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.
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.
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)
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.
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn’t like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event.
It’s never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists – Morris Chapter, and if you’re an interested UMM student, they’d like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.
I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don’t even have to be a student to show up.
Leslee Unruh, witch-queen of the Dakotas, is in Minnesota for the National Abstinence Clearinghouse convention. Fortunately, we’ve got Jeff Fecke to document the atrocities. The question remains: who will fumigate and sterilize the Crowne Plaza Riverfront hotel afterwards?
Academia is a strange little world—we’re happy about this news!
The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.
We’re an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!
I’ll be speaking at the Minnesota Atheists on 22 July, on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations
for the Mind and Religious Belief“. Michael Egnor is welcome to stop on by.
Hey, Stevens County and all the residents thereabout: you can catch a performance of Inherit the Wind tonight at 7, or tomorrow in a matinee at 2, in lovely Barrett, Minnesota. I’ll be there. My colleague in the biology department, Van Gooch, will be acting in the show, so UMM people should definitely go.
In an unfortunate twist of fate for the former home of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Church of Scientology is moving in.
The Church of Scientology has purchased the former Science Museum of Minnesota building in downtown St. Paul
Eric Rapp, a Welsh Cos. broker who marketed the space, said the church plans a major renovation of the building that once housed exhibits and has since been the home of the failed Minnesota Business Academy.
Rapp wouldn’t disclose the sale price of the 80,000-square-foot west building of the former museum complex. The sale closed Friday. A number of financial institutions had come to own the building, which was on the market since May 2006, he said.
It’s depressing, but the new building the Science Museum of Minnesota is in is wonderful, and you all ought to visit it. Skip the scientologists, though.
