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pharyngula | October 22, 2009It's disgraceful. During some football game, our mascot, Goldy the Gopher, mocked a player on the opposing team who thought it was appropriate to ostentatiously kneel down and publicly pray.
Now Goldy wasn't the disgrace (I have a new-found respect for our goofy guy in a costume), nor was the young lady who came out and gave him a fist-bump afterwards. Hooray for them! The guy making a show of his piety…yeah, he's a disgrace, but he's not on the UM team. No, the real disgrace is our craven PR flacks.
Minnesota spokesman Dan Wolter says the stunt was "plainly a mistake" and the mascot didn't…
pharyngula | October 9, 2009This could be ominous — we're getting our first snowfall right now. It's coming down wet and heavy, too.
I knew this was going to happen. I'd made arrangements for a contractor to come by and do some fairly substantial improvements to the insulation of the house — we're having a couple of doors and a big picture window completely replaced — and I told them it would be highly desirable to have this done before the snow arrived…and they told me yeah, yeah, they'd be out within a couple of weeks. They said that two weeks ago. So I knew they'd never get here in time and that we'd have an early…
pharyngula | September 11, 2009Mother Jones magazine has posted a list of "ten cool schools that will blow your mind, not your budget", and UMM is on it. I look forward to the surge of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-munching, eco-freaking freshman students joining us next year.
pharyngula | September 1, 2009Old-timers may recall that there was a little event last year that had a lot of people riled up — there were angry letters to me and my university, with frequent demands for my immediate firing. The university stood up for academic freedom, I'm happy to say, but there was one other concern. A lot of these letters had another kind of threat: they said they were not going to be making donations to UMM. I have several letters where people said that they had been planning to donate sums on the order of a million dollars, but because I was there, the money was going to go somewhere else.
That's…
pharyngula | June 20, 2009Apologies for the short notice, but today at noon, there will be a march to show solidarity with the people of Iran. Meet at Hennepin and West Lake in Uptown for a peaceful gathering and march.
pharyngula | June 12, 2009I got a very annoying announcement on our university listserv today. Among the usual community and campus events, it says:
Please mark your calendars: Don Bierle, PhD in Biology, polar explorer, and former skeptic, shares FaithSearch Discovery at Morris Area High School Sunday, September 27, 6:30 pm. This event is sponsored by Stevens County Ministerial and area churches.
This really pisses me off.
Our local high school has problems. It's underfunded, it's academically compromised in many ways, and we were immensely relieved to get our kids out of there. It's a small school, with a total of…
pharyngula | June 8, 2009Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's…
pharyngula | May 25, 2009The boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma, and whose parents wanted to treat him with herbs, is back in Minnesota, and most importantly, in the hospital. The poor kid now has to face a painful chemotherapy regimen on top of having a lunatic for a mother — it's good that he'll get the treatment he needs, but I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
pharyngula | May 19, 2009On July 2-5, right nearby in Minneapolis, we're having a SF con, CONvergence. One of the great things all the cool cons are doing nowadays is having a skeptics' track, and this one is no exception. We've got skepchicks (they're everywhere!) and me on various panels, so you locals ought to show up.
Unfortunately, they shifted the dates a little bit (actually, they expanded it to a four day event), and it now overlaps horribly with my trip to the Nobel conference in Lindau, so I have to miss the first part…but I'll be there for the last half, all exhausted and jet-lagged, so you'll be able to…
pharyngula | May 16, 2009Sunday's episode of Atheists Talk radio may just annoy me — they're going to be talking about a local joint Bible study between atheists and a Methodist church. There are some atheists who like to dig into the Bible, but I'm not one of them — been there, done that, found it to be worthless drivel. Maybe you'll find it more interesting than I do.
The second half is more promising, with an interview with a board member of the UM student group, Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Yay students!
Also tomorrow, I'm getting rid of my daughter — we have to drive in to the Minneapolis airport…
pharyngula | May 11, 2009Here's a great opportunity for Minnesota fossil freaks: Minnesota Atheists is organizing a fossil hunting trip to Lilydale park on Saturday, 20 June. Sign up and go collect 440-480 million year old marine fossils. Maybe I'll have to rummage around and find my old rock hammer.
pharyngula | April 27, 2009This should be good, but I may have to miss it: Sean Carroll will be speaking at the University of Minnesota on 15 May — he'll also be speaking at the biology commencement the day after. He'll be talking about his new book, Remarkable Creatures, which is very good.
I'll be flying back from California the day before, and have my own university's commencement ceremony to attend the day after, so he's right there in a tantalizing hole in my own schedule…I could do it with a little bit of shuttling back and forth. I'll have to think about how to manage it…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009If anyone is in the Roseville area tomorrow, somewhere near Northwestern College, you might have an entertaining time if you drop in on a meeting of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. I can't even imagine what they're going to say in this one.
God's Design in Weather
Weather is more talked about
than any other topic. God has
arranged the weather system on
the earth. There are patterns to
this weather. How does a tornado
form? What causes hurricanes?
Why aren't raindrops larger?
Science is about finding patterns
and then predicting what will
happen. The study of weather
allows us…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009I'm going to periodically repeat myself and remind biologists looking for a job that there is a temporary opening here at UMM, which you can also find listed in the official University of Minnesota human resources site. Four applications have already come in, so get to work!
pharyngula | April 6, 2009Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position in Biology
University of Minnesota, Morris
The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year position in biology beginning August 17, 2009. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including an introductory level cell biology course for majors (with lab), an upper-level microbiology course for majors (with lab), and contributing to other courses that support the biology curriculum. Excellent fringe benefits and a collegial atmosphere accompany…
pharyngula | April 6, 2009Look up. The next thing I'm going to post is a job ad…you need a job, right?
I'm going on sabbatical next year, leaving a small hole in our staff that we need to plug up with someone as clever and resourceful and pedagogically exciting as me. Don't be intimidated, though! We'll take someone who knows cell biology and microbiology well, would like to join our team at a university that values education highly, and doesn't mind a little spatio-temporal isolation in our remote corner of the universe. It's a good career step for new graduates to take, too — a year spent here looks very, very nice…
pharyngula | March 10, 2009My university has closed the campus, and we're supposed to shoo everyone off towards home, all because of a little blizzard. It's like a Snow Day!
Unfortunately, getting kicked out of work just means I have to go home to Morris. In a blizzard. With everything shut down and locked up tight. Well, I hope I don't get lost in a whiteout and freeze to death while trying to find the door to my house…
2:37. Made it home, covered in snow. All that wind also blows the snow in through every crevice — took my coat off and shed snow on everything. Afraid to go to the bathroom now.
3:10. Have discovered…
pharyngula | March 5, 2009He was probably able to get home before midnight last night. You can now read his description of the social events around Dawkins' visit, and a much more thorough account of the talk itself.
One other point that I should emphasize. This talk presented an overview of how we should look at the appearance of design in the universe, for a general public. While I heard some complaints that there was nothing new in it, that's the way this had to be: it was a synthesis of a position.
Dawkins is often given a rap as one of those ultradarwinians who see every detail of life as the explicit product of…
pharyngula | March 5, 2009I may be getting too old for this.
Yesterday, I finished up teaching at 1 in the afternoon, then had to leap into the Pharyngulamobile and drive, drive, drive to Minneapolis. I got together with Lynn Fellman and Greg Laden for a hasty dinner before I had to go move my car and park prior to Richard Dawkins' talk. This was almost a disaster; it turns out that last night, at the same time as the talk, there was a basketball game scheduled. The streets were packed, parking was a nightmare, and I only got to Northrop Auditorium with a whisker of time to spare. Many of the attendees seem to have…