Chrononautic Log: nature

August 29, 2005

And Mississippi, too.

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August 10, 2005

So I’m not saying I support Google bombing, but I’m also not saying it would be a bad thing if this statement on Intelligent Design had a higher PageRank than, say, the Intelligent Design Network.

Fig. 1. Charles Darwin has a Posse.
More portable than The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,
yet less confrontational than a Darwin fish.

This is probably also a good time to point out Project Steve to anyone who hasn’t heard about it yet:

The list of Steves is far more prestigious then any list of living scientists the creationists have ever produced. It includes Nobel Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and influential authors such as Stephen Hawking. It is telling that creationist lists tend to be lean on practicing research biologists. In contrast, about two-thirds of the scientists on NCSE’s list are biologists, who are the most qualified to evaluate whether the evidence favors evolution. Another point is that the NCSE’s list includes the information on where the Steves got their degrees and their current position. By not doing so, the creationist lists do not make it obvious how many of the people listed are not practicing scientists.

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May 28, 2005

I wasn’t going to do this, but I just want to note that we’re fifteen minutes into this panel and the alleged moderator is still talking. The other panelists have been allowed to say, literally, no more than their names. Ah, moderation.

Update: 10:20. Still talking.

Update: 10:27 — Okay, Ben’s getting to talk now.

Update: 10:35— I wish I could type half as fast as Ben can talk. At least I can capture this book recommendation: Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, Dan Kindlon & Michael Thompson.

“Even inside feminist discourse, there’s often this thing about protecting women — this baseline idea that women are fragile. It’s interesting to me that it’s a relatively radical thing to talk about men being fragile.”

Update: 10:37 — Ian’s turn: “I have never actually seen ‘friends with benefits’ lumped with domestic violence before.” “Whenever I run across things like ‘all X are Y’ I start to itch.” “I’m a member of the SM community in Seattle, I see a lot of things that are really concerning, I talk to the people involved and they’ve negotiated whatever they need to negotiate . . . in that community, the idea of consent is really important — if you’re doing something and the neighbors call the cops, and you need to explain something, you really need to have that stuff worked out ahead of time.” “Men, taken as a group, act violently towards everybody — of course, as a person of color, I think white people, taken as a group, act violently towards everybody.” “I certainly think that boys and men are a good place to start in terms of avoiding rape . . . [But] I don’t think that useful, nuanced conversations about privilege can happen while only talking about one privilege at a time.”

Update: 10:46 — Joe is channeling Anne Harris, suggesting talking about the cultural construction of maleness. “One of the ways I think of my work is translating radical feminism to males.” “How do we teach that explicit consent is hot, and not ‘not hot.’”

Update: 10:47 — Mary Anne: “I’m interested in the next generation of the problem. I’ve mostly dated sensitive New Age guys. They’re really well trained, they’re inculcated with this. They’re really paranoid, really scared that anything they might do that’s the least bit pushy might be rape, or lead to rape . . . I’d like to hear the panel address that, and also, this question of . . . it feels to me like feminism has appropriated a lot of the traditional male virtues, such as strength, the ability to take care of yourself, the ability to take care of others. I think that’s great. But at the same time I wonder what men are left with. How are the sensitive new age guys defining themselves, how do they navigate that?”

Ben: “Going from a perspective of ‘what’s to work on?’ to this perfect prince — and how frustrating this was for her — how my inability to stand up for myself is what led to the end of the relationship . . . This story’s also the story of a series of women taking me in hand and going, um, no . . . Okay, I need to make people do what I want . . . then you renounce that power, and you’re left with no power, and that's not really very interesting for anybody . . . It has a lot to do with trusting the power of the other person, that I need to be neither dominant nor protective . . . that I didn't need to give in just because I needed to be gallant.”

Mary Anne: “The problem with gallant is that it assumes power in the same way.”

Ian: “The standard sort of redneck white guy response to feminism: They’re taking my power away — is correct. That’s something that needs to be kept in the forefront — there needs to be a conversation about empowerment rather than over-powerment. Without that, there’s not going to be buy-in . . . there’s not going to be movement, or there’s only going to be movement among us sensitive new age guys . . . or those of us who like getting laid enough to hang out where women are empowered enough that we can get laid a lot . . . . In order to be empowered, people need to be able to say yes and they need to be able to say no. ‘Not right now’ can mean not right now, and not never . . . it can mean ‘Ask me later’ and not ‘Not you, not ever.’ Freedom is the ability to choose, and anything less isn’t the world I want to live in.”

Joe: “Nice guys haven’t reproduced . . . The boys in the world I go into do not see options for masculinity.”

Update: 11:03 — Ben: There’s an easy heuristic to tell if you’re asking in a way that people can say no — they sometimes say no.

Ian: “Men are expected to make the first move . . . and that’s a power disadvantage. I never make the first move, and that's a stance I’ve taken — of course it helps that I’m good looking. I don’t know if my standard would work for everybody. For most people . . . the real situation is, if I want to get laid, I have to make the first move, I have to risk rejection — and everybody really likes to risk rejection. . . . Feelings are facts. Remedial sex education problematizes anger. Sometimes anger is a problem, somtimes anger means someone has violated your boundaries. It’s not always a case of ‘I feel afraid, but I can’t feel afraid, because I’m a boy, I have to feel angry because anger is a safe emotion.’”

Ben: “There’s this thing, whether it’s cultural or biological, boys like things to be loud and fast and go boom . . . There’s a distinction between two kinds of violence, and they're conflated. As a kid, I was never very violent . . . then as an adult I started playing rugby, and I really liked hitting people . . . you really need to distinguish between violence ‘overriding someone’s boundaries without consent’ and the dictionary definition . . . you look at the dictionary definition of violence and a lot of it’s about being loud and sudden.”

Ian: “There need to be many models — there needs to be a continutity of models.”

Ben: “It’s interesting that women can talk much more easily about whether and when and how they like or don’t like sex. With men . . . if you’re not able to say no to something, you’re not really able to say yes either. There’s so much at stake for men. Men’s attention is often not so much on having sex as on having done her.”

Update: 11:20 — Audience member: “It is much harder to take hold of someone’s hand than it is to make a pass at them.”

[wiscon]

Comments (4)

June 11, 2004

Kathryn Cramer finds a kid who gets it:

From a first grade perspective, extinction was something that happened only to dinosaurs. Together, Peter and I changed that point of view, acquainting them with fascinating animals recently gone extinct: the thylacine, the great auk, the quagga, the moa. At the end, I asked what people could do about the problem of extinctions. One eager boy, raising his hand urgently until I called on him, answered “Form an angry mob!”

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May 29, 2004

And here’s me without my hat nor my umbrella. Actually it’s only 50° now. On the Doppler radar I can see a rainstorm the size of Michigan; on the satellite it’s clouds from the Rockies to the Appalachians, except for a bit of Iowa and a bit of West Texas. Damn it, it was bloody beautiful out here yesterday.

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Update: Memo to self: The idea of — rain or no rain, hat or no hat, umbrella or no umbrella — taking a brisk turn around the Capitol Square Farmer’s Market, amusing though it may seem at first, will cease entirely to seem amusing just about at the point where it’s no better to go back than to go forward.

The current temperature has dropped to 45°, and the predicted high is now 66°.

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February 13, 2004

Deep time, that is — courtesy of PaleoIndustrial: The Lost Worlds of Deep Time.

Half a billion years before the first humans walked the earth, and hundreds of millions of years prior to the reign of the mighty dinosaurs, the Paleozoic seas teemed with bizarre and beautiful life forms. PaleoIndustrial strives to bring these long-extinct creatures back to life in still images, short animations, and interactive 3-D reconstructions.

And do they ever. You want to give yourself nightmares, imagine going snorkeling and running into Anomalocaris canadensis.* (Yeah, it’s only three feet long, but on the other hand, you know — Jesus! It’s three feet long!)

* Anomalocaris: Latin for freaky shrimp. Which is what they thought the mouth-parts were when they’d just found those, and not the rest of the body.

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August 22, 2003

I just watched a yellowjacket fly up to the two-foot spiderweb outside my fifth-floor office window, latch onto the mummified body of a mayfly, and fly off with it. (Or most of it. It looks like the yellowjacket found it easier to detach the body from the wings than detatch the wings from the spiderweb.)

Aside from some practical instruction regarding mosquitoes and cockroaches, my childhood education in entomology was limited to a very simple and straightforward Standard Model, presented in fables and children’s books and the occasional Bible story. The Standard Model included five Fundamental Bugs: Ants, Bees, Spiders, Flies, and Grasshoppers (or Locusts).

Yellowjackets that steal food out of spiders’ webs were not in any way part of the Standard Model.

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July 1, 2003

No, really.

The researchers . . . tested monkeys by showing them side-by-side video images of another monkey making two sounds, while playing a soundtrack of just one of the sounds. . . . [T]he test monkeys were able to match the sound with the correct video image.

I’m sure it won’t make a dent in the idea that speech is uniquely human and qualitatively different from all other forms of animal behavior. But it’s a start.

(Now my question is, how do you get a “friendly coo” from a monkey trussed up in a “standard primate restraint chair”?)

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March 26, 2003

More reputable sources (than that Moroccan weekly newspaper, I mean; Rob is as reputable as you like) are reporting that the Navy has flown two mine-sweeping dolphins into Umm Qasr to look for mines there — presumably in the water.

The dolphins are taught to avoid touching the mines, which might cause them to explode, said Capt. Mike Tillotson, a Navy bomb disposal expert.

(Dept. of Pronoun Referents: I think I know what the writer means, but I couldn’t help read that as “...which might cause [the dolphins] to explode,” not the mines.)

He said there was little risk to animals doing this kind of work. The biggest hazard could come from other indigenous dolphins in the waters of Umm Qasr. Dolphins are territorial and there is a fear local dolphins might drive the interlopers out, causing them to go AWOL.

You’d think that U.S. Navy Special Forces dolphins would be tougher than that, but apparently not. Then again, they aren’t exactly volunteers. Anyway, I just hope the Moroccan monkeys are tough enough to deal with those indigenous Iraqi monkeys.

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