A Romantic Rationalist

Happy Father’s Day to all the other Dads out there. Unfortunately, I live apart from my children but still manage to stay close to them by keeping the lines of communication going. The key is to be there emotionally. Just as it is all to common for fathers to be there physically but not emotionally, it is also possible to remain emotionally accessible to your children even when you are separated by a long airplane ride. In other news…I have started my one class for the summer. I am at that point one’s college education where you’ve nearly run out of classes that you need or are even remotely interesting. The one class I found was on Middle Eastern history. This should be an interesting one. I certainly have opinions on the historical roots of what is going on in that part of our planet but I also know I do not have all the facts yet either and may very well find out I am mistaken in many things. I have already chosen the subject for the obligatory “paper.” My research question wil...

I am a documentary junkie, I admit it. Not too terribly long ago there were fairly reliable sources for such programs on networks like The History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and A&E. Now these networks are filled with shows like Ice Road Truckers , Axmen , and Dirty Jobs . If I were trapped to a desert island and had a chose between an overly-credulous UFO show and a show about high school dropouts working shit jobs, I’ll pick the UFO show. I am a snob, I admit. It is not that I do not appreciate the essential work such people do in our modern economy; I completely agree with the sentiment of the opening lines on Dirty Jobs , where the host/narrator speaks of the jobs “that make civilized life possible for the rest of us.” To my mind though, these shows place these people on a pedestal and carry the not-so-subtle message that “you don’t need to be smart, you don’t need to study or do well in school; as long as you are willing to sweat like a pig and grunt like a “real man...

At the moment, I am living in one of the last states to hold their primary elections, South Dakota . I grew up here but was absent, except for short visits, from 1983 until 2005. With the Democratic race going right down to the wire, South Dakota voters (at least the Democrats) are the recipients of much unaccustomed attention from Senators Clinton and Obama. This attention is probably a good thing if it serves to overcome voter apathy and get people fired up for the whole informed self-government thing. Though I am not registered with any political party, I certainly won’t be voting Republican. Nor am I terribly enthused about the Democratic contenders. The lengths the Democratic candidates have gone to in bending over backwards to appeal to “people of faith” have, quite frankly, appalled me. Sen. Obama announced on May 31 st that he has withdrawn from membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago after repeatedly having to distance himself ...

I am going to be doing something a bit new. I am scheduled to graduate in December 08 and I have a senior Capstone Project to do and I thought it would be fun, as well as therapeutic, to blog about it. First, a description of my project (from the formal proposal): “In July 2007, South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds announced that the former Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota had been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the site for a new Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). South Dakota had already invested considerable state monies in preparing the former Homestake mine for this purpose and in lobbying the NSF and the scientific community generally. The Governor, in persuading legislators and the public to make the investment in the mine’s rehabilitation, in addition to the obvious economic benefits, frequently touted the benefits of having such a facility to education, particularly science education. ...

Tragically, the places likely to be devastated first and worst by Global Environmental Change (GEC) are the poorest, most overpopulated regions of the world. There are many elephants in the room that need to be dealt with and one of them is culture (and that includes religion). The governments of such countries must realize that their (predominantly) patriarchal cultures in which women are treated like breeding livestock and that are beset by rampant overpopulation, illiteracy, and lack of economic opportunity, must change. The problem is, no one is going to come right out and say that "The culture of _________ is primitive, backwards, and positively maladaptive in the 21st century." When natural disasters strike regions where life is already marginal at best due to overpopulation, the loss of life is magnified many times over. Not to pick on Myanmar and Bangladesh , which recently suffered terrible natural disasters, but Western, industrializ...

A reader was kind enough to comment on one of my recent posts . I will try to answer each of the points raised. The readers’ original comments will be indented and italicized. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors are as in the original and will be underlined for easy identification. Mr. Mark Northrup . I stumbled upon your space in msn spaces and followed your link here. I am not sure why I am commenting on your blog except that I, being a Christian, have never found an ex-Christian to really have been a true bible believing Christian as they claim. Sure there are those who say they believed as I believe. However after asking a few of them some simple questions I found they never really believed those things set out in your blog here under proposition #1 ever. I think Mr. James's difficulty in finding any ex-Christians that were ever, to his mind, “bible-believing” Christians, is the sense in which he uses the word “believe.” For my ...

As one who aspires to (humbly) carry on the noble work of conveying science to the public in the vein of people like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen J. Gould, I recently become a student member of the National Association of Science Writers. For a senior-year science writing course, we were to review and critique the primary professional website in our respective fields. My classmates are from a number of different fields including computer science, several engineering disciplines, and pre-med, just to name a few. I realize that I may live to regret posting this here as my analysis may be read by other association members, but I feel this piece has a wider applicability than just the dozen or so people that would otherwise read it... In the first decade of the 21st century there are very few public policy issues that are not profoundly affected by science and to have an electorate that is not scientifically literate and informed is a recipe for disaster. This is why having a ...