right? Then anybody bigger than us has the right to squash us like the proverbial bug?

Isn't there more to us than that? Isn't our embrace of liberties as important as our preaching of Liberty, of democratic laws as of Democracy? And what is that Democracy we intend to spread around the benighted world if it's just authoritarianism in pretty clothes? Why should anyone kill, or die, for that?

Our flag is the symbol of something very precious. But part of that something is allowing the symbol to be destroyed sometimes.

Cory Maye - injustice in action

I am late learning about this. It's thanks to Alon over at UTI that I even heard about it. He provides a on-line petition to free Cory Maye which you may sign if you like (I have doubts about the usefulness of such things, but as long as that's not your only response I don't see how it can hurt. I signed it.).

Cory Maye's door was kicked in four and half years ago by armed intruders. His baby daughter was sleeping in the room whose door was kicked in. Fearing for his life and for hers, he shot one of the intruders as they came into the house, and it was then that they identified themselves as police, at which point he instantly surrendered. Unfortunately for all involved, the policeman he shot died.

The police were executing a warrant on a different man, one who didn't even live in the same half of the duplex as Maye. It's unclear if they thought Maye's half of the duplex was empty, part of a single residence, or what - but he wasn't the target of the raid.

Now he's on death row. Read the background and details here and then write to Gov. Barbour of Mississippi. A real, snail-mail letter, to Gov Haley Barbour, P.O. Box 139, Jackson, Mississippi 39205.

Silly Humans: Carnival of the Godless #43

Silly Humans is hosting the 43rd Carnival of the Godless for this fortnight, and my post Angry, scary men in black is one of the attractions. Check out the whole Carnival for some tasty freethinking goodness!

Happy Birthday, George!

Born today in 1903, Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 from his experiences in Spain with Stalinism - which taught him that any idealism carried too far became corrupt.

My Brazilian Soccer Name

Blame this one on Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life.

(At least mine's pronounceable!)

What's Your Brazilian Soccer Name?

Language Quiz

Here's the new quiz - and always remember, maybe nothing is wrong!

From the Biography Channel's ad for Sherlock Holmes:

He thrives on the dizzying, delights in the bizarre, and relishes in the puzzling.

And here's the previous one:

From the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve site:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, oaks and oak moths have been coevolving for a long time and can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve

The answer here is:

There's a problem with the coordinated subject of the matrix clause (or the main clause, if you prefer that term) and its predicate in the second part. The sentence, as it stands, tells us that "oaks and oak moths" (subject) "have been coevolving" (first part of coordinated predicate) and are "one of the insects of the Reserve" (second part).

Oaks are an insect? Not when last I looked.

For comparison, look at this:

The Johnson brothers and the Smith sisters have been playing tennis for a long time and are among the best players on the women's team.

It doesn't work.

English permits - almost demands - deletion of repeated parts of sentences. But here, the deleted subject of the second part of the matrix clause is only part of the subject which was overtly stated in the first part.

That subject, if deleted, must be assumed to be the subject of the second predicate in its entirety. In other words, the only way to have two predicate verb phrases with only one expressed subject is to have the exact same subject for both verb phrases.

If the predicate verb phrases have different subjects (as here, where one is "oaks and oak moths" and the other is only "oak moths"), then the subjects must both be stated.

Something along the lines of:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, oaks and oak moths have been coevolving for a long time, and the moths can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve.

Or, to eliminate the repetition of "oak moths" (three times in the above version!), this:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, they have been coevolving with oaks for a long time and can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve.

And previous quizzes can be found here.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose!

Ambrose Bierce, born this day in 1842.

He left us

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,

The Devil's Dictionary,

an opinionated style manual called Write it Right which is more fun than Strunk's "horrid little book",

several fantastic short stories,

and the abiding legacy of a mysterious disappearance...

(Are you still out there, somewhere, Old Gringo?)

Natural Wonder

Nice. I've always been partial to thunderstorms - and recently that's been a good thing.




Which "Natural Wonder" are you?

Ignoring the Road Ahead...

Remember how GM is going to give new Hummer owners a year off from reality?

Tom the Dancing Bug has a take on it:


GM: paying off America to Ignore the Road Ahead.

The Paris Hilton Tax Exemption?

The so-called "death tax" has been neatly repackaged by the Republicans into something that threatens virtually all Americans, instead of the top 1%.

Here's what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about the "Paris Hilton tax exemption" (anachronism for the effect of it):

"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered--not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective--a graduated income inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against invasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

For more on the debate - and the way it's been framed recently - head on over to Matthew Nisbet's Framing Science. You'll be glad you did. (Well, maybe you will. Depends on who you are, I guess.)

Videos from Saturn

On the Cassini-Huygens page are several videos of Saturn's moons:

• teeny-tiny, walnut-shaped Pan inside the rings


• crater-covered Rhea slips between the moons Mimas and Enceladus - catch how Saturn illuminates the night sides of Mimas


• little Epimethius passing massive Titan and smallish Dione


• Janus and Epimethius, both quite small, passing Dione


• and my favorite, Rhea occulting Saturn

That one begins with the crescent of Rhea, a sliver of light, under the straight unlit slash of the rings (which cast their striped shadows on Saturn's northern hemisphere) off to the side of Saturn's much larger crescent, shows Rhea drifting until it is a black sphere of shadow against Saturn and then continuing until once again it is only a crescent, this time against Saturn's own dark night...

They're all mesmerizing.

Happy Birthday, Anna!

Back when I first was learning Russian, I had an old teacher who was introducing us to the plethora of Russian gendered occupational nouns (uchitel, teacher; uchitelnitsa, woman teacher). He said that some of these distinctions were going away - a woman could be a "doktor" instead of a "doktorsha" nowadays, he said; but some weren't: women weren't "poety" but only "poetessy".

What about Akhmatova, I asked.

"Akhmatova!" he said. "Ah. Akhmatova - ona nastoyachiy poet!" (She is a true poet!)

Born this day in Odessa (then part of the Soviet Union), in 1889, Akhmatova lived through the Revolution and Purges and de-Stalinization. She wrote love poetry, nspired by her affair with the then-unknown Italian painter Amedeo Modiglia, and became a sensation in Russia. She wrote more complicated stuff about WWI, and then was banned from publishing by the Bolsheviks. Her husband was shot, and her son arrested ... Famously, she was asked by a woman outside the prison where she, and Akhmatova, and hundreds of others, went daily for news of their imprisoned loved ones, "Could anyone describe this?" Akhmatova answered, "I can" - and she did, in the cycle she called "Requiem". It went unpublished for years, while she earned her living as a translator and wrote poems praising Stalin to keep her still-imprisoned son alive... Eventually she outlived the dictator and was able to publish her own works again, works she had kept alive by having friends memorize them while she was under house arrest.

Эпиграф

Нет, и не под чуждым небосводом,
И не под защитой чуждых крыл,
Я была тогда с моим народом,
Там, где мой народ, к несчастью, был.

Epigraph to 'Requiem'

No, I was not safe under foreign skies,
Nor covered by some stranger's shielding wing:
Then I was there, with my people,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

(and, for those who don't read Cyrillic; notes: i=ee, u=oo, o=oh, t'= a soft or palatalized t, ya/ye/yu=y+vowel, as in 'yak' etc)

Ehpigraf

Nyet, i nye pot chuzdhym nyebosvodom,
I nye pot zashchitoy chuzhdykh kryl,
Ya byla tokda s moyim narodom,
Tam, gdye moy narod, k nyeschastyu, byl.

Absurd

"That's absurd!" cried W, when asked what he had to say to Europeans who thought the US was now the biggest threat to global stability.

Etymology: Middle French absurde, from Latin absurdus harsh-sounding, incongruous, absurd, from ab- 1ab- + surdus dull-sounding, silent, deaf -- more at SURD
1 : marked by an obvious lack of reason, common sense, proportion, or accord with accepted ideas : ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous
absurd as to forget you're a man, and to act like a child -- Anthony Trollope>
2 : SELF-CONTRADICTORY: fallacious by reason of contradiction

Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (24 Jun. 2006).

So, I'm guessing the concepts of "US" and "threat to global stability" are self-contradictory to W. The idea is marked by an obvious lack of common sense and accord with accepted ideas.

True Believers don't deal with competing Truths© do, they?

It might have better for him to ask why anyone would think such a thing, instead of just denying the thing's existence.

I'm just sayin' ... especially since what's an 'accepted idea' pretty much depends on who's doing the accepting. Or not, as the case may be

Primary Evolution - Hawai'i

At The Questionable Authority Mike has begun a series on evolution on Hawai'i. As he says,

There are a number of places on this planet where the signal of evolution is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look. Most of those places are islands. It's no coincidence that Darwin made the Galapagos famous, or that Wallace did his most important work in the Malay Archipelago. As helpful as those places were to the discovery of evolution, they pale in comparison with the Hawaiian Islands, and I'm not saying that because I work there. We've got examples of evolution out here that will knock your socks off.

...

The Hawaiian Islands are located almost precisely in the middle of nowhere. There is, quite literally, no other archipelago that is so far from the nearest continent. The closest part of North America is currently about 2500 miles from Honolulu; the nearest approach to Asia is about 3500. The extremity of the isolation has two separate effects. The first is that the probability of something reaching Hawaii for the first time is coming from Asia isn't all that different from the probability that it's come from North America, so the biota here has a very mixed origin - unlike, for example, the Galapagos, which are also Darwinian islands, but are so close to the coast of South America that their endemic life has a very clear South American flavor. The second effect that the huge distances separating Hawaii and the continents has is that it makes it very hard for things to find their way out to the islands. New arrivals are rare, which gives the ones that were there before much more opportunity to evolve in piece. It also means that there are some common ecological niches on the continents that are either unfilled or filled in strange ways in Hawaii, because the continental occupants were unable to make it here on their own.

Keep checking back there for the series, which promises to be an excellent one.

Talk about the AWK-WARD

Bush is in Hungary today, where he's going to talk about the 1956 uprising ...

For most people, I'd think that would be a very definite case of the awk-ward, given how the uprising pretty much happened because the West and especially the US gave the Hungarians to understand that we'd back their attempt to become neutral in Cold War Europe, and then, well, didn't.

I wasn't very old then, and don't first-hand remember it, but I grew up knowing that we'd betrayed Imre Nagy (I even grew up knowing how to pronounce his name, EEM-ray Nodj, so that it jars me when I hear that surname said as "NAG-y"). Hungarians in the streets, Soviet tanks rolling in and crushing them ... the whole legacy of the Warsaw Pact beginning, pretty much, with that bloody October.

But though W is older than I am, I doubt he'll feel that special sense of shame when he speaks today. I mean, this is a man who can't even say "shame on me" - he's not going to feel it for something that he wasn't nimself personally involved in.

But then again, this trip (what Tony Snow calls "kind of a tone poem about the 1956 revolution") isn't coinciding with the real 50th anniversary - Bush is months early. He was supposed to be going to Ukraine, but since the Orange parties have been having a hard time putting a coalition together, the decision was made for Bush to go the Hungary (a symbol of what's gone right in post-Soviet space) instead.

"This is mainly about visiting the Hungarian government and paying homage to what they went through 50 years ago," Snow says. Bush is, according to the BBC, expected "to acknowledge the high cost Hungary paid in its struggle for independence". He isn't expected to mention that some of that cost is due to the failure of the US to live up to its rhetoric in that long-ago October. (I know. Quel surprise.)

And maybe he'll be lucky enought that the Hungarian people won't be bringing that up... even though this is yet another country where he'll have no choice but to see demonstrators against his policies. But he'll be home again tonight, so I doubt it'll make much of an impression.

I mean, not much does, does it?

$10,712 a year

$5.15 an hour.

That's minimum wage.

That's a full-time, 40-hour-a-week wage of $10, 712 a year.

You want to live on that? Let alone raise your family?

It's a moral outrage.

Obsessed with Being

Some press sources say "the world", some say "the nation" (meaning the UK). But they're all making hay of the fact that the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) shows "time" to be the most frequent noun. This shows we're obsessed with time

Well, of cour-- say what?

Not exactly.

As Benjamin Zimmer points out over on Language Log, "time" is the 55th most frequent word overall. The top spots are, of course, claimed by function words such as "the, a, to, of, in" ... the building blocks of English syntax. Let's acknowledge that's not very meaningful and move on to the content words.

A bunch of verbs are more frequent than any noun. Apparently, what we English speakers are really obsessed with is "being, having, doing, saying, getting, going, and making."

Okay - now that actually sounds sort of reasonable.

Zimmer's article goes on to point out that this is not new - the huge Brown corpus of the 1960s showed "time" as top noun, too.

(If you're interested in such things, the top twenty nouns are time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, and government. Make of that list what you will.)

You can read the press release in pdf format here.

Happy Birthday, Billy!

Billy Wilder, born one hundred years ago today! He gave us Sabrina, Stalag 17, Lost Weekend, Witness for the Prosecution, Sunset Boulevard, and the incomparable Some Like It Hot... Thanks!

They are all-American boys

Those Marines in Iraq seem like "all-American boys", people keep saying.

They are. That's the problem.

And you'd think that all these right-wing Protestants who seemingly knee-jerk "support the troops" and the war and the president would understand the problem. I always thought it was doctrine that all men are fallen, sinners and damned without the intervention of Jesus.

That's why we have rules in war - to make sure that our boys in uniform don't act like people do, without those rules.

That's why we need to live up to the rules - because we say our country is better than all the others. Not just like them.

Even though we are, underneath.

What makes us different is, we don't want to be.

Or at least, we didn't use to want to be...

And it's that willfull abandoning of the moral high ground that I find hardest to forgive W and his cronies for. When it comes right down to it, he asserts we have a right to be as twisted as our enemies, instead of an obligation to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

A Simple Fact

Because it can't be repeatd often enough:

Publication date of The Communist Manifesto: 1848
Publication date of On the Origin of Species: 1859

(Tip of the hat to Sean Foley)

Reneging on Progress

Looks like I spoke too soon.

The Episcopal Church backtracked and insulted the majority of its members, its gay priests, its gay bishop, and everyone who wanted to stay in the 21st century.

They passed a resolution advising dioceses that

"No bishop should be approved whose lifestyle presents a challenge to the wider church."

Sheesh.

Does that include women? Does their "lifestyle" of being wives and mothers count? It challenges those who still think women can't be priests, let alone bishops.

What about scientists? Does their "lifestyle" of rejecting creationist nonsense count?

What about those who believe that gays are just like people?

Sheesh.

I'm disappointed, and can only hope that most dioceses will ignore this "advice" and do what they feel is right.

Happy Midsummer (that's MID-summer)

Yes, I know. It's the summer solstice.

Guess what? Today is not the "first day of summer". I don't care what your tv weatherman, or your calendar, says.

Look up midsummer in the dictionary. You'll find something like this:

midsummer
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English midsumer, midsomer, from Old English midsumer, from midd, midde mid + sumer summer
1 : the middle of summer
2 : the period about the summer solstice

"midsummer." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (21 Jun. 2006)

Then look up Midsummer's Day in the dictionary.

midsummer day
Function: noun
Usage: usually capitalized M&D
Etymology: Middle English midsomer day, from Old English midsumer dæg
: June 24 : SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST's day

"midsummer day." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (21 Jun. 2006).

So - summer's only 6 days long?

Look, in the Celtic calendar (which had two seasons) summer started in May and ended in late October. We count four seasons, and summer is roughly late May through August, right? Even if you arbitrarily assign three months to each season, summer is June July August ...

The solstice marks the point the sun is at equilibrium. If you start the summer today, then the entire summer is characterized by shortening days. (The entire winter is characterized by lengthening days, too.) I think it makes a lot more sense to say the solstices mark the middle of the seasons. Clearly, whoever labelled June 24 as "Midsummer's Day" agreed - remember the precession of the equinoxes which is why June 24 isn't the solstice anymore, just as Christmas isn't on the winter solstice anymore (for which my pagan friends are happy, at least: they're getting Yule back! Thank you, Mother Nature! but I digress...)

Lots of other countries' and cultures' calendars do in fact define summer as beginning much earlier than June 21. It's only the US that stubbornly insists on today being the 'first day of summer'.

Glorious Double Crescent

Cassini snapped this picture about a month ago - Dione passing in front of Rhea, a double crescent. Simply gorgeous.

I Might Start Going Again

I was born and raised an Episcopalian (in fact, my mother was carrying me when she was confirmed), but in recent years I have found myself drifting into apatheism.

But after the last two days, I might start attending church again.

I'm so proud of my old church for electing Bishop Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop - she of the scientific mind, and the acceptance of evolution and the age of the universe, and the clear-sighted evaluation of what the church should be involved in - and then today they stood firm against the rest of the world-wide "communion" and refused to recant the election of Bishop Gene Robinson, to apologize and promise not to do it again. This "would have signaled that the American denomination understood the concerns of Anglican leaders".

I think they signaled that they understood the concerns - and rejected them decisively.

No going back to the Dark Ages. No return to hate and bigotry. Not for them.

Hell. Maybe not for us.

Breast Milk - Really That Miraculous?

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science Janet has an informative article about that breast-feeding brouhaha. She's looking at the actual studies (yes! Gasp! the actual studies!) used as its basis.

Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst). Will it surprise you that the data don't seem to support the conclusion that breastmilk has miraculous powers?

For instance - that 21% reduced risk of death?

But turn to the AAP's source. The scientific study used to support this claim found that babies who are nursed are less likely to die... of injuries!

Yep. As she asks, "Is this because breasts are softer than formula cans ... or is this one of those 'don't mistake correlation for causation moments?'"

And it gets better... or worse, as you choose to define it.

Go there now and read the whole post.

Another Old Boys Club gone...

Bishop Jefferts Schori said yesterday:

"Our primary emphasis needs to be feeding people, educating children and looking for healthcare for everybody."

What? What kind of Christian is this woman?

Oh, that's right... the caring kind.

And then there's this:

An oceanographer who studied squids and octopuses in the northeastern Pacific Ocean before going into the ministry in 1994, Jefferts Schori is considered a progressive. She supported the consecration three years ago of V. Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, as bishop of New Hampshire. She also has endorsed same-sex union rites in Nevada.

So, also the tolerant and loving kind.

And there's also this:

Her journey as "a person of faith and a trained scientist, begun in some struggle over how to understand the two of them together," she said.

As she read the works of great scientists such as Albert Einstein, she realized that scientists also "delighted in the rich mysteriousness" of all creation.

Science and theology are both ways of looking at the wonder and mystery of God's work, she said. "Scientists look to understand it. Theologians and people of faith look to understand the meaning behind life. I don't see why there needs to be a conflict."

So... also the rational kind.

Then I read this:

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion of which the Episcopal Church is a part, said in a statement Monday that the presiding bishop-elect had his "prayers and good wishes as she takes up a deeply demanding position at a critical time."

But at the same time, he noted that "her election will undoubtedly have an impact on the collegial life of the Anglican Primates, and it also brings into focus some continuing issues in several of our ecumenical dialogues."

And I think, what is it they get up to, those Primates, that they can't share with a girl? I'm trying to be charitable, but I'm hearing "oooo- girl cooties!"

And those issues? They kind of need to be in focus, you ask me...

And then there's people like this:

"We feel sorrow for her, as she inherits the tragedy of a fractured church that has lost its sense of mission and lost touch with its grass roots," said the Rev. Canon David Anderson, president of the Atlanta-based American Anglican Council. "What signal does this choice send to the faithful in the pew and to the Anglican Communion worldwide? The election of Presiding Bishop-elect Jefferts Schori only intensifies the current trajectory of the Episcopal Church."

What signal? Possibly the signal that bigotry and hate have no place in the church, and that those who preach it are unwelcome here.

Just sayin'...

[Anderson] also noted that her election would present problems for those who do not recognize the ordination of female priests.

Well, duh. Like I said.

The Episcopal Church consecrated its first woman bishop in 1989. A few male bishops "irregularly" ordained women as priests way back in 1974; the next year, the Canadian church regularized it and did it legally and the US Church followed suit in 1976. (Check here for a brief history of women as priests and bishops)

The US, Canada, and New Zealand churches have women bishops; a few other places have women priests; most have only men. But the call for churces where women are people - even if second-class people - to reject that notion and go back to considering them as lesser beings to whom God will never speak is, frankly, a load of crap. The church (any church) always follows, rather than leads, such social change. But that's no excuse for giving up and going even further back to suit the least advanced and tolerant among us.

Quotes here from K. Connie Kang in the LA Times, 20 June 2006.

I'm Nobody. Who are you? Are you Nobody, too?

Apologies to Emily Dickinson, but - This was my first thought as I listened to Deadeye Dick saying,

"I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered."

Oh?

Perhaps you meant, nobody who kept his job or your ear...

The Week in Entertainment

DVDs: Samurai Jack season3 and Count Duckula season 1. Yay! Finally out! (He won't harm beast or man 'cause he's a vegetarian, but things never run quite to plan for Duckula!) and continued with Planetes.

Read: The Inspector Ringwood novels by Katharine Farrer (The Missing Link, The Cretan Counterfeit, Gownsman's Gallows) and the Guy Northeast novels by Joanna Cannan (They Rang Up The Police and Death At The Dog). Started Bones, Rocks and Stars - The Science of When Things Happened.

Hindsight is 20-20, isn't that what they say?

Interesting news from the Gallup Poll folks today - looking back, more people think Clinton did a good job now than did four years ago. And Bush I is getting lower ratings - perhaps it's distaste by association?

The summary:

Kennedy gets the highest retrospective approval rating, at 84%. Ronald Reagan ranks second at 71%. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans approve of the jobs Jimmy Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Gerald Ford did as president. Only two presidents do not receive net positive retrospective ratings -- Lyndon Johnson, of whom 41% approve and 41% disapprove, and Nixon, of whom just 28% approve.

When Gallup last asked this question in March 2002, just 51% approved of Clinton's performance as president, 10 points lower than his current retrospective rating. In the 2002 poll, the elder Bush's rating was 69%, which, compared with the current 56%, has declined 13 points. Most other presidents' ratings have remained stable and are within a few points of their 2002 measurements. There has been a small but statistically significant change in Nixon's evaluations -- the current 28% rating is down from 34% in 2002 and is the lowest Gallup has ever measured for him on this question, which was first asked in 1990.

Re those Johnson numbers, a hefty 18% have no opinion on him - and that's down from 27% in 2002 and where most of the change over the last four years has come from. That 'no opinion' bloc has shrunk for everybody, though in some cases (like Clinton, from 2% to 1%) it was negligible to start with. (Interestingly, both Ford and Carter had their whole swing come from formerly no-opinion respondents, one up and one down. The others absorbed some in both directions.)

It's an interesting set of numbers. Take a look.

Hawaiian National Monument - a different slant

Although I joined Mike at the Questionable Authority's praise for W's creation of a new Marine Reserve in Hawai'i, I have to admit that this Tom Toles cartoon rings equally true:

Halfway There: Rooting for the Enemy

Two columns well worth the reading:

Over at Halfway There is an unsettling post called Rooting for the Enemy. It recalls a 1971 Art Hoppe column that began

The radio this morning said the Allied invasion of Laos had bogged down. Without thinking, I nodded and said, “Good.”

And having said it, I realized the bitter truth: Now I root against my own country.

Zeno goes on to discuss the parallels between that column's time and today's, which is, of course, to discuss the parallels between that time's war and today's:

We are frequently told it is a mistake to try to draw comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq, but comparisons are inevitable. Both conflicts were launched on pretexts later exposed as false (the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the case of Vietnam, the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” in the case of Iraq). In both wars critics of the federal administration were accused (and are being accused) of favoring the enemy. As Art Hoppe explained, however, “I don't root for the enemy.” Rather, “I hate what my country is doing....” Hoppe was rooting against the war and against the mendacious leaders who took us into it. The bitter truth is that the liars who lead us into disaster suffer no great consequences from their incompetence. We cannot take much satisfaction in being proved correct in our positions when confirmation comes in the form of casualties and body counts. George Bush ends up with lower approval numbers in the polls. The men and women in uniform end up dead or maimed in mind and body. Their suffering leaches all the smugness from shouting “I told you so, asshole!” at the president and his minions. We have anger. We do not have joy.

Zeno ends his post by saying:

I think I would be able to endure any embarrassment that I might experience if it were to turn out that Bush is the brilliant war leader that his apologists claim. It would be worth it. Rather than have the continuing opportunity to denounce a president I don't support, I'd much prefer to have my former students, based now in Iraq and Pakistan, back home safe and sound. When Bush screws up, they are the ones who get screwed.

Unfortunately, our nation's fate (and the world's) is to endure thirty months more of Bush disasters.

Hoppe ended his column by saying:

But I would hope the day will come when I can once again believe what my country says and once again approve of what it does. I want to have faith once more in the justness of my country's causes and the nobleness of its ideals.

What I want so very much is to be able once again to root for my own, my native land.

I'll end mine: what they said.

Note to self...

The next time you have an emerald table which will unleash an evil the likes of which the world has never known ... don't break it into four pieces and hide it around the world. Smash it into smithereens and grind it into dust.

Oh, yes - burn that black book, too.

And then me!

Swiss Family Robinson is on the tv while I'm working (what can I say? I like James MacArthur) and it's gotten to the scene where they're building their hill-fort to hold off the pirates, and my least favorite bit of dialog is still, somehow, in the movie (I keep hoping it'll vanish, somehow, but it never does).

"We'll keep the muskets for our last defense, and I'll give the order when to use them. Of course, if anything happens to me, Fritz will take charge, and then you, Ernst."

"And then me!"

"Yes, and then you, Francis."

Yes, Francis, then you, because after all a grown woman and an 18-year-old girl couldn't possibly be next in line before a ten-year-old boy.

Of course it's you.

And there's more to it than the blatant relegation of the women to the status of less than children. What a hideous burden to put on a small boy, if it were to happen.

I remember a moment in Shake Hands With The Devil, where Dallaire was talking about how he'd tossed that at his son, telling the fourteen-year-old boy that he'd have to be the "man of the family" if anything happened to him ... and how terribly that weighed on the boy when it became clear from the newscasts that Dallaire was in palpable, deadly danger. He wished he'd never laid that burden on a boy.

It's a cliché, of course, and I'll bet most people who say it or see it in movies don't take it seriously. It's all about bucking up the boy, and no one ever thinks about the damage to him - or to the women who are being treated as no-account.

But it's a piece of dialog I've never been able to stomach.

Someday, it'll be gone...

An Excellent Question

Tip of the hat to Number 80 who pointed me at this op-ed by Muriel Gray in the British paper The Sunday Herald. She's talking about police profiling - and wants to know who's at fault for it.

The difficulty is that it is the police’s job to discriminate, to act on hunches and preconceptions, and sometimes to judge quickly on appearances or tip-offs to try and bring their suspect before court. They are paid to be suspicious. Then it becomes the judiciary’s job to be blind to anything except hard evidence. One cannot police effectively with political correctness. If young religious fanatics are the ones who blow us up, then young religious fanatics who have no intention of blowing anyone up will nevertheless continue to be of more interest to the police than young farmers from Fife.

Read the whole thing - it's thought-provoking.

Happy Birthday, Barbara!

It's the birthday of one of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century, Barbara McClintock, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1902). She grew up in the semi-rural Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and, growing up, she was much more interested in playing sports with the boys of her neighborhood than she was in studying.

Unfortunately, McClintock's mother refused to let her attend college. So McClintock got a job at an employment agency and spent all her free time at the library. Her parents eventually realized that she wasn't going to come to her senses and get married any time soon, so they relented and let her study biology at Cornell University.

She became interested in the study of maize, or Indian corn, because its multicolored kernels showed visible evidence of genetic changes from one generation to the next. She became one of the first scientists to show that the visible traits of a plant were directly linked to the structure of its chromosomes.

Despite her revolutionary work, Cornell would not give her a faculty appointment, because she was a woman. A friend eventually got her a permanent research position at another school, and she was elected president of the Genetics Society of America, but her research into genetics was so radical that it was ignored by other scientists. Nobody accepted her theories. She eventually stopped publishing her work altogether.

It wasn't until the 1970s that molecular biologists with more sophisticated tools began to prove that Barbara McClintock's theories about genetics were correct, and suddenly she was seen as a visionary. In 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for the work that she had first published in 1951.

She said, "I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them."
---
This is taken from The Writer's Alamanac

The Three Commandments

Don't kill. Don't steal. Don't lie.

Congressman Lynn Westmoreland let Stephen Colbert interview him (I don't know why, I really don't). He wants to have the 10 Commandments posted in Congress because "the ten commandments is not a bad thing for people to know and respect. they are the basis of all laws" and "where better place could you have them than in a judicial building or in a courthouse?" Colbert asked him - leadingly - whether he couldn't think of a better building for them (er, a church?), but he couldn't. Colbert then asked why the 10 Commandments - because "if we are totally without them," Westmoreland explained earnestly, "we may lose the sense of our direction."

Colbert then asked him what they were. "What are all of 'em?" "Yes." "You want me to name them all?" "Yes." "All ten of them?" Colbert raised his fists in front for a count-off. Westmoreland gulped and tried. "Don't murder." One finger up. "Don't steal." Another. "Don't lie." A third ...

And that was it. That was it.

"I can't name 'em all."

After an uncomfortable pause, Colbert said, "Congressman, thank you for taking time away from your busy schedule to be with us tonight."

But this man wants to post a set of religious laws - and all he can name is the three that are actual crimes: murder, theft, and perjury. (He can't name the purely religious ones: have one god, no art or worshipping idols, no blasphemy/false oaths, keep sabbath to honor god; he can't name the ones telling us how to think: honor parents, don't covet; he can't even name the one that's often considered a crime, especially for women: don't commit adultery.)

He can name the three that are realio-trulio real live laws.

So let's post them. Anybody got a problem with that?

Updated June 17 with a link to the video

Bush Creates A National Marine Protected Area

Thanks to Mike at The Questionable Authority for this piece of good news!

Today, President Bush invoked the Antiquities Act to create the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument. In so doing, he has created the single largest marine protected area in the world - at 360,000 square kilometers, the new national monument is slightly larger than the 348,000 km² Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. This is absolutely fantastic news. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are a relatively untouched area with tremendous biological diversity.

...

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this act. This new area is seven times larger than the sum total of the other marine protected areas in the country. It contains the primary breeding areas for the Hawaiian Monk Seal (endangered) and the Hawaiian population of Green Sea Turtles (threatened). Midway Atoll, which is included in the monument, is the site of the largest albatross colony in the world - and that's just the above sea level parts. The coral reefs in the monument are in reasonably good shape. The islands and atols are largely uninhabited, and the ecosystem as a whole has suffered relatively little damage from human activities.

Keep checking with Mike, who plans "to put up posts about the individual islands, atols, reefs, and banks that make up the new monument."

He closes with a sentiment I agree with - both parts of it:

Right now, I'll close by saying something that I never expected to: President Bush, you done good this time.

Helping Schools Help Kids - the Science Blog Way

If you read any blogs over at Science Blogs, then you probably have seen this. In case you haven't - or you don't:

It was Janet's idea (from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and she got 18 other bloggers to join her. Go over, pick a blog and a cause (or shop for the cause and don't worry which blog) and donate. Anything will help, even as little as $10, because your money can be joined to others' to reach a goal.

All the goals are concrete, with firm price tags - and they range from books to cast skulls to science equipment to field trips, for all ages - these are things specific teachers from specific classes need. I know you can find something you'll want to help support.

Run over to Adventures in Ethics and Science's Challenge Post and help some kids get ahead.

And why should we want to stay together?

NPR just told me that the National Convention of the Episcopal Church is contemplating a temporary ban on gay bishops in order to preserve the unity of the Church.

Note: I was raised Episcopal, my parents still are, I do have a dog in this fight, even if it's a scrawny one due to my current state of not exactly believing anything.

My question - and it's always been my question, and may have led to my current status as a freethinker - is simple: Why should People A, who believe in something, even want to be part of the same thing as People B, who think that People A are wrong and heinous and sinful? Especially if the only way that People A can be part of it is to renounce what they believe and pretend to think like People B? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that why there are several hundred versions of Protestantism?

To get specific, if you think that women are just as likely to be called by God to be priests, why would you want to belong to a Church that teaches the exact opposite of that? Likewise, if you believe that gays can be elected bishops - which obviously means you believe gays can be called by God to be priests - why would you want to be part of a Church which teaches the opposite?

Especially if you've already elected a gay man to be your bishop. What happens to Bishop Robinson and those who elected him if this ban is put into place? What happens to the other gay people in the church - what is this lesson? That being part of a bigoted organization is so important that you must deny what God has told you is the truth? Or that well, we all made a mistake and he's not really a bishop? Or what, exactly?

Anyway, I've never understood why the least progressive, most reactionary, most intolerant in a Church should be the ones who everyone else caters to - out of some need for "unity".

I don't want to be in "union" with people like that.

Ecumenism is all well and good, but if it's carried to its logical end - the end the RC Church demands - the only way there'll be any world-wide church is if we all go back to RC teachings and forget everything we've learned since then.

Roots of US war prisoners' rights run deep

Hat Tip to Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory for a pointer to this splendid op-ed by Robert Norton in the Christian Science Monitor.

Norton examines the treatment of prisoners of war in the Revolution, citing Washington and Hamilton, both of whom refused to maltreat either British or Loyalist/Tory prisoners. He admits that some of their motivation was pragmatic, and that today's American leaders don't have to worry about what will happen to them personally if they lose, but then says:

What they overlook, of course, is that the moral high ground is still there to be taken - or lost. And as long as "Abu Ghraib" and "Guantánamo Bay" remain in the international lexicon, tyrants around the world can laugh off criticism of their actions coming from American leaders - after all, America understands that desperate times call for inhumane measures, right?

Certainly the idea that the despots in Central Asia, for example, can cite our behavior to justify theirs means that the moral high ground is, if not lost outright, near to it.

And let's not have that straw man about releasing terrorists. We're asking that they be tried, not turned loose. We're asking that they be held responsible for their actions.

As we will be for ours.

Five Times as Important as TWOT and Iraq

Over at Ebonmuse's Daylight Atheism is a post reflecting on the current right-wing hysteria over gay marriage. One point made:

But the prize for hysteria must surely go to Republican strategist Jack Burkman, said that the gay marriage issue is "five times as important as the war on terror and the war in Iraq combined". Can we take this to mean that, if given a choice between preventing both 9/11 and the Iraq war and banning gay marriage, the Republicans would choose the latter without hesitation? Do they really believe that their vendetta against homosexuals is more important than over 5500 American lives? I have often said that one of the primary evils of religion is that it convinces people to value dogma over human life, but even I am stunned by the brazenness with which the religious right proclaims its allegiance to that same principle.

It's a long post - too long to summarize with justice. But it's a well-written, well-argued, and (I think) important post.

Please go and read it.

Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats!

Yeats, born today in 1865

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Secrets: Should they be published?

Over at Unclaimed Territory, Hume's Ghost has an excellent post on the ethics and necessity for newspapers publishing things the government would rather they didn't. Along with quotes from the Founders which amply show that (as usual) they knew exactly what they were doing* when they established Freedom of the Press, he covers Robert Kaiser's Washington Post editorial which sparked his essay, including the very important point that "secrecy and security are not the same."

He quotes Kaiser's list of things that have been revealed that the White House intended to keep secret.

Thanks to resourceful reporters, we have learned a great deal about the war that the administration apparently never intended to reveal: that the CIA never could assure the White House that Saddam Hussein's Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction; that U.S. forces egregiously abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib; that the United States had a policy of rendering terrorism suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where torture is commonplace; that the United States established secret prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorism suspects; that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants on the phone calls of countless Americans, as well as keeping track of whom Americans called from home and work.

Both of them tackle Gonzales and then Hume's Ghost goes off on some tangents of his own.

But the main thrust of the post is simple and (I think) undeniable: It is the press's job to watch the government, not abet it, because with this sort of reporting We the People have no chance to control the government and will, instead, be controlled by it. And that's not what our country was set up to be.

As always at Unclaimed Territory, the comments that follow offer some equally good information and discussion.

* To listen to many people, particularly on the godless Constitution issues, you'd think the Founders cranked the Constitution out in a couple of hours, with no input and less thought. It took time, and they were careful, and you can believe it - because you can find the sources - that people pointed it out to them. You may not agree with what they did, but they quite certainly knew what they were about.

Headed for trouble? Or are we?

I ran across this on the Prairie Home Companion web site, in a letter to GK:

I hope for their sake you're a tough grader, since a nation that loses the distinction between "lie" and "lay" in its own language is surely headed for trouble.

Are we?

English has thousands of verbs where the transitive and intransitive forms are identical. Are we really "headed for trouble" if we lose that distinction in a couple more pairs? (I say a couple, because although no one ever complains about it, I hear "sit" and "set" being used interchangeably, too. And, in fact, I've seen an increase in transitive "rise", as in this Terry Bradshaw - Tiki Barber exchange earlier this year:

Bradshaw: "Tiki, I've noticed it seems you're able to elevate your game when the Giants play against team's featuring the league's elite running backs… Tell me if there something subconsciously inside of you that says, ‘Hmm. I'm going to rise it up a little today.'"

Barber:"Without a doubt. When going up top-flight backs on this league, and Larry Johnson is fast becoming one of those, you want to raise your game to the next level and outplay that person.

"Rise/raise" are exactly parallel to "lie/lay", and it looks like we're losing that distinction, too ... really headed for trouble.

Or just losing the difference between transitive and intransitive forms of these small set of verbs, the verbs of placement. English is a language which is (as all languages are) changing through time. One of the changes English is undergoing is a massive loss of grammatical inflections, and a use of word order to make those distinctions.

People complain (and often violently) about those changes that occur during their lifetime, but I've yet to hear any of these folks who go ballistic over "between John and I" complain about the fact that "John" is no longer marked for case. Or, for that matter, that "you" and "it" have no objective form any longer (or rather, that "you" has no subject form and "it" no object). Nor do they complain about having only one verb conjugation (he knows, but all others, singular and plural, know) where once we had several (I wit, thou woost, he woot, they wooten for example). Or about any of the many, many other "distinctions" lost over the centuries. Instead they focus on those lost since they started paying attention.

But surely the distinction between "lie" and "lay" is important? Yes, but do we need different verbs to make it? That's the question. "Lie" is intransitive; it takes no object. "I lie on the beach." "Lay" is transitive; it takes an object. "The hen lays eggs." That the past tense of "lie" is "lay" adds to the confusion between forms, of course, but not fatally. After all, the word order and context in the sentence make it very clear whether the transitive or intransitive meaning is meant. If it's the transitive, the object is supplied. The sarcastic "You lay on the beach? What are you, a hen?" is just that, sarcastic - that "lie" was meant is clear to all who hear it, otherwise there would be honest confusion, and there never is.

The distinction between "I raise" and "I rise" is likewise context driven. You're not likely to confuse them.

I'm not arguing for the loss - the ability to say "I raise" without needing to supply the object is a nice one, though hardly earth-shaking. And, come to think of it, losing the confusion between "lie" and "lie" could arguably be worth it - though we'll lose a lot of puns.

I'm only asking, are we really headed for trouble because of it? At all, let alone "surely"?

Or is this just another case of language change being resisted to the death?

The Week in Entertainment

Film: A Prarie Home Companion - what a delightful movie!

TV: Doctor Who, the season finale (not 'series' finale - the Brits use 'series' where we use 'season'). Wow - that about covers it. (But poor Captain Jack!)

DVD: not much this week... a bit of Planetes

Read: a big box came from Rue Morgue Press, and I overindulged in four vintage mysteries featuring "Lady Lupin", two "Inspector Ringwoods", and one "Mrs Bradley". Also, Dead Connection

Takes one to know one

Michael Abramowitz reports on W in Omaha, talking immigration... and taking one oddly resonant shot at Hugo Chavez:

Bush took an unexpected shot at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with whom the administration has long been at odds. Told by one woman at the center, Lourdes Secola, that she was from Venezuela, Bush said he is worried about her country.

"I think it will be okay," Bush told Secola. "But it's going to take awhile. Sometimes leaders show up who do a great disservice to the traditions and people of a country."

Yeah. Sometimes guys like that show up... Here's hoping the US can get past ours.

The Intolerance That Hides Its Face In Darkness

I'm linking to this post at Brent Rasmussen over at UTI's request - because I agree with his points - both of them.

If you're a religous camp, like this Kenesserie Camp is, then yes - you have a perfect right to vet your counselors and fire any that don't match up to your doctrinal requirements. Hell, yes.

But if you do, then you need to have the courage of those convictions and admit it when you fire an atheist for being an atheist, not lie about it and not threaten to sue the atheist for slander when she reports what happened.

If it's the right thing to do, stand up for it. If you can't stand up for it, maybe you know it's not the right thing...

That's a boring tatoo...

Wiley's Non Sequitur is sometimes odd, often funny, and today poignant and pointed.

Happy Birthday, Ben!

Ben Jonson, born this day in 1573, a contemporary and in his day peer of Shakespeare and John Donne... An orphan, victim of religious persecution (his Protestant father was executed by Mary), a soldier for the Protestant cause in Holland and by all repute a formidable swordsman, a man of fiery temper who killed another playwright in a duel and nearly hanged for it, who lost several children to childhood deaths (including the son he called 'his best piece of poetry'), an immensely popular poet and playwright who courted prison for his political views and yet was a poet at the Stuart court, who reigned supreme among English writers long after Shakespeare had died until his own death at the age of 64...

A Hymn to Diana:

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright.

Angry, scary men in black

So - I went to the Muvico Egyptian 24 at Arundel Mills today to see A Prarie Home Companion (which I enjoyed very much), and on road outside the mall proper (which is private property) there was a large group of men (possibly some women, across the street, but I couldn't tell) wearing black suits and carrying black and red banners and chanting one line over and over (Holy Mary pray for us sinners! now and at the hour of our death (emphasis very definitely theirs)), and carrying signs and posters urging us to honk if we hated the blasphemous film The DaVinci Code, telling us that blasphemy in fiction was still blasphemy, and other such slogans.

I don't know who they were. I presume they were Catholics. I wonder if they were from Opus Dei, or some other group.

I was sorely tempted to pick up several copies of the book at the BAM there and hand (or toss) them to the guys when we left (just as well I didn't, as they were gone by the time we left the mall). But there were far too many of them, and they were intimidating - all these guys, dressed alike, chanting and waving signs, and getting angry when we didn't honk (we were stuck there for the entire cycle of the light, trying to make a left turn, and they were on the median strip, not a yard away, so we couldn't avoid eye-contact entirely) - any interaction with them was definitely contra-indicated. They didn't want a conversation: they wanted compliance.

So we didn't talk to them. But what I thought - and said to my friend - was, "This is why we don't want them in charge of the country."

I mean - blasphemy? They want the movie banned because it's blasphemous? What next - shutting down the Harry Potter franchise? Plenty of Christians feel that's blasphemous, after all.

I get it: they feel their faith has been insulted by the movie (the book, too, I imagine, though they aren't out there picketing bookstores). But it's not enough for them to refuse to watch the movie. Those guys want to shut that movie down. They probably want to ban the book as well, but again, these fellows weren't out there saying "Honk if you hate the blasphemous book". It's the movie that has them agitated.

I understand that - a picture's worth a thousand words, and more people watch movies than read books, even best-selling novels. You don't have to be a reader-for-pleasure (and many people aren't) to see a movie. You don't even have to be literate. Movies are pictures, and pictures are 'realer' than mere words. Movies are a much, much bigger threat than books.

That's why they picket the movie, but not the book, though several of their signs aren't true of the movie. It doesn't deny Jesus's divinity (question it, yes, but not deny it), and neither of them deny the Crucifixion. The source material may deny that, but nowhere in Dan Brown's stuff is the charge made that Jesus faked his death. Mary Magdalene fled to Europe "after the Crucifixion" and alone, not with her husband... But of course, to question is, for people like this, tantamount to denial. And questioning cannot be allowed.

I imagine that these guys wish they were back in charge of movies, with the "Hays" Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency, but it's been since the early 50s that they had that kind of clout - and since the movies were considered not to have First Amendment status, for that matter. So they have the right not to watch the movie, or buy the book, but that's not good enough. They don't want anyone else to watch or read, either.

I'm sorry their faith is so easily bruised. But that's their problem. And I mean that: it's not my problem. If I don't believe in their god I can't blaspheme; blasphemy is "indignity offered to God in speaking, writing, or signs" according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. (Merriam-Webster, 2002) and you can't offer an idignity to something that doesn't exist. Or do they admit that their (Catholic, as evidenced by the DECLARATION "DOMINUS IESUS" ON THE UNICITY AND SALVIFIC UNIVERSALITY OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE CHURCH made by Pope John Paul II in 2000, which explicitly calls the Roman Catholic Church the "one true religion") opposition and condemnation of other gods is, indeed, blasphemy against them?

Blasphemy should not be a crime that the state is concerned with. As Thomas Jefferson remarked, "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." In this country, a person's religion is between himself and his god(s) and is no one else's business. Setting up blasphemy laws - even such mild ones as the Production Code - violates the firm belief of our Founders that the further government was held from religion, the better off religion would be. After all, the power to sanction cuts both ways, and once government is allowed to choose one religion, it's been granted the power to choose another.

The arrogance of groups like these picketeers apparently prohibits them from seeing that they could fall victim to this themselves - what happens if the country tilts way to the fundamentalist Protestant side? Praying to Mary as they were doing (even though such mindless chanting is far from prayer in my book) is blasphemous to many Protestants - an irony of the whole DaVinci Code phenomenon is that with all its talk of "the sacred feminine" Mary the mother of Christ, whose devotion is the Catholic answer to goddess worship, is completely ignored (although the Magdalene is merely the sacred womb, mother of Jesus's heir, not a divinity in her own right, just Mary at one remove). The mere existence of a statue or a crucifix could become blasphemous - many's the Protestant theologian who thinks Catholic saints' statues are idols and prohibited by the Ten Commandments. They don't think like that - they (and their Protestant brethren (cousins?)) refuse to understand the wisdom of the Founders' decision to quarantine religion from the government - for the protection of both institutions. Instead, they want the right to force everyone to behave as if they were members of their sect(s).

Blasphemy is an internal religious offense. It is not a civil offense, much less a criminal one, not in this country at any rate, not now. And never again. Never again must any religion be able to force others to speak as though they believe its tenets.

(The good news is, only one car passing them in that entire time actually honked.)

Bang! Another Paradigm Gone... (and that's a Good Thing©)

From Number 80 I found out about this article by Joe Eaton, archived at the Berkely Daily Planet. It's about grass, and lizards and snakes and venom, and discovery.

It's also about science, and how it works. It starts out like this:

Anyone else remember the Firesign Theater’s record “Everything You Know is Wrong”? You get that feeling if you follow science at all closely. One day the earth is solid and stable; the next, the continents are whizzing around the mantle like bumper cars. You learn that the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and then it turns out you just had one for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the paradigm shift, and it just keeps happening.

Before talking about lizards, the article also goes into some detail about just when grass showed up - and the evidence that it was much earlier than we thought, which impacts our notion of the "evolution of herbivorous mammals. Unspecialized leaf-browsers died out, and lineages that evolved teeth capable of processing the tiny bits of silica in the grass blades—horses, for one—throve." Not so - and how exciting!

Then he moves on to a close look at the discovery that it's not just a couple of lizards that are venomous, but most - though not venomous enough to damage large animals, just the tiny things they eat. A complete and radical re-evaluation of lizard-snake evolution is called for:

Snakes, of course, are just highly specialized lizards, having shared a relatively recent common ancestor with the Komodo dragon and other members of the monitor family. And venom glands are a widely shared, although not universal, trait among snakes. ...

The exceptions to the venom trend are mostly constrictors like the boas and pythons, who squeeze the life out of their victims. Because of anatomical features like vestigial hindlegs, they’re considered to be primitive among snakes. So it made sense to see venom and its delivery system as characteristics that more progressive snakes evolved.

But then "University of Melbourne biologist Bryan Fry, who studies the evolution of snake venom", began actually looking at lizards - and found out they're venomous as well, or many of them, including the Komodos and other monitors. So it looks like we have to rethink our ideas of snake evolution:

So there goes another paradigm. And that’s fine; that’s the way science is supposed to work, what distinguishes science from theology. Any scientific theory is potentially falsifiable. Someone once asked JBS Haldane what he would consider as clenching disproof of evolution. “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”, he replied. Fair enough; if those 600 million-year-old rabbits ever turn up, science will have some explaining to do. But no rabbit, fossil or otherwise, is ever going to convince the acolytes of faith-based pseudoscience that their belief in intelligent design is misplaced. [emphasis mine]

Indeed.

And one more thing:

You will note that no 'established' scientists are attacking Fry, or the "botanist named Caroline Stromberg at the Swedish Natural History Museum" who did the work that brought down the conventional wisdom on the Miocene triumph of the grasses. Scientists really are thrilled when they're proved wrong (key word here: proved).

And that's what distinguishes scientists from theologians, to paraphrase Eaton. Science and scientists welcome challenge and accept changes to the received notion - because it was received from other scientists. Theologians won't even hear challenges - vide heresy laws and death sentences for blasphemy.

Of course, if you want to challenge the dominant paradigm in science, you have to have done the work and the results to show. In the words of Robert Park: "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."

But scientists will listen to you.

The paradigm will shift.

Learning will advance - and we with it - as long as we choose science, not faith.