Hard, Ain't It Hard

First, you'll have to excuse me for a self-indulgent entry.

Sometimes, writing comes naturally and easily... and, sometimes...

It doesn't.

Particularly when you allow circumstance to get the better of you, and fail to take the proverbial bull by the goolies (or should that be 'horns'? -- Ed.) and give them a good yank and run for your life (still not sure about this line of reasoning... -- Ed.). How does a writer fail to do that proverbial, if nonsensical thing? By not writing every day.

Which isn't fair, because I have been writing, but nothing that I felt like publishing. There are the bare bones of my Seed essay entry, and a long essay about my own deconversion, several books that need urgently to be reviewed, and some other things that I've been kicking around. So is my fervour for science and science education diminished? No, of course not. Am I still angry about the lamentable standards upheld in politics, even by people who I might normally consider "the good guys"? Certainly not. Did I miss the series finale of Doctor Who? You will of course know that I didn't. And I'll be talking about all of that again, very soon.

Sometimes the outside world overtakes you, that's all.

If you spend too much time longing nostalgically for the things of your childhood and youth, then you're not fully engaged in the present. Maybe it's due to the influence of the children, but I've been thinking rather more about those days recently. It's not that life is bad right now. Uniformly and in all quarters, life is really quite good. Sure, there have been a few set-backs this year, but far worse have been weathered by better people than me. But that knowledge hasn't stopped the wanderings into parts of my own mind which I hadn't imagined could still be opened.

When I was a child, I used to spend idyllic hours listening to my parents' old records, especially recordings of the Kingston Trio. I still have fond memories of sitting in front of old console stereo set, listening to the "Live from the Hungry I" album. Although listening back now and realising that I couldn't possibly have understood it all, I knew that the music was fun and that it was as close as I would get to pop music in that household. Songs like "MTA" and "Take Her Out of Pity" and "All My Sorrows" and "Raspberries, Strawberries" and "Tom Dooley" and "The Sloop John B"... all of these form part of my mental soundtrack of those years.

But at the same time, it makes me wonder about something. The Trio clearly were not Establishment figures in any sense of the word. Raucous and sometimes innuendo-laden folk songs are not the stuff of conservatism and repression. However, these were my parents' record albums, as were countless other folk and jazz records. But they changed, to the point where this music no longer made any sense to them. And it makes me think, now: how futile is the quest to remain intelligent, skeptical, and liberal - all of which I steadfastly defend as good things to be - when nature may just take that away with the onset of senescence?

So yes, it's time for the metaphysical meta-crisis now. Which could also explain why I haven't been writing, I imagine. Too much in my own head, and little enough in the outside world. And that's probably where the first planks of the doors of the closed mind begin to grow, from little acorns of self-centric isolation, for hours at a time during the day. That's a dreadful metaphor, but I'll leave it in. I'm out of practise at writing, sure, but hopefully not beaten yet.

Flashback: James Burke, After the Warming (1989)

I make no secret of the fact that I am a huge fan of the work of James Burke. As a populariser and historian of science, Burke's books and television series have served as a source of delight and fascination to me since I was quite young. Burke's approach to science and information is entertaining and intelligent: it makes sense when explained by him. I would urge anyone who hasn't seen his various programmes to find them and view them - it's worth your time.

Here then, for your Friday viewing pleasure, is Burke's 1989 mock-umentary, After the Warming. In this long (about one hundred minutes long) film, Burke takes the state of knowledge about climate change in 1989 and projects it sixty years into the future, showing how, with the cooperation of world governments and thanks to the judicious application of technology, the worst could be averted.

I was in my final year of high school in 1989, and remember watching this programme and feeling a tremendous sense of hope and relief - yes, there was a problem, and yes, it could be fixed. I wish that, nearly twenty years later, I could say the same thing. Unfortunately, Burke could not have predicted the changes in the world political landscape - and the greed and cupidity of wantonly foolish industries making profits on borrowed time.

After the Warming is fascinating not so much for what it gets wrong about the future of global climate change as for what it gets right. It also has that whiff of lost opportunity about it - the world as it might have been.

Enjoy.

Our Fragile Oceans in History (The Richness of Science, the Poverty of the Irrational, No. 1)

It's time for a first installment in what I intend to be a new regular feature: the Richness of Science, the Poverty of the Irrational. This time, I'm just pointing quickly at a new article published in Nature, which discusses an event known in paleontology as oceanic anoxia during the mid-Cretaceous. There's also an article deriving its information from the Nature at the BBC.

It has been known for some time that there was a drop in the levels of oceanic oxygen in the Cretaceous (in this case, between 95 and 90 million years ago), resulting in a die-off of many species. But the cause of this extinction, demonstrating the fragility of oceans even without the intervention of humans, had previously been mysterious.

Scientists at the University of Alberta have used differences in the levels of two isotopes of osmium, osmium-187 and osmium-188, which exist in varying concentrations between the Earth's crust and mantle, to assess volcanic activity in sedimentary rocks. A massive undersea volcanic event some 93.5 million years ago which corresponds to a change in the isotope ratio now appears to be the culprit. Although the mechanism by which a volcanic event would cause a drop in oceanic oxygen levels is for the time being unclear, this discovery is another step in determining exactly what happened, and determining if any lessons can be learned from the event.

None of which, by the way, we would know if we limited ourselves to saying "magic man done it again" when confronted by an observable fact in nature for which our various holy and weird books had no answer.

For that matter, we wouldn't even be asking the question. The score, therefore, of this keeping, is:

• Science, 1, Irrationality, Nil.

Thanks for playing, everyone. Watch this space for further points scored in the game...

Real Men Go Green

A link popped up in one of my email alerts the other day, and it seemed too interesting to allow to pass without comment.

I've never particularly considered myself a "manly" sort of man - not really a proper bloke, as Jeremy Hardy once said. I know very little about cars, and actively avoid discussions of sport - although I've been known to enjoy a baseball game and am fascinated by cricket. I don't box, lift weights, or actively pursue anything physical that doesn't interest me, which limits me to hiking and the odd pick-up game of baseball or softball, if anyone were ever around who wanted to form a team (I merely throw that out for consideration).

In light of that, it may seem odd for me to post a link from the Art of Manliness, but I have to say, this site actually piques my interest, in the same way that The Dangerous Book for Boys did when it first came out in Britain a few years back. The latter fascinated me because it served as a reminder of all of the things that I did as a child - the hours of playing outside, the building of toys from bits of wood, the fun with trading cards and so much else that belonged to the pre-video game age. It was a good childhood, in parts, and the best parts were those where I also learned something that I still retain - how to drive a nail and a screw, how to use a saw, how to make models, catch insects, and study nature.

The Art of Manliness fascinates me because it appears to posit that men need not necessarily be tool-wielding and monosyllabic. Previously, I've posted a link to lists of things that everyone should know how to do - changing a tyre, mowing the lawn, repairing a light switch - the exact content of the list evades me now. This new list, from the AoM, is interesting: Ten Reasons Real Men Go Green. It seems that some so-called "men's men" have, up until now, not been in the reality-based camp when it comes to the world around us... not just in terms of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, but with regard to science and nature overall. Given the choice between understanding evidence and falling for party-line polemic, some men (including some of the commenters on the list, as you will see) seem to be of the "you can take my Hummer when you pry it from my cold dead hands" school - if it can be called a school, rather than a collection of intellectual truants. For the record: I've always suspected that drivers of the larger SUVs and trucks have other issues for which they are attempting to compensate, but my suspicion does not a peer-reviewed double-blind study make.

If being "manly" matters, then this is an excellent first step in saying that it also matters that we give a damn about the world around us, and that giving a damn is just as "manly" as hunting, fishing, and making stuff out of wood and metal.

So go green. It doesn't make you a cissy. It makes you a better man, and a better human being.

Colour Fossils May Be on the Horizon

Recently in the talk that I was giving about Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions, a question was asked about how we might know the colours which adorned ancient animals. And my answer was based on what I knew at that time, namely that it wouldn't be possible to know what colour an animal was, because that information hasn't been preserved by the fossil record. So, sadly, we would only have our best guesses, derived from how animals of the modern world are decorated and camouflaged.

Until now, that is.

In a story reported by the BBC, a team of researchers from Yale University have discovered that the banding in fossilised feathers in fact represents the colour-carrying bodies in these animals, the melanosomes, which contrary to expectations appear to have been preserved, allowing the team to distinguish several possible colours.

Combined with the preservation of banding in certain fossil dinosaurs, these discoveries push our understanding of ancient animals still further, and excite amateur paleontologists and encouragable seven year-olds everywhere. In a way, it's as though we've been given a colour television after years of having to use our imaginations watching an old black-and-white set. You can say that things are just as good in black-and-white all that you wish, but, at the end of the day, unless it's an old film, colour just makes it that much better.

In Defense of PZ Myers

We were out the other night in a bar (something very usual for me and GHR, as I am getting old), to enjoy some company and decent singing which almost made up for the overpriced drinks. The wall was painted with a number of pithy quotes, but I liked the one that was above my head the best:

"God is going the same way as Zeus."

It appealed both to my sense as an historian and my sense as an anti-theist. I've been making an effort of late to replace one meaningless oath with another - replacing "god" in my vehement remarks with "Zeus" (or "Jove" or "Jupiter" or even, from John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell character, "Archons of Athens!"), just to see if it could be done. I'm also trying to determine if the substitution of the Classical canon for the Judeo-Christian one makes the very point about the sole surviving modern exemplar of the ancient angry sky-gods, whatever it may be called. I have to tell you that it is surprisingly difficult to purge something so ingrained from everyday usage, but it's not impossible.

I'm sure that some of you are familiar with the kerfuffle which has exploded over at Pharyngula regarding Professor PZ Myers' statements about the integrity of a small biscuit (John S. Wilkins' review of the matter can be found here). Specifically, it's the biscuit which a Catholic is compelled to believe becomes the literal flesh of their fallen Messiah when they place it in their mouths, through the mumbo-jumbo nonsense known as transubstantiation, another of those empirically-testable, yet strangely still believed manifestations of the "magic man done it" school of thought (with thanks to Robin Ince for generating the incomparable YouTube clip to be found at the end of that last link - the truth is sometimes best when it's really, really funny). The full story is recounted at Pharyngula ("It's a Frackin' Cracker", "Now I've Got Bill Donohue's Attention", "Fight Back Against Bill Donohue!", "I Get Email - Special Cracker Edition", "FYI", and several sets of comment threads), as is the resulting unpleasantness brought about by a man who is perhaps a textbook definition of the word "unpleasant", a Mr Bill Donohue.

The story ends with a letter to the President of the University of Minnesota system, following requests from both Dr Myers and Professor Richard Dawkins, urging support for Dr Myers' freedoms in the face of (which will no doubt be construed by the god-bots as the inability to think for myself, although on average it seems to me that I do more of that than they do - I do still have some off-days). If you've been following this story and haven't yet written, please do consider it before things get further out of hand.

And here, as promised, is the letter:

To: bruin001@umn.edu

President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

President Bruininks,

By now, I am sure that you have been nearly overwhelmed by this particular storm in a teacup resulting from the contretemps between Dr Myers of Morris and certain individuals claiming to speak with the authority of the voice of "god". I apologise in advance for adding to your workload and that of your administrative staff, however, I wish to add my voice to the chorus speaking in support of Dr Myers' freedoms, whether they be freedom of speech, freedom of academic inquiry, or even freedom to express himself however hyperbolically may take his fancy.

My opinion of Minnesota as a state and the University therein has been shaped by the degree to which Dr Myers and his students have expressed themselves (pedagogically and otherwise) in his blog in recent years, and I must tell you that thus far, that opinion has been summarily positive. While I might occasionally despair at the coarseness with which some of the more fervent adherents to Pharyngula express their support for Dr Myers' views, sometimes at the expense of those who have aroused his or their ire, I cannot and shall not disagree with the root of their sentiments. Even were I to be in disagreement, I would have no desire whatsoever to impinge upon the right of any person to express his or her views as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

I am also appalled, if not surprised, at the savagery and vehemence of the responses provided in the name of religion by some of those who should know better. I condemn and abhor any threat of physical violence against a man or woman who might happen to disagree with me on some philosophical position or other - there is no room or tolerance in a civilised society for such language. This must not be allowed to stand unchallenged, and I hope that you also will, as your position allows, express your dismay at the intemperance of these remarks. It is one thing to say something mildly disparaging about a baked good imbued with suspect mysticism. It is quite another threaten a man's livelihood - or indeed his life.

In so saying, I remain,
Very sincerely yours,

A voice crying in the wilderness indeed - perhaps. But if we genuinely believe that god is going the way of Zeus, then these are the battles that we should expect, and not be afraid to wade into, whatever opposition we may face.

Silent Running

I've been quiet for a little while now. Essentially, I've done the thing that I always do with journals of any form: after an initial burst of enthusiasm, or even excess, I've sloped away for three weeks without so much as a word. That doesn't mean that I've vanished - on the contrary, it means that I've been busy in the real world and not making quite so much time for online activities. There's been a week's holiday for the children at home instead of being stuck in summer camp, another holiday, some home repair activities, lawn and garden time, and a greater than usual demand for sleep.

That's going to change, though - more coming shortly.