April 2005

Atrios is right: this is an excellent article by Fareed Zakaria on the wet martini.

• Either/Orchestra, Unnatural Pastime
• Charles Mingus, Self-Portrait in Three Colors
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Moon
• James Blood Ulmer, Too Lazy to Work, Too Nervous to Steal
• Thelonious Monk Quartet, Bye-Ya
• Yohimbe Brothers, Welcome to the Freq Show
• Led Zeppelin, Good Times Bad Times
• Nick Cave, Stagger Lee
• Sex Mob, You Only Live Twice
• U2, Acrobat

News out of Odessa, Texas, is that they want to start teaching the Bible as “history/literature” in high schools. (See Salon, via Media Girl guest blogging at Rox Populi, and see also Lorraine’s diary at Daily Kos — ain’t the internet grand?)

Now, in the real world, this is just a thinly-disguised attempt to teach Christianity in the public schools, and will doubtless run into all sorts of First Amendment troubles. But let’s indulge for a moment in fantasy-world, where words actually mean what they appear to mean. The history of the Bible is a fascinating and informative story. You can read for example Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? and The Bible With Sources Revealed. These books will explain how the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but rather assembled by editors from a set of several pre-existing texts by different authors — J (who refers to God as “Yahweh”), E (who uses “Elohim”), P (the priestly author), and D (who wrote Deuteronomy). This understanding will be very useful, as it explains (for example) why the beginning chapters of Genesis include two completely separate, and mutually incompatible, creation narratives. The students should probably also read something like Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, so they can learn how the early Hebrews were not actually monotheistic, and how Yahweh evolved from one god among many (in charge of storms and battle) to the only deity in the pantheon. This will help them understand, for example, why in Psalm 82 God is found talking to a bunch of other gods.

Of course, there are some interesting side effects of such knowledge. When Shadi Bartsch and I taught our course Moments in Atheism last year, students in the class came from a wide range of backgrounds and religious beliefs, which we found to be no hindrance when talking about Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God or Hume’s objections to the argument from design. There was only one part of the course that seemed to bother some people — the honest history of the Bible. It certainly wasn’t our intention to bother anyone, and many of the leading scholars of biblical history are religious themselves. But it seems to be the case that simply talking about the true history of religious practice can cause people to question their beliefs in a way that philosophical debate never will. Of course, I would argue that the real goal isn’t to cause people to question their religious beliefs — it’s to train people to think critically and rationally about whatever sets of preconceptions they may have, and evaluate them according to standards of reason and evidence. If we can do that by talking about the history of the Bible, then why not?

But sadly the real world doesn’t quite work like that, and I don’t imagine that the course I have in mind is the one being planned in Odessa. It’s the same issue that PZ Myers talks about in the context of evolution and creationism. “Teaching the controversy,” as creationists like to encourage us to do, is a great idea, if you actually do it. By comparing the standards of argument of creationists to those of real scientists, students can both learn a lot about biology and about how to be independent critical thinkers. This is of course not what is intended by the creationists.

The upshot is: when we really “teach the controversy,” we win. How do we guarantee that “really”?

Okay, this is truly funny. From Not Even Wrong, Princeton professors stage “filibuster” against the anti-filibuster machinations of alumus Bill Frist. Two of the filibusterers are physicists Chiara Nappi and Ed Witten, the latter of whom regaled the crowd by reading selections from Griffith’s Introduction to Elementary Particles. Couldn’t he have just given an introductory lecture on twistors and string theory?

As discussed in some earlier comments, it’s worth asking why physicists still bother flying around and giving talks, since we could easily just record a single example of each talk and make it available on the web for perusal at one’s leisure. Of course, we could say the same thing about, for example, any class you take at school — why bother with live teachers, when we could just play a video of some classic lectures? And why go to concerts if we can listen to recordings of some previous live performance? Or why bother meeting friends for a drink, when we can drink at home while sending email back and forth?

Enough sarcasm — it’s actually a good question, but to me it’s clear that the opportunities for direct interaction make all the traveling quite worthwhile. Still, you can’t always get everyone interesting to come give a talk, which is why it’s extremely useful to have talks online. With that in mind, here is my recent talk on “Why is the universe accelerating?” in various formats — html slides, pdf slides, and an actual video (some of me, but mostly of slides). The video is from the talk at Goddard Space Flight Center, which was marred by a computer glitch, so some of the graphics are missing.

I hope everyone understands what a style-cramping thing it is to give away talks online. Of course people who give a lot of talks will use basically the same slides over and over — no reason not to, if the new audience hasn’t yet heard the talk. More importantly, though, one tends to use the same jokes over and over, usually with some confidence that they’re new to this audience. Now that the whole internet can hear my talks ahead of time, does this mean I have to come up with new jokes?

As poetry month screeches to a conclusion, we present a special treat: a poem (if it deserves the designation) actually written by me. This is a sonnet constructed from the magnetic poetry kits on my refrigerator years ago, which I found simply too priceless to allow to slide into oblivion. You might think that some of these words aren’t part of the standard magnetic-poetry collection, but I had the pretentious pedant expander kit (naturally).

I listen morning unrequited dark
remember deft temerity perhaps
drink coffee a brazen prisoner verbose
abide concrete to conquer gilded breath

capricious squirming turgid universe
spurns our secret salient desire
above an arid circle chaste and stiff
the sky impugns my torpid poetry

bring once your laughing bleeding ocean dance
ephemeral translucent liquid zeal
linger cold champagne ferocious ice
mere dazzle almost naked warm repose

why was that open eye haunted with guile
when will this blushing word learn to avail

Okay, so I was a bit too slavishly iambic, but happily made little attempt to rhyme. Enjoy it, this won’t be a regular feature.

Mark gets one of the most amusing grant-program notices ever.

The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love – Altruism, Compassion, Service (http://www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org/), which was established through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (http://www.templeton.org/), has announced “Unto Others: Scientific and Religious Perspectives on the Love of Neighbor,” a course competition for secondary school faculty.

I don’t want to be on record as coming out against unlimited love, but — would it be cynical of me to think that, as goals go, this one is perhaps a little vague and unrealistic? The Templeton folks are just throwing money right and left, though. I got a notice myself, but it was only for lunch, not for unlimited love.

The John Templeton Foundation Brown Bag Lunch Program

As a follow-up to the mailing sent last week, we wish to encourage you to apply to lead a discussion group at your university. The aim of the Templeton Brown Bag Lunches is to create space for the discussion of broad, interdisciplinary, and timely themes relating to questions of human significance. We have great hopes that this program will succeed in fostering creative conversation and stimulating new research ideas.

Attached are the program announcement and application form. We are welcoming applications now, and they must be postmarked by no later than June 1, 2005 to be considered for funding. The first program cycle of this new initiative will run from September 2005 – December 2005.

Please respond to this e-mail with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,
Maya Brym
Program Manager
Templeton Brown Bag Lunches

They’ve mastered the art of proposing things that seemingly nobody can disagree with. Who would be against the creation of space “for the discussion of broad, interdisciplinary, and timely themes relating to questions of human significance”? But as Mark says, it’s all part of the bigger agenda of lending respectability to religion through an apparent affiliation with science.

Usually cosmologists don’t have to work very hard to avoid temptation, since nobody considers us important enough to warrant corruption. It’s nice to feel wanted.

I could have taken some time today to blog about my lovely visit here in Los Angeles, during which I have enjoyed the gracious hospitality of Samantha Butler and Clifford Johnson (frequent Preposterous commenters, not to mention highly accomplished scientists), and where we were joined last night for dinner by Marc Kamionkowski (also an accomplished scientists, but not [so far as I know] a commenter, although now that Lawrence Krauss is leaving comments perhaps we should encourage all the famous cosmologists to do so). I didn’t take the time because I spent the day in pleasant conversation with various USC physicists, up to and including a nice dinner after my talk. At that point a responsible blogger would have spared a moment to recount the day’s stories, but instead I took advantage of my visit to LA to go play some poker at the Commerce Casino.

Commerce is one of those many municipalities that is spiritually part of LA, but politically a separate entity. Playing cards for money is apparently legal in some of these places, although I don’t think that other forms of casino gambling are. The Commerce, at any rate, is one of the biggest card rooms in the world; I counted about fifty active tables of Hold’em alone at midnight on a Monday.

I played a fairly low-limit game ($3-$6) for a few hours. At this point I should regale you with tales of how my shrewd poker skills won me pot after pot from the bedazzled locals, but alas these aforementioned skills were not much in evidence. It was one of those frustrating games where it was hard to do well because there were a substantial number of unpredictable (read: bad) players at the table. You could have great cards yourself, but inevitably four or five people would call you down to the river and someone would hit a straight or flush at the end. At least four or five times someone had pocket aces, and I don’t think they won once. In such circumstances you have to take multiple flyers on long-shot drawing hands, hoping to rake in huge pots once in a while. After substantial swings on either side of the ledger, I ended the night down by a net total of nine bucks.

I’ve always (in my limited experience) found poker players at casinos to be engaging and chatty people, except for the occasional loose cannon. We had one tonight, a young guy who suffered a bad beat early on and sat there for another ten hands cursing loudly about how we were all amateurs and he couldn’t stand playing with such losers. I wanted to politely ask why he didn’t simply adjust his devastating game and take us all to the cleaners, but I’m pretty sure he would have turned around and hit me. Then my chips would have scattered everywhere, and it would have been a mess. Not worth the drama.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up at Timothy Sandefur’s blog, collecting recent blog entries from a god-free perspective. Timothy is a self-described Objectivist, free-market, capitalist pig lawyer, thus proving that atheism is inded a Big Tent.

For the last couple of weeks, Chicago has been enjoying marvelous spring-like weather. Now that it is deep into spring, they are predicting snow for this weekend. Good timing for me, as I am off to LA to give a colloquium at USC on Monday.

The weather was quite nice at the APS meeting last week in Tampa. Here’s an exciting action photo of some of the best and brightest of our nation’s young cosmologists, hard at work investigating the secrets of the universe.

L to R: Uros Seljak, Arthur Kosowsky, Hiranya Peiris, Rachel Bean, Mark Trodden, Arielle Phillips, Bhuvnesh Jain. Mark has a more substantive report on the conference (also here).

Which reminds me that Lawrence Krauss is stalking me. Not only did he give about twenty talks at the APS meeting, and not only did we bump into him at the restaurant we went to while escaping the throngs of physicists, but he was also at Notre Dame, giving a public talk on the cosmological constant the very evening after our conference in honor of Father McMullin. (And his name is even popping up in the blogs I read.) A couple of us tried to go to Lawrence’s talk, but problems getting his Mac to communicate with the projector meant that he started about 45 minutes late. We had to bug out early, or run the risk of missing the free food and wine at the conference dinner. So Lawrence, if you’re reading this, it wasn’t that we weren’t fascinated.