2009-11-29 2230: I managed to solve a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, without looking anything up (getting only a single letter wrong). The puzzle was therefore relatively easy and also entertaining. The theme turned out to be familiar words or phrases with the letters QU inserted into them to produce peculiar puns. My favorite: "Part of an Irish playwright's will?" This turned out to be WILDEBEQUEST.
2009-11-29 2215: I had a wonderful Thanksgiving visit with my sister and her family. They live in Fredericksburg, Virginia; a rather long drive, which was made quite tolerable by the audio book I listened to: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . This proved to be a rather entertaining mutilation of the Jane Austen novel, contrived by a writer named Seth Graham-Smith. In the original story, Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters are courted by gentlemen, not all of whom are of sterling character. In the mutated version, Mr. Bennett has given his daughters elite training in Chinese martial arts, and they fight against the hordes of zombies that infest Regency-era England. Many a brain is feasted upon, and an unwelcome marriage proposal might be met with a savage kick to the head. The joke tends to wear thin after a while, but the original Austen shines through, particularly in the latter parts of the novel.
I managed to get to the Mall in Washington, to see two of my most favorite museums, the National Art Gallery and the Natural History Museum. I was glad to see once again the famous French Impressionist and post-Impressionist artists, especially Vincent van Gogh; but I found myself completely enthralled by the galleries of American artists. There were magnificent western landscapes, and fascinating allegorical works as well as wonderful American Impressionist paintings. I was amazed by one particular painting, by the early 19th century artist John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon . Everything in this large painting was given an extraordinary scale, from the vast armies assembled to do battle, to the gleaming marble city in the mountains above them.
I went to the Natural History Museum expecting to see the familiar but wonderful galleries of gems, minerals and fossils I have seen since I was a kid in the 1960s. (I loved that museum as a child, when we lived in the Washington, DC area; I think it is one of the main reasons I became a scientist.) But when I got to the museum, I was in for a surprise: I happened across my colleague Kyle Forinash, who teaches physics at IU Southeast. Neither of us knew that the other would be there. He was with family members, and for a little while, I tagged along with them as Kyle looked for one exhibit with particular meaning for him. This was an exhibit showing fossils representing the evolution of horses from a creature the size of a cat to the modern animal. Kyle told me that this made evolution real to him when he saw it as a kid back in the 1960s, and perhaps led him to his career in science. We did find the exhibit, or at least the current version of the exhibit; it shows leg bones and skulls from each stage in the evolution of horses, and is indeed a striking demonstration of evolution.
2009-11-24 2200: Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species . I saw nothing in particular in the news today about this breathtaking milestone, but there have been interesting features and stories about Darwin and evolution all year (Darwin's 200th birthday was earlier this year). This month, I saw the three-part NOVA special on the evolution of man. This was a bit over-produced but very interesting. I learned from that show that Neanderthals were carnivorous; they had little plant matter in their diets. They also grew quickly and were muscular, and they used heavy stabbing spears instead of the light throwing spears favored by our own species.
This week, NOVA had a show on dreams. This was also very interesting; it's well worth watching if it crops up again on public TV. The most amazing bit was a research team that has managed to correlate the brain signals of a dreaming rat with its daytime explorations of a maze; a computer display showed what parts of the maze were correlated with its brain waves while it was dreaming.
2009-11-23 2215: Today's New York Times crossword puzzle was very easy (which is normal for Mondays). But it was still fun, because of its theme: the Beatles.
2009-11-18 0830: Today is the Great American Smokeout, sponsored by the American Cancer Society; this event happens every year the Thursday a week before Thanksgiving. Few if any health initiatives are important or more personal than smoking prevention and cessation efforts. The issue is deeply personal for me because I lost my father because of cigarettes. He died in December of 2005 five months after being diagnosed with large-cell carcinoma of the lungs. (He had been a two-pack-a-day smoker for about 25 years.)
I have become convinced that many people, especially smokers, don't realize how dangerous smoking really is; they lump smoking with other less serious habits said to be bad for you. But the lifetime risk for smokers of developing lung cancer is greater than ten percent (see Villeneuve and Mao, Lifetime probability of developing lung cancer, by smoking status, Canada , Can J Public Health. 1994 Nov-Dec;85(6):385-8). And other diseases (obstructive lung diseases and heart disease) kill as many smokers as lung cancers.
2009-11-14 1500: New York Times columnist Gail Collins has a charming piece today, Once Again, Into the Apocalypse, about the current fascination in popular culture about the end of the world (particularly the new Roland Emmerich movie 2012). It's hardly necessary to explain why end-times prophecies are silly, but Gail offers several examples, most notably a Nostradamus quatrain — For the merry maid the bright splendor / Will shine no longer, for long will she be without salt. / With merchants, bullies, wolves odious, / All confusion universal monster — which she says is an obvious foretelling of Sarah Palin's book tour. (I wasn't certain if this quatrain was a real Nostradamus quatrain, but it turns out it is Quatrain 98 in Century 10 of his prophecies.)
Her piece ends with an interesting reference to the Fatima prophecies; as a young Catholic girl, she wondered why she had to do her homework if the prophecies indicated the world would end by Sunday. This reminded me of my own run-ins with the Fatima prophecies. While visiting my grandparents years ago at Our Lady of the Snows (a Catholic retirement community near St. Louis), I bought a book about Fatima, written by an historian named William T. Walsh (if memory serves). He told the story of the Portuguese children who received several prophecies from the Blessed Virgin Mary, during the First World War. One of these prophecies was that the current war would end, but an even more terrible war would follow, which would be preceeded by a sign or light in the heavens. The author said this was fulfilled by an ominous red glow that filled the skies over Europe shortly before the Germans entered Austria. He claimed this had no scientific explanation. I went to the university library and found the issue of the New York Times for that date (January 25-26, 1938). There was an article about the red light in the skies: It was only a red aurora, an event that happens every decade or so. (The web site fatima.org acknowledges this event was an aurora.) I mentioned this to a colleague. He said that when he was a kid in Tennessee, a similar aurora occurred, and sent rural fire crews driving northward in search of fires.
My earlier run-in with Fatima was reading about the "Miracle of the Dancing Sun" in the context of UFOs. This event, which occurred on October 13, 1917, involved tens of thousands of people who gathered at the site of the Marian apparitions to see a miracle promised by the Blessed Virgin Mary for her last appearance. It was raining, but the weather broke at midday, and the sun appeared. But it coruscated strange prismatic colors and appeared to gyrate in the sky. One book I recall reading claimed that persons at a distance saw the sun come below the cloud deck. But perhaps more believable is the claim I have read that only some people present saw the miracle. Another possibility is mentioned in a peculiar book I have, The Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena , by William Corliss (Doubleday Anchor Press, Garden City, New York, 1983). Apparently, a similar meterological phenomenon has been seen on other occasions, and is referred to as a "Kaleidoscopic Sun." Corliss quotes an account by an observer named Joseph Mintern of a kaleidoscopic sun that occurred on January 9, 1932 in Cork, Ireland: A friend shouting to me to hurry out, I saw the sun behaving in a most unusual fasion; now surrounded by bright, flashing rays of red in all directions, then changing to yellow in which the body of the sun, though more clearly visible, appeared to dance and shift about here and there in a radius of about 5°; again, changing to green, the rays flashing as in the red—all these changes taking place in less time than it takes to write. … Of all the beauties seen I should think the quickly changing mock suns the most beautiful as they flashed here and there faster than it was possible to count them. The colours were so brilliant and dazzling that even after I had come indoors anything I looked at appeared a mixture of all the colors seen. Corliss speculates the phenomenon may have arisen from sheets of falling ice crystals of different geometries, and he suggests that this is strongly similar to the Fatima miracle.
2009-11-08 1545: Science magazine had a feature article on the evolution of religion, one of a series on evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species). This article, by Elizabeth Culotta, outlines various theories for how or why humans became religious. (No link, because unfortunately it's behind a paywall.) One theory is that religion enabled a greater level of cooperation among human communities that were religious, which was adaptive—religious communities were able to out-compete non-religious communities that were less cooperative. The idea here is that religion, which teaches the existence of higher powers that will hold individuals accountable for anti-social behavior, allows a greater level of trust and encourages helpfulness. Another theory is that the human mind is tuned to be alert to intentionality or human agency in events, because of the need to be wary of potential danger or reward from other people, but this mental trait prompts people to believe that inanimate objects or forces are the result of intelligent agents. This is especially evident in children, who find it easy to believe teleological propositions such as "rocks are pointy, to keep animals from sitting on them" (an explanation favored by elementary school children in one study). According to the article, some researchers believe studying the beliefs of children may reveal what is innate in our attitudes and beliefs about religion. The article also details research in archaeology that seeks evidence of the origins of religion; this includes evidence of deliberate burials of the dead as early as 95,000 years ago. The first clear evidence of a temple is believed to be found at a site in Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, dating to 11,000 years ago. This includes carvings of wild animals on 6-meter-tall standing stones. (A link in the article points to an earlier article about this site, that contains a picture of a beautifully-rendered lion on one stone.)
The 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, by the way, is this November 24.
2009-11-07 2130: An interesting Associated Press article by Lisa Leff and David Sharp appeared yesterday. The article details the successful strategy by opponents of same-sex marriage to win the votes in Maine and California: use images of children and claim that same-sex marriage will force schools to tell children about same-sex marriage and gay people. This strategy was developed by political consultants Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint. Their strategy was misleading (there was nothing in the same-sex marriage legislation that would require schools to change their curricula) and appealed to the same prejudice that was used by Anita Bryant in the 1970s when her anti-gay-rights campaign was named "Save Our Children." But the strategy was successful in part because many people already resented schools teaching tolerance towards gay people. Conservative Christians interpret this as hostile to them and their beliefs, and fear that their freedom of religion is in danger.
One disturbing aspect of the recent votes on same-sex marriage is the fact that the rights of a minority are subject to a vote by a majority. It occurred to me to wonder if there were examples of public votes on civil rights during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. I haven't done any real research on this, but Google did turn up an interesting example: There was a public vote in 1964 in Seattle to ban racial discrimination in real estate sales and rentals. Unfortunately, the "Open Housing Ordinance" failed by a margin of almost two to one. (See the Trevor Goodloe article at the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project web site.)
Update 2009-11-08 1515: The Friends of Jake blog made an excellent observation last Wednesday (November 4): According to Gallup polling, a plurality of Americans did not support interracial marriage until 1991, roughly 25 years after the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling legalizing interracial marriage.
2009-11-04 2230: The Maine ballot measure to end gay marriage in that state (enacted by the legislature) passed by a 53% to 47% margin. This is given to be a painful setback to gay people, but I think we can take heart that the vote in favor of same-sex marriage was so close to a majority. I find it hard to believe that anything like this level of support would have been possible ten years ago; opinion polling shows a monotonic increase in support for gay rights over the last two decades. Since support for gay rights is stronger among younger people, this can only continue. It will be only a matter of time before many states have gay marriage. Indeed, it appears that Referendum 71 in Washington State will pass, although 600,000 votes remain to be counted and the margin in favor of the referendum remains narrow. R-71 would grant many of the rights of marriage to same-sex couples in civil unions.
2009-11-01 0745: I enjoyed a fine performance by the IU Southeast Theatre Department of the musical Godspell. I had never seen this before, although some of the music was familiar (the song Day by Day, at least). The musical is often silly, sometimes almost a parody of the Gospel; so for example the disciples were on their hands and knees baaing for the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. But the underlying attitude about the material—reflecting an early 1970's longing for peace and healing—bordered on Christian evangelism in its sincerity. I was delighted, by the way, to see a student of mine, Tyler Youngs, play the lead role, Jesus. It was his first theatrical production, but his performance was charismatic and his singing was terrific.
Before the performance, I saw the current exhibition at the Barr Gallery on campus. One piece, by an artist named Barry Kite, put me into the right frame of mind for Godspell. It was a take-off of the iconic Andrew Wyeth painting Christina's World. This familiar image shows a woman in a field, with a house up the hill. But Barry Kite's digital photomontage shows two EMT workers carrying Christina into the back of an ambulance. The title: Christina removed for observation.