They’re joking, right?

The pope has condemned this silly sculpture as blasphemous, and German Catholics are trying to get it removed from display.

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They can’t be serious, can they? It’s kitschy and funny. But really, they’re unhappy about this.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope’s name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture.

“Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people,” Pahl told Reuters by telephone as the museum board was meeting.

The Vatican letter said that the work “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love”.

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

So wait…now doing anything with two sticks stuck together at right angles is going to be an affront to “God’s love”? I have been told over and over again by pompous wackaloons that I’m on the shock-jock trajectory, compelled to try and top my outrages against religion in an ever-upward spiral of offense, and that it’s going to be really hard to top cracker abuse. However, it looks like you can piss off the pope just by playing around with a couple of popsicle sticks.

Pop-sci book meme

Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It’s the usual thing, a long list of books and you’re supposed to highlight the ones you’ve read, this time with the theme being that they’re all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette’s choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it’s to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we’re going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling’s Schismatrix. If we open the door to SF, though, the howling hordes will pour in and we’ll never get anything done.

Anyway, here’s my copy of the list:

  1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
  2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
  3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
  4. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
  5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
  6. The Devil’s Doctor, Philip Ball
  7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
  8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
  9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
  10. 1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
  11. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
  12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
  13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
  14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
  15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
  16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
  17. Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
  18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
  20. Vermeer’s Camera, Philip Steadman
  21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
  22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
  23. Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
  24. Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
  25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
  26. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
  27. Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
  28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
  29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
  30. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
  31. E=mc2, David Bodanis
  32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
  33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
  34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
  35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
  36. Apollo’s Fire, Michael Sims
  37. Flatland, Edward Abbott
  38. Fermat’s Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
  39. Stiff, Mary Roach
  40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
  41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  42. Longitude, Dava Sobel
  43. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
  44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
  45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
  46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
  47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
  48. The Executioner’s Current, Richard Moran
  49. Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
  50. Pythagorus’ Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
  51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
  52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
  53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
  54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
  55. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison
  56. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
  57. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
  58. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
  59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
  60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
  61. Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
  62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
  63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
  64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
  65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
  66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
  67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
  68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
  69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
  70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
  71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
  72. Chaos, James Gleick
  73. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
  74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
  75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

Jennifer did suggest that we make additions, so let’s beef up the biology a bit with a few more off the top of my head (OK, McPhee and Rudwick are geology…but that needs bolstering, too!).

  1. Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
  2. Basin and Range, John McPhee
  3. Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
  4. Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
  5. Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson
  6. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
  7. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer
  8. Genome, Matt Ridley
  9. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
  10. It Ain’t Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin
  11. On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
  12. Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran
  13. The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins
  14. The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd
  15. The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson
  16. The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin Rudwick
  17. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
  18. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
  19. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Richard Lewontin
  20. Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner
  21. Voyaging and The Power of Place, Janet Browne
  22. Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier

Don’t vote for Dole in North Carolina

Every time I see the disregard the Democratic party shows for secular values — which is painfully frequent — I wonder why the heck I’m even voting for these addled con artists. But then the Republicans remind me by showing up and being even worse. The latest is from the Elizabeth Dole campaign in North Carolina, which has decided to vilify her opponent, Kay Hagan, because she dares to actually meet with atheists. How horrid! Hagan has probably got godless cooties now. Here’s what a Dole press release says, expressing disgust that Hagan is actually going to meet with the Secular Coalition for America.

“Kay Hagan does not represent the values of this state; she is a Trojan Horse for a long list of wacky left-wing outside groups bent on policies that would horrify most North Carolinians if they knew about it,” [Communications Director Dan] McLagan said. “This latest revelation of support from anti-religion activists will not sit well with the 90% of state residents who identify with a specific religious faith.”

Fair enough, actually. It does represent a difference in values: that Hagan may not be an atheist but is willing to speak with them says one thing about her values, and that Elizabeth Dole thinks atheists are un-American says something else about her values. It also says a lot about Dole that she is willingly affiliated with the party of bigotry and incompetence, the Republicans. These are choices made by candidates that are legitimate issues to help voters decide who they should elect.

It says to me that people should vote for Hagan, or almost any other Democrat, over almost any other Republican.

Pareidolia poll

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Two things I find absurd are people who see Jesus in random patterns, and internet polls that try to impose patterns in noise. Here’s something that does both: a moth was found with speckles that are supposed to look like Jesus.

“His hair right here and you can see the mustache and the beard and there’s a little slit right there that looks like His mouth and when he would move the mouth would open so it looked like he was trying to talk to you.”

Kirk Harper spotted the moth on an RV trailer Monday, and right away could tell it was unique.

“I immediately thought it looked like Jesus and that was what was so cool cause you’ve seen His face in grilled cheese sandwiches and windows and things but on a moth’s back…we thought that was pretty neat.”

Just to top off the silliness, the story comes with a poll to ask if you see a face. Yeah, I do — it’s Charles Manson.

On BBC radio…

I was interviewed by a rather baffled radio announcer about the destruction of crackers (I know! Who would have thought such a silly event would be the focus of so much attention?) on BBC Radio Ulster. Reader DaleP tells me that it will be available online only until Saturday, so if you want to hear another flat-voiced nasal American talking to the lovely lilting voice of an Irishman, here’s your chance.

Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne write a letter

It’s a very nice letter to Nature. I especially like the last line.

We were perplexed by your Editorial on the work of the Templeton Foundation (‘Templeton’s legacy’ Nature 454, 253-254; 2008). Surely science is about finding material explanations of the world — explanations that can inspire those spooky feelings of awe, wonder and reverence in the hyper-evolved human brain.

Religion, on the other hand, is about humans thinking that awe, wonder and reverence are the clue to understanding a God-built Universe. (The same is true of religion’s poor cousin, ‘spirituality’, which you slip into your Editorial rather as a creationist uses ‘intelligent design’.) There is a fundamental conflict here, one that can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality.

The scientific study of religion is indeed full of big questions that need to be addressed, such as why belief in religion is negatively correlated with an acceptance of evolution. One could consider psychological studies of why humans are superstitious and believe impossible things, and comparative sociological studies of religion using materialist explanations of the rise and fall of the world’s belief systems.

Perhaps the Templeton Foundation is thinking of funding such research. The outcome of such work, we predict, will not bring science and religion (or ‘spirituality’) any closer to one another. You suggest that science may bring about “advances in theological thinking”. In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.

Engineers aren’t all bad

If you’ve got the 29 August issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there’s an interesting editorial inside. It seems there has been a flurry of activity on C&EN on the issue of evolution; the editor dismissed the whole idea of intelligent design creationism back in February, saying that it was not an acceptable alternative to the theory of evolution and should not be taught in the schools. He got hammered with forceful complaints from pro-ID engineers, and many letters were published in the April issue. Uh-oh, I hear all the engineers out there groaning, here comes the Salem hypothesis again…

However, here’s the cool thing: those pro-creationism letters spurred an even greater response from the C&EN readership, a wonderful colossal roar of disapproval against the vocal subset who were endorsing ID, and a small fraction of the letters are published in the latest issue (I’ve got the print copy; the online edition is a bit behind, but keep an eye open for it.)

It’s reassuring. A noisy few cranks in engineering occasionally get all the news, but give them a chance and a voice and the majority do favor good science.