I am … unhindered by talent

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune printed 11 letters today sent in response to their “invitation to readers on ID/evolution“. Mine was not among them, but most of those that they did print were definitely better than mine anyway so I’m totally cool with it.

The bulk of the letters (8 of the 11) were in support of the cause, and none of the remaining three could make any claims to being even a vaguely plausible argument in favor of neo-creationism. Since the paper probably used the number and balance of letters they received to help decide on the distribution of letters to publish, I figure my letter helped get some of those good ones printed, and that’s a happy thought.

One of the real high points is a high school sophomore (Benjamin Segal) from Minnetonka (where “the opposition’s” Dave Eaton is on the School Board - yikes!), who did an excellent job of pointing out the serious problems of any system that allows for miracles:

Scientific theories must be falsifiable: It must be possible to prove them wrong. Yet ID proponents can always claim that any evidence challening their “hypothesis” was planted by “the designer” to deceive us. It’s impossible to repond to such an assertion.

Someone here at UMM needs to get started on recruiting this fellow!

The three “pro-ID” letters were pretty weak. One basically came down to “Bad Paul! Athiest! Athiest!”, without even mentioning either ID or evolution; one wonders why the Strib bothered printing it. The second follows in a similar vein, but at least connects to the subject at hand, claiming that

Evolution is by nature atheistic. It requires that death be considered a natural part of life, instead of a result of The Fall as described in the Book of Genesis.

Wow - to think that all those zillion microbes that die around the world every minute are suffering for the follies of a few humans.

The third is a real gem, providing no actual argument (do I sense a trend here?), but instead quoting two “well-known evolutionists” saying that it’s important to look carefully at all the facts, and to study both the strengths and weaknesses of our current understanding. I always love this incredibly silly approach. This is presumably done in an effort to sow some seeds of doubt, but betrays an truly remarkable failure to understand the scientific process, since any reasonable scientist would agree enthusiastically that these things must be studied carefully and especially at their weak points. The rub, as Mr. Segal pointed out so nicely above, is that this study must be based on evidence and falsifiable claims, and ID just ain’t there.

Oh, and the two “well-known evolutionists”? They turn out to be Charles Darwin and (…wait for it…) Stanley Salthe. Huh? Darwin was a remarkable fellow and a real hero in the story, but hardly represents the cutting edge of contemporary evolutionary theory (and would almost certainly be aghast at the continued use of his embryonic ideas as straw men in these arguments). Salthe, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be the champion of evolution the letter writer suggests, as his web page makes clear:

I see [reducing all evolution to the effects of competition] as morally vicious, if understandable in the genealogical sense that it serves as a myth congenial to capitalism.

Yowza! He’s clearly focussing on the scientific evidence.

Good job to PZ for setting things up so well in the first place, and to all those that wrote in on behalf of some common sense on this issue. You should also check out PZ’s response to these letters, as he includes all three “opposition” letters in full, as well as providing some more context for the Darwin quote mentioned above.

Apparently you can get all this stuff on-line, but you have to register, blah, blah, blah…

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The following is a letter to the editor that I intend to send to our local paper regarding the current school funding issues (also here). Comments and questions always welcome. (I should mention that as an anti-spamming measure, all comments have to be approved before they appear on the page, and unfortunately you’re not given any immediate feedback to that effect. Don’t worry - your comment has gone into the system and will be approved and appear shortly.)

As I teach, my working assumption is that my students will go on to do interesting and important things. While I may not always be right, any other assumption has a strong tendency to be self-fulfilling, and I’m just not willing to yield that ground.

As a member of this community and a parent of a child in MAES, my working assumption for our children is the same: They are going to go on to do interesting and important things. They need our support for that dream to come true, and frankly we need them. We need them to develop into the kinds of people that can help our community grow and thrive in an environment where rural communities continue to struggle. We need their help in managing the many challenges that we’ve yet to dream of but which will surely present themselves.

Challenging students to meet these expectations and become leaders of tomorrow is hard work. It requires more than just marking time in a classroom. It requires class sizes that allow teachers the time and space to get to know kids and tailor their educational experience. It requires a broad range of curricular and co-curricular opportunities so that students can find and develop their individual sets of skills. It requires faculty and staff who believe they have the support of their community.

We are blessed with some exceptional teachers and staff in our district who are willing to put in enormous effort and hours because they believe in the importance of our children and in their ability to make a difference. Our students need those teachers, and those teachers need our support. One nearly certain outcome of the deep budget cuts that are being proposed is a serious blow to the morale of our district’s staff, and an unsupported, dispirited staff is much less capable of challenging our children to find what they’re capable of.

For these reasons I strongly oppose the vast majority of the proposed cuts to our school district budget. Instead we should be exploring alternative approaches to resolving the current budget problems, including the re-passing of the levy our community agreed to in the year 2000. While I realize that a levy wouldn’t go into effect immediately, it would certainly give the School Board much more flexibility in how they approach the short term issues, and it would provide the long term support that our schools and our community need.

I would encourage those who wish to learn more about those alternatives to attend school board meetings, follow developments in these pages, and visit MorrisQualitySchools.org for more information.

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Last night was the monthly CAC Concerts Open Mic Night. Sub-Evil Boy was able to join me because he didn’t have school today (Good Friday, or Spring Break in more religiously neutral terms), which was a lot of fun.

Eagan MC’ed this time and did a very nice job. I really liked his opening set of songs, including an fine rendition of the classic “Drunkard’s special”. Later (after very nice pieces by Grace and a woman who does English folks songs on the recorder, penny whistle, etc.) John H. did a duet with Huck on “The William” (or two of them more accurately) which was pretty crazy and totally fun.

John and I then sang “An American folk song”, which was two instrumental verses through of Guthrie’s “This land is your land” (John on guitar and me on harmonica) ending with us singing the one verse about private property that no one ever sings. (Guthrie himself rarely sang it on recorded versions of the song; I have four different recordings of him singing this song, and only one has that verse.) The instrumental part went really well, but the mic levels were pretty whack when we got to the vocal part and I think our vocals came out as distorted mud (and not in a way that was intended or necessarily desirable). Sigh.

Joey then did a couple of songs which Sub-Evil Boy really liked. The (new?) one about the ghost of his great-great-great-grandfather making calls on his cell phone was really cool - one of his best in my opinion. He’s going to be performing live on KUMM tonight somewhere between 9pm and midnight, which should be cool.

Sub-Evil and I were right after Joey. Sub-Evil had been nearly asleep in the back, so I was a little worried, but he totally came alive when we got “on stage”. It’s quite amazing (and wonderful) how powerfully he responds to an opportunity to perform in public.

We did two songs that we’d written together last year: “Phantom, the Three Neuron Dog” and “Hey, hey, fat fly”. “Phantom, the Three Neuron Dog” was for my sister when her wonderful dog Phantom died last December, and as such required a certain amount of introduction (who are Julian and Turq, for example?). We’ve never performed it in public before, and it went over really well (esp. for a song that’s very specific to our family), with several nice laughs from the audience. When we were rehersing last night Sub-Evil Boy broke into a can-can dance during the chorus after the 4th verse, and WeatherGirl and I thought it was really funny so he did it again at the performance. The floor in that space is flat and (despite the huge growth spurt he’s in) Sub-Evil Boy isn’t yet 6 foot 2, and it was fun watching the people in the back bobbing and weaving to see what everyone in the front was giggling about.

Phantom lives!

Sub-Evil and I also did “Hey, hey, fat fly”, which we wrote last summer for a community theater project. I’d sung it at the open mic night two months ago to good response, but had never sung it in public with Sub-Evil before, as I was in NYC at the ConBio conference with my sister when the group performed it in August. Earlier in the evening he’d been pretty lukewarm about performing it with me, but once he got on the stage and the energy kicked in and he was totally good to go. I flubbed the third verse (left out a line, and ended up running out of words before I ran out of music), but we recovered well and headed off to the next chorus. The audience response was really nice, but who wouldn’t love a 5th grader singing goofy songs in public?

We stayed for Huck’s set, which included a great song about wanting to be a rock star. I’m not sure if it’s a cover or an original, but either way it was a total hoot.

Sub-Evil was dying by then (it was 11pm) so we bailed and headed home. Who knows what wonderful stuff we missed after that?

I really enjoyed performing with Sub-Evil and hope that we get to do more of that in the future!

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It was a long few days, but the paper is in a reasonable state and submitted. There was some pretty tired and harried editing at the end, so I’m sure we’ll see all kinds of annoying things after we’ve had some sleep and come back to it, but I still think it’s pretty good stuff.

We’re managed to cut from 21 pages down to 18, but we’re still not at the required 16. Please let us have two extra pages…please… :-)

Now we’ll have to see what the reviewers think.

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Ellery and I continue to wrestle our GPTP paper into submission before tomorrow’s deadline. There’s a ton of cool data, but we’re both tired and worried about the deadline and the page limits, and I suspect it’s going to be a long 30 hours before we send this thing off.

In the meantime, however, here’s a cool graph…

This shows the shapes of a population of 1,000 trees at the end of one particular run of our system. The outer circle (sort of) represents the possible space of trees, and as one can see, the system explores a very small subset of that space.

And it makes a really spiffy picture :-). Props to Jason Daida and his colleagues for inventing this nifty visualization technique, and for sharing their Mathematica code so that we can draw these cool graphs, too.

Back to the grindstone.

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CAC Concerts has been hosting a series of open mic nights this year (a first at UMM in my memory). Lots of students I know (mostly from FYS) have been going, performing, and saying cool things about the event, but for various reasons I’d been unable to attend. I finally went tonight (not that I had time, but that’s another story) and it was really quite a lot of fun. John did his wondrous Tom Waits-Captain Beefheart singing, Grace was again splendid, Eagan was every bit as good live as I’d been led to believe, and Huck sang a crazy fun song about the advantages of an arachnid girlfriend. And that was my undoing.

I hadn’t really intended to perform (although I confess to having thought about it), but once Huck sang about wanting a spider for a girlfriend, I just had to sing the fly song. I was a lot of fun, though, and the audience was very appreciative, which was definitely cool. I’m looking forward to telling SubEvilBoy tomorrow morning what a hit our song was :-). I also sang “Get along little doggies” (had to get an old song in there), and it was politely received, but clearly not as popular as “Hey hey fat fly”.

In further support of the claim that no good deed goes unpunished, I’ve been asked to MC the next event (24 Feb). Not 100% sure I’ll be able to do it, nor do I know how much performing I’ll do while I’m up there, but it was nice to be asked and I’ll certainly try to make it fit in the schedule.

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