The saddest part is watching players and spectators refuse to join in

via Behind the Lines:

John Carroll University students protest a decision not to include GLBT students in an anti-discrimination statement.

New Article on Writing Centers

In addition to poetry and politics, my other main interest is writing center work. I’m excited to say I have an article in the latest issue of New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. It is a themed issue on “Universities, Corporatizaton, and Resistance.” Although I have not finished reading every piece, it includes some great subjects, with locations ranging from Spain to the US and Canada.

My article focuses on how the work of the writing center can serve to disrupt the expectations of an increasingly standardized educational system. A pdf can be found here.

Goosebumps

An interesting post about the apparent uselessness of goosebumps for humans.

But of course goosebumps aren’t of any use to us. They don’t keep us warm, nor do they make us look bigger and fearsome . . . They’re evolutionary leftovers, evidence of our common ancestry with other mammals.

He lists two causes for goosebumps: cold and fear. But aren’t there others? Like awe? Or R.L. Stine?

Scott Roeder found guilty

Scott Roeder, the man who assassinated Dr. George Tiller, has been found guilty on all counts and given a life sentence. What a ridiculously short trial!

The defense appeared basically inept, and their main goal of arguing for “justifiable homicide” was rejected by the judge. I may write more on this all later, but for now I’ll just do the happy dance. That the trial was so short and avoided some of the vile and prolonged propagandizing the anti-choicers seem to love at least means Dr Tiller’s family can begin to take whatever steps they must.

Sexy dictionary?

This article has been making the rounds, and is still worth a look:

After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across “oral sex” in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster’s 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week.

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. The dictionaries were initially purchased a few years ago for fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms districtwide, according to a memo to the superintendent.

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

I call bullshit. I went to a fairly conservative, white, upper-middle class suburban school, and we had our first sex ed in fifth grade. (The kind where they separated the boys and girls, one day watching “our” video and the next watching “theirs.” We had more comprehensive education a year or three later. Also, in seventh grade (and again in high school), we had abstinence-only guest speakers brought it. “Put out the fire of your sexual desire,” they told us.)

It isn’t as though the teacher was assigning an oral sex project – the student just stumbled upon the entry. I find racism offensive, but I still want it included and defined in the dictionary. That’s the point of the dictionary, to include as much as possible as honestly as possible. Isn’t that the point of education?

I’m drunk.

That’s all. Just thought that, as a writer, it should be mentioned.

Love to all.

the good letters

Been getting some of those good letters in my (e)mail. This time, from two really fine political journals: Pemmican and Wheelhouse Magazine. My poems are not out yet, but they’re such good journals I thought you should know about them (if you didn’t already). Also, I just don’t have a lot else to blog about right now.

Except the snow, but that is something I’ll let others blog about (and goodness knows they have!).

Three poems

Three poems in the inaugural issue of Eclectic Flash, which you can read as a free PDF right here. Interestingly, the issue contains no italics.

Stephen Jay Gould on “theory”

Earlier, I posted Stephen Hawking’s take on scientific theory, and then Neil deGrasse Tyson’s. Here’s another:

In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect fact”–part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is “only” a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science—that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.”

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, “fact” doesn’t mean “absolute certainty”; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory—natural selection—to explain the mechanism of evolution.

Stephen J. Gould, ” Evolution as Fact and Theory”; Discover, May 1981

Universe Down to Earth, pt 2

Since this site, rather than an interesting, focused, and structured blog, instead basically serves as a place I can save interesting quotes, here are some random bits from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Universe Down to Earth:

What is a scientific theory?

An excellent scientific theory is one that is not only based on data but is falsifiable, predicts new phenomena, and unifies previously disjointed sets of ideas. pg 30

How what is the relationship between religious and scientific theories?

Some other theories are constructed so that they are not falsifiable. Herein lays the primary schism between deity-based mythology and scientific theory. If all that you see, do, measure, and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature. pg 34

Some humorous statements (Tyson has an odd humor, and so do I):

Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do no normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover-oven. pg 40

As the adage goes, “The person with one clock knows the time. The person with two clocks isn’t sure.”

And the most bizarre: When explaining how the center of mass works, he uses the example of a cat.

If you have ever seen a cat accidentally fall or have been deranged enough to toss a cat through the air, you may have noticed that it usually lands on its paws. pg 86

And this is why I don’t make a good scientist: 300 pages of interstellar exploration and wide-ranging scientific history and theory, and I’m left with the image of a deranged person throwing a cat.