Country music week

December 16, 2012 • 6:44 am

Yesterday I found an old file on my computer listing my favorite songs in various genres (and also a list of the “worst songs”), and decided to put up some songs from one genre: country music.

Now, I’m not a huge country music fan: I don’t listen to country stations or follow the “stars.” But some country songs are great, and many of these have crossed over to the “popular” charts. Those are the country songs I know, and the ones I’ll feature this week. I have 21 songs, and will put up three a day until next Sunday.

I’ll begin with the classics, and try to feature live performances when I can.

Hank Williams (1923-1953) is of course one of the brightest stars in the country music firmament, and had many good songs (“Jambalaya,” “Your Cheating Heart,” and so on), but this one, which came out the year I was born, has always been my favorite. It’s been covered many times.

According to Wikipedia,

Rolling Stone ranked it #111 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It is the second oldest song on the list, and one of only two from the 1940s.

I can’t find a live version of this, so you’ll have to do with the original recording.

Like Williams, Patsy Cline died at age 30, but in a plane crash —and I remember the news, Her voice is unmistakable, and she also had many hits, including “Walking after midnight.” But this one, “Crazy“, is my favorite. Music-trivia buffs will know that it was written by Willie Nelson—in 1961. I still think it’s the best thing Nelson ever wrote.  This version was recorded live (without video) at the Grand Ole Opry:

Finally, a song that’s been criticized for praising the subjugation of women. I won’t argue about that, but I will claim it’s a classic country song, with all the power of Tammy Wynette’s spectacular voice. (Wynette lived from 1942-1998; she had many health problems and I’m sure a lot of us remember her death.) “Stand by your man” was cowritten by Wynette, released in 1968, and, according to Wikipedia:

It proved to be the most successful record of Wynette’s career and is one of the most covered songs in the history of country music. The song was placed at number one on CMT’s list of the Top 100 Country Music Songs.

Check out that CMT list!

. . . The song remained contentious into the early 1990s, when soon-to-be First Lady Hillary Clinton told CBS’ 60 Minutes during an interview that she “wasn’t some little woman ‘standing by my man’ like Tammy Wynette.”

This version was recorded live on The Johnny Cash show:

Schrödinger’s Kitteh

December 15, 2012 • 5:05 pm

If it were Schrödinger’s Dog, imagine how much less physics the layperson would know! Schrödinger’s Gedankenexperiment mit Katze was a felicitious (and felinitious) meme.

205040_10151291294683622_563099450_n

The original suggestion, from Wikipedia:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”
—Erwin Schrödinger, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics), Naturwissenschaften (translated by John D. Trimmer in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society)

“MOOC”s on critical thinking at Michigan State and on genetics and evolution at Duke

December 15, 2012 • 12:34 pm
I hate the acronym “MOOC” almost as much as I do the word “blog.” But what it stands for—”massive open online courses”—are innovations that promise to make education widely available to those who aren’t near universities or lack the time or exorbitant tuition that modern universities demand.
My ex-student, Mohamed Noor, is again running a sort-of-MOOC at Duke, teaching “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” beginning January 4. It’s ten weeks long, FREE, has no “prerequisites” (i.e., it’s for beginners) and, judging by the enthusiastic reaction of students in the earlier incarnations, I’d urge you to take it.  Watch the short introductory video at the site.  (Full disclosure: my book is recommended but not required. I’ll also be Skyping in some time during the course to answer students’ questions.)
And here’s another that looks intriguing: a course at Michigan State University on critical thinking and the Foundations of Science. This one begins in May 2013, and runs through June. Sign up here; again, it’s free.  You’ll have to enter your name and email to get more information, and you can also read this blurb about the course at the MSUToday news:

Tongue-in-cheek humor aside, Foundations of Science is intended to help students improve critical thinking skills and empower them to make intelligent decisions. If they happen to laugh along the way, that’s all the better, said Stephen Thomas, MSU assistant professor of zoology and one of the course creators.

“Science isn’t just for nerdy people wearing white lab coats; it’s useful for everybody,” he said. “Results from the traditional course offered by our collaborators Matt Rowe and Marcus Gillespie at Sam Houston State University showed highly significant improvements in students’ critical thinking skills as well as their understanding of science.”

. . . The course will offer multiple types of media and exercises to give students experience applying critical thinking to different scenarios involving pseudoscience, such as psychics, homeopathy and ghosts. Students also will be able to participate in group discussions, compete for badges and interact with members of the scientific community.

There you go!  If you don’t have a background in evolution and genetics, Mohamed’s course will help you navigate my own site as well.
h/t: Diane

Let the apologetics begin

December 15, 2012 • 9:19 am

You know the story: a gunman armed with semiautomatic weapons invaded an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children, 5 adults, and then himself.  The children were only 5 to 10 years old.  There is nothing more horrible than the pain of lives unfulfilled, the massacre of young innocents who never got a chance to let their lives unfold. For years the parents will be thinking “what if?” and trying to make sense of the senseless.

I don’t feel like fulminating right now against gun laws (see P.Z.’s short take on this: “I have no idea what could motivate a man to gun down 3rd graders, but I do know it’s past time to put rational gun control laws in place. Give it an hour, some idiot will propose arming all the 7 year olds instead.”), or gloating about how this supports the absence of God.  So let’s just see how the faithful deal with this horror.  It’s obviously because Americans have kicked God out of our schools!

Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the execrable American Family Association.  “God doesn’t want to go where he’s not wanted. He’s a gentleman.”

Some gentleman!

Mike Huckabee, failed politician and Baptist minister, makes the same excuse:

Huckabee notes that God will be there with hugs and consolation after the tragedy, but let it happen because of our godlessness. It’s obviously the same God who ordered Abraham to kill Isaac.

Zazzle is capitalizing on school shootings and religiosity with this tee-shirt:

Picture 4

What has our country come to? First the loonies who kill, then the loonies who explain.

Hitch died a year ago

December 15, 2012 • 6:01 am

Christopher Hitchens died a year ago today—it seems longer, doesn’t it?—and of course nobody has emerged to fill the vast lacuna he left. His rhetorical skills were unmatchable.

Several months ago, reader Dermot C sent me an email in which he transcribed one of the great pieces of oratory delivered by Hitchens. I’ve saved this until today, and will let Dermot tell the story:

I have transcribed, for my own purposes, Hitchens’ great closing argument against William Dembski, after Hitch had been diagnosed with the cancer. No-one seems to have done it online, so I assume I’m the first to have copied the words out.  It’s great, if you don’t know it: delivered to an audience of young believers whom he appears to win over hugely, judging by his reception on the link.

No doubt at some time, perhaps the first anniversary of his death, you could use it.  In any case, it’s thoroughly inspirational, and brings a lump to my throat, every time I listen to that lovely rich baritone.

I get that lump, too. Here’s the video, with Dermot’s transcription below.  We miss you, Christopher, and I say that knowing you can’t hear it. Grieving is for the living, not the dead.

(Actually, a reader called my attention to the fact that Anne Crumpacker, who was there at this conference, transcribed this statement some time ago in a comment on my post about her daughter Mason’s encounter with Hitchens. Anne’s comment is here.)

Transcription:

“Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer?  Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?  I mean…I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled and have conversations with authors from previous epochs, it’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology and I have to say it sounds like a complete fairy-tale to me.

The only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him anytime because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment. But when Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy, for challenging the gods of the city, and he accepted his death, he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters, too.

In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure and what is true—could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having.

And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive.

Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith, that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the…on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any otherway.

And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you, those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead, till you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling to children!

And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift.  Think of it as a…think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself.

Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

Thank you.”

Thank goodness that we can still have that conversation with Hitchens.

Caturday felid: High-jumping tabby

December 15, 2012 • 5:29 am

This Japanese cat jumps nearly 2 meters (196 cm, or about 6.5 feet) to retrieve a toy. Its grace is ineffable; its athleticism amazing. A dog couldn’t do this, or, if it could, it would look dumb.

NOTE: The music is extremely annoying; you may want to mute your computer.  And perhaps a Japanese-speaking reader can decipher the opening information.

Notice how the kitteh begins its characteristic tail-and-hindquarter rotation as soon as it strikes the prey, ensuring that the cat lands on its feet.

This ain’t your Ground of Being

December 14, 2012 • 2:08 pm

Today’s Bizarro comic, by Dan Piraro, is funny but also a bit sad.

 Picture 2

Sophisticated Theologians™ tell us that God is indescribable, that he’s “outside of space and time,” a Being Whereof We Cannot Speak, a “ground of being”—anything but a humanoid being. Well, for most believers that’s not true.

I’ll quote here from the book I’m reading, When God Talks Back, by Tanya Luhrmann, which is an anthropological study of an evangelical Christian sect: not an ultra-loony one, but one that comprises intelligent and well-off people (one branch Luhrmann studied is right here in Hyde Park, Chicago).

Luhrmann describes the very personal relationship that members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship have with God.  They talk to him constantly, pray with him, and one even has “dates” with him, sitting on a park bench and imagining Jesus sitting next to her with his arm around her and chatting.  Why, one person even pulls out a chair at breakfast and pours God a hot cup of coffee, conversing with the imaginary deity as if he were right there with the java!

The whole nature of God for these people (and for many, many Americans) is that of a personal God, something with the characteristics of a human. To deny the ubiquity of this concept of God belies profound ignorance of religion. Either many theologians are ignorant in that way, or simply feel that such people have wrong belief.

Here’s a statement from one of the booklets on God that members of the Vineyard Fellowship read, Bruce and Stan’s Pocket Guide to Talking With God:

“It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.”

Tebow 1, Kierkegaard 0.

h/t:  Tommy R.

I get email: Coyne’s Converts’ Corner

December 14, 2012 • 11:20 am

Over the past two years I’ve had a few emails like this one, which really makes me feel good. I haven’t had hundreds, as has Richard in his “Converts’ Corner,” but we all do what we can.  This came today:

Dear Dr. Coyne,

As you are a person who surely receives far too many unsolicited emails, please do not feel obligated to reply. I am compelled to extend personal thanks to you for Why Evolution Is True, and in doing so I’ll try to keep it brief.

I count myself as one of the success stories resulting from your book, if the measurement of success is understanding why evolution is true and why the creation stuff of religion is not.

A personally traumatic event earlier this year–the death of my stepfather (who raised me) as a direct result of his religious faith–pushed me over the edge. My mother and stepfather had been evangelical Christians since the 1970s, and to keep it short I will say only that I was exposed to and taught things that were unhealthy and confusing. Earlier this year my stepfather died of septic infection caused by an ulcerated melanoma that went completely undiagnosed and untreated for years in favor of prayer. Upon the revelation of his condition my mother asserted to me that everyone’s days are “numbered” by God, and if it hadn’t been the illness he would have been hit by a car or suffered cardiac arrest. God was going to call him home that day no matter what. Further emphasis is unnecessary. Whatever tiny bit of residual faith I had from my upbringing was gone; I had had enough of the nonsense.

The point of my story is that I, like many former Christians, had avoided exposure to subjects that contradicted the Bible. One of my mom’s favorite Bible verses is, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of heaven like a little child will never enter it.” This is a terrific scripture to use against the pursuit of knowledge. Christians often warn against thinking one is smarter than God.

After I admitted to myself that religions are foolish superstitions, I set about to expose myself to the things that I had avoided earlier in my life. The primary was evolution. Not only did I want to understand it, I wanted to know. The first book I read was yours. It is a powerfully-written and accessible presentation of the evidence, and it inspired me to continue reading on the subject, which I have done with great enthusiasm.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that acknowledging the truth of evolution can be a life-changing event. It was for me, in the very best way. So thank you for your work.

Sincerely,
[Name redacted]

I suppose there’s some solipsism in my publishing this (with permission of the writer, of course), for we all like a pat on the back.  But I also put it up to show that stridency and militancy need not turn one away from evolution, and that, contrary to the accommodationist line, evolution does provide an impetus for letting go of faith.  In that sense fundamentalists are right.  As they know well (but accommodationists and scientific organizations apparently don’t), learning about evolution often weakens one’s faith, for reasons we all understand.

And now I challenge Karl Giberson, Chris Mooney, or the people at BioLogos to produce, say, six letters that match this one or the hundreds on Richard’s website, and to document their claim that the accommodationist approach, showing that faith and religion need not be at odds, is the best way to turn opponents of evolution into supporters.