Usually it's the Daniel font that gets all the attention, but another of my fonts has been popping up lately — Yataghan. It's gothic and snaky.
Yesterday at the bookstore, I noticed that they decided to use it for the Omnibus edition of Chris Bunch's book, Dragonmaster. I must say, it looks quite imposing in all caps like that. And the review quote — 'a banquet of blood and thunder' — looks suitably dagger-like in the lower case.
You're welcome to download Yataghan and use it for anything you want. Just try not to harm anyone, okay?
We're a day late on the Oscars thing in Australia, so I'm only just getting to the videos.
I was moved by the acceptance speech of Lance Black, who won Best Screenplay for Milk. He grew up in the Mormon church.
Here's a transcript of the relevant bit, for those of you who can't do video.
"I heard the story of Harvey Milk and it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life openly as who I am, and that one day I could even fall in love and get married.
"I want to thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to.
"But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you God does love you and that very soon I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.
Thank you and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk."
I grew up as a straight kid in the Mormon church, and they gave us heaps of guilt just over playing with ourselves. I simply can't imagine what he must have gone through as a gay teenager.
Black's comments are laudable. If they make some gay person feel like they're all right despite the attempts of religious bigots to convince them otherwise, then well done. Suicide averted. But there's a bigger problem here: Black is trying to mitigate the effects of religions without challenging their authority. By taking god as a given, Black unwittingly gives tacit legitimacy to religions as potential sources of moral guidance. In fact, they have no more moral authority than anyone else, and most likely less because of their immoral actions.
It comes down to the whole God thing. Black somehow knows that this mysterious being 'god' loves gay people. How does he know that? Is it possible that god really disapproves of them, or perhaps even hates them? How does he know that God 'gave' us Harvey Milk? If Satan exists, why didn't he give us Harvey Milk as a way of deceiving us and making us into homos? Does Black have some magical conduit to heavenly knowledge? If it's possible to get revelations from a god, how do we know Black has the right idea, and not those nice men in suits that we see in General Conference?
I was re-reading this article again, an interview with Carol Lynn Pearson. She's a Mormon poet, playwright, and actor. With her one-woman show, Mother Wove the Morning, she's worked to bring Mother-in-Heaven out of the periphery of LDS doctrine. She's also an advocate for gay Mormons.
It's the question Carol Lynn Pearson hears just about every time she appears in public. She heard it again last weekend, during an audience discussion that followed a packed-house performance of her play "Facing East" at Theatre Rhinoceros.
How, one woman asked, could Pearson justify her own membership and involvement in the Mormon church? ... Pearson, a slim, forthright woman of 67 who wears her silvery white hair jauntily short, nodded along as the question was posed. "I love the Mormon community," she responded, "and I have a unique opportunity to build bridges." A number of her church ward leaders, Pearson noted, had attended the opening of "Facing East" the night before. "They've been nothing but supportive," she said. "I believe the Mormon heart is a good heart. I feel comfortable with my role in the Mormon church."
That was before the LDS Church's involvement in Proposition 8. I wonder if she still feels 'comfortable' being linked with a church that claims divine support for inequality and prejudice. Yes, she seems to do some good, but does she need to do this from inside the organisation? Is she not, in fact, attempting to help those who suffer, while providing a way for them to remain connected to the church that is dishing out the suffering?
There are two approaches you can take in this kind of conflict: reject religion, or attempt to transform religion into something less authoritarian.
The transformative approach is tempting, especially for religious liberals. You get to stay in The Bubble, where it's comfortable (even though you take some knocks from the orthodox believers), and you get to imagine that someday... some beautiful day... your religion will change from conservative authoritarian to liberal democratic — perhaps even gay-friendly! And you can play a part in this magical process just by making occasional comments in Priesthood Meeting. And then the Millennium comes, and Jesus tells you that you were right all along, and everybody gets a pony.
Needless to say, I think the other approach — to reject religion — is the right one. We need to recognise that there probably isn't a god, that religious organisations have no special authority to dictate the terms of morality, and that actions like Prop. 8 are signs of their all-too-human origins. This view has the benefit of being true.
I have this disturbing thought that keeps popping up: What if things had gone differently for me, my deconversion somehow hadn't happened, and I was a believing Mormon in the middle of this Proposition 8 mess? Would it have been a deal-breaker for me? Would I have had the fortitude to recognise the signs of man-made prejudice? Would I have realised that it was time to get out? Or would I have kept making excuses for the Church, like some abused spouse? Would I have imagined things would change... eventually? (We let Blacks have the priesthood, after all! Well, black men.) Would I have fallen back on my old rationalisations: that the Lord is in control, but he allows his servants to make mistakes? Would I have privately disagreed with the Brethren, and fancied myself courageous for doing so?
I worry that, even confronted by an ugliness of this magnitude, I would have remained a liberal Mormon. Dependence on others for your opinion conditions you to be a coward, and I was very well-conditioned. And so I probably would have continued to give my time and my money to an organisation that was actively working against my values, and cared nothing for (in fact, actually disdained) the views of people like myself.
Now, outside the Church, I am free to speak out against injustice and duplicity without having to step carefully around 'criticising the Brethren'. I get to live a moral, fulfilling life, without the moral conflict of trying to hold two opposing sets of opinions simultaneously.
The LDS Church will carry out actions like Prop. 8 whenever they wish, whether you are a member or not. But if they count you as a member, they do these things with your support. Something to think about.
How do you type upside-down on your keyboard? No, the answer is not to turn your laptop over. If you have a Unicode-compatible system, you can use this link. It converts what you type into equivalent upside-down characters, many of them from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
I've just discovered the film archives of the Film Board of Canada. Not only have they served as the inspiration for a great band name, they've been behind some great short films. Some of them I've seen before, and I'm very pleased to have found them again.
The Big Snit
People in relationships really know where all the hurts are. Here, a game of Scrabble becomes all-out war between Mr and Mrs Snit. But there are funny moments here — the voice of the cat is a touch of genius. Favourite moment: Mrs Snit says, "Do you have to keep sawing on the table?" and Mr Snit stops sawing long enough to holler, "I"M NOT!" But they'll get it back together and remember why they loved each other in the first place, and when they do, there's a comfort that could make a nuclear war seem barely noticeable.
Blackfly
You think flies are bad where you are? Try living in Ontario. At least, that's how this folk song has it. I'd still say they're worse in Australia. Catchy chorus, though.
Hunger
I was especially glad to find this one. I remember seeing this with my Dad when it first came out in 1973. There was a screening in the Kennedy Library at EWU (but then it was EWSC). It was so visually arresting that I never forgot it, and have still remembered the basic plot even though I was six when I saw it. Some amazing early CG work, especially considering the state of computer animation at the time.
Neighbours
I'd only ever heard about this one. The film uses stop-motion animation to show a conflict between two neighbours that escalates into something unexpectedly savage.
A lot of these films, like 'Hunger' and 'Neighbours', address dark human tendencies like war and racism, but by examining how they play out at the level of our individual desires. They do this with lightness and humour, and a kind of high-minded earnestness that seems refreshing but anachronistic today. Imagine: perhaps someone thought these problems could be beaten in our lifetime.
Hope you had a good Darwin day. The thing I keep coming back to about Darwin is this. The guy was training to be a clergyman, but dumped it when it became clear that the facts ran counter to his beliefs. I gotta respect that. That's tough to do.
But if you think that's tough, here's an act for you. This Mormon biologist can give a talk about evolution while making a sculpture of Charles Darwin. And all without his head asploding from cognitive dissonance. Let's have a listen as he talks about his mentor, Clayton White.
"He became an important example to me of a first-rate scientist and a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
Now Fairbanks believes with most biologists that evolution is the unifying theory in the field. And he is the same kind of mentor as White was to new generations of Mormon would-be scientists, helping them understand the importance of evolution without losing their faith.
Okay, full marks for accepting evolution. He's not a dishonest idiot. But let me ask: what's wrong with losing your faith? It hurts for a bit, sure, but then you're free to accept reality without having to twist your brain into knots trying to make the facts fit your religious preconceptions. What's so great about being able to do that? Shouldn't a scientist be able to take the hit and accept reality directly? Particularly when his Mormon religion is strewn with beliefs that are explicitly refuted by evidence. (E.g. Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon, Old Testament creationism, and on and on.)
I hold to the view that science and religion conflict, and can't be reconciled. Other people disagree, but it doesn't help their case that some scientists go to church. That just means that people can wall off part of their brain from scientific examination. Like Jerry Coyne says in his wonderful article for the Edge:
True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.)
I'm not even saying that Dr Fairbanks can't do good work in biology and still hold religious beliefs. You just can't do both at the same time. Even he admits this.
"We are obligated to examine experimental data and interpret it in an objective way, without allowing nonscientific beliefs to influence our interpretations," Fairbanks says.
Great advice — but why shouldn't religious beliefs therefore be discarded? They're non-scientific. Why should he get to have it both ways when it comes to religion?
He continues:
But that is no reason to reject God or Mormon scriptures, which, he says, explain why God created the world, not how.
An old canard. Science explains how, religion explains why. Except that religion doesn't explain why. It just gives you fluffy stories that you have to maintain faith in without being able to verify them.
I used to really look up to liberal Mormon thinkers who struggled to merge facts with fables, grappled with the difficulty of such an endeavour, and copped nothing but abuse from ignorant iron-rod believers. Now I think it's the saddest thing I can think of, like someone who's so close to understanding, but stopping themselves from taking the final liberating step. I actually think I'd rather talk to someone who argues that science is wrong and religion is right. At least then I'd be talking to someone for whom the truth matters.
Scott Murphy is running for Congress in District 20 in the great state of New York. Not only is he a Democrat, and therefore one of the good guys, his campaign clearly has very discriminating taste.
Amanda Kitts lost her left arm in a car accident three years ago, but these days she plays football with her 12-year-old son, and changes diapers and bearhugs children at the three Kiddie Cottage day care centers she owns in Knoxville, Tenn.
Ms. Kitts, 40, does this all with a new kind of artificial arm that moves more easily than other devices and that she can control by using only her thoughts.
“I’m able to move my hand, wrist and elbow all at the same time,” she said. “You think, and then your muscles move.” ... The technique, called targeted muscle reinnervation, involves taking the nerves that remain after an arm is amputated and connecting them to another muscle in the body, often in the chest. Electrodes are placed over the chest muscles, acting as antennae. When the person wants to move the arm, the brain sends signals that first contract the chest muscles, which send an electrical signal to the prosthetic arm, instructing it to move. The process requires no more conscious effort than it would for a person who has a natural arm.
You really ought to take a look at the video. Amazing.
I think it'd be tricky to use the arm and fingers because of the lack of tactile feedback. You'd have to look at the object you're holding to make sure you had it securely and weren't squishing it. Maybe in future you'd be able to 'feel' the item you're grasping by some kind of neural feedback.
When some new age creep wants to talk about the shortcomings of Western medicine, they'll get a face full of this article from me.
Cheney people are having a non-stop virtual high school reunion on Facebook. I'm communicating with people that I haven't seen in 25 years. What a great way to bring people back into your life!
One day not long ago, a guy from my old high school sent me a friend request. To preserve his anonymity, I'll call him 'Barry'. Barry was never very popular in school, but I couldn't say exactly why. He was actually a pretty decent guy, as I found out when I talked to him at a chance supermarket meeting a couple of years after graduation. But not the sort of guy you'd hang out with. You'd say hi in the halls. Maybe if you were socially conscious, you'd hope no one was looking, but you'd feel guilty about it. A very high school feeling.
So when I got Barry's friend request, I felt that old reflex. It was like Barry had come up to me and said, "Hey, guys! What are you doing?" A brief thought: would people see him on my friend list? Then I came to myself and felt ashamed of my reaction. What was this, high school all over again? I had forgotten he existed for the better part of three decades, but he remembered me, and now here he was, asking for me to be… his friend. And all it required of me was to click.
Had I learned nothing about common human decency in the last 25 years? We weren't kids anymore — especially not Barry, by the looks of his Facebook photo. But what did that matter? I'm past all that stuff. Yes, Barry, yes! I will be your friend! And just that simply, the pettiness of adolescence was erased in one virtuous act. If Barry had only one friend, it would be me. Even if I was just a Facebook friend.
The next day, Facebook sent me an email. I had a pillow fight request. Barry had somehow hit me with the Eiffel Tower. I ignore these requests from everyone, and so I ignored it from Barry. Over the next two days, Barry hit me with four more objects, and invited me to play backgammon and Scrabulous. I was busy. I changed my email notification preferences.
I don't hit the 'Book often, so the next time I logged on, I found that I had been kidnapped twelve times, each time by Barry.
I tried not to feel conflicted as I clicked the 'Ignore all requests from this friend' button. Stupid Facebook, bringing people back into my life. Why couldn't they stay in the past where they belonged? It was high school, all over again.
The main charges people made against the London atheist bus ad was:
1) It made claims that broke rules of substantiation and truthfulness, since the ad offered no evidence for god's non-existence.
2) The ad was offensive.
I find both complaints questionable. The inclusion of 'probably' helps to tone down the claim, and as for offense, I found the ad quite positive in tone. Maybe people found it offensive that anyone would express a belief they disagreed in.
The first one libels a group of people, and the second has factual problems! Both are far guiltier of the charges than the original ad itself.
If they're so sure that there's 'definitely' a god, let's see their evidence. They don't know their bible either; calling someone a fool puts you in danger of hellfire. Name-calling is name-calling, even if it's biblical.
I can't say I mind the Christian ads though. A vigorous debate is always healthy, and these ads will probably just make people think of the original.
The Problem of Evil was never a problem for me in my believing days. I always thought it was a pretty weak argument. So bad things happen to good people. It's too bad, but why should god come running in to save us from every bad thing that might happen? How would we have free will if we couldn't suffer the consequences of our actions? Don't murderers have free will too? How would we have good if we didn't have evil? And god's intervention would ironically prove he existed, so how would we have faith in him? Besides, life isn't so very long when we compare it to an eternity in god's presence. It was all a case of putting unrealistic expectations on god, who after all probably had good reasons to allow kittens to drown, children to be abused, neglected, and murdered, bombs to fall, hurricanes to destroy, viruses to kill and maim, and all the other wonderful things that work towards god's greater glory.
And so I would walk away from the Problem of Evil, dusting off my hands and whistling, thinking the matter settled. Well done, me. What I see now was that I accepted those answers not because they were all that great, but because they allowed me to put my cognitive dissonance back to sleep so I could stay in The Bubble and keep believing for yet another week.
Of course, the temptation to accept bad ideas because you like them still holds whether you're a theist or an atheist. So I've been wary of throwing myself into the PoE because, until recently, I still thought it was a weak argument. This document changed my mind: The Tale of the Twelve Officers, by Mark I. Vuletic.
It was, of course, sad to hear that Ms. K had been slowly raped and murdered by a common thug over the course of one hour and fifty-five minutes; but when I found out that the ordeal had taken place in plain sight of twelve fully-armed off-duty police officers, who ignored her terrified cries for help, and instead just watched until the act was carried to its gruesome end, I found myself facing a personal crisis. You see, the officers had all been very close friends of mine, but now I found my trust in them shaken to its core. Fortunately, I was able to talk with them afterwards, and ask them how they could have stood by and done nothing when they could so easily have saved Ms. K.
Each officer has a rationalisation for their failure to act, and what do you know — all my old friends are here! Wonderful ways to explain why an all-good and omniscient god would fail to do what any normal, compassionate, sinful human being would do in the same situation.
How do their answers sit with you, whether theist or non?
The University of Michigan-Flint is the latest school in the state to accept American Sign Language as a foreign language.
The Flint Journal reported Friday the decision follows years of effort by Jill Maxwell of [sic] for the designation. Maxwell graduated in December and substitute teaches at the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint.
The 32-year-old DeWitt resident argued it was discriminatory not to accept ASL for second language requirements.
Yes, ASL is a foreign language to English speakers. It has its origins in spoken English, but it's grown and changed since then, and (most importantly) it's not mutually intelligible with English.
D.J. Trela, dean of UM-Flint's College of Arts and Sciences, says faculty studied the issue for 14 months.
I hope they spent the 14 months hashing out the procedural details, and not just wondering if it was actually a different language. They could have asked a linguist.
My head of department asked the postgrads who teach classes to give some advice to new teachers. Here's what I wrote. I think it applies to areas of teaching beyond linguistics.
Here are some ideas to think about, though obviously everyone will have to do things their own way.
• Ask yourself: Why do you like linguistics? You're probably in this area because you think it's sort of cool. And it is! So show your students what you love about linguistics. They will pick up on your enthusiasm.
• Try and remember one teacher that you liked. What did they do? Why did you like them? For me, I remember Marge Foland, my drama teacher. She was fun and 'sparky', with a zany sense of humour. She expected great work from us, and we were happy to give it. I don't teach just like she did because I'm a different person, but I do find that that kind of style works for me. Whatever your teacher did that clicks with you is an indicator of a teaching style that you'll probably do well at.
• Teaching is a lot like parenting. You have to convey expectations clearly to your students, give them nurturing feedback, and dish out consequences when they need it. (Warm and fuzzy, not cold and prickly.) Also, you must like your students.
• People learn by doing things. Try and take every opportunity to present students with real live data, and have them deal with it. Focus on the principle you're trying to reinforce. Often what will happen is that they'll run up against the limits of their knowledge, and struggle to find a solution. Then they're ready for you, the experienced one, to provide some suggestions for moving ahead.
• No one expects you to be infallible, just reasonably well-read and well-informed. A great thing to say is "I don't know" and the next thing you should always say after that is "How could we find out?" And it's not bad to follow that up with "If I had to make a guess, I'd say… And the reason I say that is…" When you say these things, you're preparing them to solve their own problems.
• Let them talk to each other and contribute their unique experiences to the class. I do a lot of small group discussion in tutorials. When I'm doing all the talking in the tutorial, I know something's wrong. Step back and let them work through the issues without you. You may worry that they'll reinforce each others' mistakes, but that doesn't usually happen. Groups of people are smarter than their smartest member, so they've got a better chance of getting it right. Sometimes they come up with ideas I haven't thought of. And they get a chance to contribute, so they're building the class.
• Always have a contingency plan. Activities run short or sometimes just don't work, and you'll need to have something else to do. Even having a few discussion questions up your sleeve can save the day. Don't be afraid to toss the lesson plan and have a discussion they're interested in, if the tutorial goes that way. Let them drive. Some of the best tutorials are like that.
• Teach the scientific method. Our data comes from the physical world. We develop testable and falsifiable hypotheses to explain the data, and if the hypotheses don't correspond to the facts, we modify or dump them. We have many perceptual filters and biases that prevent us from seeing things clearly, and we have tools like statistics to help us avoid these traps. Find out about them. Use issues in linguistics to teach the basics of critical thinking, including the virtues of open-mindedness and skepticism. Avoid holy wars. By teaching students the scientific method, we're not just doing good linguistics, we're building a populace that is better equipped to live in the world, even after they've forgotten all the things we've presented.
Last week was taken up by a happy event: Ms Perfect and I moved into our new home. That meant getting all the furniture in, tracking down the right hedge trimmer (so as not to obscure the white picket fence), and getting the utilities hooked up. Now the Internet Drought is over, and I'm back online.
We here at Good Reason like to keep up with everything typographical, so when we found the Atheist Bus typeface, it was too good not to share. Here it is: Dirty Headline, the very same font used on atheist buses in England (and atheist t-shirts elsewhere), downloadable for free thanks to dafont.com.
Making your own atheist slogans is now a simple matter. Maybe you like the current one, but you think it lacks a little punch. Why not try pumping up the volume?
Usually it's the Daniel font that gets all the attention, but another of my fonts has been popping up lately — Yataghan. It's gothic and snaky.
