Blue Collar Scientist

The Institute for Creation Research has released an enemies list, apparently as a tribute to the deep paranoia of Nixonian politics they engage in. It contains some interesting tidbits. It is mostly the usual collection of misleading quote-mining lying by misquoting others, but a few points had me laughing.

For example, about Dawkins - their Enemy Number One - they say:

It is no wonder that Dawkins has elsewhere concluded that “life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” If this is what evolution offers, can there be any other result but despair?

Any other result but despair? Let us read from the Bible. Please open the good book to Ecclesiastes 11:8, and read along with me:

Indeed, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but it seems pretty clear to me who is purveying despair, and it isn’t Richard Dawkins.

Under Eugenie Scott’s entry, they trot out the tired old lie that creationists have been retreading since the 1860’s:

[T]here has been no observable scientific evidence for macroevolution.

Of course there have been; at one web page alone, you can learn about no less than 29 observed instances of evolutionary speciation, complete with citations to the scientific literature. One wonders, if they are right in their claim that evolution is false, why they have to lie about the scientific findings on evolution all the time….

But that’s not really my point here. I want to return to the bible again. Please attend to Genesis 1:11:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit….

Sadly, the ICR doesn’t respect its own sources. If you read that, you surely noted that the bible does not say that god created plants. The text clearly states that plants were to be brought forth by the Earth. This is a clear example of biogenesis, the transition of inorganic material to advanced organic life.

And let us also look at 1 Corinthians 15:45:

So also it is written, “The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.

A strong endorsement of the naturalistic world view that science, and evolutionary theory, represents. Naturalism comes first; without it, the bible says you can’t have spiritualism.

They move on to PZ Myers, and lead with their chin ignorance:

Although many other evolutionists are active “evangelists” in the world today, P. Z. Myers deserves a mention because of his prolific presence in cyberspace, mainly through blogs on his website Pharyngula.

I was under the impression that Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, is at Scienceblogs. Shows you what I know.

They don’t really say anything in the Myers section about their beliefs, so there’s no way to consult the final authority (the Bible) on the truth of their claims. So, disappointed, I will simply have to bring this posting to a close.

When the intense heat of a forest fire or volcano warms the humid air above, the air rises to a point of stability, generally within a humid layer of atmosphere. The phenomenon creates what is known as a pyrocumulus cloud¹.

When the cloud gets so big, and so turbulent, that it exhibits electrical activity, it graduates to pyrocumulonimbus status.

That’s what’s happening at Chaitén, the volcano in Chile that has been erupting recently. And some photographers are taking some spectacular photos of the phenomenon, like this one picked up by National Geographic, and this one by an uncredited photographer.

The last decent-sized pyrocumulus that I saw was while I was hiking on the Iceberg Notch trail in Glacier National Park in northern Montana. A small forest fire on the nearby Blackfeet Indian Reservation created a pyrocumulus, the turbulence and winds of which quickly whipped the fire into a huge conflagration. After my hike was over, it graduated to pyrocumulonimbus status, giving us a nice electrical display as we tried to get back to our rental cabin on a road that went right through the firefighters’ central command and even a small corner of the fire itself. Quite exciting.

1. Nuclear detonations, and sometimes industrial activities, can also create these clouds. [↩]

It takes three minutes to explain the evolution of the eye.

It only takes an intelligent design creationist three seconds to say “it is still too complex to have evolved.”

Ken Miller has written an op-ed for the Boston Globe that all should read.

There have been two pretty high profile cases of teachers being fired recently, and I thought it was time to comment on both.

The first one involves the firing of substitute teacher Jim Piculas in Florida for engaging in a bit of performance art. Piculas performed a pretty standard magic trick in his classroom, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear. Years ago when I was a kid I did a trick like this; that means, by definition, that it is a beginner’s trick and one that just about anyone can learn.

Piculas probably did the trick because such things are encouraged by education experts as ways of gaining the attention of the class, regulating the classroom, and winning the respect of the kids. I’ve seen such advice dispensed at several educational conferences. If you do a google search, you will find 420,000 references to classroom management and magic tricks. Many of the pages advocate using magic in the classroom, especially for substitute teachers like Piculas; for example one suggests performing tricks as rewards:

If you have special kid friendly talents, sometimes these can be used as great classroom management techniques! If you can play the guitar, bring that in with you and play for them when they are working quietly…. If you know some magic tricks, that works well in the same way. Show them one at the beginning of class, and then offer to show them more as rewards. Juggling can be used in the same way, if this is something you are capable of doing.

Even religious school authorities advocate magic tricks in the classroom, although in this case the trick is being performed by the kids:

Pastoral Care Day at our school takes place at the end of every term. Children may choose to sing a song, recite a poem, read a short story, crack a joke or say a riddle, share an invention, show their art work, put on a one-minute skit, dance or sing to music, play on an instrument, do a magic trick, etc.

Suffice it to say, performing magic tricks in the classroom is a widely sanctioned professional activity amongst teachers, and it has a very important role in classroom management. You don’t have to go far at all to find experienced educators advocating such performances.

And the key here is performance. Magic performers¹ know that what they do is performance art, and they don’t claim - in fact they specifically deny - that they are using supernatural forces to accomplish the illusion. However, that is not the stance that the Pasco County School District has taken - they’ve specifically accused Piculas of engaging in wizardry. And if they are responding to a student’s complaint via its parents - well, maybe they ought to re-evaluate what they are teaching in this school district. Normal people know magic isn’t real.

I suppose it would be going too far to say that the school district has established a religious test for employment - their issue is that engaging in wizardry is unacceptable in their schools, not, apparently, being a wizard. But one wonders about the edge cases. Christians are allowed to pray in schools; is disappearing a toothpick and then re-appearing it significantly more disruptive than a teacher who retreats into an internal mental world to have a chat with the creator of the universe? I wonder what kind of hay a lawyer could make of this situation. Of course Piculas, who probably wants to be able to get other jobs, would be wise not to take on such an experiment unless he’s looking to change careers. Opposing the establishment will get you blackballed.

And that leads us to our other case. Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies teacher who teaches units on constitutional freedoms, was fired from her job for not taking a loyalty oath exactly as written in the California constitution. Gonaver is a Quaker, and hence a pacifist. The loyalty oath, which dates from the McCarthy era, requires that those who take it defend the Constitution of the United States and of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

As that language is the same language used in the loyalty oaths that are taken by people who are shortly going to be sent out to kill America’s enemies, Gonaver wanted to include a statement that she would do so non-violently. This is permitted by other state institutions, but not by hers, who chose to take a hard line on the matter. They even claim that adding or supplementing material that explains an oath-taker’s interpretation of the oath is against the law. Presumably we’re to be grateful that Gonaver wasn’t thrown into jail for declaring her intention to commit a crime and recruiting conspirators.

It is not the first time the institution has pulled hard-line tactics. Marianne Kearney-Brown took the oath, but inserted the word “nonviolently” into it before she signed it. She was fired for her trouble. Kearney-Brown is a math teacher who specializes in teaching math-phobic and otherwise not math-inclined students, so there’s a depressingly urgent need for her and people like her to be able to get jobs teaching math. Her case gathered enough media attention that she was eventually rehired.

The main effect that California’s loyalty oath has on state hiring is to exclude Quakers and Jehova’s Witnesses from employment. Apparently, the oath also makes reference to god, but a state supreme court case struck that down, allowing atheists, agnostics, and polytheists to get jobs in state government in California.

One might also mention that if you have to take an oath to get the job, that would appear (at least to the oath-taker) to be taking an oath under duress. I’m not sure that’s going to be particularly effective at rooting out commies, or barring people who won’t take up guns and kill people the state says are bad. Only principled commies or pacifists will be stopped. Spies and traitors, if there really are any² will slip through.

In any case, these three examples serve to illustrate the same point. The government can’t seem to figure out that it shouldn’t impose religious tests on employment, and is stupefied by the idea that it should impose tests of merit instead. The sooner this generation of bureaucratic dunderheads goes off to their retirement, the better.

1. Excepting Yuri Geller and a few other such frauds. [↩]
2. We really only hear about them from political delusionaries who make their livings by smearing people for supposedly believing weird things; the real spies and traitors get rooted out periodically by the FBI and are generally shown to have been working for money. [↩]

It is almost too tempting to avoid making a Jenny McCarthy joke here, so I’m going to avoid it by the skin of my teeth. I’ll just point you to this bit of news.

In another sign pointing to an inherited component to autism, a study released on Monday found that having a schizophrenic parent or a mother with psychiatric problems roughly doubled a child’s risk of being autistic.

“Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism,” said Julie Daniels of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who worked on the study.

“We also saw higher rates of depression and personality disorders among mothers, but not fathers,” she said in a statement.

This study has a pretty big n - 1,227 children with autism, compared with families of 31,000 children without autism.

The result is not new; previous studies have supported the conclusions. This study appears in Pediatrics.

No one knows what causes autism, but researchers think it is likely that several genes and possibly environmental factors contribute.

The Discovery Institute has written more anti-semitic Holocaust revisionism, this time slandering a recently-passed resolution of the Methodist Church. The DI says:

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

So the Discovery Institute says, among other things, that eugenics specifically comes from Charles Darwin.

Contrast this with what the Methodists’ well-researched resolution actually says:

The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England.

Darwinian eugenics, huh?

Poor creationists. They can’t tell the difference between the name Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. No surprise, I guess; they seem to be unable to understand considerably simpler biological concepts.

Hat tip to Bay of Fundie, who has a more complete takedown.

Well, it just seemed like some kind of warning was in order.

I’ve been gone for just over a week to southern Arizona to do some observatory work, but I got back into Anchorage Wednesday night, and I can now say that I’m mostly almost recovered from the experience, at least in superficial ways.

I have one more video to put up relating to the trip - all the footage was made in Arizona, but I didn’t have time to get it edited and posted before I left. I’m expecting that to appear sometime Friday, but it will probably be late. There will also be new posts to this blog starting at about 8:00 AM EDT, just a few hours from now.

I will also be editing some pictures of Rebeccawatson and sending them to Rebecca Watson, and to a newspaper that keeps bugging me about them; and I think I’ve uncovered the discovery images of Philplait; Phil has patiently been waiting for them for more than a month. I’ll be posting those here in due time.

Other than that, I have unpacking, laundry, photo tripod assembly, the editing of an all-sky, all-night time lapse movie that I made while I was on the trip, and a number of household chores to catch up on. And even though the time difference is only an hour, I have to admit that the big honking travel day that it takes to get here exhausts me. I think I’ll be soundly and long for a few nights.

The trip was highly productive. I installed a new high-level control system with a number of new features and nearly 10,000 lines of new code, and saw it perform flawlessly while I was there. This is in part due to the ability to test the code while running the ASCOM suite under Windows XP on my MacBook under VMWare, whilst doing the actual development on the MacBook using native Mac OSX text editors, which - get this - are better development editors even for Microsoft proprietary languages like Visual Basic. I’m mainly talking about BBEdit, which frankly is so superior to any other text editor I’ve used that I consider it useless to look any further.

And yes, I’m even editing compiled Visual Basic (6 and .net) code modules with this editor. Of course I’m still designing VB interfaces¹ with Visual Studio under Windows, but otherwise, there’s no point to this that I can see. (Disclaimer: Intellisense has never worked in my IDE under six different platforms, so maybe if it did work, I would be singing a different tune.)

I also installed an AppleTV in the observatory’s entertainment room, updated some old networking stuff, evaluated the telescope for proper collimation (it was fine, requiring no adjustment), advised on the reproduction of some century-old photographs, and visited Tom Kaye’s observatory and paleo lab, an experience that is likely to affect me for a long time. I also smashed bugs and deployed new versions of two other programs that I write - a simple utility for adding targets to the scheduler, and a little gadget that is part of the image analysis pipeline that makes sure everything is formatted just-so for the Minor Planet Center. Basically, I was busy practically every moment of the trip. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve also taken a new commission: Automating milli-magnitude photometry - both image acquisition and reduction - from the 32″ at the observatory. This shall be an interesting project. Interesting project indeed. If this works out, gents, I expect my name on some of the exoplanet papers you guys are going to publish. Just so we’re clear. :-)

<gross>

While I was in southern Arizona, the humidity dipped most days to around 12%, which leads to nosebleeds and rock-hard bloody snot stuck in both the near and far reaches of the sinus areas. This is of course profoundly uncomfortable, and it seems I’m especially prone to the problem for some reason. I’m pleased to report that 30 hours back in Anchorage has worked that problem out.

</gross>

So anyway, I’m back in AK. And it is nice to be getting back to the routine.

1. When I have to design an interface, that is - most of my software are black boxes with no user interfaces, just .net or COM+ programmatic interfaces. [↩]

I just thought I’d mention, for anyone going through Tucson in the near future, that if you sit out in front of the Delta ticketing counter and select the “linksys” ssid, you might well find that you can reach the intertubes.

I’ve finally completed the video about data reduction at Junk Bond Observatory. In this video, we answer the question of how Junk Bond Observatory got its name, and provide a demonstration of what our images look like and how we turn them into scientific results. The demonstration by Dave is followed by a higher-resolution screen recording to show you the details, so stick with it to the end if you are interested in seeing the images up close. (And yes, I know this isn’t the best way - I’ve been learning whole new continents of my computing system doing this, a