May 21, 2008
Category: Society Gone Bananas
The Washington Post ran a brief, boilerplate, and unflinching editorial yesterday calling the latest round of witless yammering about "academic freedom" by creationists exactly what it is -- wounded, pitiful bellyaching that could probably fool no one with a pulse living outside the God-soaked U.S. (Well, I'm paraphrasing, but barely.)
This is one of those many issues in which those who agree have agreed since the beginning for reasons obvious to them, while those who do not are never going to change their "minds." This is one of many reasons why trying to meet creationists on some rhetorical or functional middle ground is pointless. They are like Stephen King's Langoliers -- they know only to munch, slice, and gobble their insatiable way through a world that left them behind but hasn't killed their spirit for ruin or slaked their hunger for darkness. It is therefore necessary to fight them, mock them, and not let the discomfiting level of intellectual incompetence in America become a source of personal angst. I mean, I would never allow such a thing to happen.
The comments contain the usual garbled complaints, phrase-bytes (e.g., "activist judges," "there is no Wall of separation in the Constitution," etc.) and lies, from the dolterati, whose dutifully unthinking and brainwashed representatives simply do not care that what the want taught to kids is rank nonsense and what they want ousted is scientifically unimpeachable.
I'm mostly okay with living in a country with a gruesomely high titer of ignorance both among the rabble and in the for Chrissakes educational system. but I'm not okay at all with their efforts to ruin things for people who prefer to operate within the constraints of the real world -- a perfectly comfortable place to exist once you get used to the idea that life isn't finite and there's no one living in your thoughts.
It's a wonderful fantasy to imagine every one of these tripe-bots being viciously mugged by the elusive avenger known as Mr. Reason in a brightly-lit alley on the way to the polls, but a fantasy it is.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 1:19 PM • 7 Comments •
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May 20, 2008
Category: Troglodytes at Play
About once a year I remember that a site you'll swear up and down is a parody exists, and I have a look around to see what ol' Ikester has done with the place. The site is called YEC Headquarters, and although I cannot vouch for whether it serves any official or unofficial administrative role in creationist machinations (though I have a good guess), what I know for sure is that I have never seen a domain that so beautifully captures every Bible-whacky canard, misinterpretation, myth, misunderstanding, lie, and desperate attempt at fact-evasion as this one.
Where to begin? Well, there's the front page, where Ike tells us that:
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 12:18 PM • 5 Comments •
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May 19, 2008
Category: The Running Ape
Some of us had a feeling something big was coming yesterday. With 2008 less than halfway over and the real track action yet to commence, Shannon Rowbury, a 23-year-old middle-distance runner from San Francisco I randomly had the pleasure of training with and writing about this winter, had picked up a national title (the 3,000 meters at the USATF Indoor Championships in Boston in February) in her first race in over a year and lowered her personal best in the 1500 meters to 4:07.59 at the Cardinal Invitational two weekends ago.
The impressive thing about those wins was not just that she crossed the finish line in first place or ran faster than she had as a collegian at Duke, but the dominating way in which she turned back some of the best runners in the country. In Boston, having followed the leaders through 2600 meters at a clip of about 73 seconds per 400 (about a quarter of a mile), she dropped a 61 to put five seconds on everyone else; some women in the low-nine-minute range can't run one quarter that fast, fresh and all-out. At Stanford she did more or less the same thing, blasting away from the field in the last 300 to again gap everyone by five seconds. Understand that five ticks of the clock is a huge gap at the elite level.
The message here was that Shannon had a lot more to give under the right circumstances. And give more she had to, because the qualifying standard for the Olympic Games is 4:07.00 (a country can send up to three athletes who meet this standard and can have one representative as long as he or she meets a lesser, "B: standard). Yesterday, at the adidas Track Classic in Carson, Calif., those circumstances presented themselves, and so did Shannon.
But even we optimists weren't ready for this one.
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 12:42 PM • 0 Comments •
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May 18, 2008
Category: So Much Like Us
I'm not asking why a judge in the most populous state in the U.S. ruled that a 2000 law rendering same-sex marriages illegal is unconstitutional did what he did. What I'm wondering, seriously, is why people get so pissed off when things like this happen.
I'm going to follow a schematic process of reasoning here. I'm sure to leave things out of the chain, so please jump into the comment section and help me out.
I'm starting with this question: Why would anyone -- in particular someone in a heterosexual marriage -- care what the practice of marriage in general includes or permits?
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 3:32 PM • 23 Comments •
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May 17, 2008
Category: The Running Ape
An international court ruling has given South African 400-meter runner Oscar Pistorius approval to compete in the Summer Olympics.
The double amputee told reporters in Italy, "I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people."
The issue is that some view Pistorius' "disability" as being qualitatively similar to that of a NASCAR Chevy being accidentally equipped with too little internal engine friction and too much horsepower. Pistorius, wearing two giant springlike devices in place of his lower legs and feet (picture below the "fold"), basically runs like a velociraptor once might have, inasmuch as Stephen Spielberg can be trusted as a paleozoologist. Many have argued that if anything, Pistorius runs faster than he would have were he using the legs he was born with, and is in effect riding a one-cylinder Harley in the Tour de France.
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 7:21 PM • 8 Comments •
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May 16, 2008
Category: D'oh(pe)!
Tim Montgomery, who once held the distinction of being the fastest man on the planet with a 100-meter dash time of 9.78 seconds, is about to become a number of a vastly different, much less celebrated sort.
The 33-year-old one-time partner of Marion Jones -- also a former sprint superstar and also sentenced to jail (she's serving a six-month stint for perjury and obstruction of justice in a Fort Worth facility) -- has landed almost four years in prison courtesy of Judge Kenneth Karas, who told Montgomery, ""Being a track star does not somehow disable someone from saying no."
Actually, I wouldn't count on that. Tim Montgomery Jr., Jones' and Montgomery's four-year-old, is one of four children the Montgomery has fathered.
Montgomery, who pleaded guilty last year to his role in a scam that saw him deposit $1.7 million in fake checks, is also facing charges for heroin distribution. Marion Jones may have had a longer fall from her pinnacle (she held five Olympic medals) to Earth than did Montgomery, but the latter is clearly en route to digging himself much further into ignominy and an all-around bleak future than Jones, whose legal problems will at least be over by fall.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 5:55 PM • 1 Comments •
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Category: D'oh(pe)!
So says someone who should know. Victor Conte, the head of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) in Burlingame, Calif. who spend four months in the federal pen for his massive role in supplying professional athletes with illegal performance-enhancing drugs, has seemingly done nothing but thrive rhetorically and even professionally since serving his slap-on-the-cuticle penalty. He has turned his blunt and almost charming realism into an asset that keeps him squarely in the center of the drugs-in-sport issue as those he served line up to face federal perjury charges and Conte himself remains immune to further prosecution.
CBC Sports out of Canada has an article about the upcoming Games vis-a-vis drug use that reviews BALCO's role in the more recent chemical maelstroms and solicits Conte's ideas not only on drug use itself but -- somewhat in the manner of law enforcement bringing a jewel thief on board to help with safecracking techniques -- how to best fight it. This passage captures what continues to be a media and public-opinion blind spot on the issue:
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 11:55 AM • 0 Comments •
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Category: The Running Ape
A couple years ago, San Francisco native Shannon Rowbury, then a junior at Duke University, was one of the best middle-distance runners in the NCAA. As a film major, she made a video about her cross-country team's quest to win the 2005 national cross-country title.
Now Shannon is a national champion (she won the 3,000 meters at the USATF Indoor Nationals in February) with Olympic aspirations, and her father has submitted her video to a contest staged by Flocasts, a site that streams coverage of track and field meets that don't make the cable TV cut (which in the U.S. is practically all of them). The contest winner, as determined by votes cast by site visitors, will receive two airline tickets, hotel accommodations, and tickets to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Shannon is as good a bet to make the Olympic Track and Field Team as anyone, and it would be nice if she could to grab a couple of tickets so that friends or family members who otherwise couldn't make the trip to Beijing could go watch their heroine take on the world's best milers. If my bias here is showing, I have good reasons for it -- I've spent time with a lot of elite track and field athletes over the years owing to my personal and vocational travels, and there are few hominids out there with Shannon's combination of talent, humility, competitive spirit and joie de vivre.
Y'all have shown that you're into descending on polls and toppling them in favor of the most reasonable position by dint of sheer numbers. Well, here's another chance to do the same thing, albeit with no moral outrages or ethical quandaries at issue. Fact is, Shannon's an experienced filmmaker with an eye for both imagery and editing and her project outclasses those of the other clowns on the ballot by a rollicking amount. So here's the deal:
- First go here and watch
- Then go here and give Blue Soles a "6" vote.
That's it. Some of the other submissions are entertaining, but (cue up Michael Myers and Dana Carvey voices)) they're not worthy!
Anyway, enjoy.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 11:19 AM • 1 Comments •
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Category: Arachnophobia
I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out.
Spider porn below the fold...
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Posted by Dr. Joan Bushwell at 11:10 AM • 3 Comments •
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May 15, 2008
Category: Society Gone Bananas
Keith Olbermann is over the top (and understandably so) whenever he takes aim at George W. Bush, and his criticism of Bush for responding to a "what's the worst-case scenario?" question by saying "they'll attack us" is unfair -- Bush's reply to this, if not to much else, was eminently reasonable. But there's something surreal about what happens whenever Bush abandons his campaign of profligate, Machiavellan mendacity and actually tries to address the citizenry from the heart -- and I'm certain Bush honestly believes that telling the country he was giving up golf was a warm and brilliant stroke -- because that's when it hits home that America actually elected someone this dumb to the presidency. The man looks like a kid with really bad ADHD who decided to skip his Ritalin one morning and smoke a three-ounce ball of hash instead.
Kinda makes you not want to stand in line in public for too long, eh?
Posted by Kevin Beck at 4:12 PM • 3 Comments •
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Category: Troglodytes at Play
No editorializing is needed on this. As the Pope himself admits, you're either a Catholic who accepts this weirdness without blinking or a thinking human being (Catholic in name or otherwise) who can only shake his or head when confronted with the kind of foolishness that terms like "outdated" only glorify.
Posted by Kevin Beck at 1:35 PM • 9 Comments •
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May 14, 2008
Category: Troglodytes at Play
As you have perhaps heard, Jose Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, has gone public with the idea that life may have developed elsewhere in the universe.
There's nothing radical or outlandish about this at all. It's squarely in line with what most astronomers believe, and if anything the AP headline was -- in conjuring up images of Alf or E.T. -- taking an unnecessary potshot at Funes, who has been a credit to his post throughout his brief (21-month) tenure as chief stargazer.
That said, Funes' attempts to reconcile faith and science only underscore how futile -- and moreover, pointless -- it is to try to meld baseless mythological belief systems with systematic, evidence- and trial-and-error-based information gathering. Anyone with a scripted agenda, a touch of verbal dexterity, and a load of wishful thinking can claim that X doesn't contradict science, where X is anything, from a well-defined observable concept to something ludicrous you just pulled out of your own ass.
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 7:54 PM • 9 Comments •
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Category: D'oh(pe)!
The BALCO trials are officially underway, and its targets are finding out that it's not about the drugs anymore -- it's the dishonesty, stupid.
If Barry Bonds believed that his fame and fortune would allow him to slide on federal charges, he may be starting to rethink that philosophy. The government has far more resources that the all-time dinger king could ever dream of, and if it's one thing the feds don't let pass with wink-winks or slaps on the wrist, it's lying to them.
The wording of the AP story is amusing:
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 8:16 AM • 3 Comments •
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May 13, 2008
Category: Troglodytes at Play
Quick: What goes through your mind when you look at the following image?
If it occurred to you that this cartoon, which Marietta, Georgia bar owner Mike Norman is proudly and defiantly hawking at his establishment in the form of T-shirts, might be considered racially sensitive in some circles, you're not alone. But as of 5:35 EDT on May 13, you'd be in the minority of respondents to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution Poll.
Based on some other verbal gems he's produced, Norman would have a hard time arguing that he legitimately supports the Democratic front-runner for the presidency. To wit:
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Posted by Kevin Beck at 5:40 PM • 51 Comments •
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Category: Pattern Juggling • What The Heck Is That Thing?
And now for something completely different, the tongue drum:
The tongue drum is also known as the slit drum or xylo-slit drum. It is the modern descendant of the ancient log drum. This is a large 14 key unit tuned to a pentatonic scale in G. It can be played with mallets or your fingers (with somewhat of a quick, snapping-back style). The sound is very mellow and pleasing. Organic might be a good term. This particular item came from here.
Besides the tone, what I find interesting about the drum is that unlike most musical instruments, it doesn't have a "normal" orientation. That is, the instrument can be approached and played from any of its four sides. You just don't do that with other instruments. Nobody walks up to a piano, lays across the closed lid, and proceeds to play with bass keys to the right and treble to the left. There's really only one way to hold a saxophone in all practicality. While some people have been known to arrange drum kits in non-standard ways, I don't know of anything as simple and direct as a tongue drum which exhibits this sort of free-wheeling, play-me-from-any-side nature.
Why would anyone care? Well, the way you interact with an instrument, the way it talks to you and you get it to talk, depends in part on the way you approach it, both figuratively and literally. While my first inclination was play it in the horizontal mode pictured above, it quickly occurred to me that a 180 degree rotation changed the locations of the notes and thus an identical hand pattern produced a different, though related, melody. It was a short step from there to a vertical orientation, more like a glockenspiel than a xylophone. It's almost like getting four instruments in one.
And ultimately, this reminds of another useful thing about electronic drums, and that's the ability to assign sounds and pitches anywhere on the kit. I think it's time to create a few new kits where the tom pitches are lowest toward the front and higher off to the sides.
Posted by Jim Fiore at 8:34 AM • 2 Comments •
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Category: What The Heck Is That Thing?
Humans have an ability to recognize patterns, even if they're not really there, like the face of Jesus in a pizza or Elvis on the side of a Holstein. Apparently, a local lumberjack recognized something in a certain tree trunk and decided to flip it upside down and paint it blue in order to help passersby see the illusion. This little bit of "found art" is located less than two miles from my house and I had a good laugh when I first saw it:
Jesus on a pizza it ain't, but it sure is entertaining nonetheless.
Posted by Jim Fiore at 8:22 AM • 4 Comments •
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