I am … unhindered by talent

I’ve just spent way too long flailing away in the horribly cramped confines of 150 words trying to write a letter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on the whole ID-in-schools silliness. I wrote about a zillion drafts, and WeatherGirl expertly poked holes in one after another, sending me back to the drawing board time after time. Gotta love having a wonderful editor across the kitchen table, but it’s darn frustrating when you just want to get the thing done and turn it in. Fuss, whine, moan - rinse until done.

So, after much work, we’ve gotten to here:

In his 23 April piece, Dave Eaton is clearly unable to critically examine the complexities of the “Intelligent Design” debate or understand the underlying scientific issues. He starts by seriously misrepresenting the state of the debate in evolutionary biology in a desperate attempt to create the illusion of a crisis when none exists. He then suggests that ID should have some place in our science curriculum. Yet Paul Nelson, a major spokesperson for the ID cause, recently admitted in a talk here at UM-Morris that to date ID had no scientifically testable hypotheses to offer.

Until ID can bring such hypotheses to the table, it should not and cannot play a meaningful role in our science curriculum. ID may have a useful role to play in a course on creation myths, but not in our children’s science courses.

Thoughts or suggestions are most welcome, although I’ll need to send this off tomorrow night (Sunday, 1 May).

For those with a twisted interest in the painful birth pangs of this letter (and as evidence for my students and son when they complain about all my scribbles on their work), I’m actually including an abridged history below the fold of how we ended up with this draft.

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I just heard that Bernice Johnson Reagon (see my earlier piece on her talk Tuesday) will be visiting our humble KUMM radio show (”Unhindered by Talent“) this Sunday from 2-4pm as part of her time here as our first Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Wow, I’m so totally nervous and intimidated. But it’ll be really cool.

What should we play? What should we talk about? I’ve got to talk to WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy about this ASAP!

If you’re within 30 feet of campus you can listen on-air at 89.7FM. For those of you out in the distant lands you can listen on-line at kumm.org. Feel free to send us questions via e-mail (”request” at kumm.org) or IM (”kummdj” on AIM) during the show and we’ll pass them along. Thanks!

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We’ve had a crazy and wonderful week or two for arts this week. Last week and this week was Cootie Shots (where Sub-Evil Boy publicly declares that I’m “exceedingly weird”, to the great amusement of the audience) with all the attendant hullaballoo.

Monday was the 5th and 6th grade band concert which was extremely impressive, especially since the vast majority of the 5th graders had never played their instrument 9 months ago. Something like that could be pretty painful, the worst kind of parental duty, but it was a truly enjoyable evening of music. Dot Vick does a truly remarkable job with that program and is a real asset to our community.

Tuesday was Bernice Johnson Reagon as reported earlier.

Then last night was the opening of Peter Pan, with our Sub-Evil as John Darling (Wendy’s brother). This was a great show, and the enormous amount of work that they’ve put in over the last two months really shows. The kids were confident and fun, and it was a wonderful evening. Jeremy Hance deserves big props for his excellent script, and David Johnson did a remarkable job as director, pulling together that huge production and cast and complex sets and costuming, and really making it happen in the end. The many elementary school kids (Peter, Wendy and John and Michael Darling, the Lost Boys) really held their own with the (very talented) high school students (the Darling parents and Nana, Hook and the Pirates, the Indians). The photo is Otto (left, as a Lost Boy) and Sub-Evil mugging it up.

All is further evidence of what a great thing we have going here, and how important things like the levy are to preserve and continue these wonderful traditions.

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In case you need to know the date or time, this has got to be one of the coolest ways of helping you out that I’ve run across recently. It reminds me of WeatherGirl’s art in a weird way…

Ellery gets the cookie for the pointer, although it was to a copy on someone else’s site that has (legally questionable?) copies of a number of other interesting clock/time animations (e.g., here, there, and elsewhere).

The yugop.com folks appear to have all kinds of crazy toys and one could waste way too much time there…

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Lance Fortnow had a real go at the MIT students that got the bogus paper accepted at the SCI conference.

I would consider someone who intentionally submits a bogus paper to STOC guilty of academic fraud. Why are these MIT students any different?

I (and many of the people who’ve commented on his blog) think there’s a big difference. Fraud implies some serious intent to “get away with something”, to pass one thing off as another. Anyone who spent 2 minutes reading their paper would immediately realize that this isn’t a real paper. They might be confused regarding the intent, but they would know instantly and absolutely that the authors weren’t even trying to fool anyone into thinking that it was a real piece of science. The papers that SCIgen churns out are about as subtle as a Three Stooges film, and that’s not fraud, that’s parody. Parody is a crucial tool in the toolkit of those looking to expose shams and shallow thinking, and as such I think the students’ actions were completely reasonable.

P.S. One of the comments on Fortnow’s blog points to this fascinating piece on the The Bogdanoff Affair. One might perhaps argue that academics (including scientists) have some obligation to make some sense in our writing and speaking, and that we should demand no less when reviewing the work of others.

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Bettina Blake has funded a new Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts position here at UMM. Our first such Professor is Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, and her visit officially began tonight with an excellent lecture.

In the early 1960’s, Reagon was active in SNCC and a founding member of the Freedom Singers, and in the 70’s became a historian for the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History while also founding the fine group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

WeatherGirl and I got to see Sweet Honey in the Rock several years ago when they performed here as part of the Performing Arts Series, which was a great show. Reagon’s lecture tonight was just as good, and certainly an excellent start to the visit of a distinguished professor in the liberal arts. She blended history, and thoughts on what history means to us as a culture, with her personal stories and great songs and fragments thereof.

For me the best bit was the wonderful way that she got us to sing. There she had a bunch of unmoving Minnesota lumps (I’ve never seen a people so capable of stillness in the face of great rhythm as these Minnesotans) who for the most part weren’t used to singing in public and certainly hadn’t ever sung together. And she got us to sing. In harmony. Really well. It was quite something and I’m thrilled to have been part of that moment.

Other neat bits included:

• “I have faith because I remember” - that knowledge of history can give us the ability to manage our present and envision our future.
• We are all living archealogical evidence of our past - that the lives and struggles and choices and successes of our ancestors live on through us and that we are witnesses to their stories. (Reminded me a bit of PZ’s excellent piece “The proper reverance due to those who have gone before”.)
• When we started (spontaneously) to sing in harmony she commented that the “big chord” (the harmony) was courage, as it takes courage to not just follow the melody. I really liked that idea, and it could be a cool concept for my Roots Music class.
• There was an interesting question from Paula about why there aren’t songs in the current movements like there were in the Civil Rights Movement, and her answer echoed many things I’ve thought/said. (Nancy Schuman and I discussed this at some length after my “Music in the Civil Rights Movement” talk.) The short version is that the Civil Rights Movement came out of a culture of song, which isn’t true of most/many of the current “movements”. Also two important things have changed since the early 60’s: The music industry has set up the (false) dichotomy of producers and consumers of music, and the incredible availability of cheap (or free) recorded music means people no longer have to sing (to themselves or to each other) in order to preserve and propogate songs. While I think she’s spot on in most of this, I think she and I differ in some ways on where the future takes us from here. I’ll need to think about it some more, though. Stay tuned?

Added 27 Apr, 9:25am
Last night I gapped one of the coolest ideas from her talk. (I stopped taking notes once she started singing - it was just too engaging.) She talked about Pete Seeger coming down to help with the Movement in the 60’s and helping her change her vision of what being a “musician” was/could be. Instead of focussing on trying to “get a hit” and “make it big”, he talked about a musician as having a job like a teacher or plumber or grocer, where if you get up each morning and get on with it you can make it work. You may not make millions, but you can make it work. I really like that idea, and probably should share it with my Roots Music students.

I know that I’ve been trapped in that kind of thinking in the past, which is weird since I have no aspirations to great fame or fortune. Performing as part of the open mic nights this semester, though, as been really liberating and fun, and has done a lot to make music a more active event in my life instead of just listening endlessly and never making.

What sucks is that it’s taken me until my early 40’s to reach a point where I’m singing in public. Happily Sub-Evil Boy is happily singing away and I know I’ll work really hard to keep that going through the difficult puberty-laden years ahead. Last night while we were talking to my Mom he just launched into “Uncle Achin” and we ended up belting out that and “Ain’t no booze (Fireman save my child)” together there in the kitchen and it was a total blast. (These were the songs that I opened and closed the evening with at the February open mic night when I MC’ed.) God only knows what Mom thought :).

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PZ wrote an excellent letter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (the Strib - often cited as the states’s “paper of record”, although I’m guessing that Pharyngula will give them a run for their money) on the many failings of “Intelligent Design” to meet any sensible standards for an explanatory proposition. He also points out that the Strib is calling for letters on the subject by Monday, 2 May.

An invitation to readers on ID/evolution.
We’re interested in your thoughts on intelligent design, evolution, and their proper places in school curricula. Write us an e-mail of no more than 150 words and send it to opinion@startribune.com, with the word “evolution” in the subject line. Be sure to include your name, address and telephone number so we can contact you if we decide to publish your response. Please reply by Monday, May 2.

It would clearly be a fine thing if they hear from a wide variety of folks on this important issue, especially given the enthusiasm of many to subvert our educational institutions. I’ll have to see if I can figure out something useful to say in less than 150 words before Monday.

P.S. Do other people also find it exceedingly painful to have to type the otherwise excellent word “intelligent” when writing out ID? Iggity-iggity-iggty-shiver…

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I was going to post the playlist from our KUMM show Sunday, along with some commentary, but it’s Tuesday already and that commentary thing is clearly going to get in the way, so I think I’m just going to post the list and let you poor folks sort out the rest.

And while I’m tying up perfectly good bandwidth with one silly list, I might as well give it a friend. So I’ve included the results of a game of “My Aunt went on a trip and in her handbag she carried…” that Sub-Evil Boy and I started on the way to school yesterday and finished up on the way in this morning.

There’s no doubt an interesting psychological study to be performed on the basis of this data, and I’m expecting people to promptly start submitting applications to major granting agencies. Not that I’m going to help, though…

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For years I’ve wanted to know exactly how to cook a game hen using lava, and thanks to Carlos I finally found a good set of instructions. I can get the banana leaves from the green house and the game hen (or equivalent) from Willie’s, but the lava is a bit of a problem. Hot air is easy enough to come by (we are a university, after all), but I’ve never seen it melt stone…

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Just got back from KUMM’s Tower Awareness Concert (aka March Music Madness, but in late April because of scheduling difficulties) and it was another great KUMM show. Or at least the part that I saw was great. I got there late (lots of reasons) and ended up missing the first two acts - big apologies to The Swiss Army and The Plastic Constellations. I meant well, but life got in the way.

I did catch Doomtree, though, for the second time this semester, and they kicked ass once again. (They headlined the show following the screening of Afropunk back in February.) I really love Doomtree’s stuff because they’re so obviously a collective instead of just a bunch of egos sharing a stage for a while. The raps are tight and politically spikey in all the right ways, and their sound is broad and inclusive in ways that really take advantage of the diversity of the collective.

And for those who think there’s nothing shaking out here in west-central Minnesota, I challenge people out in the “real world” to put on a great show like this and manage to draw a candidate for U.S. Senate and the owner/operators of an organic co-op farm. Not to mention a whole host of past KUMM luminaries and exec staff members (Travis, Gilson, Robert Fitzgerald, Mike D, and more!).

(One could argue, BTW, that the world would be a better place if more candidates for U.S. Senate hung out at college radio concerts, but that discussion will have to wait for another day.)

It was a blast, and major props to all the KUMM folks that pulled it all together and to the musicians for giving us something to jam to. I’ve now showered all the nasty cigarette smell off my person, and I’m taking my tired and happy self to bed. Huzzah!

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