A triumphant beginning!

Last night was the activities fair at UMM, where student groups try to catch the attention of the new students and persuade them to sign up. It was a mob scene with hundreds of milling people, and there in the middle of it … the brand new UMM chapter of the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Here are most of the current officers — the missing one was me, behind the camera.

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Viktor Berberi, Collin Tierney, and Skatje Myers (and Richard Dawkins playing on the computer)

I was impressed. I expected they’d go over there and get maybe half a dozen to a dozen people to sign up, but instead they got more than twice my most optimistic prediction, and that’s drawing primarily from the freshman class. I think there has been a pent-up demand for this sort of thing, and the response was almost entirely positive. Collin mentioned that there were a few dismissive remarks, but otherwise, I think we can look forward to a good, large group of godless activists to be operating in Morris, Minnesota this year.

Only one problem: we’re going to have the first meeting at 7:00 on Thursday, and I said I’d buy all the pizza. I may have escaped a $15 million lawsuit, but the pizza bill may demolish all the money I saved.

Give labor its due

Classes start this week at UMM and next week at our branch campuses in the Twin Cities, and it looks like we might get to deal with a clerical workers’ strike. AFSCME Local 3800 is taking to the picket lines to protest the inadequate pay raises offered to them. We’re all tightening our belts in our underfunded universities — we’ve had salary and hiring freezes in the few years I’ve been here, and we’re seeing cuts to library services and teaching lab support; you could argue, I suppose, as university president Bruininks does, that we’re all in this together and that everyone should compromise and accept these yearly parings-away together.

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Nope, no aquatic apes found in Morris

How come you people never come visit? I’m only an hour from the freeway by way of a two-lane county road, roughly equidistant from Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Minneapolis, yet somehow no one ever happens to be passing through this remote rural town … until today. Jim Moore took a little detour from his road trip from Victoria, BC to Oklahoma to pop by lovely Morris, Minnesota and say hello. Now we expect the rest of you to come on by.

In case you don’t know who Jim Moor is, he maintains this web page, a critique of the Aquatic Ape “Theory”. This “theory” (really, it doesn’t deserve the promotion) is often taken as quite reasonable at first glance — hey, whales have reduced body hair and are aquatic, humans have reduced body hair so maybe they also went through an aquatic stage in their evolution — but once you dig just a tiny bit deeper, the inconsistencies within the hypothesis and the contradictions with reality loom larger and larger, and you really should realize that it’s utter nonsense. But weirdly, there are a number of people who have gotten quite obsessed with the idea and who have written reams of papers to rationalize the baloney. Back in the 20th century wrangles over the Aquatic Ape nonsense would spontaneously emerge on usenet all the time (here’s one example) because its proponents had to be completely refractory to contradicting evidence. Good times.

One interesting twist to it all is that it’s an odd variant of denialism. These people aren’t rejecting an established scientific conclusion, such as that HIV causes AIDS or that human activities contribute to global warming — they are pushing beyond reason for a conclusion that science denies. I suppose you could say they’re denying the evidence that shoots down their favored beliefs, but at least they actually have a positive (but bogus!) hypothesis that they aren’t afraid to recite at you, which puts them several notches above the Intelligent Design creationists.

Anyway, Moore has a tremendous amount of useful information rebutting the Aquatic Ape Speculation — it’s well worth a browse, and also amusing to read some of the crackpot defenses (one of my favorites is the claim that Neandertals had large noses that they used as snorkels). And I’m not just saying that because he was nice enough to stop by Morris!

We won’t have Dianne Mandernach to kick around anymore

Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here’s a short summary of her career:

This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.

So she hid real cancer risks and promoted fake cancer risks. She got it wrong coming and going! How could that be? Could it be…ignorance and arrogance?

Marty said his misgivings began about a year after her appointment, when Mandernach was forced to remove the wording on the website that claimed a link between abortion and breast cancer.

“She told me it was her judgment to override all of the scientific information at the time,” Marty said.

What were the qualifications of this paragon to override scientific evidence? She was “a former nun and teacher, was chief executive of the Mercy Hospital & Health Care Center in Moose Lake”. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

Bridge collapse update

The place to go if you want to track the media responses to our Twin Cities bridge disaster is Minnesota Monitor. There are regular updates as new information comes in.

If you’re looking to know where the responsibility is going to fall, Nick Coleman has the answers.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

After citing that ghastly quote from Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half … to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (especially after Katrina, that quote deserves to be Norquist’s epitaph), Phoenixwoman seconds that suggestion:

It’s possible that delayed maintenance — delayed because of budget cuts, as the Republican Pawlenty would rather chop off his own genitals than undo his tax cuts for the rich — may have been a factor.

I think we can safely say that the Republican party platform has been a catastrophic and costly failure. Let’s hope one positive result from these recent disasters is that people realize that taxes ought to be used for investments in infrastructure rather than propping up the obscenely wealthy and funding wasteful foreign military adventures.

Spot makes an interesting observation: he reminds us that the Republican convention is in Minneapolis next summer. This disaster is not going to be corrected by then. Can we all remember to rub their noses in the debris when they come around?

Now we just need an opportunity to tell the Democrats that they’d better set their priorities appropriately, too.

Also read BldgBlog: Infrastructure is patriotic.

It’s interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration’s annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I’m on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That’s $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.

To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.

Yikes!

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I was nowhere near this disaster—I’m on the other side of the state—but I’ve been over this bridge lots of times when I travel from Morris to the Twin Cities campus; now it has suddenly collapsed during rush hour, killing at least half a dozen and injuring many more. I’m shocked. There wasn’t any obvious cause, just boom, it fell apart.

An in-person account by someone living right by the bridge, with photos, is available.

Go for a walk

Here’s a cool tool: Walk Score. Type in an address, and it uses Google Maps to look up destinations like parks and stores and theaters that are in walking distance of the place, and gives you a score out of 100 on walkability. A place like Manhattan will give you high scores; one of those desolate suburbs where you have to drive to get anywhere (like my old address in Pennsylvania) will give you lousy low scores.

Morris is middling: I get a 52.

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There’s funny stuff in the Google data base, though. It places a Donnelly grocery store a few blocks from my house and says it’s 24 miles away; there are also a whole lot of appropriate businesses that simply aren’t listed.

(via Mercury Rising)

They can’t shut me up!

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!

Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).

By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.

And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.