Two local events

One of the many virtues of my university is that, because of our history and policies, we get better than average contact with Native American cultures. Tonight, at 7:30 in Edson Auditorium, we get to hear from Sherman Alexie.

Sherman Alexie (b. October 7, 1966 Spokane, WA) is a prolific artist who is
an accomplished writer, poet, stand-up comedian, screenwriter, director,
and editor. He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on the Spokane
Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. He attended high school in Spokane, WA
and graduated in American Studies from Washington State University. Alexie
has published 18 books to date, including his most recent novels are Flight
and a young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,
which received the 2007 National Book Award Young People’s Literature
Award. In 1999 his film Smoke Signals received a Christopher Award, and was
nominated for the 1999 Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

Tomorrow, same place and time, it’s Bill Miller.

Bill Miller (born 1955) is an American, Grammy Award-winning
singer/songwriter of Mohican heritage. He was born on the
Stockbridge-Munsee reservation, near Shawano in northern Wisconsin.

Miller’s Mohican name is ‘Fush-Ya Heay Aka (meaning “bird song”). He began
playing guitar when he was 12 years old, and is an accomplished player of
the Native American flute). In 1973, he moved to Milwaukee and won an art
school scholarship; today he is an accomplished artist whose drawings and
paintings have been widely praised.

In 1984, he moved to Nashville. His biggest break came when popular
musician Tori Amos, after listening to his Red Road CD on her tour bus,
asked him to serve as the opening act on her Under the Pink tour. Miller
continuously gained fans with other artists from a broad musical spectrum.
He went on to tour with diverse musicians such as Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder,
The BoDeans, Richie Havens, and Arlo Guthrie and wrote songs with artists
such as Nanci Griffith, Peter Rowan and Kim Carnes.

In 2005, Miller’s instrumental Cedar Dream Songs won a Grammy award for
“Best Native American Music Album”. Miller has collaborated with other
notable Native American musicians such as Robert Mirabal, R. Carlos Nakai,
and Joanne Shenandoah. His project with Mirabal, Native Suite was an
experimental and traditional project, featuring flute and percussion, as
well as Mohican pow-wow singing.

I’m hoping to make it to the Alexie talk, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get away for Miller’s, unfortunately — the first week back from spring break is a busy time.

An admission from Mark Mathis

My account of the affair at the Mall of America has been confirmed by none other than the movie producer, who wrote to Denyse O’Leary:

You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.

This is what I’ve been saying all along; I was not “unruly”, nor was I “gatecrashing”; Mathis saw me there, and on a petty, arbitrary, vindictive whim decided to have me thrown out without legitimate cause. It really is that simple. That is how creationists operate.

Hey, now Mathis repeats the same thing in IHE.

Mathis later confirmed in an e-mail that he had barred Myers from the screening. “Yes, I turned Mr. Myers away. He was not an invited guest of Premise Media. This was a private screening of an unfinished film. I could have let him in, just as I invited Michael Shermer to a screening in Nashville. Shermer is in the film as well. But, in light of Myers’ untruthful blogging about Expelled I decided it was better to have him wait until April 18 and pay to see the film. Others, notable others, were permitted to see the film. At a private screening it’s my call.

“Unlike the Darwinist establishment, we expell no one.”

Unless it’s someone they don’t like.

(The IHE article isn’t very good — it’s the usual media mush that runs away from the idea of actually calling idiocy idiocy.)

Om lingalingalinalinga, kilikili

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The laughing fellow on the left is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International and atheist. The cranky old man in the robes on the right is Pandit Surinder Sharma, a self-described Tantrik Magician. The scene is in a studio on Indian television, where the magician is trying to kill the atheist with sorcery. Sharma had said he could kill anyone with sympathetic magic inflicted on a doll made of dough, and that he could accomplish this in a mere three minutes … so Edamaruku confidently offered himself as a victim. The old fake went on for hours and failed.

After nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik’s failure. The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku. Finally, the disgraced tantrik tried to save his face by claiming that there was a never-failing special black magic for ultimate destruction, which could, however, only been done at night. Bad luck again, he did not get away with this, but was challenged to prove his claim this very night in another “breaking news” live program.

Edamaruku obliged and willing went to his “doom” that night.

The encounter took place under the open night sky. The tantrik and his two assistants were kindling a fire and staring into the flames. Sanal was in good humour. Once the ultimate magic was invoked, there wouldn’t be any way back, the tantrik warned. Within two minutes, Sanal would get crazy, and one minute later he would scream in pain and die. Didn’t he want to save his life before it was too late? Sanal laughed, and the countdown begun. The tantriks chanted their “Om lingalingalingalinga, kilikilikili….” followed by ever changing cascades of strange words and sounds. The speed increased hysterically. They threw all kinds of magic ingredients into the flames that produced changing colours, crackling and fizzling sounds and white smoke. While chanting, the tantrik came close to Sanal, moved his hands in front of him and touched him, but was called back by the anchor. After the earlier covert attempts of the tantrik to use force against Sanal, he was warned to keep distance and avoid touching Sanal. But the tantrik “forgot” this rule again and again.

Now the tantrik wrote Sanal’s name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. Nothing happened. Singing and singing, he sprinkled water on Sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. Sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. Only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. He kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked Sanal to touch it. Sanal did so, and the grand magic finale begun. The tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. That moment, Sanal should have broken down. But he did not. He laughed. Forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five… it’s over!

This sounds fun! I’ve been getting email lately from creationists telling me I should die, I should be fired, I should suffer horribly, but all they do is whine that they’re going to mumble to their god to have me destroyed. They should take a lesson from their Indian brethren and start using flash powder and chanting nonsense syllables — it would be no more effective, but it would be much more entertaining.

About that cell video in Expelled…

I was wrong — it’s not the Harvard multimedia video. It’s an independently generated copy. I grabbed a few images from the DVD I got at my truncated visit to the Expelled screening, and here, for instance, is the segment that shows that striking kinesin motor protein towing a vesicle down a microtubule. This is the version in the Expelled movie:

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Now here’s an equivalent frame from the actual Harvard video.

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Now I’m embarrassed to have mistaken one for the other, since the Expelled version is of much lower resolution and quality. However, do notice that they both have roughly the same layout and the same elements in view; this is a remarkable, umm, coincidence, since these are highly edited, selected renderings, with many molecules omitted … and curiously, they’ve both left out the same things.

Another curious coincidence: you’ve heard of the concept of plagiarized errors, the idea that the real tell-tale of a copy is when it’s the mistakes that are duplicated, in addition to the accuracies. In this case, I previously criticized the Harvard video for a shortcut. That kinesin molecule is illustrated showing a stately march, step by step, straight down the microtubule. Observations of kinesin show it’s more complex, jittering back and forth and advancing stochastically. That’s a simplification in the Harvard video that is also present in Expelled‘s version.

It’s clear that what they did was brainlessly copy what they saw in the original. I don’t know whether this is actionable anymore — that they slapped together a look-alike video to cover their butts makes the issue much more complicated.

Funny…he’s not shutting up!

Hmmm. I should have thought the powerful voices of communications experts shrieking at Richard Dawkins to hide under his bed would have had some effect, but no…he’s gone ahead and written his review of Expelled. And lo, in the camp of the Framers, there was much wailing and weeping and grinding of teeth, and rending of garments, and epic despair, because surely this will cause the destruction of Science.

This day in history

This is Easter, the day Christians everywhere set aside to celebrate the day they were hoaxed by a gang of Middle Eastern charlatans into believing a local mystic rose from the dead. Zeno finds that this year it’s also a day to remember another flop: the cold fusion debacle.

It’s been 19 years since Pons and Fleischmann announced their purported discovery of a mechanism for generating energy from a room-temperature fusion cell. Unlike the resurrection, I was actually there for that one. I was a post-doc at the University of Utah at that time, in the building right next door to where Pons and Fleischmann worked, and I attended the various events associated with the “discovery”.

Even then, there was reason to doubt: I remember being mystified that they’d chosen to announce it via press release rather than a scientific publication (a strategy that you’ll notice the Discovery Institute has expanded upon), and when I attended Pons lecture on the phenomenon, I was bothered by the lack of mechanism and the uncontrollable variability in the experiments — it was basically a laundry list of experiments done, some of which did nothing, some that got a trickle of excess energy output, and others that exploded. It was exciting and interesting, and we all hoped that this was real, but it wasn’t science yet.

And it still isn’t. I guess some people are still puttering away at it, but it’s still an inconsistent phenomenological collection of anecdotes.

If only Pons and Fleischmann had thought to make a religion of it, that wouldn’t be a problem.