For instance, why do they never give me the seat next to the panda?
Must be a smart panda, as it’s sitting in the emergency exit aisle and they only let competent individuals capable of assisting others do that. Remember, in the unlikely event that the oxygen masks are released from the overhead panel, always help the panda affix her mask securely before putting on your own.
Mainly because I’ve been writing like a fiend for the last two weeks when I haven’t been driving across the state. So I took a couple days away from the computer, mostly.
Went on a little seven-mile round trip hike in the National Park next door. No great feat compared to what I used to do routinely, especially since the total elevation gain was less than 500 feet. But it’s the first hike of that length I’ve done in some months, so it did me more or less in. Especially the part about the mile and a half furthest from the trailhead being on deep sand. Which meant three miles hiked on deep sand, as I had to come back. Ow my aching lower extremities.
Along the Boy Scout Trail in Joshua Tree National Park
The trail led to Willow Hole, a seasonal wetland with the aforementioned trees in the middle of the bouldery part of the park called the Wonderland of Rocks:
Just upstream from Willow Hole.
Got there, sat, drank water, heard my favorite desert birdsong, from the canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus):
[Source]
All in all, a good day. Ow.
We didn’t think to take any photos that I know of, so I’ll have to make do with an image to capture the gist of the meetup at the Jupiter in Berkeley on Wednesday.
Artist’s impression
Known hordelings in attendance were Ron Sullivan and her celebrated trophy husband Joe Eaton, robro, moarscienceplz and a lovely gentleman whose real name I caught but whose posting name remains a mystery to me, so I’ll let him decide whether to announce that he was there and bought me a beer. (Thank you.)
There was also someone who came by the table and asked whether any of us was PZ. I jovially identified myself as PZ-lite, and he left in a hurry before anyone could clarify. If that was you,
Also in attendance were a few other good friends from various sections of the last 35 years of my life, and it was an incongruous but simpatico mix of people. It was too bad that Andrew Alden couldn’t stay longer, but he had a geologists’ meeting to run off to, and several in attendance didn’t get a chance to meet him. But you can all still read his geology blog.
I did have a moment of something like terror when I mentioned the BBC show QI and no one there had heard of it. You can no longer say that. Here’s the first episode of Series 1. There are 10 years of QI so far. See you later.
Having reviewed my schedule for my Bay Area visit, including the fact that Tuesday evening will likely be mainly consumed with helping my Dear Old Mom celebrate her 40th birthday,* I have concluded that I will be having a beer at the Jupiter in Berkeley starting at approximately 5:30 on Wednesday the 27th. The Jupiter is close to the Downtown Berkeley BART station. As the bearded hippie, I will be easy to spot. Hope to see you there.
In other news, I gave my old growth desert lecture a couple weeks back here in town, and a report on that lecture has just shown up in the local press. The reporter, a lovely person, got a couple minor details wrong but I’m always glad for a sympathetic story on desert plants showing up in desert newspapers.
* for approximately the 30th time
Who here can tell me the difference between hay and straw?
With very little notice, I’m going to be in the Berkeley-Oakland area Tuesday and Wednesday, Feb. 26 & 27. My schedule is somewhat in flux at the moment what with borrowing cars and catching up with close friends and family I haven’t seen in too long, but should there be sufficient interest in a FlashHorde Beer Hour, I will carve out the time to make that happen. Discuss.
I like reading David Roberts’ stuff on Grist, especially when I disagree with him. Sadly, there’s not a thing I disagree with in this piece rebutting Andrew Revkin on opposition to Keystone. (Perhaps excepting his characterization of Matt Nisbet as a “professional wanker,” which I find overly generous given that I have always found Nisbet sorely lacking in professionalism.)
This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.
As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded “my way or the highway environmentalism,” y’all, but don’t worry, he’s got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.
This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.
Nice line, that last one. Useful in SO many contexts.
Roberts’ casual slam against the Frameinator comes in response to this tweet, in which Nisbet chides 350.org types for not hewing to his own special brand of 13-dimensional chess:
@globalecoguy @revkin @levi_m @philaroneanu @350 Strategy distracts, limits ability for Obama et al to broker path forward, even w/ Dems.
— Matthew C. Nisbet (@MCNisbet) February 18, 2013
What struck me about the thread that tweet came in was the overwhelming criticism of Keystone pipeline opponents for not having an overarching strategy that extends past stopping the Keystone pipeline as they mobilize people to oppose the Keystone pipeline. That criticism isn’t quite true: 350.org, for instance, is full of local student groups putting pressure on their colleges to divest from fossil fuel companies, in much the same fashion as the anti-apartheid divestment movement that hit U.S. campuses in the 1980s.
But there’s also an uncanny similarity between the objections voiced in that thread to Keystone opponents’ lack of a formal program, and objections we heard to the Occupy Wall Street folks way back in 2011. We heard back then that because OWS didn’t have, say, a 13-point program to adjust the schedule of lunches at quarterly SEC hearings, that they weren’t Very Serious People.
Which, of course, essentially translates to “your genuine groundswell of concern and subsequent activism threatens to undermine our position as experts.”
I used to get lots of letters and emails when I worked at Earth Island Institute from helpful people who thought somebody ought to start a campaign to do something. That something varied: take on the issue of overpopulation, plant redwood trees along the shore of San Francisco Bay, teach inner city children about marmots, whatever. The problem was that very few of these missives were phrased in the first person: “I would like to do this work.” It was almost always “…you should do this thing I think is important.”
I roundfiled those letters, but they kept coming.
Which all raises two questions for me:
From Jacquelyn’s fine blog The Contemplative Mammoth, a bit of context:
You’re enjoying your morning tea, browsing through the daily digest of your main society’s list-serv. Let’s say you’re an ecologist, like me, and so that society is the Ecological Society of America*, and the list-serv is Ecolog-l. Let’s also say that, like me, you’re an early career scientist, a recent graduate student, and your eye is caught by a discussion about advice for graduate students. And then you read this:
too many young, especially, female, applicants don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented.
I’m not interested in unpacking that statement beyond saying that “don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know” is basically a really sexist way of saying that they female applicants “are on par with or even slightly exceed others.” There is abundant evidence that perception, not ability, influences gender inequality in the sciences– it’s even been tested empirically.
What I am interested in is why other people in my community don’t think those kinds of comments are harmful and aren’t willing to say something about it if they do.
And then the question:
After the sexist comments were made, some did in fact call them out. This was immediately followed up with various responses that fell into two camps: 1) “Saying female graduate students are inferior isn’t sexist” (this has later morphed into “she was really just pointing out poor mentoring!”), and 2) “Calling someone out for a sexist statement on a list-serv is inappropriate.” Some have called for “tolerance” on Ecolog-l; arguably, more real estate in this discussion has gone into chastising the people who called out Jones’ comments. These people are almost universally male. To those people, I ask:
Why is it more wrong to call someone out for saying something sexist than it was to have said the sexist thing in the first place?
That is a really good question.
[Updated to add:] Apologies to Jacquelyn for misspelling her name at first. Need moar coffee.
As pointed out by several in email, Daniel Fincke, whose last actual direct conversation with me consisted of a defense of his “Chris Christie is fat hur hur” jokes on Facebook some months ago, provides me with an opportunity to clarify something:
Also, I will note that where Chris Clarke completely unfairly attacked civility on the irrelevant grounds that you could order racist internment of people in a way that uses no abusive terms (as though just because bad things can be done civilly, routinized uncivil discourse is our only recourse to prevent that), he has not condemned Pharyngula’s routine use of the word “moron”, a word coined by racist eugenicists to justify equal atrocities against those deemed too intellectually inferior to have civil rights (even though he blogs at Pharyngula). There is an dehumanizing word that coined as part of a movement that did documentable damage to marginalized people and he is indifferent, apparently to the screams of those people while he paints me with no justification as a silencer of the oppressed simply because I advocate reason rather than bullying as the method of persuasion among professed critical thinkers and defenders of reason in the public square.
I’m ignoring the bulk of the paragraph: just shows the guy can’t read for comprehension when he’s upset. Which is an affliction a lot of us have. But he’s right about my not having offered my opinion on the use of the word “moron”.
And here it is: I don’t like it.
For my reasons, you can pretty much take this post and do the obvious find and replace.
I’ll confess I haven’t seen a whole lot of commenters in my threads using the M word, which may be because I don’t read every single comment. I also confess I slip up and use it myself on occasion, and “idiot” more often still.
Still, it’s about goals rather than perfection. I don’t like the word “moron” and wish we would all use something else non-ableist to express our disbelief at a person’s sheer wrongness. Suggestions for alternatives: doofus, fuckwad, jackanapes, buffoon, professional philosopher.
Can I go back to ignoring him now?
Because its base is made up of people like Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm:
Signs that read “Deer Crossing” and the like are going to continue to pop up throughout our country including Avon Lake, but who are these signs for? Deer cannot read, do not obey the law and probably will cross where they wish. Although adorable companions, it is hard to remember the last time that the news reported an animal talking, thinking or providing significant input for the benefit of society. Yet, these signs cost taxpayers like so much of government.
It gets better from there. Just go read. Don’t say I never provided the Horde with amusement.
