Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I had an interesting chat with an old friend a few days ago. It started with the sunken oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico wreaking havoc with the environment, which was essentially a segue into accusing the oil and power companies of “suppressing” clean energy technology. I’m inclined to give the corporations the benefit of the doubt that they are not cartoonishly evil villains. Thus, I’d assume they would be more likely to actively develop cleaner technology since they will be able to make money just as easily off of it once it’s adopted, which it eventually will be.

However, I am told, that their “suppression” of technology is common knowledge (although no sources have been forthcoming from either my associate or my Google searches) and that they only want technology they can “control.” I’m curious as to what kinds of developments they’re sitting on. Do they need a control collar for a living spaceship a la Farscape? But I digress. Suppression of safe, clean, efficient power is a reality, but it is not the work of corporate technocrats. Rather, it is the environmentalists themselves carrying its banner. Its name: No Nukes. (more…)

I hope everyone had a fantastic solstice season. I spent a week visiting family in Arizona, including a day trip to Sedona, woo-woo capital of the United States. Each visit there I feel like I should really write something about it, and I have a few ideas that will probably require some time I don’t have to do research. What I wanted to say today, though, is on a slightly more serious note. As you almost certainly know by now, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab attempted to detonate plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The result is that another set of inane restrictions are being placed on innocent American travelers. As Joel Johnson at Gizmodo has pointed out, TSA is providing a line of defense against plans so specific as to be nearly useless in screening. I already have to take my shoes off thanks to the shoe bomber. I can’t take the kind of hair gel I like with me unless I check a bag thanks to the perpetrators of the (completely implausible) 2006 liquid explosives plot. On top of that, I have to take my laptop out of it’s bag thanks to some supposed threat so archaic I honestly have no idea what it was.

As the Gizmodo article quoted, the two biggest factors keeping us safe are the reinforcement of cockpit doors and passengers identifying and taking out threats on their own. So these new rules that forbid having anything in our laps and having to hold it in for the last hour on international flights are, in my opinion, only slightly less idiotic than requiring that a brave Dutch man be on every international flight since it was Dutch passenger Jasper Schuringa who tackled the perpetrator on flight 253. If my dime-store science fiction paperback book is a threat, arrest me when we’re all safely on the ground.

Labor Day weekend is the Cleveland National Air Show. I’ve gone every year since I’ve moved here. And every year there have been protesters standing out front who just don’t seem to get it. It’s an attractive time to object to an apparent military spectacle with two unjust (in my opinion) wars going on and no clear plan to wrap them up. But to object to displays of technology, even if it was developed in black helicopter fashion for the purposes of being a weapon, edges in on the Luddite.

Technology comes from war (read: a non-negligible amount of technology comes from weapons development). As an observational astrophysicist, I use technology which is basically on loan from the military. If you’re prone to getting lost and have a GPS navigation computer on the dash of your car, you use it, too. It started out as a system using radio towers employed during WWII, and the first satellite system was deployed by the U.S. Navy as TRANSIT or NAVSAT. The current constellation of about 30 GPS satellites transmits different signals for civilian and military use.

So it may not be obvious watching aircraft designed to deliver bombs and munitions riding on one or two of the world’s most powerful jet engines that one day some part of that weapons system could be part of your daily life. Certainly, it’s unfortunate that it is frequently humanity’s desire to render other humans dead that leads to innovation. But I think it takes just as much brains and determination to re-purpose it for civilian and academic use. So hopefully here in a little bit I’ll actually get around to talking about how the GPS can be used to help make several simultaneous precision timing measurements against a clock several miles away (in space).

Besides, fast things can be just plain cool.

I may or may not have mentioned in passing that I set a goal for myself this year to read every one of the James Tiptree, Jr. award winners going all the way back to 1991. I’ve finished 1991 (A Woman of the Iron People), 1992 (China Mountain Zhang), and 1993 (Ammonite). The books for ’91 and ’93 weren’t fantastic, but worth reading. China Mountain Zhang, though was amazing and I recommend it strongly. At first it caught me just because it was the first science fiction novel I’ve read with a gay main character not written by Samuel R. Delany.

So I’ve been going at about one book per two months instead of two books per month like I’d need to do it all in 2009, but it’s still been rewarding. And I was really exited to start the next entry to arrive in my possession, 1995′s Memoirs of Elisabeth Frankenstein. I was actually nearly in love with the book, until (here be spoilers)…
(more…)

I’ve read advice before (which I would link to if I could find a link) that in writing a skeptical blog the best way to go is to choose the most specialized, specific topic you can. I don’t have that kind of patience. The “whimsical adventures” bit in my tagline was originally my way of escaping the confines of a purely straight-up science and skepticism blog, but I still wanted to keep it reasonably narrow.

Well I’m going to loosen myself even further, I think. Because even the ostensibly specialized blogs have such a low signal-to-noise ratio, that I have to subscribe to ten RSS feeds on a particular topic to get that many posts I actually finish reading a day. To be entirely honest, my main motivation for starting to blog myself was that the signal-to-noise on comment threads is so bad, they are almost universally unreadable. On a popular blog, the comments unfailingly degrade into people repeating what other people have already said ad nauseum. I think some people award themselves participation points based on their post count rather than on the actual content.

Which is not to say I think they should stop posting. I’m just saying that I’m not reading what they’re posting–and I am definitely not following them on Twitter, which I think might be the noisiest information channel currently available on the internet. It’s nominally a micro-blogging tool, but is by and large used as an instant messaging tool shipped out to anyone who’s listening. The result is that even if I want to follow some of my dear friends back home in Indiana, all of the information I actually care about will be drowned out in their half of a conversation about cow tipping with people I don’t know.

So we’ll see, maybe I’ll one day become popular and have to eat those words. For the time being, I’m going to direct anyone who cares to my sidebar if they’d like to check out the non-science links I’m adding to my blog roll. This will be a bit slow as WordPress doesn’t seem to provide the specific tools I want to make this process feel like less of a chore. Also, I still want one co-blogger, and I actually have a couple of candidates who I should probably just ask if they’d like to do it.

I more or less grew up on science fiction. Actually, I pretty much remember how it started. I was sitting outside at school reading Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain. My english teacher asked me if I liked reading science fiction, which was something I’d never really stopped to consider. First I actually had to figure out what science fiction was. I had a vague idea what it wasn’t, but was pleased to discover that it had “Grand Masters,” so I could probably read them to dev elop a better idea of what science fiction was.

From here things probably get pretty predictable. I read Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov–everything by these two authors I could find on the shelf of Barnes & Noble. I sort of knew there was more, but I’d have to order it and I loved to just browse at the bookstore and pick something out that way. So I browsed my way into reading almost the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe series of novels. And having gotten through those, I started looking for authors of Star Wars books I liked in the rest of the stacks.

This led me first to Timothy Zahn, who wrote a fantastic story called A Coming of Age that I found at the local library. Zahn’s other pre-Star Wars works were quite good, but the real gem that I found in my post-Star Wars epoch was a book by Vonda McIntyre called Dreamsnake. This was my first, completely unassuming, foray into feminist science fiction. I can’t do justice to the emotions I felt reading through that book, but it opened up the longest continuous obsession with a genre of fiction in my life to date. To this day Dreamsnake sits next to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Feminist science fiction seems to have a small, dedicated community surrounding it. I’ve been using feministsf.org as a reference for what books to look for at the library or used book store for the better part of a decade. While that search is exciting, I still find it mystifying how so many people have come upon authors like Joanna Russ or Suzy McKee Charnas when finding copies of their books is so difficult. There are many central authors of feminist science fiction whom I have never read on account of never having come upon a book of theirs.

Which isn’t so say the handful of books available in your local bookseller aren’t worth reading. Ursula K. LeGuin is still my favorite author, hands down. Octavia Butler is available from time to time, as well, and the last Vonda McIntyre book was easy to find back in 1997. But even the new feminist science fiction is unseen. Every year the Tiptree Award goes to a book for exploring sex and gender in some exceptional way, and there’s usually not a book on the list on the shelf at Borders.

So what I want to know, is how do the people who nominate books for the Tiptree Award find them? In world that’s any fair at all, one should not have to be a member of the Secret Feminist Cabal to hear about these amazing books when they hit publication. I’ve got plenty of classics left to read, but I want to feel in-touch with the community. Reading the Feminist SF Blog only goes so far. I want a new book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other and a weekend spent sitting on my porch reading.

When I was a wee little undergraduate, longing for some kind of student organization for atheists, agnostics, and secular minded folk of all kinds I eventually came into contact with someone starting up a new chapter of the Campus Freethought Alliance. Eventually, I wound up in the co-pilots seat organizing speakers and events for our weekly meetings. Unfortunately, when the original founder graduated I was left in command flying solo and had to let the group fall by the wayside as no one else was willing to step up. However, the process helped me learn a lot about how to be an effective activist on a college campus.

As a college student you have at your disposal an amazing number of resources within the university. How accessible and abundant these are change from one institution to another, but most campuses will have some means for providing student organizations with the funds or facilities to meet their needs. If one can manage to tap into these resources, and frequently all it takes is two people and a draft of your idea, you can really do a lot more than one might expect.

When you sit down in a room with more than one skeptically minded individual and brainstorm, it is possible to fill pages with common misconceptions and ways to address them. If your bull-session happens to consist of college students, have them think about someone they might know who has some expertise on a particular topic. For some people it’s a bit of a leap, but here’s a hint–they’ve probably had a class from them. If you want to have an event to help dispel various New Age interpretations of quantum mechanics, for example, you might send an email to your favorite physics professor.

In my experience, my professors have all cared about the accuracy of information in their field. Even if it’s not a controversial issue you want to tackle, if you can find someone with a vested interest in the reality of the matter you can have an interesting and informative event built around it. Granted, there are plenty of people in academia with some very strange ideas, but the university is also rife with people willing to challenge strange and nonsensical ideas in a variety of formats. So whether you want to host a debate on the anthropic principle,  have a forum on pseudoscience in psychology, or present a lecture on the historical Jesus, odds are you will be able to find the necessary experts willing to help you out.

Now it might not always be possible to host a huge event. In my experience, we never really had a very large attendance and could easily sit comfortably in a classroom provided by the university. Ultimately, though, I don’t know how necessary it is to bring in people in droves. If you do enough advertising through fliers and word-of-mouth, you’ll get people there who are already interested in questioning the topic you’ve chosen for that week, and those are the people who stand to benefit the most. Even the regular members of your student organization stand to learn something new that then gets shared with others. Skepticism and good information are viral like that. You can feel good for organizing an event even if it’s small enough to fit around a couple of tables.

That’s my message to the embattled college student. I started out looking for some people to socialize with. When I left, I left without fear of asking strange questions to important people. And really, that is not something you should fear at all–more often than not you’ll get a better answer than you bargained for, and the worst “snub” I ever received was an email that said, “the spirit is willing but time is of the essence.”

The high point of this entire week has been indulging in the privilege of bothering whichever of my fellow TAs happen to be on the floor with all the undergraduate labs. Honestly, it’s given me fuel for introspection. Also, while eating an early dinner this evening so I could make it to the department colloquium which was followed by teaching a lab and not run all night on an empty stomach, I indulged in a bit of reading–a book of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly a commencement address she once gave at a university. The ideas presented within were not new to me, but I’m somewhat curious as to why I hadn’t given them more thought.

Having dispensed with that background, I’ll get to the point. Language is gendered. Of particular interest to me right now is the idea of success–which, according to Le Guin, requires someone else’s failure. I would like to have a successful career–which, taken by itself, is actually a very masculine statement. Feminine goals are usually family-oriented. But if I were to actually analyze what it is I mean when I say, “I would like to have a successful career,” I find that I probably mean something quite different than what is carried by that phrase.

So I’ve attempted to distill what it is I mean. My starting place is probably an even more enigmatic phrase: “I want to share science.” The first two obvious readings of this imply that I want to teach or that I want to publish results, and while both of these are true, they also fail to capture everything I mean. When I say I want to share, I imagine a two-way exchange. I want to provide “science,” or knowledge of science, or my love of science with others. In exchange I’d like to receive from others in kind–I want to learn things which I could not from a book or from working by myself. To me, that kind of exchange is more important than a job at the right university or a paper published in the most prestigious journal.

Even reading the preceding paragraph again, I find that it sounds a little bit silly to me. But why should it? Why should my career goals have to revolve around the exaltation of me? I see no compelling reason why the sharing of knowledge should be first associated with the ritualistic process of foisting curricula on uninterested students, which seems to be the general expectation of what a career in education should be. The anecdotes I supply to rest my case for this evening are R. Buckminster Fuller, who made a living by patenting inventions he suspected people in the near future would want or need without ever promoting them. The second is the Sharer culture from the wonderful science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski whose language reflected this concept much better than English can, apparently.

I adore Skepchick, and consider it to be one of the finest skeptical blogs on the internet. This is for many reasons, but chief among them are that Rebeca is one of the most amazing people on the Interblag and that I consider myself something of a feminist. Having said that, I’ll ask people to read this post on “What is a feminist?” before continuing on. I agree with sentiments expressed by writerdd such as

I don’t think feminism is related to skepchickism, because there are a lot of feminists who believe really weird stuff. I find it disturbing that feminism is often linked to new age superstitions and to really bizarre concepts, such as the idea that all male-female intercourse is rape.

(more…)

Listening yesterday to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, they discussed some criticism received from another podcast called Skeptiko. Today, my curiosity got the better of me and I had a listen. I was hardly a few minutes in when I heard the first tidbit of inanity and paused to go look for a few appropriate links. The question Alex Tsakiris poses is whether or not the general public would rather see research into whether or not sheep are gay or whether they’d rather see research into whether or not a medium can communicate with dead relatives. 

Now I remember hearing some controversy about some research involving gay sheep, so I did a quick search on scienceblogs and found these posts on Gene Expression, The Frontal Cortex, and A Blog Around The Clock. This is not a failing of science. This is a failing of the media and public relations. Research into homosexuality in sheep tells us something about life–perhaps not human life, but life nonetheless. I’m not a biologist, so I can’t even begin to speculate as to what benefits might come out of research like this, but I think one can rest assured that it might very well help someone someday stay alive.

Regardless of whether or not a medium can communicate with my deceased grandfather, I would personally be significantly happier in a world in which the likelihood of myself becoming someone’s deceased relative has been reduced. Which choice the general public would make is a matter of speculation, but should they choose to fund research into mediums’ ability to communicate with the dead over research into anything that might prevent someone from becoming dead, they would be making the incorrect choice. We all inhabit the world of the living together, and as of yet there isn’t a shred of evidence that there even is a world of the dead.