I spent most of my day yesterday at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a judge for the Denver Metro Science and Engineering Fair. I thought the Denver Public School science fair was going to leave me feeling more confident, but I was wrong.
The environment was just very different. At the DPS fair we had to look at four or five projects over the course of two hours. At this fair, it was 10 projects in the same amount of time, and this time I also didn't have a partner. There were two other judges looking at the same ten projects as me, so it meant we got to chat about them a little, which helped. But I was on my own with talking to the kids, and that was a bit nerve wracking at first just because I wasn't quite sure what questions to ask. Then again, with 10 projects and only two hours, I didn't have a whole lot of time to spend with each kid; a little less than ten minutes to talk, and then a few minutes to go off in a quiet corner to write some comments on the scoring sheet.
I'm not the best at talking to people I don't know, but I think I muddled through well enough once I'd had a couple practice runs. I basically started off by asking the kid to just describe their project to me and tell me why they had wanted to do it. From there, I was normally able to find a couple of questions to ask, like, "How many trials did you run?" or "Which variables did you control?" or even, "If you had this to do over again, what would you change about your setup?" I actually got some extremely good answers for that last question, which made me happy. A big part of this sort of experimentation is running one experiment, figuring out all of the things you did wrong that make your results less than useful, and then trying again with the design flaws fixed.
This time I was also dealing with a higher grade level - the junior division, 6-8 grade - as well, so the projects were understandably more complex. I was put in the physical science category, which I felt a little out of my depth in since I'm not a chemistry or physics person. Then again, we weren't really dealing with chemistry/physics more complex than you'd get out of your first two semesters, which is still impressive in itself when you realize that it's middle school students working on these projects.
Aside: Some of the kids I spoke with were as tall as me. This should be illegal.
Overall, the quality of the projects was extremely impressive. I can't imagine being able to come up with anything as cool as some of the experiments now, let alone when I was thirteen. I'm not going to say anything about the winning or favorite projects at the moment, since I checked the schedule and the awards ceremony isn't actually until tonight. And while I doubt that any of the three or four people that read this blog have kids that participated in the science fair, if I'm putting this out on the internet I think it's best to just keep it under my hat.
Several of the kids I talked to pointed to an episode of Mythbusters as the reason they wanted to try a particular experiment to see for themselves. Warm fuzzies all over again for that. One of the projects that I saw (though it wasn't in my category) even had "Myth Busted" in its title. I was also incredibly happy to see a lot of young girls with some really fantastic projects and a lot of enthusiasm for the scientific process.
I'm still trying to mentally sort through my day. It was bigger, louder, and much more hectic than the other science fair, as one might expect. I'm considering seeing if I can volunteer for the Colorado State science fair. I think it'd be a great experience to spend a Thursday in April feeling completely stunned by how much smarter than me a bunch of teenagers are.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Big Brother is watching students (II)
BoingBoing is doing a fantastic job adding more and more to this already horrifically creepy story about school issues laptops being used to spy on students. I'm glad to know that the EFF and ACLU have gotten in on this now.
Anyway, a couple highlights, about the district policy:
Honestly, it's got to be pretty cool if your school district has so much spare money that it can afford to get laptops for its students and loan them out1. If nothing else, making sure kids are up with the technology from the start gives them a good advantage, I think. But when it tips over in to requiring that students use these laptops and punishing students that have a different laptop they want to use, that's creepy, and I really makes it sound like the intent from the start was to tightly monitor the kids. I could even maybe understand it if they were focusing on in-school use, since letting kids have laptops in class is a recipe for not getting anything done unless there are some real restrictions on what they can do with those laptops2. But that this overbearing monitoring extended so obviously outside of school makes it impossible for me to see it as anything other than intrusive and just... creepy.
And they sure were. A little more detail on the kid who was punished for something he did at home:
Way to go, Lower Merion School District. Way to go. Even if the kid were actually taking drugs, doesn't that become a law enforcement issue if it takes place off of school grounds? Oh yeah, except the police can't do that sort of thing without a warrant. Thank you Fourth Amendment.
From an article about the response of the EFF and ACLU:
Of all things, this is making me think of one of my favorite movies, Enemy of the State; toward the end, one of the shadowy bad guys, Tom Reynolds, is trying to justify how important it is for the government to spy on people:
The idea of course being that privacy (and in many ways, personal freedom) should take the back seat to the illusion of safety. If my earlier rantings didn't make it obvious enough, this is not something I agree with. And while I understand not wanting kids to use school issued laptops to surf porn during class, the entire concept of the web nanny is famously flawed. And I also tend to think (admittedly, it may be easy for me since I'm not a mom of a kid of that age) that treating a kid like he or she lives in a police state isn't going to do them any favors when they turn 18.
These are big issues that get bigger each day with the march of technology. David Brin has an interesting take on the issue of surveillance, transparency, and privacy in the Transparent Society. I don't agree with what Brin says in a lot of ways3 (I tend to agree more with Bruce Schneier) but one point he does make well is that a major problem in surveillance is that it only goes one way. The government (in this case the school) is able to spy on you without your knowledge, and there's very little that can be done to hold them accountable unless they do something phenomenally stupid, such as trying to suspend you for eating candy in your own home. The students are not allowed to monitor the school to make sure that the school is acting with the same responsibility that it is demanding of its students.
Larry King got the last word in Enemy of the State, and I think he deserves to have it here as well.
1 - Though also knowing of many a district that can't even afford to get its kids new books while others can do this kind of extravagant spending tarnishes the shiny.
2 - I've been in a lot of lecture halls and watched a lot of supposedly more mature and restrained university students use laptops. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times that said laptop usage involved actual note-taking rather than Facebook and Youtube.
3 - Another of Brin's ideas is that in a truly transparent society, everyone would be familiar with everyone else's secrets, which leads to a sort of mutually assured destruction if we don't respect each other's illusion of privacy. Interesting, but not a place I'd personally like to live in.
Anyway, a couple highlights, about the district policy:
* Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes
* Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated
* Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion
Honestly, it's got to be pretty cool if your school district has so much spare money that it can afford to get laptops for its students and loan them out1. If nothing else, making sure kids are up with the technology from the start gives them a good advantage, I think. But when it tips over in to requiring that students use these laptops and punishing students that have a different laptop they want to use, that's creepy, and I really makes it sound like the intent from the start was to tightly monitor the kids. I could even maybe understand it if they were focusing on in-school use, since letting kids have laptops in class is a recipe for not getting anything done unless there are some real restrictions on what they can do with those laptops2. But that this overbearing monitoring extended so obviously outside of school makes it impossible for me to see it as anything other than intrusive and just... creepy.
And they sure were. A little more detail on the kid who was punished for something he did at home:
However, the lawyer for the Robbins family says that their son was called into the vice-principal's office and confronted with a photo secretly snapped by his laptop's webcam while he was eating Mike & Ike's candy, and he was accused of taking drugs.
Way to go, Lower Merion School District. Way to go. Even if the kid were actually taking drugs, doesn't that become a law enforcement issue if it takes place off of school grounds? Oh yeah, except the police can't do that sort of thing without a warrant. Thank you Fourth Amendment.
From an article about the response of the EFF and ACLU:
Even if the school district had gotten students or parents to agree to the monitoring as a condition of receiving the notebooks, the spying would have still be unconstitutional, according to Bankston. He told us that private schools or employers can ask you to sign away your right to privacy, but not a government entity like a public school. “To condition one’s receipt of government benefits on your surrendering a constitutional right is itself unconstitutional,” he said.
Of all things, this is making me think of one of my favorite movies, Enemy of the State; toward the end, one of the shadowy bad guys, Tom Reynolds, is trying to justify how important it is for the government to spy on people:
We won the war. Now we're fighting the peace. It's a lot more volatile. Now we've got ten million crackpots out there with sniper scopes, sarin gas and C-4. Ten-year-olds go on the Net, downloading encryption we can barely break, not to mention instructions on how to make a low-yield nuclear device. Privacy's been dead for years because we can't risk it. The only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough. You think we're the enemy of democracy, you and I? I think we're democracy's last hope.
The idea of course being that privacy (and in many ways, personal freedom) should take the back seat to the illusion of safety. If my earlier rantings didn't make it obvious enough, this is not something I agree with. And while I understand not wanting kids to use school issued laptops to surf porn during class, the entire concept of the web nanny is famously flawed. And I also tend to think (admittedly, it may be easy for me since I'm not a mom of a kid of that age) that treating a kid like he or she lives in a police state isn't going to do them any favors when they turn 18.
These are big issues that get bigger each day with the march of technology. David Brin has an interesting take on the issue of surveillance, transparency, and privacy in the Transparent Society. I don't agree with what Brin says in a lot of ways3 (I tend to agree more with Bruce Schneier) but one point he does make well is that a major problem in surveillance is that it only goes one way. The government (in this case the school) is able to spy on you without your knowledge, and there's very little that can be done to hold them accountable unless they do something phenomenally stupid, such as trying to suspend you for eating candy in your own home. The students are not allowed to monitor the school to make sure that the school is acting with the same responsibility that it is demanding of its students.
Larry King got the last word in Enemy of the State, and I think he deserves to have it here as well.
How do we draw the line - draw the line between protection of national security, obviously the government's need to obtain intelligence data, and the protection of civil liberties, particularly the sanctity of my home? You've got no right to come into my home!
1 - Though also knowing of many a district that can't even afford to get its kids new books while others can do this kind of extravagant spending tarnishes the shiny.
2 - I've been in a lot of lecture halls and watched a lot of supposedly more mature and restrained university students use laptops. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times that said laptop usage involved actual note-taking rather than Facebook and Youtube.
3 - Another of Brin's ideas is that in a truly transparent society, everyone would be familiar with everyone else's secrets, which leads to a sort of mutually assured destruction if we don't respect each other's illusion of privacy. Interesting, but not a place I'd personally like to live in.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The canyons of Mars
Super cool post over at Phil Plait's blog in regards to an oblique view of an exposed section in the Gale Crater on Mars, courtesy of NASA. This is some exciting stuff if you're a sed/strat nerd like me. Outcrops are the bread and butter of any geologist - unless you've got the money to drill cores or shoot seismic, subsurface geology is inferred from outcrops - and this one looks quite beautiful.
I just wish NASA would tell us a little more:
Since of course I'm immediately dying to know what sorts of clays, and which sulfate minerals. I'm thinking that when they're talking about sulfates consistent with Mars drying out, it'd be sulfate evaporites like gypsum, barite, or anhydrite. Which then allows my fevered imagination to bring forth images of the Paradox Formation in eastern Utah and Colorado.
Of course, I have to stop myself from getting carried away here. The Paradox Formation is in places thousands of feet thick and covers an enormous area, which is what allows it to have such a profound tectonic effect on the landscape. Looking at that outcrop, I'm having a hard time getting a sense of just how thick the evaporites would be, but probably not that much. But what it does say, about the existence of water on the surface of Mars in the past, is pretty huge. And of course - letting my imagination run just a little wild here - opens the possibility of more evaporite deposits lurking under the surface, and bigger ones, and somewhere out there, one of the salt tectonic guys is going, "squee!"
I just wish NASA would tell us a little more:
Layers near the bottom of the mound contain clay and sulfate minerals that indicate wet conditions. Overlying rock layers contain sulfates with little or no clay, consistent with these layers forming in an environment in which water was evaporating and Mars was drying out.
Since of course I'm immediately dying to know what sorts of clays, and which sulfate minerals. I'm thinking that when they're talking about sulfates consistent with Mars drying out, it'd be sulfate evaporites like gypsum, barite, or anhydrite. Which then allows my fevered imagination to bring forth images of the Paradox Formation in eastern Utah and Colorado.
Of course, I have to stop myself from getting carried away here. The Paradox Formation is in places thousands of feet thick and covers an enormous area, which is what allows it to have such a profound tectonic effect on the landscape. Looking at that outcrop, I'm having a hard time getting a sense of just how thick the evaporites would be, but probably not that much. But what it does say, about the existence of water on the surface of Mars in the past, is pretty huge. And of course - letting my imagination run just a little wild here - opens the possibility of more evaporite deposits lurking under the surface, and bigger ones, and somewhere out there, one of the salt tectonic guys is going, "squee!"
Volcano for Monday
It's a twofer: the NASA Earth Observatory captured Klyuchevskaya and Bezymianny on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula erupting simultaneously. Pretty cool stuff. Like Sakurajima last week, both of these are composite volcanoes that live on the rim of the Pacific plate, which is a zone of active subduction. Volcanic rumblings in that area are never a surprise.
It's as if we've caught a hint of a new competitive sport played out over a geologic scale - artistic erupting! While these two volcanoes really get points for being coordinated, I've still got to give Sakurajima the lead, though. I'm a sucker for volcanic lightning.
It's as if we've caught a hint of a new competitive sport played out over a geologic scale - artistic erupting! While these two volcanoes really get points for being coordinated, I've still got to give Sakurajima the lead, though. I'm a sucker for volcanic lightning.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Big brother is watching students
School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home - via BoingBoing. This is absolutely ludicrous. A school issues laptops to its kids, then proceeds to use those laptops to spy on them while they're at home. And apparently in one instance, even disciplined a kid for something that they did at home.
This is beyond horrifying. You can argue that personal privacy is a changing landscape right now, as society adjusts to the realities of new social media and the basic fact that on the internet, nothing is ever truly dead. That's why you get messes where commentary on Facebook causes trouble or stupid use of social media gets you fired. There are arguments that can be made on either side for that kind of thing1. But using a laptop to spy on someone - anyone - in their own home is something I'd hope anyone that's not on a fascist big brother-esque power trip can agree is beyond the pale.
"We noticed you checking out some stoner sites, so we've informed your parents that you're doing pot and will be suspending you. Oh, and those were some cute panties you had on yesterday."
I'd be calling myself paranoid, except that it's actually happened. It's apparently time to take the tinfoil off of your head and put it on your laptop instead.
1 - I am solidly on the side of "it's none of your damn business what I do outside of work/school as long as I'm in no way representing the company/school."
This is beyond horrifying. You can argue that personal privacy is a changing landscape right now, as society adjusts to the realities of new social media and the basic fact that on the internet, nothing is ever truly dead. That's why you get messes where commentary on Facebook causes trouble or stupid use of social media gets you fired. There are arguments that can be made on either side for that kind of thing1. But using a laptop to spy on someone - anyone - in their own home is something I'd hope anyone that's not on a fascist big brother-esque power trip can agree is beyond the pale.
"We noticed you checking out some stoner sites, so we've informed your parents that you're doing pot and will be suspending you. Oh, and those were some cute panties you had on yesterday."
I'd be calling myself paranoid, except that it's actually happened. It's apparently time to take the tinfoil off of your head and put it on your laptop instead.
1 - I am solidly on the side of "it's none of your damn business what I do outside of work/school as long as I'm in no way representing the company/school."
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
It is done.
I took the bus up to Boulder this morning and turned in my signed acceptance letter, as well as the notarized faculty oath that I needed to take if I want to be a TA or RA. So, it's official! The paperwork avalanche has been started.
I also talked to my boss yesterday and let him know what was going on. The good news is, I can keep working as long as I want, so I'm planning to stay until the beginning of August. I can't really work past the start of school, though, not if I'm going to be working 20 hours a week for the university.
It's a little scary, since I've been working here for four years now. They took me in when I was unemployed and had nothing better than a high school diploma to my name, and there are a lot of people in this company that I have to thank for the opportunity to get my Bachelor's degree. I suppose the good news is, Mike will still be working here, so I can stop by and visit people.
More than anything, though, I'm excited. Graduate school! It's going to be an adventure.
I also talked to my boss yesterday and let him know what was going on. The good news is, I can keep working as long as I want, so I'm planning to stay until the beginning of August. I can't really work past the start of school, though, not if I'm going to be working 20 hours a week for the university.
It's a little scary, since I've been working here for four years now. They took me in when I was unemployed and had nothing better than a high school diploma to my name, and there are a lot of people in this company that I have to thank for the opportunity to get my Bachelor's degree. I suppose the good news is, Mike will still be working here, so I can stop by and visit people.
More than anything, though, I'm excited. Graduate school! It's going to be an adventure.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Lusi mud volcano: a drilling disaster
Strongest evidence to date links exploration well to Lusi mud volcano - this is quite the debacle. Obviously, there are safety concerns to be discussed regarding any sort of economic drilling. (Such as the long talk back in December about hydraulic fracturing. I think this one scores extra style points, however. There's something impressive about drilling that's gone so badly wrong that it's created a freaking mud volcano. One that's slowly covering the surrounding area in steaming, awful mud.
Just one of those errors in and of itself is bad. All five together? Ouch. Double ouch. Triple ouch.
A mud volcano may sound like a funny thing, but I don't think anyone in the area is laughing. Take a look at the extent of the mud flow, courtesy of NASA. The area basically sits on a giant, extensional basin full of highly pressurized carbonate mud and petroleum. Lots of petroleum. Drilling there requires getting to the oil and gas while avoiding mud volcano systems, which apparently failed, in this case. Badly. It's sort of like poking a hole in a water bed that someone's sitting on; no wonder Lusi has been erupting for six years already and is expected to continue to do so for another thirty. There's a lot of mud, under a lot of pressure, and a nice little path to the surface.
The group of scientists has identified five critical drilling errors as the causes of the Lusi mud volcano eruption:
• A significant open hole section with no protective casing
• Overestimation of the pressure the well could tolerate
• After a complete loss of returns, the decision to pull the drill string out of an extremely unstable hole
• Pulling the bit out of the hole while losses were occurring
• Not identifying the kick more rapidly
Just one of those errors in and of itself is bad. All five together? Ouch. Double ouch. Triple ouch.
A mud volcano may sound like a funny thing, but I don't think anyone in the area is laughing. Take a look at the extent of the mud flow, courtesy of NASA. The area basically sits on a giant, extensional basin full of highly pressurized carbonate mud and petroleum. Lots of petroleum. Drilling there requires getting to the oil and gas while avoiding mud volcano systems, which apparently failed, in this case. Badly. It's sort of like poking a hole in a water bed that someone's sitting on; no wonder Lusi has been erupting for six years already and is expected to continue to do so for another thirty. There's a lot of mud, under a lot of pressure, and a nice little path to the surface.
Late again: Monday volcano
Two weeks in a row. I'm such a failure.
This week: Sakurajima
Sakurajima (literally "cherry blossom island") is not quite an island; it's connected to the rest of Kyuushuu on one side by a bunch of lava flows that occurred in 1914. But the "island" itself is basically a volcano poking up in the middle of Kagoshima bay.
Sakurajima's lava output is mostly andesitic or dacitic in composition; it's an intermediate composite volcano, which means it tends to have the impressive explodey eruptions and pyroclastic flows.
And more volcanic lightning.
This week: Sakurajima
Sakurajima (literally "cherry blossom island") is not quite an island; it's connected to the rest of Kyuushuu on one side by a bunch of lava flows that occurred in 1914. But the "island" itself is basically a volcano poking up in the middle of Kagoshima bay.
Sakurajima's lava output is mostly andesitic or dacitic in composition; it's an intermediate composite volcano, which means it tends to have the impressive explodey eruptions and pyroclastic flows.
And more volcanic lightning.
Just a quick follow-up from yesterday
I think that this is a fine example of why I think the proposed "religious bill of rights" for students in Colorado would be a stupid, stupid idea.
Because if nothing else, a lot of the language in that so-called "bill of rights" sure makes it sound like this kind of shit would be acceptable:
Sounds like an awesome learning environment to me. More commentary at Pharyngula.
In good news, as of yesterday - I'm thinking some time after I wrote the long, bitchy post about it1 - the Judiciary Committee:
I take that to be state senate speak for "We think this is such a phenomenally stupid idea that we're just going to sit on it until everyone forgets this bill even existed." Or I can hope.
EDIT: Phil Plait pointed out to me that the judiciary committee went straight along party lines. That is completely unsurprising in this state. When I checked out the actual votes, I noticed that Evie Hudak is one of the members of the committee, and she's my state senator2. I think I shall send her a nice note, since she voted to kill the thing.
1 - I am totally not proposing a causal link between these two things (or involving the post that Phil Plait wrote that prompted me to be cranky) but wouldn't it be awesome if there was?
2 - Not only did I vote for her, I also donated $200 to her campaign when she ran; I received an attack ad from her opponent featuring a hysterical warning about how Mrs. Hudak wants pedophiles to rape your children in the bathroom because she supported a bill that lets transgendered individuals use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. It made me just a little angry.
Because if nothing else, a lot of the language in that so-called "bill of rights" sure makes it sound like this kind of shit would be acceptable:
Parents said the situation escalated after a student put a postcard of Jesus on Hussain's desk that the teacher threw in the trash. Parents also said Hussain sent to the office students who, during a lesson about evolution, asked about the role of God in creation.
On her Facebook page, Hussain wrote about students spreading rumors that she was a Jesus hater. She complained about her students wearing Jesus T-shirts and singing "Jesus Loves Me." She objected to students reading the Bible instead of doing class work.
But Annette Balint, whose daughter is in Hussain's class, said the students have the right to wear those shirts and sing "Jesus Loves Me," a long-time Sunday School staple. She said the students were reading the Bible during free time in class.
"She doesn't have to be a professing Christian to be in the classroom," Balint said. "But she can't go the other way and not allow God to be mentioned."
Sounds like an awesome learning environment to me. More commentary at Pharyngula.
In good news, as of yesterday - I'm thinking some time after I wrote the long, bitchy post about it1 - the Judiciary Committee:
After consideration on the merits, the Committee recommends the following:
SB10-089 be postponed indefinitely.
I take that to be state senate speak for "We think this is such a phenomenally stupid idea that we're just going to sit on it until everyone forgets this bill even existed." Or I can hope.
EDIT: Phil Plait pointed out to me that the judiciary committee went straight along party lines. That is completely unsurprising in this state. When I checked out the actual votes, I noticed that Evie Hudak is one of the members of the committee, and she's my state senator2. I think I shall send her a nice note, since she voted to kill the thing.
1 - I am totally not proposing a causal link between these two things (or involving the post that Phil Plait wrote that prompted me to be cranky) but wouldn't it be awesome if there was?
2 - Not only did I vote for her, I also donated $200 to her campaign when she ran; I received an attack ad from her opponent featuring a hysterical warning about how Mrs. Hudak wants pedophiles to rape your children in the bathroom because she supported a bill that lets transgendered individuals use the bathroom of the gender they identify with. It made me just a little angry.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Like a fish needs a bicycle.
Saw on Phil Plait's blog this morning that the Colorado state Legislature is considering a "religious bill of rights" for students. Phil's got a lot of good commentary about it already, but I thought I'd take a look through it myself and see what I thought; local issues are pretty darn important.
What caught my eye first are a couple bits out of the very beginning, which are justifications for why we'd need something like this:
And:
Frankly, kids DON'T have free speech in public school1. I don't think they ever have. In some schools, there are uniforms are strict dress codes, often times out of concern regarding kids wearing gang colors to school and making the environment less safe. That's how it was when I went to school here, and in some places it's become a lot more restrictive in the time since I graduated. There are a lot of rules in place for schools in regards to speech in general that are supposed to be there to guarantee a safe learning environment. Fred Phelps may be allowed to run around in the outside world with a sign that screams "God Hates Fags" because it's his Constitutional right to be a hate-filled douchebag, but that sort of thing is not currently allowed in schools because it creates an extremely hostile environment for students who are, for example, perceived to be gay.
So that's the first question - do kids in public schools have a right to free speech as strong as that of adults outside of schools? Does that right mean they have the unfettered right to make life hell for other students? School - and upper level schools in particular - are already a flaming cesspit of kids trying to find an other to demonize. So does a kid get a right to free speech that extends to creating an extremely hostile - possibly deadly - environment for other students?
You may think I'm going a little far here, but consider that there has been some conservative Christian shrieking about how the Matthew Shepard Act is totally going to restrict their religious freedom. Because apparently, hate crimes against gays are essential to religious freedom in this country.
Which sort of leads in to this idea that people have a perception their religious freedom is being impinged upon. As mentioned above, because it's now a hate crime with a harsher sentence to beat someone else to death because they're gay. We've also seen some sneaky attempts to get mandatory prayer back in to schools, disguised as a moment of silence. Some outright believe that America is going to hell in a handbasket because mandatory prayer has been struck down; they don't seem to realize that prayer is just fine and dandy and protected as long as it's not mandated by the school. So frankly, I'm not that impressed by the "PERCEPTION AMONG CITIZENS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE HOSTILE TO INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION AND EXERCISE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS" because it sure smells like the ol' Christian persecution complex to me. I'm sure it's not pleasant to be in a privileged group that is slowly losing its privilege and being treated like everyone else. But this particular bill is just going to be more mental justification for the persecution complex, I think - "See? Our religion is under attack! We need a religious bill of rights!"
Scanning through the student's rights section, there are some things I really take exception to on principle:
Should there be religious songs as part of a school sponsored program to begin with? Is this the school promoting religion?
See "God hates fags," above.
See Phil Plait on this one.
And for the teachers:
Honestly, if I were a parent, I would take SERIOUS exception to this.
Again, see Phil Plait. But I would also add that this one really pisses me off, just like pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. If you disagree with something, that's fine. How about being a responsible adult and not putting yourself in a position where you'll have to do something you find morally repugnant, instead of an arrogant fuckwad that does it on purpose in order to push your personal beliefs on others?
Also:
Have fun in regular college, kid. That shit don't fly there.
Though really, I have another issue with the above. Though we all do it to some extent, it's pretty stupid to isolate yourself completely from viewpoints that disagree with your own. If nothing else, disagreement is how we learn to flex our intellectual muscles. Of course the most obvious application of this is creationism versus evolution, in allowing a kid to completely hide from any material relating to evolution. But technically, this also applies to world history that covers the ancient world, since there were civilizations that existed long before the creationist god created the world. Or if we want to get super ridiculous, the definition of pi in the Bible is actually 3, not 3.14. Oops.
Personally, I don't think public school should be a place where you get to be sheltered entirely from anything and everything that disagrees with your worldview. You're certainly not being sheltered from other kids that may disagree. I'm sure there are parents who disagree with me, though I hope they realize that their kids are in for a serious shock if they go on to higher education at anywhere that isn't Liberty University.
Honestly, I think it probably wouldn't hurt if a school wanted to cover its butt on religious grounds by having a pamphlet available about all the relevant Supreme Court rulings; that would actually be quite educational. Citizens of all ages really ought to be aware of what their Constitutional rights are and what they mean. But this thing isn't framed in relation to the Constitution of the United States. Instead, the framing of this bill feeds the ridiculous Christian persecution complex, and really pushes the bounds on several things. It's one thing to let a curious kid know that yes, their ability to go have a prayer group each morning at the flagpole before school is Constitutionally protected. It's another entirely to give a teacher tacit approval to deviate from the curriculum because they have a religious disagreement with it.
I'm really hoping this one dies of neglect in committee.
1 - Thinking back to high school, I think you could make a good argument that schools aren't even on the same PLANET as the rest of us.
What caught my eye first are a couple bits out of the very beginning, which are justifications for why we'd need something like this:
(b) MANY INDIVIDUALS ARE UNAWARE OF THEIR EXISTING CONSTITUTIONAL RELIGIOUS RIGHTS. BECAUSE THESE RIGHTS ARE COMING UNDER INCREASING ATTACK IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM, A METHOD TO RECOGNIZE, PROMOTE, AND ENFORCE THESE RIGHTS IS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO STUDENTS, PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND EMPLOYEES.
And:
(e) THERE IS A GROWING PERCEPTION AMONG CITIZENS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE HOSTILE TO INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION AND EXERCISE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, AND PARENTS OR GUARDIANS WHOSE CHILDREN FEEL THEIR RELIGIOUS RIGHTS ARE BEING SUPPRESSED OR THREATENED ARE REMOVING THEIR CHILDREN FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS, THUS SUBSTANTIALLY REDUCING THE SCHOOL DISTRICT'S PUPIL COUNT AND THEREFORE ITS REVENUE
Frankly, kids DON'T have free speech in public school1. I don't think they ever have. In some schools, there are uniforms are strict dress codes, often times out of concern regarding kids wearing gang colors to school and making the environment less safe. That's how it was when I went to school here, and in some places it's become a lot more restrictive in the time since I graduated. There are a lot of rules in place for schools in regards to speech in general that are supposed to be there to guarantee a safe learning environment. Fred Phelps may be allowed to run around in the outside world with a sign that screams "God Hates Fags" because it's his Constitutional right to be a hate-filled douchebag, but that sort of thing is not currently allowed in schools because it creates an extremely hostile environment for students who are, for example, perceived to be gay.
So that's the first question - do kids in public schools have a right to free speech as strong as that of adults outside of schools? Does that right mean they have the unfettered right to make life hell for other students? School - and upper level schools in particular - are already a flaming cesspit of kids trying to find an other to demonize. So does a kid get a right to free speech that extends to creating an extremely hostile - possibly deadly - environment for other students?
You may think I'm going a little far here, but consider that there has been some conservative Christian shrieking about how the Matthew Shepard Act is totally going to restrict their religious freedom. Because apparently, hate crimes against gays are essential to religious freedom in this country.
Which sort of leads in to this idea that people have a perception their religious freedom is being impinged upon. As mentioned above, because it's now a hate crime with a harsher sentence to beat someone else to death because they're gay. We've also seen some sneaky attempts to get mandatory prayer back in to schools, disguised as a moment of silence. Some outright believe that America is going to hell in a handbasket because mandatory prayer has been struck down; they don't seem to realize that prayer is just fine and dandy and protected as long as it's not mandated by the school. So frankly, I'm not that impressed by the "PERCEPTION AMONG CITIZENS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE HOSTILE TO INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION AND EXERCISE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS" because it sure smells like the ol' Christian persecution complex to me. I'm sure it's not pleasant to be in a privileged group that is slowly losing its privilege and being treated like everyone else. But this particular bill is just going to be more mental justification for the persecution complex, I think - "See? Our religion is under attack! We need a religious bill of rights!"
Scanning through the student's rights section, there are some things I really take exception to on principle:
(IV) SING RELIGIOUS SONGS ALONG WITH SECULAR SONGS AS PART OF A SCHOOL-SPONSORED OR CURRICULUM-RELATED PROGRAM;
Should there be religious songs as part of a school sponsored program to begin with? Is this the school promoting religion?
(VI) WEAR RELIGIOUS GARB ON A PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CLOTHING WITH A RELIGIOUS MESSAGE;
See "God hates fags," above.
(VII) EXPRESS HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SELECT RELIGIOUS MATERIALS WHEN RESPONDING TO A SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT IF HIS OR HER RESPONSE REASONABLY MEETS THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT;
See Phil Plait on this one.
And for the teachers:
(V) ANSWER A STUDENT'S QUESTION ON A RELIGIOUS TOPIC;
Honestly, if I were a parent, I would take SERIOUS exception to this.
(VI) NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;
Again, see Phil Plait. But I would also add that this one really pisses me off, just like pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. If you disagree with something, that's fine. How about being a responsible adult and not putting yourself in a position where you'll have to do something you find morally repugnant, instead of an arrogant fuckwad that does it on purpose in order to push your personal beliefs on others?
Also:
(a) A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO OPT OUT OF ANY CLASS OR THE USE OF SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS; OR
Have fun in regular college, kid. That shit don't fly there.
Though really, I have another issue with the above. Though we all do it to some extent, it's pretty stupid to isolate yourself completely from viewpoints that disagree with your own. If nothing else, disagreement is how we learn to flex our intellectual muscles. Of course the most obvious application of this is creationism versus evolution, in allowing a kid to completely hide from any material relating to evolution. But technically, this also applies to world history that covers the ancient world, since there were civilizations that existed long before the creationist god created the world. Or if we want to get super ridiculous, the definition of pi in the Bible is actually 3, not 3.14. Oops.
Personally, I don't think public school should be a place where you get to be sheltered entirely from anything and everything that disagrees with your worldview. You're certainly not being sheltered from other kids that may disagree. I'm sure there are parents who disagree with me, though I hope they realize that their kids are in for a serious shock if they go on to higher education at anywhere that isn't Liberty University.
Honestly, I think it probably wouldn't hurt if a school wanted to cover its butt on religious grounds by having a pamphlet available about all the relevant Supreme Court rulings; that would actually be quite educational. Citizens of all ages really ought to be aware of what their Constitutional rights are and what they mean. But this thing isn't framed in relation to the Constitution of the United States. Instead, the framing of this bill feeds the ridiculous Christian persecution complex, and really pushes the bounds on several things. It's one thing to let a curious kid know that yes, their ability to go have a prayer group each morning at the flagpole before school is Constitutionally protected. It's another entirely to give a teacher tacit approval to deviate from the curriculum because they have a religious disagreement with it.
I'm really hoping this one dies of neglect in committee.
1 - Thinking back to high school, I think you could make a good argument that schools aren't even on the same PLANET as the rest of us.
Friday, February 12, 2010
I'm going to grad school!
I got a "letter" (it was actually a pdf attached to an e-mail because this is the twenty first century, baby!) this morning from CU, and here's the most important part:
やった!!!!!!!
Also, this:
Plus a lot of other details that indicate this magical, magical thing: I'm going to have funding! So I can actually afford to go!
やった!!!!!!!大学合格！
Edit: And hilariously enough, I just got an acceptance letter from the School of Mines as well, in the actual hard copy mail. They are also not offering me wads of money to defray the cost of my tuition. Though even if they were, I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to work for Mary for anything. Still, it's a lovely ego boost.
During your graduate program, you will be under the supervision of Dr. Mary Kraus.
やった!!!!!!!
Also, this:
The Department of Geological Sciences has advanced your name to the Chancellor of the University as a candidate for the Chancellor's Fellowship.
Plus a lot of other details that indicate this magical, magical thing: I'm going to have funding! So I can actually afford to go!
やった!!!!!!!大学合格！
Edit: And hilariously enough, I just got an acceptance letter from the School of Mines as well, in the actual hard copy mail. They are also not offering me wads of money to defray the cost of my tuition. Though even if they were, I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to work for Mary for anything. Still, it's a lovely ego boost.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A guy's take on gender performance
Jock Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl? is an article that made me giggle. A lot. But it's also an interesting look at the culture of masculinity and - the reference hit me like a sucker punch, since I hadn't been expecting in an opinion piece about football, of all things - the "performative" nature of gender as proposed by Judith Butler.
Now, to this day I still have screaming flashbacks of trying to slog through the selected pages of Butler's Gender Trouble, but I also think the woman's got an interesting take on things if you can just get past the wall of unnecessarily complex academic language. There's a lot to her work, but the bit that matters to this article is that she views gender as not something inherent, but rather a culturally enforced performance. Seeing that idea applied to masculine rather than feminine performance was really, really interesting.
If nothing else, I like seeing that feminist theory isn't just for us women-folk.
Now, to this day I still have screaming flashbacks of trying to slog through the selected pages of Butler's Gender Trouble, but I also think the woman's got an interesting take on things if you can just get past the wall of unnecessarily complex academic language. There's a lot to her work, but the bit that matters to this article is that she views gender as not something inherent, but rather a culturally enforced performance. Seeing that idea applied to masculine rather than feminine performance was really, really interesting.
If nothing else, I like seeing that feminist theory isn't just for us women-folk.
Today in dead things.
The little crocodile that could... provide a tasty meal for a snake. See, I think a 6-7 foot long crocodile still sounds pretty intimidating. I wouldn't poke it with a spoon or try to wrestle it. But I guess if you're a 45 foot long snake, it's just a scaly Happy Meal. Yes, a 45-foot-long freaking snake. That eats crocodiles. It would be like Anaconda, except the snake wouldn't be made out of either plastic or badly rendered pixels and would be, you know, genuinely TERRIFYING.
Extremely cool spider fossil here. I love that you can even see the individual hairs on its legs; it really does look like a modern tarantula. China's really getting all the good fossils these days. (Insert tired joke here about them being cheaper than American fossils.)
Extremely cool spider fossil here. I love that you can even see the individual hairs on its legs; it really does look like a modern tarantula. China's really getting all the good fossils these days. (Insert tired joke here about them being cheaper than American fossils.)
More volcanic lightning
Check out today's astronomy picture of the day. Very cool picture, and different from a lot of the other pictures of volcanic lightning I've seen since this one lacks the really striking, ash-filled plume.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
(Very belated) Volcano for Monday
It's Tuesday, and I just remembered that I forgot to find a deadly geological hazard for Monday. Mea culpa.
The Soufriere Hills volcano in Montserrat has a minor explodey incident last Friday. For ignorant Americans like myself, Montserrat is a little island nation in the Caribbean, which we've been so recently and strongly reminded is quite the tectonically active area.
Soufriere Hills is an andesitic volcano, and if you check the page I've linked above, it's done some impressive blowing up in the past. The page is actually incredibly detailed about the volcano's history and it's quite the interesting read. Anyway, the good news about the recent small eruption is that no inhabited areas were affected and the pyroclastic flows didn't reach more than 2 km.
The Soufriere Hills volcano in Montserrat has a minor explodey incident last Friday. For ignorant Americans like myself, Montserrat is a little island nation in the Caribbean, which we've been so recently and strongly reminded is quite the tectonically active area.
Soufriere Hills is an andesitic volcano, and if you check the page I've linked above, it's done some impressive blowing up in the past. The page is actually incredibly detailed about the volcano's history and it's quite the interesting read. Anyway, the good news about the recent small eruption is that no inhabited areas were affected and the pyroclastic flows didn't reach more than 2 km.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Communication with the unconscious
When I first saw the title of this article, "Giving the 'unconscious' a voice, I immediately wondered if it would be more depressing facilitated communication crap. But this looks really interesting:
Now that's some good effort to do experimental controls. After the team analyzing the scans came up with the answers they thought were indicated, those answers were then checked with the family.
I'm also pretty impressed by the caution, because it's easy to become excited about something like this. It seems really huge, but there's also only so far you can get with the ability of someone to answer yes/no questions:
Still, very exciting stuff, I think. It makes an interesting comparison to the Rom Houben case that Dr. Novella refers to in the post that I linked to. What you get out of 'facilitated communication' which I suppose sounds a lot better, versus a yes or no response.
To find out whether a simple conversation was possible, the researchers selected one of the four - a 29-year-old man who had been in a car crash. They asked him to imagine playing tennis if he wanted to answer yes to questions such as: Do you have any sisters? Is your father's name Thomas? Is your father's name Alexander? And if the answer to a question was no, he had to imagine moving round his home.
The man was asked to think of the activity that represented his answer, in 10-second bursts for up to 5 minutes, so that a strong enough signal could be detected by the scanner. His family came up with the questions to ensure that the researchers did not know the answers in advance. What's more, the brain scans were analysed by a team that had never come into contact with the patient or his family.
Now that's some good effort to do experimental controls. After the team analyzing the scans came up with the answers they thought were indicated, those answers were then checked with the family.
I'm also pretty impressed by the caution, because it's easy to become excited about something like this. It seems really huge, but there's also only so far you can get with the ability of someone to answer yes/no questions:
One problem is that while the brain scans do seem to establish consciousness, there is a lot they don't tell us. "Just because they can answer a yes/no question does not mean they have the capacity to make complex decisions," Owen says.
Still, very exciting stuff, I think. It makes an interesting comparison to the Rom Houben case that Dr. Novella refers to in the post that I linked to. What you get out of 'facilitated communication' which I suppose sounds a lot better, versus a yes or no response.
Diamonds are interesting, but I have no desire to take them to the movies.
Interesting post here about "The facts about diamonds." The author of the post mostly focuses on the cultural/social aspects of diamonds, and for the most part I agree with him. I've always found jewelry commercials in general irritating, and even more so the ones that dig up the rotting corpse of "diamonds are a girl's best friend" and display it on national television. I don't like the message that women are shallow beings that can be bought off with a shiny bauble; it's demeaning for women (we're coin-operated sex bots) and men as well (since apparently men have nothing going for them except their ability to give us shiny things.) It's not any better if you approach it from the angle of "jewelry as a means for men to show off their wealth" since that places women squarely in to the category of an ornament for men, the vehicle by which they do their social posturing.
Bah. Bah, I say.
I actually do own two pieces of jewelry that involve diamonds. One of them is a small pair of earrings that a good friend of the family gave me for my birthday several years ago. I bring them out for special occasions. The other is actually my engagement ring. It wasn't something I asked for; I always told Mike that if he wanted to get married, I'd be just as happy with a plastic ring out of a vending machine, or no ring at all. But Mike is an earnest, wonderful guy, who likes to feel as if he's doing things properly when he's moved to do them. In this case, that meant finding a really cool looking ring (no standard gold band with a rock on it for him) and giving it to me at the most bizarre moment imaginable. I think that's what makes me feel okay about the outward appearance of tradition, there; I didn't demand anything, I didn't expect1 anything, and Mike did what he did because he had the financial means and wanted to. As anti-diamond and anti-jewelry as I tend to be, I also respect that in the great game of give and take that is a relationship, I've got to do my share of giving.
I like the shiny diamond ring and wear it every day because I love Mike to bits and know how important it is to him. Not the other way around.
I'm always left wondering, between the slime of advertising campaigns and these little events that make up my own life, where I sit relative to other women. Are there actually women whose affection can be bought by jewelry? I hope not, and I've never personally known any, but I also don't think I'd be friends with someone like that to begin with. I've already learned far more about the seedy underbelly of human relationships than I ever wanted to know, just while trying to plan a wedding.
Social stuff aside, diamonds themselves are, I think, pretty interesting rocks. If nothing else, they intersect nicely with my favorite non-sedimentary rock, kimberlite. As far as anyone has ever seen, you don't get diamonds unless there's an Archean-age craton for the kimberlitic eruption to punch through; what we get from those kimberlites are the little bits and bobs that the magma carried up with it. This is why you get diamonds in Canada (and even in Wyoming), but not in Colorado. We're just a bit too far south of the remaining, long-buried Archean age rocks.
So, there was something about geological conditions back in the Archean (about 2.5-3.7 Ga) that allowed diamonds to form then and not since. So any "natural" diamond is quite old. There was much higher heat flow and there was full mantle melting back then, as opposed to the partial melting we get today. This different melting/depletion of the mantle probably is what allowed diamonds to grow.
Cratons are actually part of the lithosphere, the basement that the crust sits on top of. They're also remarkably stable; it's actually a matter of great interest how the Archean cratons have managed to hang in there so long. So the majority of diamonds - which haven't been dragged to the surface by a kimberlitic freight train - "live" more than 100 km below the surface.
Which is why Steven Shirey says:
Jewelry? Meh. Science? WOOHOO!
1- Literally. He caught me completely by surprise, the brat.
Bah. Bah, I say.
I actually do own two pieces of jewelry that involve diamonds. One of them is a small pair of earrings that a good friend of the family gave me for my birthday several years ago. I bring them out for special occasions. The other is actually my engagement ring. It wasn't something I asked for; I always told Mike that if he wanted to get married, I'd be just as happy with a plastic ring out of a vending machine, or no ring at all. But Mike is an earnest, wonderful guy, who likes to feel as if he's doing things properly when he's moved to do them. In this case, that meant finding a really cool looking ring (no standard gold band with a rock on it for him) and giving it to me at the most bizarre moment imaginable. I think that's what makes me feel okay about the outward appearance of tradition, there; I didn't demand anything, I didn't expect1 anything, and Mike did what he did because he had the financial means and wanted to. As anti-diamond and anti-jewelry as I tend to be, I also respect that in the great game of give and take that is a relationship, I've got to do my share of giving.
I like the shiny diamond ring and wear it every day because I love Mike to bits and know how important it is to him. Not the other way around.
I'm always left wondering, between the slime of advertising campaigns and these little events that make up my own life, where I sit relative to other women. Are there actually women whose affection can be bought by jewelry? I hope not, and I've never personally known any, but I also don't think I'd be friends with someone like that to begin with. I've already learned far more about the seedy underbelly of human relationships than I ever wanted to know, just while trying to plan a wedding.
Social stuff aside, diamonds themselves are, I think, pretty interesting rocks. If nothing else, they intersect nicely with my favorite non-sedimentary rock, kimberlite. As far as anyone has ever seen, you don't get diamonds unless there's an Archean-age craton for the kimberlitic eruption to punch through; what we get from those kimberlites are the little bits and bobs that the magma carried up with it. This is why you get diamonds in Canada (and even in Wyoming), but not in Colorado. We're just a bit too far south of the remaining, long-buried Archean age rocks.
So, there was something about geological conditions back in the Archean (about 2.5-3.7 Ga) that allowed diamonds to form then and not since. So any "natural" diamond is quite old. There was much higher heat flow and there was full mantle melting back then, as opposed to the partial melting we get today. This different melting/depletion of the mantle probably is what allowed diamonds to grow.
Cratons are actually part of the lithosphere, the basement that the crust sits on top of. They're also remarkably stable; it's actually a matter of great interest how the Archean cratons have managed to hang in there so long. So the majority of diamonds - which haven't been dragged to the surface by a kimberlitic freight train - "live" more than 100 km below the surface.
Which is why Steven Shirey says:
"Diamonds aren’t just for spectacular jewelry," commented Shirey. "They are scientific gems too."
Jewelry? Meh. Science? WOOHOO!
1- Literally. He caught me completely by surprise, the brat.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Return of DeathCat
Doctor casts new light on cat that can predict death. Oy.
For the most part, it sounds like the doctor is trying to focus on the comfort that the cat can provide terminal patients. Which is good. I'm a big believer in the wonders of a fluffy, purring, shredding machine. But this?
Sigh. I'd really like to know just what they mean by "accurately." Does the cat only hang out with people who are about to kick the bucket? Does everyone he sleeps near die within a certain amount of time? Cats sleep an awful lot... I realize he's at a nursing home and all, but are patients dropping like flies there? Or does he just sleep by himself until it's time for someone to kick the bucket?
I realize that it's just a fluff article with a cute picture of the DeathCat, but still.
Fish predict earthquakes? I actually googled this. And found another fluff article about Oscar, the earthquake-predicting fish.
By the way, an okay summation of the "animals predicting earthquakes" thing can be found here, courtesy of National Geographic. That Rupert Sheldrake is an advocate of this idea makes me a little suspicious to begin with.1
So... animals can predict some earthquakes but not others? Now, I confess, I am no expert on earthquakes, so I could very well be wrong. But at its most basic, an earthquake is an earthquake is an earthquake. Either you've got seismic waves of some magnitude or you don't. Maybe you could argue that large earthquakes with a lot of foreshocks might be in a different category, but that's also the sort of thing you can observe with seismographs - and sadly, lots of little earthquakes aren't necessarily a predictor of a big one, or we'd be able to predict big earthquakes ourselves and wouldn't be worrying about what the animals think.
Honestly, I'd be willing to buy the idea of animals reacting to foreshocks if there were a decent explanation for it that's backed up with actual evidence or at the least a plausible mechanism. Animals interact with and observe the environment differently than us, so I can certainly believe that they can notice things that we don't and react to them. But when we're talking a situation where one time, dogs howled, an another time, a bunch of hibernating snakes woke up, and this other time the cattle were restless, the inconsistency really doesn't help the case. It just ends up sounding like a lot of confirmation bias to me, kind of like Oscar the DeathCat.
My new hypothesis is that animals named Oscar are psychic. My sample size of two confirms it.
1 - Yes, this is technically me committing a genetic fallacy, but darnit, people. I'm a writer, not a philosopher.
For the most part, it sounds like the doctor is trying to focus on the comfort that the cat can provide terminal patients. Which is good. I'm a big believer in the wonders of a fluffy, purring, shredding machine. But this?
When Oscar was about six months old the staff noticed that he would curl up to sleep with patients who were about to die.
So far he has accurately predicted about 50 deaths.
Sigh. I'd really like to know just what they mean by "accurately." Does the cat only hang out with people who are about to kick the bucket? Does everyone he sleeps near die within a certain amount of time? Cats sleep an awful lot... I realize he's at a nursing home and all, but are patients dropping like flies there? Or does he just sleep by himself until it's time for someone to kick the bucket?
I realize that it's just a fluff article with a cute picture of the DeathCat, but still.
"I don't think Oscar is that unique, but he is in a unique environment. Animals are remarkable in their ability to see things we don't, be it the dog that sniffs out cancer or the fish that predicts earthquakes. Animals know when they are needed."
Fish predict earthquakes? I actually googled this. And found another fluff article about Oscar, the earthquake-predicting fish.
By the way, an okay summation of the "animals predicting earthquakes" thing can be found here, courtesy of National Geographic. That Rupert Sheldrake is an advocate of this idea makes me a little suspicious to begin with.1
A reproducible connection between animal behavior and earthquakes could be made, he said, but "as the Chinese have discovered, not all earthquakes cause unusual animal behavior while others do. Only through research could we find out why there might be such differences."
So... animals can predict some earthquakes but not others? Now, I confess, I am no expert on earthquakes, so I could very well be wrong. But at its most basic, an earthquake is an earthquake is an earthquake. Either you've got seismic waves of some magnitude or you don't. Maybe you could argue that large earthquakes with a lot of foreshocks might be in a different category, but that's also the sort of thing you can observe with seismographs - and sadly, lots of little earthquakes aren't necessarily a predictor of a big one, or we'd be able to predict big earthquakes ourselves and wouldn't be worrying about what the animals think.
Honestly, I'd be willing to buy the idea of animals reacting to foreshocks if there were a decent explanation for it that's backed up with actual evidence or at the least a plausible mechanism. Animals interact with and observe the environment differently than us, so I can certainly believe that they can notice things that we don't and react to them. But when we're talking a situation where one time, dogs howled, an another time, a bunch of hibernating snakes woke up, and this other time the cattle were restless, the inconsistency really doesn't help the case. It just ends up sounding like a lot of confirmation bias to me, kind of like Oscar the DeathCat.
My new hypothesis is that animals named Oscar are psychic. My sample size of two confirms it.
1 - Yes, this is technically me committing a genetic fallacy, but darnit, people. I'm a writer, not a philosopher.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
A big dam problem
At its most basic, a river is just a conduit for the transportation of sediment via water. Rivers pick up sediment and put it back down further downstream. There's a fascinating balance between the amount of sediment available for transport and how much the water is capable of carrying. More sediment than the river can hold? The extra sediment gets piled up in to a bar. Not much sediment in the river? The water eats the bar down to nothing and carries the sediment downstream.
Rivers constantly change and rearrange their beds on their own, depending on flow and available sediment. Bars appear to move downstream over time, with new ones forming behind them. Where people come in to the process is with dams. Dams change river flow, taking out the possibility of annual floods (when you'll get a whole lot of sediment washing downstream) and generally trapping sediment in the lakes that the dam forms. Since the rivers downstream of the lakes suddenly have a lot less sediment to carry, this often leads to them eating their own bars and then not having the sediment input near the dam to build new ones.
Which is what is happening in the Grand Canyon1. We actually talked about these studies a lot in the geomorphology class that I took since it was a very good example of how sediment load affects river morphology. The Colorado River is starved for sediment below the Glen Canyon Dam, so it's been eroding its own sandbars away.
One of the proposed solutions to stop the sandbars from disappearing entirely has been changing the flow of water from the Glen Canyon Dam so that there are periodic floods, which will allow sediment to be swept out in to the river. This isn't exactly a simple proposal, though.
Exactly. It all boils down to how much sediment comes in to the system as opposed to how much sediment leaves. If they want to preserve what currently exists, they've got to do enough flooding and time it appropriately so that the system remains balanced. If they want to actually rebuild some of the eroded bars, they need to up the sediment input even more. It makes sense that the greatest benefit would come from controlled floods that coincide with the flooding of tributary rivers; that's when the Colorado would naturally be getting its influx of sediment.
I suppose that this can be seen as a depressing lesson that even "green" power (the Glen Canyon Dam generates electricity) isn't without a potential for high environmental cost. It sounds like a solution where seasonal flooding would make up for the presence of the dam may be workable, but would lower its power generated somewhat. To me, that still sounds like a real have your cake and eat it too kind of solution, though - the Colorado River gets its original character back, and the Glen Canyon Dam still gets to be a working dam.
90 percent? Ouch.
1 - You can tell the man in the picture is a geologist because he has a giant beard. True fact.
Rivers constantly change and rearrange their beds on their own, depending on flow and available sediment. Bars appear to move downstream over time, with new ones forming behind them. Where people come in to the process is with dams. Dams change river flow, taking out the possibility of annual floods (when you'll get a whole lot of sediment washing downstream) and generally trapping sediment in the lakes that the dam forms. Since the rivers downstream of the lakes suddenly have a lot less sediment to carry, this often leads to them eating their own bars and then not having the sediment input near the dam to build new ones.
Which is what is happening in the Grand Canyon1. We actually talked about these studies a lot in the geomorphology class that I took since it was a very good example of how sediment load affects river morphology. The Colorado River is starved for sediment below the Glen Canyon Dam, so it's been eroding its own sandbars away.
One of the proposed solutions to stop the sandbars from disappearing entirely has been changing the flow of water from the Glen Canyon Dam so that there are periodic floods, which will allow sediment to be swept out in to the river. This isn't exactly a simple proposal, though.
Ted Melis, deputy chief of the USGS' Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, said Tuesday that the key to maintaining the sandbars is not simply manipulating the flows from the dam on the Arizona-Utah line. The frequency and timing of the flows would have to exceed the erosion that occurs between them, he said.
Exactly. It all boils down to how much sediment comes in to the system as opposed to how much sediment leaves. If they want to preserve what currently exists, they've got to do enough flooding and time it appropriately so that the system remains balanced. If they want to actually rebuild some of the eroded bars, they need to up the sediment input even more. It makes sense that the greatest benefit would come from controlled floods that coincide with the flooding of tributary rivers; that's when the Colorado would naturally be getting its influx of sediment.
I suppose that this can be seen as a depressing lesson that even "green" power (the Glen Canyon Dam generates electricity) isn't without a potential for high environmental cost. It sounds like a solution where seasonal flooding would make up for the presence of the dam may be workable, but would lower its power generated somewhat. To me, that still sounds like a real have your cake and eat it too kind of solution, though - the Colorado River gets its original character back, and the Glen Canyon Dam still gets to be a working dam.
Since the 1960s, Glen Canyon Dam has blocked 90 percent of sediment from the Colorado from flowing downstream, turning the once muddy and warm river into a cool, clear environment that helped speed the spread of extinction of fish species and pushed others near the edge.
90 percent? Ouch.
1 - You can tell the man in the picture is a geologist because he has a giant beard. True fact.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
A pox on both your houses
If you've been hiding under your rock and playing Star Trek Online more than me over the weekend, you might have missed the fact that Amazon and Macmillan are having a little conflict.
It reminds me of the heady days of high school, when pretty much everyone was just trying to get to class and then two enormous jerks that you didn't even know would start shoving each other. Suddenly the hallway would become a clogged mass of students, with those on the inner ring chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and the rest of us just wishing those assholes would knock each other out already because we were going to be late to class and there's a danger of claustrophobia when you're being crushed by a bunch of your stinky, hormonal fellow teens.
Anyway, Scalzi, whose altar I worship at daily just so you know, is of the opinion that Amazon's come out looking like a bigger pile of fail than Macmillan. Quite possibly. But he's also gone on to further emphasize the point that the people who are getting really screwed are the authors.
I don't really see a point in taking sides in this particular corporate slugfest, even if I agree that Amazon is coming across like a petulant child. But it is the authors that are getting hurt, and badly. Particularly since Amazon hasn't completely pulled their titles; you can still buy them used or from other resellers, which means the authors get cut out of the deal entirely. Now, if you're in the market for used books normally, that doesn't make much of a difference, but if you occasionally buy books with the thought of getting a good read plus the warm fuzzy of helping one of the little guys pay their mortgage, it reveals itself as quite the dick move.
Supposedly Amazon has caved. As of the time I'm writing this post, the Macmillan titles are still unavailable through the regular Amazon store, however. And even after it goes back to normal, I wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of ridiculous skirmish happen again in the near future. I think it just serves as a very important reminder that when corporate titans clash, as amusing as it can be to watch, it also comes with the potential to hurt the livelihood of people who have absolutely no say in what caused the mess to begin with1.
It just means that we dedicated book nerds need to be a little flexible in our book-buying habits. Personally, I don't give a rat's behind which giant bookstore chain gets my money when I buy a copy of, say, Old Man's War. I just want to know that Scalzi's getting his little sliver of the pie so he'll write something else fantastic for me to read in the near future.
1 - Obviously, this is not unique to the publishing world.
It reminds me of the heady days of high school, when pretty much everyone was just trying to get to class and then two enormous jerks that you didn't even know would start shoving each other. Suddenly the hallway would become a clogged mass of students, with those on the inner ring chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and the rest of us just wishing those assholes would knock each other out already because we were going to be late to class and there's a danger of claustrophobia when you're being crushed by a bunch of your stinky, hormonal fellow teens.
Anyway, Scalzi, whose altar I worship at daily just so you know, is of the opinion that Amazon's come out looking like a bigger pile of fail than Macmillan. Quite possibly. But he's also gone on to further emphasize the point that the people who are getting really screwed are the authors.
I don't really see a point in taking sides in this particular corporate slugfest, even if I agree that Amazon is coming across like a petulant child. But it is the authors that are getting hurt, and badly. Particularly since Amazon hasn't completely pulled their titles; you can still buy them used or from other resellers, which means the authors get cut out of the deal entirely. Now, if you're in the market for used books normally, that doesn't make much of a difference, but if you occasionally buy books with the thought of getting a good read plus the warm fuzzy of helping one of the little guys pay their mortgage, it reveals itself as quite the dick move.
Supposedly Amazon has caved. As of the time I'm writing this post, the Macmillan titles are still unavailable through the regular Amazon store, however. And even after it goes back to normal, I wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of ridiculous skirmish happen again in the near future. I think it just serves as a very important reminder that when corporate titans clash, as amusing as it can be to watch, it also comes with the potential to hurt the livelihood of people who have absolutely no say in what caused the mess to begin with1.
It just means that we dedicated book nerds need to be a little flexible in our book-buying habits. Personally, I don't give a rat's behind which giant bookstore chain gets my money when I buy a copy of, say, Old Man's War. I just want to know that Scalzi's getting his little sliver of the pie so he'll write something else fantastic for me to read in the near future.
1 - Obviously, this is not unique to the publishing world.
Monday, February 01, 2010
First Corporate "Person" to run for office
Murray Hill, Inc. is going to run for Congress. The press release reads like something out of the Onion, which means that these people are A-okay in my book.
I'm still pretty steamed about the the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission SCOTUS ruling. Not because I think it's going to destroy the electoral process as we know it - I tend to agree with someone1 who was on Rachel Maddow's show. Basically, he said that it just means instead of corporations paying for adds that say "Ask Senator Bob why he keeps killing puppies," they can now run scarier attack adds that say, "Vote no for Senator Bob because he keeps killing puppies." Functionally, I don't see that much of a difference. The shadowy corporate paymasters can now just be a bit more open about throwing money around, I guess.
Of course, I'm sure there's a lot of nuance I'm missing here, since I'm most definitely not a lawyer.
Anyway, the reason I'm ticked off about the SCOTUS decision is that I deeply resent the implication that corporations are in any way equated to, you know, actual people. Agreeing with Justice Stevens, here:
If nothing else, corporations have a lot more money to throw around than those of us who are supposed to be having an active voice in our own government. I know our congresscritters rarely listen to us to begin with, but this is just rubbing our noses in it.
I suppose this is an even more powerful argument for trying to aim your spending at corporations that espouse values that you support. Considering the concerns regarding the disclosure of donations to political campaigns that we've seen pop up during the Prop 8 dust-up, I admit I'm pretty worried that even that method of exercising individual power could be in jeopardy.
...and all this from a post that was just supposed to point at a cute an amusing link.
Here: an adorable picture of a cat. That should make it all better.
ETA: Also, Corporate People in the News, from Lockwood. It made me giggle.
1 - Whose name I have forgotten, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.
I'm still pretty steamed about the the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission SCOTUS ruling. Not because I think it's going to destroy the electoral process as we know it - I tend to agree with someone1 who was on Rachel Maddow's show. Basically, he said that it just means instead of corporations paying for adds that say "Ask Senator Bob why he keeps killing puppies," they can now run scarier attack adds that say, "Vote no for Senator Bob because he keeps killing puppies." Functionally, I don't see that much of a difference. The shadowy corporate paymasters can now just be a bit more open about throwing money around, I guess.
Of course, I'm sure there's a lot of nuance I'm missing here, since I'm most definitely not a lawyer.
Anyway, the reason I'm ticked off about the SCOTUS decision is that I deeply resent the implication that corporations are in any way equated to, you know, actual people. Agreeing with Justice Stevens, here:
A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.
If nothing else, corporations have a lot more money to throw around than those of us who are supposed to be having an active voice in our own government. I know our congresscritters rarely listen to us to begin with, but this is just rubbing our noses in it.
I suppose this is an even more powerful argument for trying to aim your spending at corporations that espouse values that you support. Considering the concerns regarding the disclosure of donations to political campaigns that we've seen pop up during the Prop 8 dust-up, I admit I'm pretty worried that even that method of exercising individual power could be in jeopardy.
...and all this from a post that was just supposed to point at a cute an amusing link.
Here: an adorable picture of a cat. That should make it all better.
ETA: Also, Corporate People in the News, from Lockwood. It made me giggle.
1 - Whose name I have forgotten, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.
Volcano for Monday
Mount Rainier is an absolutely gorgeous stratovolcano that has its own national park, and is in fact not threatening to explode at any moment.
Fun fact: Mount Rainier is the grandaddy of the Cascade volcanoes, the tallest of the bunch.
Actually, the hazard that Mount Rainier is currently presenting is of a different geological variety: like basically every mountain in the US, its glaciers are in serious retreat1 and that is clogging the downstream areas with all manner of sediment. The article mostly focuses on flood risks - which are a big concern when there are people living nearby. There's also a minor mention about fish habitat, which can also be severely altered by changes in sediment load.
Mount Rainier's glaciers being in retreat also makes me quite sad for aesthetic reasons. Part of the beauty of these big mountains is then they're got their white cap on, all year round. Some day soon, we may not see that any more.
1 - You know, because of that global warming thing that totally isn't happening because it was cold outside today.
Fun fact: Mount Rainier is the grandaddy of the Cascade volcanoes, the tallest of the bunch.
Actually, the hazard that Mount Rainier is currently presenting is of a different geological variety: like basically every mountain in the US, its glaciers are in serious retreat1 and that is clogging the downstream areas with all manner of sediment. The article mostly focuses on flood risks - which are a big concern when there are people living nearby. There's also a minor mention about fish habitat, which can also be severely altered by changes in sediment load.
Mount Rainier's glaciers being in retreat also makes me quite sad for aesthetic reasons. Part of the beauty of these big mountains is then they're got their white cap on, all year round. Some day soon, we may not see that any more.
1 - You know, because of that global warming thing that totally isn't happening because it was cold outside today.
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