Let's Vote on the Sex of the Cat

I think I've used that analogy before, but I'm not positive and don't want to type "murphspot cat sex" into a search engine. It's meant as an analogy for the objectivity of reality. Let's say you and six of your closest friends are sitting around in a room. There is no form of entertainment in the room, and so you're profoundly bored. A cat wanders into the room, and one of your friends (let's call him James) asks you whether it's a male or female cat. Is the proper response:

1) Vote on the sex of the cat. Take a poll of those people who are sitting around you and ask them not "Is the cat male or female" but "What do you believe about the cat's sex?" Simple majority wins.

2) Check.

The proper response, which is to say the response that acknowledges the objectivity of reality, is "Check". If you and your friends all want the cat to be male, that doesn't stop it from being female (if it happens to be female) nor did it influence the cat to become male because you all wanted it to be. It simply is either male or female, and the correct answer is the one with the most independent evidence to back it up. It doesn't matter how you check (presumably, you'd just look at the genitalia, but if that makes you feel funny, I'm sure there are other ways of determining a cat's sex, though unfortunately I don't know them as I have no concept of cat physiology), only that you check and that you be able to back up your answer with evidence that isn't dependent upon what you want the answer to be.

Unless you're in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma House of Representatives Education committee has approved House Bill 2211, a "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act". There are some bits of it that are simply redundant, like Section 5, which states that students are allowed to organize prayer groups and "see you at the pole" gatherings before, during and after school to the same extent that other groups are allowed to form non-religious clubs that have nothing do do with curriculum, which I'm pretty sure they're already allowed to do. I know, for example, and this is only anecdotal, that there were "See You at the Pole" gatherings at my high school, though I never attended. And really, so long as everyone's allowed to go to everything, I could not be more supportive (though I'm somewhat curious about the "during" school thing, because I don't know that any extracurricular clubs had meetings during school). This is how the whole "prayer in school" issue is solved. You don't have the teachers leading prayer in their capacity as employees of the state, and kids are allowed to pray/worship however they want, as long as it's not disruptive to other students learning. Which is fine, because you're not allowed to disrupt other students if you're doing it for non-religious reasons either (standing up and singing "Paradise City" during a test, while amusing and actually happened once in high school, isn't something they encourage, and so I have no problem with asking Little Bobby to sit down and stop reciting the Namokar Mantra.) I'm somewhat skeptical of a "moment of silence" before the day starts, because it's my understanding you could just pray for the few minutes before the day starts on your own without the school telling you to, but I'm not going to get into that here. So yes. That part of the bill, from my view, is redundant and pointless, but then this is a legislature, and so that sort of goes without saying.

The part that's got everyone all hot and bothered is this.

Section 4. Students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions. Homework and classroom assignments shall be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school district. Students shall not be penalized or rewarded on account of the religious content of their work.

The problem, as a others have pointed out, is that the way that section is phrased, it becomes impossible to penalize a student who gives an incorrect answer in, say, a science class as long as the student claims that it's based on their religious beliefs. As the second linked article points out, it becomes illegal for a school to take off points if, in a science class, a student claims the earth is 6000 years old, despite the fact that the scientific evidence points to the Earth being roughly 4.5 billion years old. It's an attempt to change reality by governmental fiat, and subverts everything that science is supposed to be about.

A significant theme in the Creationist movement recently has been appealing to "fairness", which is fine and good, except that facts are not determined by what we wish them to be. The exclusion of religious interpretations of creation from science classes isn't a form of religious persecution, it's the exclusion of theories which have no scientific evidence to support them and are not falsifiable. Attempting to paint them as persecution is not only intellectually dishonest, but is actually an insult to those people around the world who actually are persecuted for their beliefs, or their non-belief.

So yes. Unnecessary-to-actively anti-education bill has passed in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. Hopefully, the State Senate will recognize it for what it is and discard it. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Oh, one last thing. The bill was formally authored by State Rep. Sally Kern, who has come into some trouble in the past few days for some virulently anti-gay comments that were recorded and posted on YouTube. I'll have my opinion up on that sometime tomorrow.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 Made Me Feel A Bit Better About The Whole Thing

Last night, for those of you who happened to miss it, the moon was stolen away and replaced with what I shall call "The Blood Sphere" from this point onward last night.

Which is me trying to be dramatic about a Lunar Eclipse, which is cool enough that it doesn't need me for dramatization. I'll agree with the Chicago Tribune article that the view of the eclipsing moon was fantastic on a clear night in Chicago and that it was interesting to check out (especially considering that we're not having another one for some time), but I'll disagree that the cold didn't deter people. At least, I'll disagree with them if I presume they're writing about me, and why shouldn't they be. Unfortunately, I was sort of still trying to get some work done in the lab, and so could only afford a few brief ventures outside to look at it, but I was glad I got to see what little of the eclipse I got to see. I always seem to miss things like this, or lack the proper equipment to view things like this. There's a photo depicting the entire eclipse taken in three minute intervals by someone just south of Chicago here, which you should check out if you missed it. Or if there were clouds. Or, I guess, if you have no idea what a lunar eclipse looks like. They're not as rare as solar eclipses but damn it, they're still fun. And they demonstrate that the moon is indeed illuminated by the Sun, which you already knew if you're not out burning Bill Nye in effigy.

That actually made me think about when I was just getting interested in science. I owe my interest to a book on astronomy that I checked out of my elementary school library over and over again, and while I've only recently started reading up on it again, I've always held a place in my heart for astronomy. For a while there, it took the form of reading Carl Sagan's books, watching Cosmos and hearing a goofy electronic rendition of Arabesque No. 1 whenever I thought of Venus. But when I was young, reading much more about it and trying to figure out how to find things in the sky, there was always a bit of a dark secret which I have never really shared with many people.

But now I've got a blog with a self-imposed midnight deadline for a post, so I'll come out with it.

I've always been kind of freaked out by Jupiter. It's always kind of scared me.


The stuff of nightmares, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't know why. I think it's because I have never been able to wrap my head around how truly vast the universe is and, by corrolary, how incredibly small we are, and given that Jupiter is the biggest thing around that's not the Sun, I sort of projected my inability to deal with immensity onto the largest planet. The Great Red Spot still makes me a bit nervous, and when I walk outside somewhere on a clear night when I'm miles away from civilization, there's a bit of me that still harbors that ten year old's fear that I'm going to look up and Jupiter's going to be right there ready to screw up my day. It's weird, because I don't have the same thing with any other celestial object. I'm totally fine with the idea that there are some parts of the universe that are so distant that their light will never reach us, but damned if I still don't trust Jupiter.

It doesn't impede my wonder, but yes. It's odd.

If you've got something which makes you nervous but you're not sure why or if you recognize that you channel a greater nervousness into a specific thing, leave it in the comments. Or anything in the comments, really.

Walking as an Energy Source

The push to get away from fossil fuels is something I'm sure all of the readers of this blog are familiar with. Two quick things along those lines while I get ready to head out of Evanston for the night.

First, this paper in Science which I'd like to claim that I found while perusing scientific journals at 7am with a big cup of coffee, but in reality I found on Ben's desk, which shows a prototype for a device which takes advantage of a normal human walking motion to generate electricity and their attempts at overcoming the burden of having to wear a big knee brace while you're walking. They employ a one-way clutch to gather energy only when the knee is straightening (not when it's flexing) so that power is generated when you step forward. I know nothing of the engineering here, but it seems like an interesting if unwieldy idea. They do a fair job of pointing out some applications for the technology, primarily power-generation in places on the earth that are not connected to a power supply and the use as a power-generating source for motorized prosthetic limbs, such that you'd use your healthy limb to help you move the prosthetic, which is kind of cool.

Second, an interesting discussion on the feasibility of biofuels on Talk of the Nation last week. I'm more familiar with cost-effectiveness arguments for and against the use of biofuels (it's not feasible to use corn as a source of ethanol in the US because of the way we grow and harvest corn and its poor return on investment, while Brazil derives a bunch of ethanol from sugar cane as a waste product, and so it's relatively cheap and easy for them to implement biofuels.) Their argument is more focused on carbon-release, and without getting into the whole global warming discussion, it's an interesting phenomenon to note that if we're going to grow crops like switchgrass (which is much more energy efficient than corn) to use as a fuel source, we'll end up either leveling forest to free up land to do so or using land which would otherwise be used for food, which forces the food-farmers to go and level forest, and so the end result is the same. I recommend listening to the bits on the use of algae and bacteria to produce fuel, but mostly because I've got a friend who's a synthetic chemist and has been, as far as I can recall, playing around with bacteria to get them to make things for him.

NPR and Macbeth

While I'm posting like mad, I'll mention that I've found that I do indeed get a wireless signal in the lab, and have been listening to NPR for the past few days. It seems like every time I start to think that it's incredibly informative and it'd be great if everyone listend to it, they do something which proves to me why people don't. Like when I was driving back from PNC Park and heard a story about the mating sounds of mosquitos. Or a few days ago when a singer/songwriter's sound was described as being "as if he had been soaking in some very warm water", whatever the hell that means. Or walking to my hood to hear that the Dodder is "One of the creepiest plants I know. I still don't know what the hell to make of that.

Oh, and in Northwestern research news, a group has found that, upon thinking of things that you've done that were bad, it's more likely that you'll want to clean yourself, suggesting that guilt is somewhat directly linked to the general feeling of disgust. That's right. Shampoo companies will now be offering you puppies to kill to get you to buy more product.

Finals!

It seems it would be a decent time to post about not being able to post. Unfortunately, finals are upon us at Northwestern which tends to lessen the time I've got available to write here, so, while I'll try to keep this updated, it might tend to fall behind until at least next Friday.

Some points before I get back to bioorganic:

I'm firmly convinced that a picture of this gentleman on one's desktop is good luck when one's giving a presentation. Moreso when the professor for the class gets a kick out of it and gives one a decent grade on the "15-percent-of-your-grade" presentation.

And who says soccer games get to start all the international incidents?. I've actually found the World Baseball Classic strangely compelling, if only for the Canadian upset so far. I would not at all be averse to this continuing, especially if it's on a four year cycle.